Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Daly, KBE, CB, DSO
(1913–2004)
Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Daly, who died in Sydney on 5 January 2004 at the age of 90, was one of the towering figures in the history of the Australian Army. Along with General Sir John Wilton (1910–81), he was one of the most important occupants of the office of Chief of the General Staff in the postwar era. During his long and distinguished career, the regular army that he joined in the early 1930s was transformed into a standing professional force responsible for the land defence of Australia and its interests—one capable, moreover, of sustained continuous expeditionary deployment in the region. Daly himself had much to do with this transformation.
Thomas Joseph Daly was born in Ballarat on 19 March 1913. His father (also Thomas Joseph Daly) earned a Distinguished Service Order (DSO) as second in command of the 9th Light Horse Regiment during the Great War, and was a bank manager in civilian calling. The young Daly was educated at St Patrick’s, Sale, and Xavier College, Melbourne. He aspired originally to a career in medicine, but entered the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in 1930 as a member of a class numbering just thirteen. Graduating into the Depression-era army in December 1933, he held the usual staff and training appointments in militia units that were the lot of young regular officers of the day, in his case serving with the 4th and 3rd Light Horse regiments. In his graduation report the Commandant, Colonel J. D. Lavarack, a future Chief of the General Staff himself, had noted Daly’s capability as a horseman and all-round sportsman, and his ‘tactful, modest and unassuming’ manner. These characteristics were frequently commented on in later confidential reports. ‘A good type’, wrote the commanding officer of the 4th Light Horse, ‘possesses decision, self-reliance, and is tactful and commands respect’. Another wrote that he ‘shows great strength of character. Highest integrity ... sound in judgement’. In 1938–39 he secured a highly desirable exchange posting with the British Army, serving with the 16th/5th Lancers on the North-West Frontier of India.
With the outbreak of war, he was seconded to the 2nd AIF in October 1939 and served with the 2nd/10th Battalion as adjutant. From there, he went to Wooten’s 18th Brigade headquarters as brigade major, where he remained until September 1941 and for which he was mentioned in dispatches. He attended the Middle East Staff School in the first half of 1942, and then returned to Australia and the position of General Staff Officer Grade 1 of the 5th Division and service in New Guinea.
In many ways, the high point of his wartime service was command of the 2nd/10th Battalion, especially in the assault on Balikpapan in Borneo in July 1945. Battalion commands were relatively rare for RMC graduates, and indeed in 1945 Daly was the only Staff Corps officer to hold such a position. In the opinion of the official historian, Gavin Long, Daly was ‘the outstanding CO of the campaign’, and his DSO citation noted his ‘courage, initiative and brilliant leadership’.
After a further short period of staff appointments, Daly went to the United Kingdom to attend the Staff College at Camberley and then the Joint Services Staff College at Latimer. From 1949 until his appointment as Director of Infantry in mid-1951, Daly was Director of Military Art (DMA) at RMC, where he impressed himself on the classes with his friendly interest in their development. In June 1952, he took over command of the 28th Commonwealth Infantry Brigade in Korea, the first Australian to hold the position (he was succeeded by John Wilton early the following year). The brigade was engaged in a positional war of patrols, ambushes, artillery and mortar barrages, and operated within a British Commonwealth divisional structure under overall American command. The two Australian battalions were often engaged in vicious fighting with the Chinese in the valleys below their positions, and Daly kept a close personal eye on their operations. He had first known many of the young officers commanding platoons in these actions as staff cadets during his time as DMA.
Increasingly, senior rank now brought with it the full range of senior command and staff positions in the army of the day. Daly became Director of Military Operations and Plans at a time when Australian defence thinking was shifting from an emphasis on deployment to the Middle East in the event of a general war to one that focused on the region to Australia’s north. This appointment was followed by a year at the Imperial Defence College (now the Royal College of Defence Studies) in London in 1956.
On returning to Australia, Daly served for three years as General Officer Commanding Northern Command, which also exercised responsibility for the Army’s affairs in Papua New Guinea. Northern Command presented several challenges, not least with the Pacific Islands Regiment (PIR), some of whose soldiers had rioted in Port Moresby in December 1957 and in which morale and discipline were at times problematic. Daly moved to replace the existing warrant officer platoon commanders with young subalterns from RMC and Portsea, improved conditions of service, and undertook a thorough overhaul of training and patrolling activities. These measures are among his most important services to the Army.
By now Daly was being considered for the highest positions in the service. The Minister for the Army, J. O. Cramer, wrote of him in 1960 as:
A young Major General of outstanding ability who will undoubtedly eventually come under consideration for the appointment of Chief of the General Staff. He has had wide and varied experience in Command and in the General Staff and should now be given experience on the Military Board and in a senior administrative appointment.
A period as Adjutant General and Second Member of the Military Board duly followed. Then, in May 1966, Daly succeeded Wilton as Chief of the General Staff (CGS) just as the army was poised to deploy a two-battalion taskforce to Phuoc Tuy province in the Republic of Vietnam.
The second half of the 1960s was a most interesting, and a most challenging, period to be professional head of the Army, and Daly exercised quiet yet firm, sustained leadership in the position for the duration of Australia’s major commitment to the war in Vietnam. He visited the 1st Australian Task Force regularly, and enjoyed an easy rapport with the soldiers whom he visited. He is said to have felt the casualties keenly, especially those that suffered from the Australian mines sown in the barrier minefield and which the enemy lifted and subsequently used against Australians. Having fought in both North Africa and Korea, Daly had a well-founded understanding of, and respect for, the use of such weapons.
Daly’s time as CGS is best remembered, at least outside the army, for the ‘Civic Action affair’, which led to the resignation of the Minister for Defence, Malcolm Fraser, and the destabilisation of the Prime Minister, John Gorton, in March 1971. The exact detail of what happened is still unclear, and Daly reflected much later that he was ‘at a loss to explain the raison d’etre for the affair. The best explanation of events probably lies in the Byzantine internal politics of a Liberal Party increasingly bent on self-destruction. No-one seriously believed that a man of Daly’s integrity and character would be caught up in such matters, and he alone, as he noted, received a fair and favourable coverage in the media commentary on the matter. Neither Gorton nor Fraser exhibited any ill-will towards Daly in subsequent years.
There were other aspects of Daly’s time as CGS that warrant sustained consideration. He created the position of Vice-Chief of the General Staff; oversaw the creation of functional commands to replace the old territorial districts; and began the process of reorganisation of the army that would continue under his successors in the wake of Vietnam. He argued for the acquisition of more troop-lifting helicopters to improve infantry mobility, and for specialised gunship helicopters for ground support roles—both legacies of the Vietnam experience.
The use of national servicemen placed the Army in conflict with some sections of Australian society. Although national servicemen were readily incorporated into the service, and served and fought ably and well in Vietnam, the political climate in which the Army found itself in this period made the job of CGS a sometimes fraught one. In 1969, Daly’s term in office was extended for a further two years. By 1971, although he was still below statutory retirement age for his rank, he was, by then, as he conceded subsequently, ‘tired, less than completely fit and when the time came, ready to make way for my successor’.
Retirement was a relative term for Tom Daly. He had served ex-officio on the Council of the Australian War Memorial since 1966, and remained on that governing body until 1982, becoming after 1974 its chairman. He held a variety of directorships, was involved with the Royal Agricultural Society of New South Wales, the Red Cross Society, and served a variety of charitable concerns, such as the Matthew Talbot Hostel where he regularly helped clean and feed the indigent residents.
Daly maintained his connections with the Army to which he had devoted his adult life through colonelcies of the Royal Australian Regiment, the Pacific Islands Regiment and involvement with the Infantry Centre Museum. A long and happy marriage and a family of three daughters, together with a range of recreational interests involving music and art, provided balance and sustenance in his personal life. His quiet and undemonstrative devotion to his Catholic faith was important in defining him as a man, and informed the integrity, strength of character and compassion on which so many remarked during his life. He was, without question, one of the great soldiers produced by the Army, one of its most important senior officers, and one of Australia’s most distinguished servants.
Jeffrey Grey
Professor of History
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
The University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy
