Book Review - The Centenary History of Australia and the Great War Series

The Centenary History of Australia and the Great War Series

Edited by: Jeffrey Grey

Oxford University Press, 2014-2015, volumes 1 to 5

Reviewed by: Professor Michael Neiberg

Mark Twain once said that Australia’s history “does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies.”¹ When it comes to commemoration of the First World War, Twain’s words may be a bit harsh, but they have a ring of truth, and not only for Australia. Among the many patterns that have emerged worldwide during the centennial commemorations of the First World War, two have stood out most consistently. First, what societies “know” about the First World War has been deeply shaped by domestic politics, the entertainment industry, and the desire of societies to believe in a comfortable version of their own history. Despite some of the excellent work they have done, the role of historians has been much less influential than we academics might like it to be. In other words, people and societies tend to believe the history they want to believe, ignoring those aspects of history that might undermine the convenient fictions, if not outright lies, that sustain their national stories.

Perhaps nothing so symbolises this phenomenon as the omnipresence of Gallipoli in Australian imagination. That campaign gives Australia its national holiday of commemoration, ANZAC Day, and remains central to Australian memory. But the Gallipoli myth masks the reality that eighty five percent of Australia’s wartime casualties happened away from Gallipoli. The result, Jeffrey Grey argues, is an Australian form of “ancestor worship” of the relatively small number of Australians who fought there. The Gallipoli trope had something for everyone in the postwar years: digger heroism, English incompetence as an explanation for Australian failure, a sense of rising national identity, and the always popular belief that the campaign was a ‘near run thing’. At the same time though, the focus on this version of the Gallipoli story deflected discussion away from crucial Australian actors toward British participants like Sir Ian Hamilton and Sir Winston Churchill.

These powerful myths, legends, and half truths continue to dominate discussions about the First World War even today despite the great work done by scholars to wash away a century of incomplete knowledge at best, wilful lies at worst. As Robert Stevenson wrote in volume three of this series, “myths are important for national cohesion, yet they can be a powerful force and a major obstacle in trying to understand the past”. The myths, of course, get recycled and further distorted by politics, social change, and our ever increasing distance from the events themselves.

Second, what politicians, writers, and nationalists depict as unique to their own society is, upon deeper analysis, rarely unique. A generation or more of international and comparative history has shown us that similarities in wartime experiences, at least among the large powers, outweigh differences far more than the national myths would have us believe. This is especially true among the various constituent parts of the British Empire, where attempts to create distinctiveness within similarity, pose the problem Sigmund Freud described as the narcissism of small differences. It may be no coincidence that Freud first popularised the syndrome in 1917.

All five volumes in this ground breaking series wrestle with these twin problems of memory and identity. In doing so, they have been influenced not just by the exciting developments in the military history of the war, but by social and economic history as well. They have also been influenced by the recent trends in imperial history that see empires as relationships of exchange rather than wholly unequal interactions between the core and the periphery.

As a group, therefore, the volumes present up to date history; accessible and informative for both specialists and general readers alike. All five books wrestle with various aspects of Australian popular understanding and the so-called ‘digger myth’, a theme explored by scholars like Jenny McLeod in the United Kingdom and, from the Turkish perspective, Burcin Cakir.² Scholars in this field still work in the shadow of CEW Bean, whose editorship and authorship of Australia’s official history of the war retains tremendous influence on the shape and tenor of the debates.³

To cite one of the most famous examples, Bean is largely responsible for the commonly accepted conventional wisdom that the performance of Australian forces during the war can be traced to the country’s ‘bush ethos’. Presumably, because Australian soldiers were from rural areas, they knew how to shoot, they were comfortable with a certain degree of deprivation, and they were difficult for professional officers to handle. But, as Bou and Dennis show, farmers made up only about ten percent of the AIF. The highest percentage of Australian volunteers by far came from urban laborers. It may therefore be that the digger’s characteristics came not from his rural upbringing but his socialist, trade unionist beliefs about authority and community. This version pushes against national mystique but helps us understand the war more clearly.

In writing these books, the authors faced an enormous challenge in undoing some of what Australians think they know about the war and the men who fought it. In the United States, where I work, the history of the First World War is nearly forgotten, making it a kind of blank slate on which Americans can write. But in Australia, voices from Bean to Mel Gibson have created a memory of the war that is no less powerful for its divergence from the history written by today’s scholars.

The series editor, Jeffrey Grey, knew the nature of the challenge he and his co-authors would face. In his series foreword, he addressed imperial issues head on. As do the authors of all of these volumes, Grey argued against separating an ‘Australian’ identity from a ‘British’ one. The point is important, as the separation has traditionally come with the implication that Australia was fighting someone else’s war. As Grey wrote, such a viewpoint “can only be maintained if one ignores Australia’s geographic, ethnic, cultural and constitutional positions as these existed in 1914”.

Australians, like New Zealanders, most English-speaking Canadians, and even many Indians, did not draw sharp distinctions between their national and imperial identity because the two identities were not in opposition in 1914. As a result, Bou and Dennis argue, members of the Church of England and the Presbyterian Church were overrepresented in the Australian armed forces while Lutherans (many of them German) and Catholic (many of them Irish) were underrepresented.

This point about the overlap of ‘British’ and ‘Australian’ as categories of identity in 1914 is central to all that follows in the five volumes. While Australians often sought more autonomy in how they contributed to the war, they did not do so in opposition to the British. As Peter Yule and John Connor note, Australians favoured imperial preference in global trade, but wanted London to recognise Australia’s need for shipping and industrial development. Similarly, opposition to conscription in Australia did not usually equate to an anti-war or anti-British stand, because to be anti-British was also perforce to be anti-Australian. This sense of identity could, of course, put pressure on those who did not fit the model. As a result, ethnic Germans and Irish faced discrimination and, in the case of the former, even internment. Michael Molkentin highlights this theme of imperial identity in his volume on Australia’s contribution to the air war. Australia lacked the financial, manpower, or industrial resources to make an independent contribution to the air war, but it could make a real and distinctive contribution through the British system. ‘Empire nationalism’ thus motivated men to join the air service, sometimes in Australian squadrons, sometimes in British ones. The decision normally came down less to an individual’s identity than ease of volunteering, or even which air service had more open slots at a given time.

As a result, Australia became the only dominion with its own air service, and jealously guarded that privilege, but not as a statement against the British, on whom Australia so deeply depended. Australian politicians did recognise that contributing so much to the British Empire’s war efforts in places like Flanders, Gallipoli, and Mesopotamia meant fewer resources for pursuing operations in places like the German-controlled Pacific island chains, which Australians hoped both to colonise and to keep away from an increasingly powerful Japan. The demands of London, however, drove strategy at all times, as Australian leaders recognised, even as they hoped to get a larger voice in the process.

Contrary to myth, Australia frequently worked well within the British system. Indeed, in the years before the war began, Australia had designed its military system to fit within the British system, not stand apart from it. Australians had agreed that their militia forces would not perform regular duties in the British Empire, but could serve in order to meet emergencies like the war in South Africa from 1899 to 1902. Such was the model in use in 1914.

The imperial system benefited both parties, at least as long as wars remained relatively short. Through participation in a larger organisation, the Australian armed forces gained access to new weapons, increasingly sophisticated British staff work, and imperial resources of all kinds. Molkentin speaks for all of the authors of the series when he concludes that “Australia’s modest contribution to the air war was possible only because it occurred in a context of imperial cooperation”

Few scholars would describe Australia’s land contributions as ‘modest,’ but the wider pattern nevertheless holds. Stevenson argues that finding volunteers in 1914 and 1915 was not a problem because of the close association many Australians felt to the British Empire and the genuine threat Australians felt from an acquisitive German Empire. An Australian defence system, that had never before formed a unit as large as a division, had formed five of them by 1916 and had fought in places as far flung as New Guinea, Gallipoli, Egypt, and France. It had also learned how to fight a modern war, adapting itself to fight with everything from camels to heavy artillery. Such a massive feat was only possible because of the support structure provided from London.

Along the way Australia had to expand its defence forces exponentially. The growth into five divisions proved hard to sustain over time, especially as manpower losses began to exceed new recruitment after April 1917. Thereafter, Australia faced enormous manpower challenges, raising the single most complex and controversial political issue of the age, conscription.

John Connor dissects the two referenda Australia held on the subject, both of which narrowly failed to pass. He shows that conscription had its deepest support in places like Western Australia where the percentage of British- born Australians was highest. Trade unions led the campaigns to stop conscription, largely on class and racial grounds. As in Canada, the debates over conscription divided former political allies and generated intense disagreement over the direction of the state’s war effort, but in the end posed no existential threat to the imperial war effort. Bou and Dennis show that Australian volunteer recruitment actually rose in the wake of manpower emergencies like the German offensives of 1918. The American entry into the war in April 1917, coincidentally at just the moment the Australian manpower situation was becoming a serious problem, meant that the Allies would have plenty of manpower with or without conscription to make up Australia’s deficits.

One of the most persistent myths of Australia’s First World War suggests that the British wasted that Australian manpower either through incompetence or, worse, callousness toward Australian lives. Both Stevenson and Grey dismantle this myth. For the former, higher Australian casualties, and dominion casualties more generally, were a function of a higher ‘tooth to tail ratio’, meaning that fewer Australians were in the statistically safer staff and rear area jobs. While British officers in command of Australians had their faults, the authors find them to be no worse, and sometimes a good deal better, than their Australian counterparts.

Thus the difference between the bloody failure at Fromelles and the great success at Pozières had less to do with the nature of British leadership than with the military circumstances on the ground. Blaming the British is easy, but misleading. At Fromelles (July 1916), an inexperienced Australian 5th Division took on too large a task and, because of the carelessness of Australian soldiers, the Germans opposite them had a good idea of their attack plan. At Pozières a few weeks later, the Australian 1st, 2nd, and 4th Divisions had better luck, the benefit of being massed together, and more experienced officers to lead them; thus they produced better results. By the time of the Battle of Messines (June 1917) the Australians, like many other armies, had learned valuable lessons that carried them through to victory in November 1918.

The debate over putting more Australians in senior command was as much a political issue as it was a military one. Until 1917, none of the Australian generals had the requisite experience and ability to do the job. By that time, however, men capable of commanding a corps like John Monash had emerged in Australia, just as Arthur Currie had in Canada. Even so, none of the dominion armies could have operated alone, and Australia (like Canada) benefited from not being primary targets of the German offensives in March 1918. They were therefore well positioned to take a lead role in the final defeat of the Germans by the end of the year.

Circumstance played a larger role than any presumed national uniqueness in explaining the AIF’s performance in the war. Grey and Stevenson both tackle the prevailing notion that Australian military success resulted from special traits like mateship or Australians’ egalitarian ethos. They find both good and bad in both the Australian soldier and his officers. Mateship, they find, is not in its essence much different from the comradeship experienced in all armies. The qualities of individualism and ill-discipline that seemed to give the digger his special martial qualities in 1914, moreover, were far less useful by 1918, when professionalism and the ability to work in increasingly sophisticated combined arms systems carried the day.

If there was a clearly Australian part of this story, it had its roots in the militia origins of the Australian system, which required officers to explain their intentions more clearly to their men. Still, by 1918 the Australian Army had adopted much of the professionalised ethos of its dominion partners and the British system writ large. The Australian forces that fought on the Hindenburg Line at the end of the war were far more sophisticated and professional than the ones that had gone off to war in New Guinea and Egypt in 1914. In undergoing this process, of course, Australia hardly stands alone.

The issue of digger indiscipline, supposedly a key to Australia’s success, is another myth that has remained persistent. Jeffrey Grey warns his readers not to see the Australian soldier through a ‘boys will be boys’ lens. Indiscipline was a serious problem in the Australian Imperial Force. Australian soldiers were eight times more likely to be imprisoned than their British counterparts. These studies attribute this level of indiscipline less to any inherent quality in the Australian national character than the much greater distances from home, the consequent lack of home leave, and the army’s inability to control its alcohol problem.

On the home front, too, we need to see Australia’s experience as broadly similar to that of other nations. War weariness had set in by 1917 in Australia just as it had in France, Germany, Russia, and elsewhere. The war seemed to have no clear end in sight; wartime policies privileged (and even enriched) certain sectors of society while demanding sacrifice from others; and inflation and flat wages made life at home increasingly difficult for the families of those at war. This war weariness expressed itself, as it did elsewhere, in the form of strikes and decreased willingness to continue inequitable sacrifices.

We would therefore do better to see Australia’s experience as sitting on a spectrum of global experiences rather than seeing it (or any other state) as exceptional. Although a free democracy, Australia, like France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, experienced censorship, harassment of minority communities, and a deluge of official propaganda. The commonality of the war experience, not the distinctiveness of national character, is what mattered.

The end of the war left Australia as a more independent political entity, but still not one that could act outside the British system. Australia’s representatives at the Paris Peace Conference rarely diverged from general British aims, although they did come with goals of their own. They included sub-imperial control over New Guinea, defeat of Japan’s attempts to pass a racial equality clause, reparations from Germany, and protection from the growing Japanese empire. While some of these positions caused friction with the British on the margins, none of them caused an existential break with British policy.

As Stevenson argues in his volume, the mythic nature of Australian memory has ‘deformed’ its history. These impressive volumes are a welcome addition to the scholarship and a way for Australians to understand their history as

it happened. With that realisation may come some disillusion and some acknowledgement that Australia is not nearly as distinct as some might want it to be. If the centennial period is to have any value going forward, it must establish a base of historical scholarship to inform both academic and public discussions. The authors and editors of this series have accomplished this task admirably.

I would like to close on a personal note. Writing this review has not been easy. Jeff Grey, who passed away suddenly in 2016, was a close friend, and my family remains close to his. May these volumes stand as a testimony to Jeff’s influence on the fields of military history and Australian history that he so dearly loved. This series, which bears so much of Jeff’s imprint, will serve as a lasting legacy of his depth and breadth as a scholar. Only Jeff could have sneaked in a comment about the All Blacks rugby team in a volume on the First World War in the Middle East. He is sorely missed, although his influence on a generation of scholarship will continue to be felt for decades.

Endnotes

1. Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1898), 169
2. Jenny Macleod, Reconsidering Gallipoli (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) and Burcin Cakir, “Gallipoli: The Turkish Perspective,” available at https://gallipoli100education.org.uk/wp- content/uploads/2016/03/Burcin-Cakir-EDUCATION.pdf
3. C. E. W. Bean, The Story of ANZAC (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1921-1924)