Search

Major General Timothy Frederick Cape, CB, CBE, DSO 1915–2003 Tim Cape had a long and distinguished military career serving from the late 1930s through World War II and, later, holding a variety of positions in the postwar period until his retirement in 1972. Born in Vaucluse, in New South Wales, he was the youngest of three children whose family could trace its heritage to a line of British colonists dating back to 1817. Tim Cape’s father was a New South Wales volunteer in the Boer War of 1899–1902 and was …

Major General Kenneth Mackay, CB, MBE (1917–2004) Kenneth Mackay served with distinction in the Australian Army for almost forty years. He entered the Royal Military College, Duntroon, as a cadet in 1935 and retired as a Major General in 1974. In a long and meritorious career, Mackay saw service in the Middle East and New Guinea in World War II; and during the Cold War, in Japan, Korea and Vietnam. In 1938, Mackay graduated from Duntroon as a Lieutenant in the Artillery Branch of the Australian Staff …

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 …

Introduction The Retrospect section of the Australian Army Journal: For the Profession of Arms is designed to reproduce interesting articles from the Australian Army’s earlier journals, notably the Commonwealth Military Journal and the Australian Army Journal from the 1940s to the mid-1970s. In this edition of the journal, we are reprinting an edited version of the then Lieutenant Colonel John Monash’s winning entry in the inaugural 1912 Australian Army’s Gold Medal Military History Essay Competition. …

* This article is based on an essay that won third prize in the Chief of Army’s Essay Competition for 2003. Defence self-reliance has been defined as indicating ‘a national will to depend as little as possible on external decisions and resources’. 1 In an Australian context, the idea of self-reliance was first formally introduced into defence policy in the 1976 White Paper and was reaffirmed by the 1987, 1994 and 2000 Defence White Papers as a main feature of official strategic thinking. Yet, while …

Looking back at the Malayan campaign of 1941–42 from the distance of more than sixty years, what is most striking is how quickly the Japanese invaders triumphed. In large measure it was a triumph of command. The Japanese commander of the XXVth Army, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, had assumed command only in November 1941, a few weeks before the invasion. He inherited someone else’s plan and put it into action with stunning effect. In seventy days Yamashita’s forces advanced the length of Malaya, destroying a …

The ultimate source of strategy lies in the values of the people of a nation - Admiral Henry E. Eccles In June 2002, the Department of Defence published a 25-page booklet called The Australian Approach to Warfare. This publication identified the manoeuvrist approach, a preference for advanced technology, and a requirement to engage in joint and coalition operations as being the main features of an Australian way of war in the 21st century. 1 These features are, of course, not confined to Australia and can …

No doubt soldiers have always understood that, when they were charged with a mission that did not look familiar—one that diverged from the agreed upon business of fighting wars—they had entered an unorthodox realm of soldiering. Roughly speaking, such military operations fall under the heading of ‘the small change of soldiering’, to use John Keegan’s now-famous phrase. 1  Finer-gauged definitions are unnecessary as Keegan’s phrase easily incorporates interventions, invasions, punitive expeditions, …

* This article is based on an address delivered at a Deputy Chief of Army Occasional Seminar at the Royal Military College in Canberra on 7 August 2003. This article concerns war generally and the current war on terror in particular, and reflects on 2500 years of history and culture. From the fighting of early Greece to the wars of the 20th century, there is a certain continuity of Western military practice. Greek phalangites and British close-order volley fire are linked by culture. In his 2001 book …

The June 2002 Bush Doctrine and the September 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSS) brought the issues of preemption and prevention in the use of force to the fore in international relations. In both the Bush Doctrine and the NSS, the United States attempted to deal with three types of new interconnected threat: terrorist groups, weak states and rogue states. Both documents promised to confront global terrorism and to hold to account nations compromised by terrorism, …