Ted Serong

TED SERONG The Life of an Australian Counter-Insurgency Expert

Anne Blair

Published by Oxford University Press 2002

During the 1960s, with the exception if the Vietnam War Victoria Cross winners, Ted Serong was probably the best known individual Australian soldier.  It is therefore entirely appropriate that the Army History Series should devote a volume to him.

Anne Blair ranges widely across the events of Serong’s long life.  She produces a convincing case that Serong was an excellent tactician and trainer, and shows also that many of his interventions at the military operational level were productive.  However, the repetitive use of the word ‘strategy’ and its variations in an apparent attempt to give greater significance to Serong’s achievements, when ‘operational’ might be a more appropriate word, becomes a distraction.  Also, Blair’s descriptions of some of his actions at the real strategic (government interface) level suggest that Serong did not always understand the processes and priorities of governments, particularly in democracies.

Perhaps it would have been better to leave Serong as he is best pictured – the exemplar of the tactical proficiency of the Australian Army in jungle warfare from the mid-1950s until the withdrawal from Vietnam in 1972.  After all, as this book records, he was a pivotal influence in achieving that level of tactical excellence.  That, in itself, is surely a worthwhile achievement (and monument) for one man.

Anne Blair portrays the respect with which the Serong family held the pre-Second World War Staff Corps.  Given the later events in Serong’s life, one wonders if he still had that respect in the final decade of the Twentieth Century, when he saw and regretted the loss of the traditions of the Citizen Forces.  Other writers, such as Albert Palazzo, have demonstrated that this loss was at least partially the result of the actions (or inactions) of the regular officer corps.  Like David Horner (writing in Crisis of Command in 1978), Serong came to the conclusion that officers with flexibility and imagination could best be developed by service with the citizen forces - not a popular concept these days!

The influence of his religion on Serong’s life is well recounted in the book.  In today’s multicultural society, few might now recall the sectarianism that gave a subordinate position to Catholics in Australian society in the early part of the Twentieth Century.  The attempt of the Catholic Church to break out of that subordinate position by educating selected children was an influence in Serong’s schooling (where he met and formed associations with other Catholics who became well known in future years, like B.A. Santamaria).  Also, his early contacts in Burma were Catholics, as were many of the Vietnamese with whom he worked from 1962 to 1975.

Anne Blair shows how Serong, with great prescience, recognised during the Second World War that Australia’s future lay in the Pacific, not in the Middle East.  Others more senior and experienced would take many years to accept this reality!  She also shows that a lesson Serong absorbed early in his time in Asia in the 1960s was the need for military forces to match their ambitions and tactics with the available level of resources.  In Burma, he was advised that the Burmese navy found that ‘When our young officers go to Britain, they see lots of big ships, and they come back and want them here.  That sort of thing is not for us’.  In Vietnam, Serong commented on the American tendency to place ‘too much reliance on forthcoming mechanical marvels’.  He considered that the Vietnamese Armed Forces improved as the level of American support declined. 

Throughout his active life, Serong was driven by a sense of purpose based on a feeling that he had somehow been ‘chosen’.  In some people, this form of self-belief could have led to delusions of grandeur, but he seemed successfully to avoid these.  It is unfortunate that his marriage seems to have essentially ended in a ‘parting of the ways’ during his long service in Vietnam in pursuit of his life’s goals, and not to have recovered after he returned to Australia, yet this did not seem to make him bitter. 

While Serong remained active after the Vietnam War ended (when he was almost 60), he seems to have kept a sense of proportion often lacking in driven people.  In his later years, he pushed ideas for Australian defence, and became involved with the unofficial militia movement and the One Nation Party.  Again, however, he seemed to avoid any drift into extremism, and, as Anne Blair recounts, may have exerted some moderating influence, specifically warning against ‘New Guardism’ on one occasion.

In his later years, when defence became less fashionable in the community, and the concept of citizen service became less fashionable in the Army, he supported both an active defence effort and expansion of the citizen forces.  Yet he also displayed the abiding weakness of many in the Australian forces – an inability to understand the strategic/government level of defence planning.  The tactical excellence of the Australian Army in jungle warfare during the Malaya/Vietnam period and the training system established at Canungra by Serong are his legacy, but his actual influence at the strategic level was limited.

The picture that emerges of Ted Serong is in some ways the idealised picture of the ANZAC legend.  He was the boy from the (religious) wrong side of the tracks who joined the citizen forces, overcame apparent social prejudice to gain entry to Duntroon and become a regular officer, then went on to become an exemplar of the Australian tradition of tactical excellence.  As a senior officer, he retained his empathy with the junior soldiers (witness his joining a nervous soldier in jumping off the tower at Canungra) and both his respect for and the respect of the senior non-commissioned officers.  Whatever his weaknesses, this is surely a worthwhile legacy.

JOHN DONOVAN