The Backroom Boys

THE BACKROOM BOYS Alfred Conlon and Army’s Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, 1942-46

Graeme Sligo

Big Sky Publishing, 2013, 380pp

ISBN 978-1-921941-12-2-7

Colonel Graeme Sligo has written an interesting story on the Army’s Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, and its enigmatic director, Alfred Conlon. However, he could have focussed more on Conlon, beyond the glimpses into his personality that appear in the book.

The Directorate started its existence as a small section reporting to the Adjutant-General, then Major-General Victor Stantke. Conlon, formerly the manpower officer at Sydney University, was commissioned as a major to head the Directorate, and stayed with it through most of its existence, being promoted progressively to colonel as the directorate expanded.

In an early excursion beyond the Adjutant-General’s Branch, Conlon also chaired a Committee on National Morale operating under the Prime Minister’s department. The principal outcome of this committee seems to have been a report on education, elements of which were later adopted through the Universities Commission. This set the precedent for other activities by the Directorate, some not of direct relevance to winning the war, that should have been conducted by other parts of the Army or by other organisations, except that Conlon had access to resources and personnel that they did not.

While, for example, it was appropriate that the Directorate provided advice on the legal framework for contingency planning in regions of Australia that might be invaded, the Army’s surveyors or the Department of External Territories could have conducted some other projects, which included construction of a terrain model of northern Australia and consolidation of the laws of Papua and New Guinea.

After nearly being sidelined by Stantke’s replacement, Major-General Charles Lloyd, Conlon saved his organisation by having it moved to the CGS Branch. From there he liaised with government ministers, including Eddie Ward, Minister for External Territories, and the erratic Bert Evatt, Minister for External Affairs, while supporting Blamey in his roles as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Land Commander under General MacArthur.

Sligo covers in detail the dispute in 1942 and 1943 between Blamey and the Secretary to the Department of the Army, Frank Sinclair. While Blamey, with Conlon’s advice, was successful in delaying the re-introduction of the Military Board until after the war, the division of financial responsibilities between the secretary and the senior military commander, at the core of the dispute, remained unresolved for decades after the war.

Probably the Directorate’s most important achievement was the LHQ School of Civil Affairs, later the Australian School of Pacific Administration, which trained personnel for civil affairs units. Deployment of civil affairs staff to British North Borneo, however, was complicated by Conlon’s willingness to support a plan by Evatt to bring North Borneo under Australian post-war administration. This plan seems to have involved first gaining Australian control over North Borneo, which would then be exchanged for Dutch New Guinea (West Papua).

This and a Directorate proposal for increased Australian administrative responsibilities in Timor might seem somewhat outlandish to modern eyes, as could Conlon’s ambition that Australia become ‘an almost “paramount power” in the South Pacific’. Sligo notes that Blamey, who had ‘a practical view of “troops to task” and military priorities’ probably told Conlon that the latter policy was impractical.

There seems only a limited connection between the problems of an army with limited resources and some of the Directorate’s activities. The resources directed into the Papua and New Guinea law consolidation project and establishing the Australian National University and the John Curtin School of Medical Research might have been better directed to higher priority tasks. Perhaps Sinclair did have a case for closer scrutiny of some of the Army’s activities, which had little direct connection with the pursuit of immediate combat operations?

While Conlon was intellectually brilliant, his attitudes suggest a less than reflective personality. His reported quote, that Blamey ‘did not have a clue who was up who in Canberra’ indicates that Conlon was either inflating his own ego, or that he did not understand the degree to which Blamey had been immersed in politics before the war and in the Middle East. While, as Peter Ryan commented, Conlon might have had ‘up-to-the-minute knowledge of “who was up who”’, Blamey was no slouch in that department.

Sligo notes Churchill’s comment that scientists (and by extension advisers like Conlon and his Directorate) should ‘be on tap, not on top’, but Conlon might not have shared that opinion. Indeed, while Conlon seems to have seen himself as some kind of puppet master, Blamey could actually have been pulling the strings.

Blamey was distrusted, in some cases actively disliked, by some ALP ministers, and might therefore have used Conlon as a ‘go-between’. Conlon had influence with and kept close to senior ALP figures, including Prime Minister John Curtin. Sligo records that Conlon was concerned that Curtin’s death might cause all his plans to come to naught, as he was not as close to Curtin’s replacement, Ben Chifley, who also did not share some of Evatt’s ambitions. Sligo notes that ‘in many respects [Conlon] behaved as if he were a ministerial or political policy staffer’, not an apolitical military officer.

Conlon’s personality also caused dissent in the Directorate, with the anthropologist (and previous commander of the North Australia Observer Unit) Lieutenant-Colonel W.E.H Stanner, being posted to London to put distance between them. Some other staff members seemed less than convinced by Conlon’s plans, as did some outsiders who dealt with him, including H.C Coombs. Many of the Directorate’s staff, however, later went on to high academic or bureaucratic achievement (one, the later Sir Arthur Tange, becoming the bête noire of many military officers).

In retrospect, it might have been better had Lloyd got his way, and Conlon and his then small group been despatched to the suburbs of Melbourne. Those tasks conducted by the Directorate that really mattered, such as training civil affairs staff, would still have been done by other parts of the Army and the bureaucracy, while Conlon’s assertive and manipulative personality would have been removed to the sidelines.

Overall, an interesting book, but it leaves open many questions about Conlon.

Reviewer:  JOHN DONOVAN