Alan Bishop Stretton (1922–2012) Alan Bishop Stretton (b. 1922 Elwood, Victoria) enlisted in the Australian Army in 1940 and was assigned to the 2nd Cavalry Division. In 1941 he was promoted to lance sergeant, before being discharged from the 2nd Cavalry Division in 1941 and accepted as a staff cadet at the Royal Military College, Duntroon. Following his studies he graduated in December 1943 as a lieutenant, and in July 1944 he joined the 2/9th Battalion, 7th Division. At this the 2/9th Battalion was …

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 …

Brad West is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of South Australia. His recent publications include Finding Gallipoli: Battlefield Remembrance and the Movement of Australian and Turkish History (2022 Palgrave) and the co-edited collections Militarization and the Global Rise of Paramilitary Culture (2021, Springer) and The New Australian Military Sociology (2024, Berghahn). He is the founding co-Director (with Cate Carter) of the Military Organisation and Culture Studies Group (MOCS), …

Australian Army Journal (AAJ):  Warrant Officer Woods, thank you for taking the time to speak with us as part of the series of interviews we’re conducting with former senior officers and soldiers to learn from the past to inform the future as the Army transitions from operations in Afghanistan, East Timor and the Solomon Islands. In order to understand the environment post Vietnam, what was the situation Army faced in the period after the withdrawal? Warrant Officer Woods:  I was a young soldier just after …

As the date of the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan approaches, it is timely to identify organisational issues the Army faced post Vietnam, via a series of interviews with former senior officers and soldiers to be published in forthcoming editions of the Australian Army Journal. The intent of the interviews is to learn from the past to inform the future as the Army transitions from operations in Afghanistan, East Timor and the Solomon Islands. The first of these interviews is with former Chief of …

This Australian Army Journal (AAJ) article started life as a themed collection of papers concerned with the topic of littoral manoeuvre. This is a priority research area for The Australian Army Research Centre after the release of the Defence Strategic Review (DSR). It is for this reason that two papers in this edition are written by AAJ Board members (Peter Dean and Rhys Crawley). This change from an edited collection of papers to an AAJ represents a return to the AAJ as a biannual publication in the …

Listed below are a select group of books recently or soon to be published that either contribute to the discussions initiated in the articles in the Australian Army Journal  or on subjects that may be of interest in the near future. Some of these books may be reviewed in forthcoming editions of the Journal. Nathan Mullins, Keep Your Head Down , Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2011, 347 pp, ISBN 9781742377940, AU$24.99. The war in Afghanistan has been the subject of many first-person narratives offering insights …

  … Chauvel Essay Prize - 2011 …

    Written by: Paolo Tripodi and Jessica Wolfendale Ashgate, Farnham Surrey, UK and Burlington, VT, 2011 ISBN 9781409401056, 296 pp,   Reviewed by: Dr Lacy Pejcinovic There is a tendency in current academic literature dealing with war, conflict and violence to assume that there have been fundamental shifts in the political, military, economic and social fabric of the international system since the turn of the millennium. Books and articles that seek to tell us what exactly has changed and how are …

    Written by: Joseph S Nye Jr PublicAffairs, New York, 2011, ISBN 9781586488918, 320 pp   Reviewed by: David Goyne Joseph Nye has given eminent service to the US Government as a deputy undersecretary in the State Department, an assistant secretary in the Defense Department, and as chairman of the US National Intelligence Council. As an academic, he has been the dean of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, probably the premier global institute for studying and teaching how government works. …