Anzac's Dirty Dozen

by Craig Stockings

  The Boer War also brought a heavy casualty list. The usual number given for Australia’s dead, around 600, seems modest enough until supplemented by the likely toll among the thousands of men who fought in units raised in South Africa. If, as seems likely, a thousand Australians died in the Boer War, it was a noticeable loss in a male population only a third of the size of the Vietnam War generation. And like Vietnam, there was no great victory to point to, no moment when Australians seemed to have tipped the balance, no higher cause that seemed to make it all worthwhile. It became more satisfying to see the conflict not as a dull, disappointing drama in itself but as a forgivably patchy rehearsal for something greater to come. Australia had federated halfway during the war and could look forward, as nations and perhaps even proto-nations were supposed to do, to a bloody test of their worth. Australians were ready to embrace the next war as a new beginning.

  Preparations for that war began soon after Federation, well before it was clear where the fighting would be and who the enemy was, and the result was a social and financial upheaval. Contrary to the folk tales of C.J. Dennis and Charles Bean,38 the soldiers and sailors who came to fight in World War I were not so much products of rough city neighbourhoods and the self-reliance bred in the bush, but of much costly and uncomfortable military reform.

  Talk of such reform began in 1905, but the hard and expensive work kicked off only in 1911, when teenage boys were forced into compulsory cadet drill. A year later the old force of volunteers, already reformed and partly transformed into a voluntary militia, gave way to a real, compulsory militia organised and funded by government, and trained and administered by professional soldiers. Half of all young men who turned eighteen in 1912 were obliged to serve. Slowly, year by year, a part-time army of seven infantry divisions and seven cavalry brigades emerged. One of its aims was to give Australia something like the military clout of Belgium or Romania – enough to warn off Japan, planning an empire in east Asia, and to prepare men to fight in a likely war in Europe against Imperial Germany, the British empire’s most serious rival since Napoleonic France. There was also a domestic motive, particularly popular with some parents and clergymen, of inculcating toughness and patriotism among a new generation widely suspected of addiction to sport and cigarettes, to cinema and soft living. Perhaps best of all, the militia would be strictly territorial in its organisation, with just one unit for each town or suburb, leaving no room for the ethnic regiments that many Australians now feared as divisive. Whatever its motives, it all seemed a bold initiative – ‘a proclamation of historic importance’, as Boston’s Christian Science Monitor put it39 – and another example of how a newly federated Australia was becoming a laboratory of political and social reform.

  But the experiment was nearly compromised. Historian John Barrett showed long ago that resistance to militia service was smaller than critics of the system claimed at the time;40 the real problem was subtle but widespread resistance while in uniform. Many young men were reluctant to learn the unglamorous basics of soldiering or to obey unpopular superiors – or any superior. One officer described his cadet company as ‘an involuntary association of stone-throwing criminals’.41 What he would have thought of the whole battalion that broke out of its camp at Liverpool in 1913, and had to be returned at bayonet point, can only be imagined. Outside of the ranks, employers objected when workers were lost to militia duty, and parents protested when their sons were sent to camp, or made to drill on cold nights. Ian Hamilton, the British general who would later command the Australians on Gallipoli, inspected the new militia early in 1914 and guessed it was capable of resisting an enemy only half its size.42 Still, by winter that year an army of 62 000 learners, loafers, leaders and larrikins was under some sort of training and discipline. Not until the 1950s would Australia have again a peacetime military force as large or as uncomplicatedly focussed on the basics of war.

  By 1914 Australian also had a navy of sorts. Although the redcoats had left in 1870, the Royal Navy continued to crew an Australia Station. But the ships were small and few, sufficient for suppressing human trafficking in nearby Pacific Islands (their usual duty) but not much else. In any case, strategic orthodoxy was calling for concentration in European waters to face the growing German fleet. Some Australians saw the sense of this. During the so-called Dreadnought Crisis of 1909, as newspapers screamed that Berlin was outbuilding Britain in the construction of the latest capital ships, five rich men and countless poorer folk across New South Wales offered more than £90 000 – nearly the size of Queensland’s entire defence budget a decade earlier – to reinforce the fleet in the North Sea. But more Australians feared Japan, or more precisely that the imperial government in London couldn’t or even wouldn’t help them fend off a Japanese attack. They wanted their own navy tied to local waters, and to hell with the cost. The final decision was a compromise – an affordable navy within a navy that would secure Australian shores in peace, and in war (provided Japan kept out of it) would reinforce the Royal Navy’s main battle fleet. When the first Royal Australian Navy ships, built in England and partly crewed by British sailors, reached Sydney in 1913 they sparked the same proud comments as news of the Gallipoli landing would later. Australia, the Labor Party heavyweight William Morris Hughes pronounced, had ‘assumed the toga of nationhood’.43 With 16 ships, one of them a battle cruiser, our navy was a more formidable force in 1914 than it would be in 1939, and a relatively more powerful fleet than Australia has put to sea since the 1980s.

  On the eve of World War I, then, Australia had the beginnings of a navy and a militia it was starting to think of as an army. When war came, the new ships and sailors proved themselves immediately, making possible the conquest of German New Guinea, running aground a German light cruiser, escorting the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) to war, and then reinforcing the Royal Navy’s main battle fleet. The militia fell into neglect during the war, and wasted away as the tide of combat refused to break on Australian shores. But the vast effort of raising, organising and disciplining it, and the experience gained by its officers, administrators and suppliers, ensured that the AIF could be smoothly and quickly formed in 1914, and that more men than a few thousand Boer War veterans knew what to do once the shooting started.

  If Australians were poised by 1914 to recast themselves as a distinct people by some act of military endurance, they continued to draw strength and to derive a sense of themselves from their long pre-Gallipoli military heritage. The best-selling book by an Australian at the time wasn’t a volume by Banjo Paterson or Henry Lawson, but probably the Reverend W.H. Fitchett’s Deeds That Won the Empire, a stirring account of heroism by Englishmen in red coats and blue jackets. The book, first published in Melbourne in 1896, was conceived for a purpose his successors like Peter FitzSimons share today – to bind Australian society with gripping popular stories of ancestral martial bravery.44 A little more scholarly but no less purposeful was a 1908 lecture on the Royal Navy’s contribution to Australian history by James Watson, a former volunteer captain and a leading light in the newly formed Royal Australian Historical Society.45 Joseph Forde, another literary bowerbird plundering the past, narrated a lively history of British regiments in Sydney to amuse readers of the scandal-sheet Truth from the late summer to the late spring of 1909.46 Not that Australia’s military heritage was only clad in red and blue. Boer War memoirs and histories such as Australians in War, Australians at the Front and Tommy Cornstalk had sketched the achievements and attitudes of a new breed of British soldier from the fringes of empire, someone scarcely different from the one soon to be dubbed a ‘digger’. Fitchett spied in a somewhat hapless defence of an obscure spot in the western Transvaal the same qualities about to revealed on Gallipoli,47 with the result that the fighting at Elands River Post was already set to become a prequel to the national military story.

  Still, in 1914 the old British army was still Australia’s ancestral military force, its default image of the real soldier. Two months after the war began, the
Sydney magazine Lone Hand covered its October issue with a picture of an Australian soldier striding off to war and saluting his predecessor – a soldier in the red coat worn at Waterloo. When news came of the Gallipoli landing, Fitchett pleased everyone by announcing that Australians were like Wellington’s army almost exactly a hundred years before – young fresh-faced militiamen, ignorant of the sound of gunfire – except that ‘Wellington’s lads would not have had the initiative and daring to climb that cliff. That was the “Australian touch”.’48 The reverend’s benediction helped Australians to shift their affections seamlessly from red coats to slouch hats, and from a military past to a military future that no longer needed a past before 25 April 1915.

  But there was a past, more substantial than even our historians usually allow. Not as substantial as the Australian immersion in the two World Wars, of course, but more so than our military experiences since. It is customary, when calculating such experience, to tally up the number of people wearing uniform. But if we also count Aborigines likely to have engaged in ganygarr, and also the members of rifle clubs, then martially active men in Australia might have numbered more than 50 000 early in the nineteenth century,49 perhaps 70 000 at the height of the Boer War,50 and certainly more than 90 000 in mid-1914.51 Such numbers were exceeded only during the World Wars and from the 1950s to the 1970s, but really only in the 1940s if we adjust for an increasing population. Deaths in combat were notoriously heavy during the World Wars, but more than 20 000 dead from frontier fighting and Boer War service is not to be sneezed at – and far exceeds all our battle deaths since 1945. On the grounds of human cost alone, the Australian War Memorial’s colonial and Boer War rooms ought to be larger and more prominently placed than its Korea and Vietnam galleries.

  While cost is one reason for pondering Australia’s military history before Gallipoli, an equally good one is the alternative and perhaps unsettling vision opened up by looking at our military experience from a different vantage point from that of Anzac Cove. Looking from Gallipoli, we see Australians dying beside their New Zealand cousins. We hail them all as Anzacs and leave the connection at that. But as Grace Hendy Pooley understood – and as later historians like me, even in this chapter, have pretended not to notice – our national military story from the First Fleet to the First World War and probably beyond, has artificial if not ahistorical boundaries unless it spans both sides of the Tasman to take in New Zealand, that seventh former British colony at the Antipodes.

  Looking from Gallipoli, we also see Australians fighting and dying against the odds and always in a good cause. That’s fair enough when considering the two World Wars. But looking again at the squalid frontier, and past the blunders of the Boer War, opens our minds to the thought that our soldiers often fight safely on the side of the big battalions against puny enemies for causes which, however politically pragmatic and even necessary, are not entirely virtuous.

  Looking from Gallipoli also places us within a national love affair between citizens and slouch-hatted soldiers. But looking from, say, the celebrations that marked the arrival of news of Waterloo, we know the love affair predated Federation and that the earliest object of civilian affection was an army in red coats recruited outside Australia. The tradition that slouch hats gave us had to be chalked in big letters over an old and well-used slate, not a blank one, and there was still room for other scribbles. A romance with the troops of great allies and old homelands has endured at the margins of Australian military engagement. It encompasses respect and affection for, say, British fighter pilots during World War II, and the secret admiration among some migrant communities for national enemies from the Kaiser to the Taliban.

  Within some marginalised sections of Australian society the understanding and experience of war largely remains a privately inherited one, sometimes indifferent to the public story, or even at odds with it. Just as redcoat settlers passed their stories of Waterloo and the Charge of the Light Brigade into their community’s consciousness, migrants from Vietnam, Somalia and Afghanistan transplant their own memories of recent wars that have little to do with the bravery of men and women in bush hats or Kevlar vests. But these alternative understandings also hold out hope for strengthening Australia’s military forces – if the enormous popularity of the old ethnic volunteer units is any guide. Colonial military forces were attractive to civilians and healthily bustling in themselves partly because of their acceptance of Irish, Scottish and similar units. Perhaps today’s socially isolated and chronically under-strength Australian Defence Force should consider raising Lebanese and Vietnamese regiments?

  No one thinks our military experience really began in 1915. But we ought to acknowledge the earlier and sometimes contrary military strands to that experience. Even on Anzac Day we should admit that our martial story doesn’t begin on Gallipoli.

  Further reading

  J. Bach, The Australia Station, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1986.

  J. Barrett, Falling In: Australians and Boy Conscription 1911–1915, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1979.

  J. Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars 1788–1838, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2002.

  J. Grey, A Military History of Australia, 3rd edn, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2008.

  K.S. Inglis, The Australian Colonists, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1974.

  M. McKernan & M. Browne (eds), Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1988.

  H. Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2006 (first published 1981).

  G. Souter, Lion and Kangaroo, Text, Melbourne, 2001.

  P. Stanley, The Remote Garrison: The British Army in Australia 1788–1870, Kangaroo, Sydney, 1986.

  C. Stockings, The Torch and the Sword: A History of the Army Cadet Movement in Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2007.

  C. Wilcox, Australia’s Boer War, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2002.

  C. Wilcox , For Hearths and Homes: Citizen Soldiering in Australia 1854– 1945, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1998.

  —— , Red Coat Dreaming: How Colonial Australia Embraced the British Army, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2009.

  [2]

  THE ‘SUPERIOR’, ALL-VOLUNTEER AIF

  John Connor

  Every Sunday night in homes across the country, procrastinating students – and harassed parents – hunch over computers frantically Googling to finish school assignments due the next day. For students studying World War I, such internet searches invariably produce this statement: the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) was the only all-volunteer army in the war of 1914–1918. This fact sounds significant. It proves the uniqueness of the Australian soldier, and can be guaranteed to appear in most students’ assignments. The only problem with this important and well-known fact is that it is totally false. The AIF was not the only all-volun-teer army in World War I. Every Irish member of the British Army was a volunteer. No conscripts served in either the South African or Indian armies, or in British colonial forces such as the King’s African Rifles and the British West Indies Regiment.Another, perhaps even more insidious myth has developed out of this basic factual error: that the volunteer status of Australian troops in World War I made them inherently superior to their conscript counterparts.

  Both mistaken notions may be attacked on two fronts. Leaving aside the erroneous idea that Australian soldiers were the only true volunteers during the war, the first is that many men who joined the AIF were not volunteers as the term would be understood in twenty-first century Australia. Unlike today, when individuals generally make their choices according to self-interest, free from external pressure, the Australians of a century ago were less individualistic. The decision whether a man did or did not join the AIF was often made not by him, but for him by parents who selected which sons would go to war and which would stay at home. Employers, workmates, fellow church-members and friends also helped determine enlistment. At a time when the unemploye
d received little financial assistance, and the Australian economy was faltering due to drought and the wartime disruption of trade, many men joined up simply because they needed a job.

  The second argument against the myth of Australian uniqueness in this regard is that wars throughout history have shown that volunteers are not necessarily superior soldiers to conscripts. For example, the British volunteer professional soldiers led by the Duke of York to northern France in 1793 were defeated by the mass conscript army of the French Republic. The myth of the superior AIF volunteers appears to have originated in the latter part of World War I as a consequence of the conscription debate. The failure to introduce conscription in Australia in the referenda of 1916 and 1917 led some to claim that the ‘No’ vote meant most Australians were opposed to war and disloyal to the British Empire. In response, other commentators turned the all-volunteer nature of the AIF into a virtue, and created this special – although mythical – status for the force.

  It was General Sir John Monash, commander of the Australian Corps on the Western Front, in his 1920 book The Australian Victories in France who first made the claim that the AIF was ‘the only purely volunteer army that fought in the Great War’. Monash went on to assert that the Australians in the offensives in 1918 were, at least partially as a consequence, a superior type of force in that they ‘contributed … in the most direct and decisive manner, to the final collapse and surrender of the enemy’, playing ‘an important’ and sometimes ‘predominating part’ in the Allied victory.1 Monash’s claim has been repeated as fact by subsequent authors. Patsy Adam-Smith, in The Anzacs in 1978, compared the all-volunteer Australian army to those of ‘other Commonwealth countries, all of whom were conscripted’. Ken Inglis, in a 1988 article, stated: ‘In 1915 an army composed entirely of volunteers was not unusual. By 1918 the Australian force was alone among armies on either side in remaining so.’ Jonathan King, in The Western Front Diaries in 2008, describes the AIF as ‘the only all-volunteer army in World War I’. The mistaken claim can also be found on the internet on websites ranging from ‘Sands of Gallipoli’ (which sells medallions and other items featuring vials of Gallipoli beach sand) to the Dynamic Learning Online site (that offers an ‘inexpensive online library … designed for use by schools, parents, seniors’).2