In Memoriam - Major General Cedric Maudsley Ingram ‘Sandy’ Pearson AO, DSO, OBE, MC
Major General Cedric Maudsley Ingram ‘Sandy’ Pearson AO, DSO, OBE, MC
(1918–2012)
Major General Cedric Maudsley Ingram ‘Sandy’ Pearson AO, DSO, OBE, MC (24 August 1918 – 7 November 2012). Pearson was born in Sydney and educated at Newington College, where he acquired his distinctive nickname after an eponymous brand of pumice soap popularly known as ‘sand soap’. He entered RMC Duntroon in January 1937, the year in which the college relocated back to Canberra from its enforced move to Sydney during the worst of the Depression. Pearson excelled at rugby, winning a full colour in 1938 and playing at representative level for NSW. His class graduated early, in August 1940, because of the war and he was allocated to cavalry and appointed to the Army Service Corps Staff of the 2nd Division in Sydney.
After completion of the first ROBC at the new Armoured Fighting Vehicles School at Puckapunyal, Pearson was posted to the 13th Light Horse, then in the process of motorisation and subsequently designated the 13th Australian Armoured Regiment, with which he began working up on the newly developed Cruiser tank. In August he transferred to the 2nd AIF as part of the 1st Australian Armoured Division, which did not leave Australia. For this reason he transferred to the infantry and in September 1944 joined the 2/7th Battalion in operations on the northern coast of New Guinea. In action against entrenched Japanese positions on 20 April 1945 he personally called in mortar fire for his company after the mortar OP was wounded and while in full view of the enemy and under direct fire from the Japanese. He subsequently directed the attack onto the Japanese positions, again regularly exposing himself to enemy fire and leading attacks onto the objective. He was awarded the Military Cross for his ‘personal courage and actions in excess of his duty’.
Pearson was a student in the first post-war intake of the Staff College, at that stage still located at Cabarlah in Queensland. He was then transferred to the Australian Intelligence Corps and in July 1947 returned to the Staff College, now at Queenscliff in Port Phillip Bay, as an instructor with the rank of lieutenant colonel. Sent on short-term posting to Britain to refresh on armour, he was chief instructor of the Armoured School at Puckapunyal (and Director of the Armoured Corps) between 1951 and 1954; the small regular Army establishment of the early 1950s regularly ‘double-hatted’ officers in this way, as instructional and other staffs were small. During his period as Director RAC the Army acquired the Centurion tank, later to see active service in Vietnam.
The growing importance of the US connection was reflected in his posting to Washington as Intelligence Officer (G1) on the Australian Military Mission which also involved attendance at the Armed Forces Staff College at Norfolk, Virginia. Returning to Australia in August 1956, he held a senior staff job at Army Headquarters (then still located in Melbourne) before appointment as CO, Corps of Staff Cadets at RMC Duntroon in late 1958. The Director of Military Art was Colonel (later General Sir) Frank Hassett. This was a fairly uneventful period in the college’s history, and after language training and promotion to temporary colonel in early 1960, Pearson was sent to Jakarta as Services Attache in a period that was anything but routine. Sukarno’s government was faltering, the Indonesian economy was in free fall, the Indonesian Communist Party was the world’s largest and increasingly assertive in domestic politics, while in late 1962 Jakarta initiated an undeclared war against Malaysia—Confrontation—in which Australia would become involved. On return from Indonesia he took command of 1RAR, recently returned from service in Malaya/Malaysia. The battalion had to be reorganised from the Tropic establishment (consistent with the British and New Zealand battalions with which it had served overseas) and reconfigured along Pentropic lines, a wasteful experiment which the Army abandoned in the lead-up to deployment to Vietnam. He was awarded the OBE for his ‘enthusiasm, tenacity of purpose and outstanding example’ as a CO in the Queen’s Birthday list for 1964.
With Confrontation intensifying, Pearson next served on the Joint Services Planning Group in Defence Headquarters before appointment as Director of Military Intelligence in November 1965. He held that post for a year and then went to Singapore as Commander, Australian Army Force, Far East Land Force, the ground component of the residual British defence of its Southeast Asian territories. The threat from Indonesia having resolved itself in late 1966, Pearson’s next assignment was command of the 1st Australian Task Force at Nui Dat in South Vietnam. Command of the Task Force was a one-year appointment, and during his tenure of command in 1968–69 the Australians returned from extensive out-of-province operations that had followed the Tet Offensive of early 1968 to engage more intensively in pacification operations and the building up of South Vietnamese forces. Pearson later commented that Vietnam was ‘the first war we’ve gone into without a strategic or political aim’, reflecting the views of many of the senior Australian commanders before and after his own time there. For his command in Phuoc Tuy he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order.
Promoted to major general and command of the 1st Division in Sydney on his return, he was quickly seconded to the Fox Committee of Inquiry into bastardisation at RMC. The Commandant, Major General C A E Fraser, took command of Australian Forces Vietnam (a move that had been scheduled earlier in 1969, before the college scandal broke) and was to have been replaced by the officer he in turn relieved: Major General R A Hay. Because of his close involvement in the inquiry, during which he ‘acquired a close insight into the affairs of the college and has been party to discussions from which will stem recommendations for its future conduct’, it was decided instead to appoint Pearson as Commandant. Not only did he oversee the inquiry’s recommendations, his period as Commandant coincided with the introduction of tertiary degree studies as an integral part of the RMC curriculum, something that had been under consideration within the Army since at least 1944.
After three years as Commandant, Pearson’s final appointment was as Chief of Personnel, a position that included membership of the Military Board, the Army’s senior deliberative and policy-making body. Awarded the AO in mid-1975, he retired from the Army in August that year. In retirement he held a number of directorships, including executive director of the Royal Agricultural Society of NSW (whose council included the former Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Daly). He was active in ex-Service organisations for many years. His wife Marjorie, whom he married in February 1941, predeceased him by a few months. He is survived by family including eight grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren.
