The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire

by H. W. Crocker, III

  Olive Garden

  “The two large olive trees in the middle of the fields are known as Blamey’s Meadows. This is because I had a night out with a couple of Tasmanian boys.... We had a bit of a fight with nine Turks in the dark. We got five, we know (and we hope we bagged eight), and then we got away without a scratch. A real good exciting hour it was.”

  Blamey at Gallipoli in a letter to his parents, quoted in John Heatherington, Blamey: The Biography of Field Marshal Sir Thomas Blamey (F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1954), pp. 40–41

  Back home in Australia after the war, he became deputy chief of the General Staff and helped establish the Royal Australian Air Force. In 1922, he returned to London as the Australian representative to the Imperial General Staff. He was expected to become chief of Australia’s General Staff in 1923, but jealous senior officers made that politically impossible, so he was instead made “Second” Chief of the General Staff. Everyone recognized his merit, but Blamey was not the sort who sought to ingratiate himself. As General Sir William Birdwood, the English commander of the Australian Imperial Force during the Great War, had said of Blamey, he was “an exceedingly able little man, though by no means a pleasing personality.”4

  Imperial Loyalty

  “General [Douglas] Haig [Commander of the British Expeditionary Force] asked General Monash a few days later to bring the Australian leaders to meet him. . . . He uttered a few words of thanks and said, ‘You do not know what the Australians and the Canadians have done for the British Empire in these days.’ He opened his mouth to continue, and halted. The tears rolled down his cheeks. A dramatic pause, and we all quietly filed out.”

  Blamey writing on the aftermath of the Battle of Amiens, quoted in John Heatherington, Blamey: The Biography of Field Marshal Sir Thomas Blamey (F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1954), p. 49

  His boss, Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Chauvel, recommended Blamey for another position entirely—Chief Commissioner of Police for the state of Victoria, which had recently suffered a mutiny of a third of its officers and needed a strong hand to knock the force back into shape and knock emboldened bully boys off the streets. Blamey accepted the job in 1925, and so began his controversial career as a copper.

  As a young man, Blamey had been a teetotaler and so successful a lay preacher that he had considered a career as a Methodist minister. But as a police chief, there were accusations that he was no longer a choir boy. In India he had acquired a taste for drink—the norm among British officers—and some said he drank too much. During a police raid on a suspected brothel, a small, stocky man flashed a police badge bearing the number 80, saying everything was all right because he was an undercover constable. Badge 80 was Blamey’s. In a later investigation, the police officers who made the raid testified that the man was not Blamey, Blamey could account for his whereabouts, and his badge was not in his possession at the time of the raid. Though he was conclusively cleared, Blamey’s political enemies on the Left made the “Badge 80” affair a bit of baggage he had to carry for the rest of his life; as they did another minor affair where he had misrepresented a constable’s wounds in a misguided effort to guard the policeman’s reputation (which, as the investigating judge pointed out, was clear in any event). Blamey was a political target for the Labour Party because he was known to have strong right-wing views. He was forced to resign in 1936.

  For a while he filled his time commanding a militia division. Then he found work as a radio commentator, where he warned that Australia’s future was menaced by an aggressive Japan and National Socialist Germany. He toyed with the idea of a political career but was rejected as a candidate. He had little money, and apparently no future. But in 1938, his rehabilitation began. He was appointed chairman of a national manpower committee to prepare for the possibility of war; in 1939 he was appointed commander of the 6th Division of the Australian Imperial Force; by 1940 he was commanding officer of the 1st Australian Corps. He and his fellow Australians were sent to the Middle East.

  As a commander, his goal was to raise and maintain an Australian army that would remain under Australian command and not be parceled out as replacement units for the British. As a strategist, he believed—especially after the Hitler-Stalin pact—that American intervention was necessary for the Allies to win. As a soldier, he impressed his staff officers as tough, demanding, unyielding to physical pain, deeply and widely read, interested in the cultures of the areas to which he was posted (while serving in the Middle East he taught himself basic Arabic), appreciative of the arts (he commissioned war artists for the Australian army), and stubbornly loyal. Field Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell gave Blamey extraordinarily high praise, calling him “probably the best soldier we had in the Middle East. Not an easy man to deal with, but a very satisfactory man to deal with. His military knowledge was unexampled, and he was a positive, firm, and very satisfactory commander.”5

  Blamey’s military knowledge was good enough to tell him that the decision to send Australian troops to Greece in 1941 was a bad one. He quietly spent much of his time in Greece reconnoitering the beaches for an inevitable evacuation from a doomed campaign. Helping to direct the eventual retreat, he was ordered to Cairo where he was appointed Deputy Commander in Chief, Middle East.

  MacArthur’s General

  Everything changed for Blamey, however, after Australia declared war on Japan, one hour after the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. As the Australians prepared for a fight closer to home, Blamey was appointed Commander in Chief, Australian Military Forces.

  The Stakes for Australia in World War II

  “If we don’t win this war it means the end of us and the whole rest of the British Empire.”

  Blamey in an interview with the press, November 1941, quoted in John Heatherington, Blamey: The Biography of Field Marshal Sir Thomas Blamey (F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1954), p. 126

  On 19 February 1942, Australia came under direct, sustained attack for the first time in its history with the massive bombing of Darwin, along with the towns of Broome and Wyndham. It was the first of what would be nearly one hundred Japanese air strikes on Australia. Blamey had to organize a new army quickly—an army prepared not only to defend the Australian mainland but take the battle to the enemy in the jungles of the South Pacific. He was made Commander of Allied Land Forces under the Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific Area, General Douglas MacArthur, whom he—mostly—admired, saying, “The best and the worst things you hear about him are both true.”6

  Blamey had been appalled by Australian complacency on the home front before the Japanese raid on Darwin. Now he found himself the voice of calm amidst the fall of Singapore and the advance of Japanese troops to New Guinea. He was not, however, any more diplomatic. On 9 November 1942, Blamey delivered a speech to Australian troops who had driven back the Japanese on the Kokoda Trail Campaign. Blamey was in a dour mood because MacArthur had expected a speedier victory, and in his speech Blamey invoked a garbled metaphor about running rabbits, which the men took as an accusation of cowardice (an imputation Blamey later said he didn’t mean to imply). The speech made him bitterly resented. Stung, Blamey belatedly stood up for his Aussies against the criticisms of MacArthur and his staff. He demanded he be given Australian troops in the battle for Buna “because he knew they would fight.”7 The belittling of each other’s troops—the Americans dubious about the slouch hats, the slouch hats carping about the Yanks—became a running sideshow in the New Guinea campaign.

  Calumny from an ex-Colonial

  “[The] Australian is not a bushman, he is not a field soldier, he is nothing but a city slum dweller. The Massachusetts soldiers knew more about the New Guinea jungle in two days than the Australians in two years.”

  American General “Hap” Arnold in his diary entry for 28 September 1942, cited in Major-General John W. Huston, ed., American Air Power Comes of Age: General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold’s World War II Diaries (University Press of the Pacific, 2004), vol. I, pp. 396–97

>   Another sideshow was Blamey’s imperial interest in developing New Guinea with tea, coffee, and quinine plantations (he was a self-taught expert on preventing malaria). He even wondered about importing elephants to help work the land. While most of his troops considered New Guinea a green, steaming, miasmic hell, Blamey liked it, and liked sleeping out under the jungle stars, dreaming of how Australia could fulfill its colonial mission to the Papua New Guineans after the war.

  They put him in much better mind than the Japanese, whom he despised. When he accepted the Japanese surrender at Morotai, Indonesia, one week after the general Japanese surrender to Douglas MacArthur aboard the USS Missouri, he said,In receiving your surrender I do not recognize you as an honorable and gallant foe, but you will be treated with due but severe courtesy in all matters.

  I recall the treacherous attack on our ally, China. I recall the treacherous attack upon the British Empire and upon the United States of America in December 1941, at a time when your authorities were making the pretense of ensuring peace between us. I recall the atrocities inflicted upon the person of Australian nationals as prisoners of war and internees, designed to reduce them by punishment and starvation to slavery. In the light of these evils I will enforce most rigorously all orders issued to you, so let there be no delay or hesitation in their fulfillment at your peril.8

  If the Allies—and his fellow Australians—found Blamey a hard man, the Japanese found him no softer.

  On 14 November 1945, after working hard to return temporary wartime soldiers to Civvy Street, he was dismissed as commander in chief. Angered that the Labour government of Australia, as a matter of policy, would not nominate senior officers he recommended for knighthoods, Blamey spurned any talk of rewards for himself, saying, “I don’t want anything. All I want to do after I leave the barracks is attack your Government. I’ll do it at every opportunity,”9 which he did as a conservative newspaper columnist. His final reward for his wartime service was his old Buick staff car; Blamey had wanted to buy it, but the government insisted, over his protests, that he accept it as a gift. He retired from the army on 31 January 1946, though he was reappointed after the conservative Liberal Party defeated Labour in the 1949 elections. Prime Minister Robert Menzies wanted to promote him to field marshal, a rank that required approval of the British War Office and the Crown, and which could only be granted if Blamey was on the active service list. He became a field marshal in the King’s Birthday Honours list for 1950.

  Blamey’s end followed swiftly. Previously in robust good health, he was bedridden when he received his field marshal’s baton. He was a determined patient, convinced he would recover, and fought to that end longer than his doctors thought possible, before dying of a stroke on 27 May 1951.

  Blamey was an imperial servant, patriotically and jealously devoted to his native land of Australia, but equally loyal to the British Empire and the king. Even if his experience of field command was slight, he was a gifted strategist, and a polymath with a curiosity and knowledge that was catholic in its scope. Regarded as a cold-hearted administrator, he did what he thought politically and militarily necessary, and those who knew him well sometimes saw the tears that cracked the severe visage. He felt deeply the losses his men incurred, and was utterly devoted to helping wartime veterans. Only in the British Empire could a drover’s son from dusty Wagga Wagga rise to become a general jousting with the likes of Wavell and Auchinleck and MacArthur—not to mention the enemy—and win a field marshal’s baton from the king.

  Chapter 26

  FIELD MARSHAL SIR GERALD TEMPLER (1898–1979)

  “He looked rather like Charles II . . . fairly short, wiry, and he had a little penciled moustache . . . and the moment he talked his eyes lit up. . . . You felt the whole time you were under his gaze.... He was one of those leaders who attracted younger officers who later most of them became generals in turn.... You gave him all you could, partly out of loyalty to him. He was a very, very great man. . . . He was legendary.”

  —John Loch, who served under Templer in Malaya1

  Sir Gerald Templer was a tough, terse soldier—the least likely person, some might think, to argue for defeating the Communist insurgency in Malaya by winning over “hearts and minds.” But it was indeed Templer, a veteran of two world wars won by overwhelming military force, who gave us that phrase and a model of successful counterinsurgency warfare.

  * * *

  Did you know?

  Templer was a hurdler on the 1924 British Olympic team (as well as an army shooting and bayoneting champion)

  He was the youngest lieutenant-general in the British Army at the start of World War II

  He developed the “hearts and minds” strategy of counterinsurgency that helped defeat the Communists in Malaya

  * * *

  For all his formidable reputation, he could be a puckish sort—particularly when discussing his origins. Sometimes he would insist he was Devonshire English (which was true). At others, he would claim to be Irish, or at least Anglo-Irish (which was also true), and certainly he always took an especial interest in Irish regiments. Templer once told Nikita Krushchev that while the Irish were Catholics who hated Protestant Englishmen, he was a Protestant Irishman who was chief of the British Imperial General Staff. In truth he was the English-born son of an Anglo-Irish father who served in the Royal Irish Fusiliers. Both sides of his family had Anglo-Irish blood and military traditions.

  He was dispatched to boarding school at ten, was an enthusiastic boy scout (he would later try to win the hearts and minds of young Malays with scouting), and was in the Officer Training Corps in Wellington College. He loved OTC but loathed the school—he later refused to become its governor—and in comparison a life in the trenches seemed a jolly prospect. He took an appointment at Sandhurst, which had dramatically shortened its training program to six months; “nobody failed at that stage of the First World War [1916] because we were so badly needed as cannon fodder.”2 A month before he was eighteen, he was a second lieutenant with the Royal Irish Fusiliers, though he wouldn’t be posted to France until he was nineteen.

  An Anglo-Irishman’s Lament

  “At heart he loved Ireland, but he was hurt by it—he felt that it had behaved badly.”

  Jane Templer on her father’s attitude to the old sod, quoted in John Cloake, Templer: Tiger of Malaya (Harrap, 1985), p. 3

  He survived the war, had his share of modest adventures, including retrieving a drunken Irishman from no man’s land, and when he was stricken with diphtheria in March 1918, he cleverly switched the tag on his toe so that he was sent to “American Ladies Hospital” rather than a dreary old field hospital. Templer liked telling such stories against himself (including how he lasted only ten days as an intelligence officer) and treated his First World War experiences with grim humor. But one image in particular—of panicked, pitifully whinnying, “wounded horses . . . tripping over barbed wire, and treading on their own guts”3—gave him nightmares until the day he died.

  After the war he was sent on anti-Bolshevik duty with the Royal Irish Fusiliers in Persia, where he had a mostly merry time except for an altercation with a hot-headed Persian that left him with a broken collar bone (badly set by a drunken doctor). Then it was on to Mesopotamia for a bit of counterinsurgency, which, he recalled later, had all the excitement of war with little of the danger. His tour of the Middle East ended with rather unpleasant constabulary duties—he had to witness hangings—in Egypt.

  His regiment survived the creation of the Irish Free State, and back in England he became an accomplished sportsman—not just with horse and gun (he was a champion shooter and bayonet fighter), but as a hurdler for the army track team, which in due course led to his winning a spot on the 1924 British Olympic team, though he ended up as a reserve hurdler and did not run. He enjoyed an active social life (the Irishman in him liked having a good time) though he was a stickler about regimental history, traditions, form and uniform (he was that sort too), until his battalion of Fusiliers
was reposted to Egypt. Here too, his duties were rather leisurely; so leisurely that he took leave to get married in 1926, before returning to his rounds of polo, shooting, and drinks (and, to be fair, maneuvers and courses, including one in aerial reconnaissance). A polo injury immobilized him long enough to pass the exams for Staff College.

  He entered the college in 1928. It was a two-year course and he was the youngest in his class. Among his instructors was future field marshal Bernard Montgomery. When he graduated he joined a new regiment, the Loyals, as it was the only way for him to be promoted to captain. He performed the usual rounds of a young officer—including encountering a bête noir commanding officer who wanted him retired for chronic ill health (for all his athleticism, Templer was accident- and sickness-prone)—until in 1935 he was posted to Palestine. He thought it an unfortunate, filthy, overtaxed wasteland. He was unimpressed by the Jewish settlers, though the Zionists were rather more impressed with him, hoping at one point to convince him to become Chief of Staff of a Jewish army. Still, he found patrolling against Arab terrorists quite fun, even if he only spent about six months doing it before being ordered back to Old Blighty.