Review Essay - Two Paeans to Professionalism

	The Architect of Victory: The military career of Lieutenant-General Sir Frank Horton Berryman,  Written by: Peter J Dean,  Cambridge University Press, Port Melbourne, 2011, ISBN 9780521766852, 406 pp
	Armies of Empire: the 9th Australian and 50th British Divisions in Battle, 1939–1945,  Written by: Allan Converse,  Cambridge University Press, Port Melbourne, 2011,  ISBN 9780521194808, 368 pp

Reviewed by: Captain Dayton McCarthy

The shadow and influence of our pre-eminent military historian, C E W Bean, has loomed over Australian military history and historiography since his seminal official histories appeared over sixty years ago. Bean’s meticulous efforts at recording the experiences and exploits of the AIF, as well as his Herculean endeavours in establishing the Australian War Memorial, ensure him a rightful place in our esteem. However, Bean’s style was to elevate individual Australian soldiers as the foci of his histories. In doing so, he was the foremost propagator of the ‘cult of the digger’ and one of the most pervasive, and certainly incorrect, myths of Australian military history—that of the ‘natural’ Australian soldier. His desire to record the war from the point of view of the average soldier for the nascent Australian democracy was noble, but this has had a long-term negative effect on how our military history has been studied, conclusions drawn, and how other aspects of military effectiveness have been downplayed or ignored. Under lesser and unfortunately more numerous historians, this elevation of the individual ‘natural’ soldier has taken root and accounts for the large amount of dross that is published as Australian military history every year.

The problem with the natural soldier thesis, besides its lack of perspective and patent falsehood, is that it creates a forced dichotomy. If a soldier is a ‘natural’ and that soldier fails in battle, it must because of something other than the soldier himself—after all, he is a natural soldier. Hence we are led to the second major thread in much Australian military historiography—the shifting of blame to others, be it duplicitous allies, incompetent officers or other influences. The pervasive nature of the ‘cult of the digger’ and the natural soldier myth is still with the Army today; it is manifest in such adages as ‘there are no bad soldiers, only bad leaders’. This may be true, but the role of the universal military principles of training, discipline, leadership, staff work and planning, doctrine and organisation are surer reasons for armies’ successes and failures than any supposedly innate qualities of its soldiers.

These two books, released as part of the ongoing excellent Australian Army History Series, published by Cambridge University Press, examine, through their own subjects, these universal military principles and their application in the Second World War. In doing so, both books undermine the ‘natural soldier’ school of historiography; instead they extol the virtues of military professionalism. Based on theses (Converse a MA; Dean, a PhD), both are successful in illustrating these principles through detailed research and the plundering of primary source material. Dean’s biography of Berryman, who was described by Lieutenant General Sir John Lavarack as ‘the best combination of fighting leader, staff officer and administrator’, is an overdue recognition of one of Australia’s pre-eminent professional officers who planned some of the most complex and successful operations in the latter stages of the war. The biography highlights the requirement for detailed planning across combined arms, and thus the importance of intelligent and dedicated staff officers such as Berryman. Converse’s book, in many ways, is the more ambitious of the two. He examines the vexed concept of morale (and thence effectiveness) through the study and comparison of two broadly similar divisions of the British Commonwealth armies—the 9th Division of the 2nd AIF and the 50th (Northumbrian) Division. His aim is to show that effectiveness was determined less by any supposed national characteristics, and more by what he called ‘basic military realities common to all armies’. He also notes that plain old fashioned luck is never far from a division’s fortunes.

For Dean, his task was relatively simple and was a matter of chronicling Berryman’s military career and illustrating his role in many of the signal Australian military operations in the Second World War. Berryman entered the Royal Military College in the 1913 intake. He excelled as a staff cadet, and when war broke out, his graduation was brought forward by two years. Having performed well in technical subjects such as science and mathematics, he opted to graduate into the artillery. He served in a number of roles, both as a field commander and then as a staff officer in an infantry brigade headquarters on the Western Front. He relished his command time, but it was his staff experience that was crucial to his professional development. He was exposed to the advances made in combined arms tactics, and as an artilleryman he was especially aware of the important role in coordinated artillery protection for advancing infantry. As Dean notes, ‘high quality staff work was exceptionally important in helping to secure victory in 1918. Without the improved operational plans and logistics being produced by (the staff), the changes in tactics and doctrine that had occurred in 1917–18 could not have been implemented.’

Like most, if not all permanent officers, he suffered from lack of career progression in the straitened interwar years, but he was fortunate in being selected for a number of overseas postings, including the Royal Artillery College at Woolwich, the Staff College at Camberley and a period as a staff officer at the Australian High Commission in London. This kept his mind honed on matters military as well as giving him valuable contacts among the officers of the empire’s armies. On the outbreak of war, he, like all professional officers, was deeply insulted by the decision to give commands in the 2nd AIF to militia officers. However, his good reputation secured him the principal staff officer’s position in the newly raised 6th Division.

His time in the 6th Division illustrates the complex nature of the staff corps/militia rivalry, as well as some insights into Berryman’s character. Berryman got on well with and respected the divisional commander and militia officer, Mackay, and one of the brigade commanders, militia officer ‘Tubby’ Allen. He loathed the artillery commander, Herring, who was a militia officer but also clashed frequently with his fellow staff corps officer, Vasey. He got on well with Robertson, who was another permanent officer, but actively suspected the militia officer, Savige, of undermining staff corps officers at every opportunity. He developed a reputation among some as a difficult colleague; others were not so circumspect, and the epithet ‘Berry the Bastard’ arose. But he was able to generally see through one’s background and judge officers on their professional competence more than anything else.

Berryman, above all, sought a prolonged command of his own but this dream constantly eluded him. He enjoyed an all too short stint as an independent, composite force commander in the Syrian campaign in 1941. From here, he began a series of rapid promotions into various staff positions, with just one other brief command appointment, that of commander of II Corps, for two months in early 1944. He held down a number of high level staff appointments simultaneously, such was the trust that Blamey, and others, had in his ability. By the war’s end, he was Blamey’s principal staff officer and planner, controlling multiple operations throughout the South West Pacific Area, which meant working closely with American staffs also. This was sometimes a frustrating experience, the culmination of which was Macarthur’s sidelining of Australian forces after late 1944. Despite longing for a command, Berryman was the consummate professional and threw himself into his staff work wholeheartedly. He understood his job as a planner and staff officer; referring to planning the amphibious OBOE operations, he pithily noted his role was to ‘get the necessary men, trained, equipped and maintained, with all the supplies and stores required, ready at the right place and at the right time to meet the enemy with the greatest possible chance of success’.

Dean generally treats Blamey well and illustrates that he was a man who understood the nature and his role as a true strategic commander. Macarthur and the Curtin Government, which all but ceded control of Australia’s military to the American general, do not appear in such a good light. Blamey’s patronage undoubtedly assisted Berryman throughout his career, but when he was seeking the prize job of CGS immediately postwar, he was passed over by the Chifley Government, which did not want a ‘Blamey man’ in the job. He saw out the rest of his military career as GOC Eastern Command.

Rightly, Dean has called Berryman the ‘architect of victory’. In 1948, Berryman had been awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, the citation from which illustrated the ‘tools’ by which he crafted such victories: ‘General Berryman’s administrative skill, broad professional knowledge, keen perception...his energy, initiative and resourcefulness...made a remarkable contribution to the successful conclusion of Allied operations in the South West Pacific Area’. A professional officer in name, outlook and performance, Berryman’s work at the highest levels of operational planning has been justly chronicled in Dean’s book.

Converse’s Armies of Empire is also about the components of military professionalism, but few of the major characters in the 9th Australian (especially) or 50th Northumbrian Divisions were career professional soldiers. The 9th was a 2nd AIF division raised for service specifically overseas, led mainly by former militia officers, augmented by some regulars in key staff and administrative positions, with the rank and file comprising men who joined off the street. The 50th was originally a part-time Territorial Army (TA) division that had suffered the inevitable decline during the postwar years but which had swollen with the introduction of limited conscription in April 1939. Its rank and file thus comprised TA volunteers from its recruiting area as well as new conscriptees. In contrast to the 2nd AIF, the British Army had an aversion to TA commanding officers and, where possible, sought to replace them with regular officers drawn from those TA battalions’ regular sister battalions. Nonetheless, many of the officers and NCOs of the 50th comprised prewar TA cadres as well as rapidly trained and promoted leaders after the 1939 expansion.

These two divisions were not chosen for comparison at random. Besides both being Commonwealth divisions sharing the same language and essentially the same doctrine and structure, the 9th and 50th were both non-regular divisions which took on regular and professional traits as the war progressed. Symbolically, both divisions fought at the first and second battles of El Alamein, during which time, according to Converse, they peaked in terms of effectiveness and morale. Therefore using morale (which was built upon and influenced by the ‘basic military realities’ described earlier) as his narrative vehicle, Converse tracks the fortunes of these two divisions throughout the war. He takes us from the divisions’ raising where he examines class background, education, physical and mental health of the raw soldier material through to initial training where the role and influence of strong leadership and discipline were often key determinants of future battlefield success. From here, the divisions’ performances are followed up to El Alamein and beyond. For the 9th, this meant the 1943 Huon Peninsula campaign in New Guinea and the controversial OBOE operations in and around Borneo in 1945. For the 50th, it fought in the Sicilian and Italian campaigns in 1943, before landing at D-Day, fighting its way through the bocage and finally driving into the Netherlands as part of Operation MARKET-GARDEN. These final campaigns, for both the 9th and the 50th, are characterised as ‘pressing on’, conducted with gritted teeth and in a workmanlike manner.

Converse digs behind the concept of ‘morale’ and while arguing that it is a force in and of itself, he is at pains to stress that morale cannot simply win a battle by itself. If this was the case, he argues, the 50th and the 9th could not have performed as well as they did during their post-Alamein/post-peak periods when pointers indicated steep declines in morale. Herein stands the true value of his work. He aims to demystify battlefield success but he is in no way ‘deconstructing’ it in a postmodern sense. He pays due respect to morale and recognises that it is often the special spark that can motivate a unit. But without the fundamental building blocks such as leadership, training, discipline, sound doctrine and personnel practices, no unit—Australian or British—can succeed. Moreover, he notes that a unit cannot maintain peak morale indefinitely, regardless of best efforts and best practice, and that ‘armies must aim for the ideal of morale but be prepared to accept less’; what they must ensure, however, is that the morale balance ‘be sufficient to withstand attrition and accomplish the mission’.

In this regard, Converse provides the reader with some hard realities. Overall, the 9th comes out of his analysis—and the war—in better shape. But there were reasons for this. For example, by the end of the second battle of El Alamein, the 50th has already lost as many men (it had fought its way out of France and Belgium to Dunkirk and been severely mauled in some opening battles of the North African campaign) as the 9th would lose in the entire war. Before the war was over, the 50th would lose many more again. These losses had to be replaced; reinforcements had to come from somewhere. The regionally-based regimental system was pushed to breaking point as the British Army endeavoured to replenish units with men from the same region. Depending on the severity of losses to be replaced and the size of the regional pool from which to draw replacements, often the replacements had to come from outside the division’s local area. Even if replacements were successfully drawn from the same region, they had to be equipped, trained and integrated into the units. Replacement leaders also had to be selected and trained. This all took time. It took even longer for the new organisation to coalesce into a team, to regenerate esprit de corps and relearn institutional knowledge. Therefore the 50th had to repeat this process more times and to a greater extent than the 9th. By and large, the 50th did this successfully, but with each iteration of the replacement/regeneration cycle, the overall quality of the division decreased, never to the reach the standards achieved previously.

Refreshingly, as part of this examination of the constituent parts of military professionalism, he looks at two elements generally overlooked in most histories—discipline and non-battle casualties, including mental strain cases. Converse is quite pointed here and, through records of courts martial and other disciplinary hearings, noted that ill-discipline was a problem that the 9th Division struggled with throughout its existence. In a large way, Converse argues that ‘larrikin culture’ demonstrated by the 1st AIF and then perpetrated (and generally tolerated) by the 2nd AIF, had much to answer for. The leaders of the 9th realised this after a number of discipline problems experienced during Tobruk and tightened discipline as a result. Still, it was problem never truly solved; one battalion alone, the 2/23rd, held thirty-four courts martial for desertion after the second battle of El Alamein.

Converse also delves into psychological casualties. Despite records being somewhat piecemeal, he was able to record that around 10 per cent of casualties were psychological. Both divisions came to understand the importance of early identification and early treatment of such cases as a means of prolonging the overall operational stamina of a unit, before it had to be removed from the line and rested, or alternatively, before it slumped into combat-ineffectiveness. He also records other historical indicators of ill-discipline such self-inflicted wounds and incidents of venereal disease, and how increased incidents mirrored the inverse decrease in morale.

Therefore, leadership—in terms of tactical acumen demonstrated, battlefield example and the means by which officers set the tone, standards and vision for a unit—comes under special scrutiny. Here Lieutenant General Morshead, commander of the 9th during Tobruk and El Alamein, and the division’s officers generally, receive special praise. Morshead was tactically adept, his First World War experience especially equipping him to fight the set-piece battles of Tobruk and Alamein very well. Most importantly, he was a firm believer in training and discipline, and this, above all else, probably set the 9th Division on its path to military fame. Converse certainly believes so; his conclusions drawn on this matter are worth quoting in detail:

Much of the credit for the 9th Division’s success really belongs to the officers, from Morshead down. This explanation....is inconsistent with the Digger Myth and unpalatable to many Australians. Morshead and most of his commanders did not fit the democratic Australian image. Their leadership style was often authoritarian, emphasising discipline...and thorough preparation...the Australian was not a ‘natural’ soldier; like the British, the Australians needed discipline, good tactics and hard training to be at their best...Morshead was a volunteer, like his men, but his values and attitudes were those of a regular soldier. These prevailed and made the 9th Division what it was.

The effect of ‘institutional forgetting’, that is the loss of lessons learned from the previous war, is also covered. Some of this is put down to the neglect of all things military during the interwar years, some of it due to an infatuated misunderstanding of German blitzkrieg tactics. One of the great lessons forgotten, which was the cause of some severe tactical reverses early in the North African campaign, was the failure to support and reinforce any breakthrough against the inevitable German counterattack. A relearning of the ‘bite and hold’ tactics from the previous war remedied this, along with a greater British understanding of combined arms warfare, which had its renaissance post-El Alamein. Professional mastery which results in victories is always good for morale!

At the end of each chapter, Converse provides a comparative ‘scorecard’ of the actions fought by both divisions. Contained in each is the tactical action, its outcome (successful/mixed/unsuccessful), its wider operational effect and the quantitative analysis of casualties (including prisoners of war) sustained and inflicted. This simple but telling data both supports and is supported by his thesis that effectiveness is ultimately a function of those ‘basic military realities’. By demystifying morale and supplying numerical data, Converse has sought to quantify and qualify battlefield performance. This may be an anathema to some. In relation to the 9th and 50th Divisions, ultimately, Converse concludes, ‘both came out ahead in the arithmetic of attrition, and they usually accomplished their missions’. The divisions did so because they applied, as much as possible, those constant, professional military values.

Both books display the uniformly excellent production values of this Cambridge University Press series, and both are well illustrated, referenced and indexed. They strike a balance between general ‘readability’ and the inclusion of military minutiae for serious students of the subject matter. There are a few faults, the least of which is that both books’ maps, although professionally produced, lack conventional military symbology, which makes deciphering them more difficult. The price of these books is also a concern and may dissuade many prospective readers. At $59.95, they are not cheap, but serious students of Australian military history—and by definition this should include all military readers of the Australian Army Journal—are well advised to save their pennies to invest in the Australian Army History Series rather than some of the more popular but markedly inferior, commercial history works on bookstore shelves.