The Fight Leaders

THE FIGHT LEADERS. 

D. Butler, A. Argent and J. Shelton

Australian Military History Publications, 2002.  178pp.

This book sets out to ‘tell the story of three great Australian battle leaders’.  While to a degree it achieves its aim, it does not really do so satisfactorily, in large part because of the uneven quality of the writing.  The best section on the three fight leaders is that on Frank Hassett, while the chapter on Charles Green is the least satisfying.  The book also attempts to ‘educate’ the reader on a range of military matters, and over a third of it comprises a philosophical discussion on the Army, particularly the Infantry. 

Turning first to the chapters on the ‘fight leaders’, that on Green really does not give a feel for the man.  The discussion of his World War II experience includes too much speculation (‘would have been…’ ‘must have been …’).  What stands out, however, is how limited was his actual operational experience before he took command of the 2/11th Battalion.  Having missed the first desert offensive and the Papuan Campaign because of injury and illness, Green’s actual time in battle by March 1945 amounted to a few days in Greece, some weeks evading capture there, and a couple of months as 2IC of the 2/2nd Battalion at Aitape (after 18 months as 2IC of that Battalion during its training on the Atherton Tableland). 

There is little sense of how Green inspired his men so effectively in World War II and Korea.  We are told that he spoke to all ranks in ‘simple terms’ before embarkation, gave ‘clear concise orders’, albeit always in a ‘low monotone’ (but most of the troops would not have been present for O Groups), and went well forward, being seen in the place of danger by his troops.  But these actions would not set him apart from many others, and his inspiring leadership in Korea was said to have dated from soon after taking command, before the deployment.  How he put together an effective unit in a remarkably short time, and then led it successfully in battle does not become clear.

The chapter on Bruce Ferguson gives a better sense of the man, but again the qualities that made him such a good leader do not become clear.  He was well known to some in 3 RAR, but many of the troops were recent reinforcements from the pre-deployment expansion, to whom he would have been a stranger (and, as 2IC, a man rarely seen until taking command).  We also hear that his attitude to junior officers was ‘abrupt and brusque’, and he spoke to them in ‘menace-loaded soft tones’.  While Ferguson also went well forward, and spoke to the troops when possible, there is no real feel for what made him different to many others.  However, the chapter does give a good account of 3 RAR’s actions under Ferguson’s command, including at Kapyong.

There are hints that Ferguson’s relief came at least in part because of his reluctance to deplete 3 RAR’s strength by sending leave parties away while the battlefield was still active.  He is also criticised for the limited number of decorations he recommended.  Did ‘back-door’ complaints about these matters contribute to his relief?  There is the faint hint between the lines that they might have, but again, no real feel for the issue.  The chapter also includes some extraneous detail, such as recounting the receipt of jeeps and a water truck, and the return of carriers to Australia.  The space would have been better spent getting to the nub of Ferguson’s command style.

Happily, the chapter on Frank Hassett is more satisfactory.  More is told about his formative years, ands those who may have influenced him before and during the Second World War, and there is a better feel for what ‘makes him tick’.  The story of Hassett making Headquarters II Corps mobile brings to mind Sir William Slim’s tale in his book Defeat Into Victory of making Headquarters 15 Indian Corps mobile in Burma – perhaps the reaction of the II Corps clerks was similar to that of Slim’s babus!  Unlike Green and Ferguson, Hassett seemed to relate better to the people around him, while still maintaining a formal relationship.  Like them, he was frequently in the forward areas and used the supporting arms well.

I think it was either Wavell or Slim who said that Infantry should always be written with an initial capital.  David Butler is clearly a supporter of this concept, as much of the book is a panegyric to the Australian Infantry of the First and Second AIFs (and some elements of the Second World War militia), and the post-war regular Infantry. 

However, although great Infantry leaders of the two World Wars are mentioned early on, by the third chapter it becomes clear that, after the Second World War, this paean is focused primarily on the regular Infantry.  Somehow, a tradition founded by citizen soldiers becomes the preserve of regulars, and citizen soldiers are dismissed with a comment that today, for those destined for the top in any profession or business, there is ‘no time for any other profession, even on a part-time basis’.

One wonders how much the belief that the management of violence is too complex for non-regulars stems from what Pat Beale (in his recent book Operation Orders) has described as the love of complexity that develops in armies during peace, that must be discarded ‘as soon as the shots begin to fly’.  Beale sees this complexity as helping ‘to pass the time and [demonstrate] the professionalism of the regulars’, but considers that there is greater merit during peace ‘in refining issues to their first principles and purest simplicity and then driving them home so that they cannot be forgotten under any circumstance’.  This would be a real challenge to professionalism!

Others have had the chastening experience of having their predictions that modern war is too complex for non-regulars disproved.  In May 1939, the Commander-in-Chief of the RAF’s Bomber Command stated flatly that he was ‘convinced that the idea that we shall be able to fight the next war with mass-produced [aircrew] … is fallacious’.  As he left Bomber Command a year later, the process of building the mass air force he could not envisage was under way.  Perhaps the separateness between regular military personnel and society leaves them unaware of the increasing complexity of civilian life that may balance the increasing complexity of war?

Some statements in this book invite query.  What, for example, is the basis for the view that the Second AIF did not reach its peak until the end of 1943?  Recall that by then it had defeated the Italians, Germans, French regulars and Foreign Legionnaires and the Japanese.  Indeed, a very few pages later, the 1942 battles in Papua (Kokoda, Milne Bay, and Buna/Gona) are compared in their effect to the climactic events of 1918, when the First AIF was at the peak of its performance.

Churchill’s quote about the Army not being ‘like a limited liability company’ is used as one chapter leader.  This quote is often used, but needs to be set in its correct time context.  It was contemporaneous with the appointment of Haldane as Secretary of State for War, and was presumably a plea for organisational stability at that time.  Yet Haldane’s reforms that followed are generally credited with making the British Army at least partially ready for war on a continental scale in 1914.  Sometimes, change is essential!  And while there is merit in the call to improve the capability of the Infantry, Slim’s injunction that armies ‘do not win wars by means of a few bodies of super-soldiers but by the average quality of their standard units’ should remain in mind.

David Butler laments that ‘we do not nurture among the people [a] proprietary interest in the Army’, yet surely the Army must take some responsibility for this parlous state of affairs.  There has been in recent years an ongoing series of incidents of bullying, which seem almost calculated to alienate the Army from society.  That incidents of this type continue suggests systemic leadership failures of a type that should not occur in an organisation that professes to admire the achievements of people like Green, Ferguson and Hassett (and the great leaders of the First and Second AIF).

He concludes with a plea for a wider acceptance of the military profession, and for the standing army to be developed as the people’s army.  For better or for worse, Monash summed up the problem of a peacetime standing army many years ago, when he noted that there is ‘something about permanent military occupation that seems to confine a man’s scope … under the circumstances of official routine, he generally finds himself wholly out of touch with civil occupation’.  In peacetime, a regular army is unlikely to attract (and retain) a high number of the most talented people. 

If the Army is to become a people’s army, it will have to reform itself internally and also revive the fortunes of its part-time element, and the links to the community that they provide.  Only then will the Army have access to the full range of talent from which to select its future fight leaders.  Two of the three leaders discussed in this book did not start their military careers in the regular forces!

JOHN DONOVAN