Military History

When the United States recently announced its commitment to enforce a ‘no-fly zone’ in Libya, the State Department spokesman was asked whether the United States was now at war. He could only manage a floundering non-answer. The unfortunate spokesman’s difficulty with this apparently simple question is a reminder of the vast changes in the nature of military conflict in recent decades. Major conflicts are seldom a matter of one state formally declaring war on another, with a largely agreed set of rules on the conduct of operations (sometimes flouted in horrific ways) and with some generally accepted markers of victory and defeat.

Witnesses to War, an ambitious book, is part of a larger project by the C.E.W. Bean Foundation to commemorate the work of Australian war correspondents. Fay Anderson and Richard Trembath, setting out to document the performance of Australian war correspondents, have tackled complex material. They deal with an enormous cast of characters and various interwoven themes, including the struggle against military censorship, how journalists have observed their duty to neutral coverage (or not), and the changing technology of reporting war – from sending stories by carrier pigeon or steamship in World War I to today’s live telecasts by journalists direct from battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. The book fills an important gap. Until now, Phillip Knightley’s more general work, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker (1975, 2004), has served as the final authority in this field. Knightley is a patron of the Foundation and an important influence.

Michael McKernan states in his introduction to his short book on Gallipoli that he is dissatisfied with much writing on military history. He writes: ‘Military history is often presented as a thing of maps and statistics, a brutal narrative based on the deployments and motives of commanders with a score sheet of those who performed well and those who failed. In this book I have tried to go beyond that ... to show that somewhere for each life lost, there was long mourning and deep grief.'

In September last year the impressive military intellectual David Kilcullen gave the prestigious annual ‘University Lecture’ to the assembled cohort of cadets, midshipmen, officers, academic staff and senior leadership of the Australian Defence Force Academy and its partner institution, the University of New South Wales. I was especially struck by Kilcullen’s argument, to the young officer trainees, that their future responsibilities would be important because war and conflict had been perennial features of human society since ancient times, and would persist despite efforts to create a more peaceful world. Was this, I wondered, the only way to impress upon the future leadership of the ADF the seriousness of their calling?

Late in 1944 Richard Turner was at last able to come home. A Sydney taxi driver, he had been captured in Greece in June 1941. Like 2,000 other Australians, he missed the last boats to leave. Though captured by the Germans, he soon escaped to join the andartes – partisans fighting the Germans in Greece’s rugged interior. With the Germans pulling out, British officers managed to contact Richard and he was finally able to leave for home after nearly five years. On 17 December 1944 the lorry taking Richard to Athens airport accidentally drove into one of the first firefights of the Greek civil war. Richard now lies in the beautiful war cemetery at Phalereon, an oasis of peace amid the traffic that chokes Athens.