The Spirit of the Digger

by Patrick Lindsay

  But I also contradict myself here too because you still need those Blueys in the platoon – just not in that style of up-the-guts. You need him when the chips are down, things are crook, morale’s low, you’ve taken a few casualties, a few killed, it’s not a good day. That’s when the Digger humour comes into it. Not so much a bloke doing something himself but an act, like jumping up into a shell hole and saying, ‘Bugger it, I’m gonna have a wash.’ It’s the joke, the laughter, it gets people going. I think it’s the ethos of Australia, our character.

  This larrikin approach and the humour, which travel with Australians wherever they go, have become ingrained in the Digger. Whatever the occasion, no matter how desperate, no matter how solemn, the Digger will find the humour in it, as former Chief of the Australian Defence Force General Peter Cosgrove recalls:

  I can remember when I was the Director of Infantry and I was watching a whole group of infantry soldiers in the Duke of Gloucester Cup Section Competition go through some very arduous military tests.

  They’d been hard at it for days, all trying in their section groups to outdo each other, just punishing themselves to be the best. It was late on the last day of the competition and I’d brought a whole lot of venerable old retired officers by Land Rover up this extraordinarily steep bush track. You’d get sunburn on the roof of your mouth walking up it.

  The Land Rover was groaning its way up in low gear past these sweating soldiers who were climbing this hill on the way. We popped out from the vehicle up the top, fresh as daisies, and we’re watching these kids struggle the last few metres across the finish line.

  And there’s some kid with a machine gun and a very heavy load plodding up this hill. He looked up, he saw me and he suddenly assumed this very worried expression. He looked at me and said: ‘Oh hello, Sir. How are you?’ I said: ‘I’m alright, soldier.’ And he said: ‘You’re not tired or anything are you, Sir, because this hill’s very steep.’ That, to me, was typical – and wonderful – the irreverence and the fact that, at the end of the test, this bloke still had a spark of humour left in him.

  The irreverence is interwoven into the traditional Digger’s disdain for traditional military ‘spit and polish’. From their earliest days, this attitude has been mistaken for a lack of discipline. But clearly, when it mattered, the Digger matched any army for discipline under fire. Wally Thompson:

  People say Australian soldiers are not well disciplined and that’s a myth, especially in the present day. They may be a little bit raucous and play up a little bit on leave, but that’s spirit and you want that spirit. But in the field, on operations, they are moulded together as one.

  It really is quite incredible. I had three tours in Vietnam and I saw it. Larrikinism is a bit of spirit. In many ways our country is drifting away from that. We’re getting a bit more selfish in our ways and I think the military pulls people back into reality and says, mate, you’re not as good as you think you are – it’s a great leveller.

  It doesn’t matter how good you think you are, it’s how good the group thinks you are that counts. It’s like somebody who thinks he’s a bit of a goer; there’s always someone who can do him. It’s that spirit and the caring for each other.

  Peter Cosgrove believes one of the cornerstones of the good Digger is his reliability. His word must be his bond:

  If the fellow says I won’t let you down, I’ll be there or I’ll guard this or I’ll take care of you, then that’s written in stone. And it’s this bond of trust that is the core of mateship. Mateship can’t exist without trust and reliability and we elevate mateship, but it must be built on the fundamental obligation felt by the individual to keep his or her word.

  Like all successful teams, the Australian Army fosters a healthy level of competition within its ranks. As former Vietnam vet the late Major Dennis Ayoub observed, competition often puts things into perspective:

  An engineer commander once told me: ‘In every group of men, each one of those men can do one thing, at least, better than you can.’ I always bore that in mind. There was always one who could run further and faster than anyone else, one who could do more chin-ups, another who was the best plant operator, the best grader operator. There was always recognition for the best. The bloke who was best at it would always get that job.

  Ayoub also learned that it was vital for Diggers to feel important, that they were valued members of a team. Each one knew he was a pivotal person in that group because of his excellence at something or that he was the team’s representative in one specific area. A natural hierarchy developed and they worked within their optimum skill divisions.

  As an officer you must know and understand that and you must foster it and work within that teamwork. But soldiers who are very good at things can become hard to manage, like very bright kids at school. So you must work to stop them being bored and keep them occupied. Often a good way to do that was to pass on their skills and information to new members of the team or other units, cross-pollination.

  Peter Cosgrove also sees the value of the competitive spirit in the Digger:

  Our infantry soldiers are an extraordinary bunch of people and they rate themselves really highly. They don’t often leave you wondering about how good they are and how they compare with any other soldiers in the army.

  That can be galling to equally feisty blokes who drive tractors or huge trucks or who service artillery pieces or who have changed the tracks on an armoured fighting vehicle. These are all blokes who do a tough job well, so there’s a little bit of that sort of internal professional rivalry, which is fine. It’s a bit like the Australian use of the term ‘bastard’: with just a couple of nuances of difference in the way you use it you can be greeting your oldest friend, or putting an eternally damning curse on somebody.

  But you know, I think Australian soldiers have got a healthy respect for each other, helped along a bit by the fact that whenever you see an infantry organisation you don’t have to look very far to see the other parts of the army that support operations in there close by.

  When the Anzacs first fought alongside the British at Gallipoli and later in France, they had to prove themselves as worthy soldiers. Having done that, they found the British officers still regarded them with disdain because of what they perceived as the ‘unmilitary’ relationships between the Australian officers and their Diggers. John Laffin, in his book Digger, wrote that British officers were appalled to find that soldiers often addressed their officers by first name in action.

  A Queensland captain was sharply rebuked by an English colonel for telling his men details of a projected attack. The colonel said testily that it was not done for officers to discuss battle details with private soldiers. The captain, whose name is unknown, said: ‘I don’t regard them as private soldiers, sir, they are my mates. Naturally I want them to know why I’m asking them to risk their lives.’

  Much of this difference in approach can be attributed to the old British military class structure where the upper class dominated the top ranks and the lower levels came from the middle and lower classes. From the start, by necessity, the Australian Army had a strong egalitarian attitude. The lack of an established national class structure meant that most commissions were earned on merit. The heavy casualties suffered by the AIF in World War I, with the consequent rapid promotions across the board, meant that tested leaders rose through the ranks. Their experiences as private soldiers gave them an appreciation of the Diggers’ problems, and the fact that the officers earned their promotions by performance meant they generally earned the respect of their troops. This system has persisted to the present day. As Wally Thompson points out, the Digger is still a key element in the Australian Army:

  Wars may be fought with weapons but they’re won by men with courage and fighting spirit to close with the enemy. Good leadership, good planning, good equipment and weapons and good training are all ingredients. But, in the end, it’s the soldiers and how they execute the plans and orders, using their field skills and we
apons with confidence, who will win the firefight or the battle – soldiers with pride in themselves and the steadfast knowledge that their mates are trained to the task and will not fail them in the test of battle.

  When you go and look at a war memorial, you’ll see private, private, private, corporal, private, sergeant, private, corporal, private, lieutenant, private, private. The soldiers do the fighting. They do the bleeding and they do the dying. And we must never forget that.

  History has shown that the Digger will perform superhuman feats if he has faith in his mates. He’s generally convinced he won’t be the one to be killed, as an old Digger told Dennis Ayoub:

  He said: ‘I wasn’t concerned about the one that had my name on it. I was worried about the one that had “To Whom it May Concern” on the fucking thing!’ Most of us believed that if someone was aiming at you, you’d probably be killed outright, shot in the head or the heart. The one to worry about is the one which you were going to cop out of the blue, a ricochet, or overspray or something like that!

  And the Digger can cope as long as he knows his mates will look after him if something does happen. Wally Thompson:

  We have a thing in our army: we don’t leave our wounded. And that’s terribly important. It all comes down to the lowest denominator – mates. It’s as an extended family: don’t pick on my brother – I can have a fight with my brother but I’ll fight with him against anyone else.

  The core strength of the Australian Army lies in the quality of its subunits – the section, the squadron, the platoon, the battery and the company – and the quality of the men who command these units. As we’ve seen on many occasions, in many conflicts, it doesn’t matter how good a soldier’s equipment is if he doesn’t have the necessary fighting spirit. Conversely, as Vietnam showed and as Afghanistan is reinforcing, a poorly armed force with an unquenchable desire to win can upset even the most powerful army. To Wally Thompson it makes sense to view the army as a human body:

  The officers are the head, the brain, the orders and the policies; the backbone is the sergeant, as it’s always been; the arms and legs are the junior NCOs which make the thing move; the actual body is made up of the soldiers. Of course, the company sergeant major is the heart because he is the link between the brain and the body.

  The NCOs have always held the view that the officers command the army … but the NCOs run it! The interplay between, on the one hand, the NCOs and their officers and, on the other, the NCOs and their troops is crucial. Some relationships have proven themselves over time. Vietnam vet Colonel Mike McDermott points to an established master–apprentice relationship between sergeants and officers in the Australian Army: the sergeant’s job is to keep the officers alive and ensure they don’t do anything stupid.

  Early in my time in Vietnam, I ran along the beach chasing some VC [Viet Cong] with a machine gun and started firing at them, and my sergeant grabbed me and said: ‘Sir, for Christ’s sake, don’t do that again! I’ve lost a few platoon commanders and I don’t want to lose any more!’ His name was Brian London and he got a DCM, the next one down to the VC [Victoria Cross].

  To McDermott, this master–apprentice relationship is part of the system. Generally the sergeant is older and more experienced than the officer.

  I was 21 and Brian was about 33 and he’d been to Vietnam before and he’d done a lot before I got there. They don’t countermand you. Rather, it’s: ‘Sir, that’s an interesting plan. Not the silliest I’ve seen from you. Some of us might survive that plan’ – non-confrontational language which just guides you.

  The Army converts most soldiers into short-term goal seekers. It’s the nature of much of the work and it’s the best way to minimise breakdowns in communication and to avoid confusion in the field. Dennis Ayoub knew how it worked. He rose from the ranks to retire a major:

  The Digger is normally a very, very manageable person. But he’s also an intelligent and wily dude. He’s a rat-cunning sort of a bloke who doesn’t thrive on bullshit for a start.

  Ayoub believed the Digger to be generally pragmatic, someone who would accept his lot but if he could see a better way of doing things was not afraid to say so.

  In fact, I think almost all Australian soldiers are potential union delegates. One thing you often hear is ‘Ayorta’, as in ‘Ayorta do it this way, it’s much quicker.’

  If you give a Digger a logical and substantial reason for doing something, he’ll do it for you. If you bullshit to him, you’ll never get him to do anything for you.

  Over a lifetime’s experience, Wally Thompson has developed some basic rules:

  Keep orders to a minimum. Pass the information through the chain of command. Let the soldiers see the importance of their closest commander, their leader, the section commander.

  Mutual respect must be upheld to all soldiers at all times by all ranks, including officers and NCOs. The company must have cohesion to be an effective fighting unit. The respect must be seen between the officers and the NCOs and between the soldiers themselves.

  Treat NCOs and soldiers as you would like to be treated yourself, firmly but fairly. There’s no room for standover merchants or bullyboys in the NCO ranks.

  You must show strength of character and toughness when and if required. Never let a fault or a sloppy activity become the norm. Set high standards and enforce them. The Diggers must see you have both physical and moral courage.

  There is a sense of instinctive leadership in the Digger: a strange dichotomy in which many Diggers are content to allow someone they respect to lead them while, at the same time, maintaining a sort of ‘watching brief’ on them. Peter Cosgrove believes this attitude contributes to a higher standard of leadership by keeping those in command on their toes. He sees the Digger as having a ‘kind of restless ingenuity’ and ‘a sense of irreverence’.

  They’re not sitting back there thinking Senior Lance Corporal is going to give me an order and that will be good. It’s more along the lines of when’s the dopey so-and-so Lance Corporal going to get here and figure out what we figured out ten minutes ago: that it’s raining or it’s going to rain, or that if we don’t move soon we won’t get a feed.

  Cosgrove sees it as a ‘cheerful pressure on those who are appointed as leaders, which actually makes them much better’.

  You don’t prance around with a sort of conferred and acquiescently agreed mantle of authority as a leader in the army. You work all the time to establish and reaffirm your credibility and it can last just a few seconds: if you come out with something dumb, if you miss the obvious point, if you’re cranky for no reason, or if you’re dismissive of this sense of initiative. And you’ve also got to play within the boundaries because with that comes a tinge of irreverence which is the Diggers, to some extent, always mildly pushing the envelope.

  To Wally Thompson, an important distinction between what he sees as ‘leaders’ and ‘commanders’:

  They are two different things. A commander commands resources. A leader actually leads men. I believe a leader can go down to about company level, sub-unit level, where the strength of our armies has always been – the companies, the platoons and the sections.

  In Thompson’s eyes, the battalion has an objective but it’s the companies, platoons and sections that actually achieve it. To the Digger, his section commander has a key role. Most commanders recognise that the section commander – the corporal or the lance corporal – is the backbone of the Army. Wally Thompson has observed that Diggers idolise their section commander.

  On operations, you can get by with a mediocre officer and a good sergeant, or vice versa, but you cannot survive with bad section commanders. They almost never get proper recognition either.

  Dennis Ayoub’s perspective about his commanding officer, Major Sandy McGregor, and his style of leadership changed once he himself became an officer. When Ayoub first met McGregor he thought he was ‘an arrogant sort of bastard’.

  Diggers are fairly irreverent blokes. They don’t like officers. They do
n’t like officers because they’re not supposed to like officers. It’s not that the officer wasn’t a good fellow or wasn’t a capable or able bloke.

  Sandy McGregor was a capable and able bloke, a very good commander and a very passionate bloke but a tough bastard as well. Because he was the officer, we didn’t like him. Anything that he said … had to be treated with a certain amount of caution. He was to be treated like a politician …