Search

Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steal, trans. M. Hofmann, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, London, 2003, 289pp. Robert Leckie, Helmet for My Pillow , Ibooks, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2001, 324pp. Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War , Scribner, London, 2003, 260pp. Review Essay by: Russell Parkin Combat memoirs written by soldiers form a unique genre in the literature of war. Much military literature concentrates on the sweep of battle. Autobiographies of generals and other senior …

Professor Gunther E. Rothenberg (1923–2004) Editors’ Note: Professor Gunther E. Rothenberg, a distinguished international scholar of war, was a foundation member of the Australian Army Journal ( AAJ ) Editorial Advisory Board from February 2003 until his death in April 2004. As a tribute to Professor Rothenberg’s services to the journal, the AAJ is publishing the eulogy delivered at his funeral in Canberra on 29 April 2004 by Professor Peter Dennis. Eleanor has asked me to speak about Gunther’s life. How …

Brigadier Monsignor Gerald Anthony Cudmore, AM 1933–2004 Monsignor Gerry Cudmore, well known to many soldiers of all or no religious faiths, died on 21 April 2004, aged 71. Monsignor Cudmore was ordained priest in 1958. After serving in a number of Melbourne parishes, he became a chaplain in the Australian Regular Army in 1963. Following appointments to the Army Apprentice School and the Officer Cadet School, he was the first Australian chaplain to serve in Vietnam with the 1st Battalion, Royal Australian …

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 …