A Stout Pair of Boots

A Guide to Exploring Australia’s Battlefields

By Peter Stanley

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 2008 Peter Stanley
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74175-665-4

Contents

Foreword Professor David Horner,
Acknowledgements,
Introduction: ‘Sniffing the ground’,
Part 1 Battle plan: Why battlefield research?,
Part 2 Intelligence briefing: Where to go and why,
Part 3 Approach march: Planning your trip,
Part 4 Crossing the start-line: On the battlefield,
Part 5 Stand down: Home again,
Glossary,
Bibliography,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

PART 1

Battle plan: Why battlefield research?

Anzac Day banners

In his book What is History?, a text familiar to most students of history, the British historian Edward Carr famously advised his students to ‘first study the historian’. For me, that study needs to go back to Anzac Day in the late 1960s. Recent migrants to Australia, living in a booming new provincial city (Whyalla, in South Australia), my family felt no need to attend the Anzac Day march that belonged to ‘old’ Australians in the established part of our city. But we did watch the ABC broadcast of the Adelaide march on television. I can remember my curiosity when seeing the last Boer War veteran in the march, and the taxis carrying the few frail Great War men, just as they now carry Second World War men. And I can remember the banners.

I remember feeling a thrill at the banners carried by Anzac Day marchers. They bore not only the names of units and associations, ships and squadrons; they proclaimed the campaigns, battles and theatres in which the marchers had served. It was from them that I first learned names such as Bardia, Tobruk, Crete, Milne Bay, Shaggy Ridge, Balikpapan and Tarakan. Even now, when I’ve seen dozens of marches and have had the honour of commentating on ABC broadcasts of marches in Sydney and Canberra, I never fail to feel a quiver at those names and what they mean. Many of them are the names of otherwise unknown hills, villages and other features, places that would have remained obscure except that a couple of dozen or a few hundred Australians fought Turks, Germans, Japanese or some other enemy there, usually a long time ago. Some of them are now the location of cemeteries in which the bodies of Australians lie; others have fallen back into obscurity, except that they live on in our imaginations. That sense of wonder at the places named on Anzac Day banners is no less now that I know a bit about what happened in these places, and have visited many of them.

That’s where this book begins: with an invitation to consider understanding those places, their history and what they mean by visiting them not as trippers or passive tourists, but as active, enquiring battlefield researchers.

Australia’s overseas battles have usually happened in really interesting places: France, Greece, Egypt, Borneo — places you’d want to go to anyway, for the food and wine, for ancient cultures or fascinating (if threatened) environments. But for Australians these places have more than just a cultural or ecological attraction. They are places where thousands of Australians have served and died over the past century. Many families (though no longer perhaps most) have some connection to a member of one or another of the Australian Imperial Forces in the world wars. Despite the passage of decades since more than a few hundred Australians served overseas in any one place at war, and despite great changes in Australian society (and several deeply unpopular conflicts) many Australians retain a deep and abiding interest in their nation’s military history. As the turn-out on Anzac Day suggests, many families cherish those long-standing connections, even if they don’t know very much to substantiate them.

Indeed, for all of this strong personal or family connection, until quite recently Australians generally did not take an active interest in their military past. On Anzac Day they acknowledged those who used to be called ‘returned servicemen’ (now we have adopted the American ‘veteran’). Families tolerated the reminiscences of Great War and Second World War men, and were vaguely familiar with names like ‘Armentières’ or ‘Madang’, even if they weren’t quite sure what happened there, or even where they were. But until about 1980, military history was very much an arcane minority interest, and it happened in places that no one expected to want to go to.

That has all changed. Two striking phenomena have occurred over the past couple of decades. One is that Australians have begun to read more about their military history — the boom in military publishing that began just about when I began work as a military historian shows no sign of ending. The other, more recent, phenomenon is that Australians seem to be increasingly willing to travel to the places where much of their nation’s military history happened, particularly the battlefields of Gallipoli, the Western Front in France and Belgium, and lately the Kokoda Trail (or Track: either is correct). Sadly, other Australian battlefields, in Korea, the Middle East, Papua New Guinea and Singapore, are as neglected as ever. While some of these visitors are backpackers, most are not: they represent a cross-section of the nation — the bit identifying with old Anglo-Celtic Australia anyway. They are for the most part ordinary working Australians, with a natural bias towards the older and wealthier — people with income and leisure to at last travel to see the places where Great Uncle Jim served or died. This change in Australia’s attitude to its war history is welcome, provided it results in a more knowledgeable and mature attitude towards our military past (and not simply nationalistic barracking). It deserves to be encouraged, and this book tries to do just that by providing a how-to-and-where guide to Australia’s battlefields.

This book, then, is intended to provide a guide to those who might like to visit an Australian battlefield purposefully, or who might never have thought of doing so but might respond to encouragement. It is aimed not at professional military historians (who to be honest don’t need any urging to get their boots dirty) but at those who share a genuine curiosity about Australia’s rich, varied and too often tragic military past, and who want to go and see what it looks like.

Call to imagination: A short history of Australian battlefield visits

Today we take it for granted that you can’t write about battles convincingly without visiting the places in which they happened, but in the past, when overseas travel was expensive and unusual, it was common to read books about battles based on nothing but paper sources. Then in the 1970s Australians began to travel overseas in large numbers. John Richardson, in his History of Australian Travel and Tourism, provides startling figures on the affordability of overseas travel. In 1945 the cheapest Sydney–London airfare cost the equivalent of 130 weeks of the average wage; in 1965 it cost 21 weeks, and by 1995 just 3.5 weeks. The year 1950 saw about 25 million international tourists in motion annually; this year the figure will probably be over 750 million. A small but growing number of these travellers were seeking out battlefields.

Australians have been visiting battlefields for just over a century. My colleague Craig Wilcox generously lent me his notes on battlefield visits by Australians in the decades before the Great War. They suggest that just as the armed struggle for their own continent was ending, with its occupation and settlement, Australians began travelling to Europe to visit the scene of the battle that ended the dream (or spectre) of a French domination of Europe. They wanted to see the field of Waterloo, the great victory that gave Britain its standing as the superpower of the nineteenth century. Colonial Australians developed a taste for battlefield visits if they were able to do so, and especially to Waterloo. Even if Wellington had beaten Napoleon only with the help of Blücher’s Prussians, nineteenth-century Britons (as the Australian colonists considered themselves) saw Waterloo as the battle that had made Britain Great.

The charismatic Henry Parkes, for instance, when not advocating democracy and federation, revelled in his visit to Waterloo, in 1882. Like thousands of British travellers before him, Parkes looked over the museum established by Sergeant Major Edward Cotton, a British hussar who practically invented the idea of the battlefield tour franchise, and then gathered flowers from a field ‘richly fertilised by heroic blood’. With renewed interest he turned eagerly to the poems he knew describing the great battle, having seen the site for himself. We still do exactly that today, at Fromelles or Hamel.

After Parkes a Tasmanian clergyman teaching in Britain took his family off to Brussels for a couple of winters. Edwin Bean saw the battlefield with a military historian’s eye. He climbed the Lion mound — a vast conical hill topped with a monument that disfigures the battlefield — to take it in from the air, so to speak. Then he walked the field, noticing a stable ‘that had evidently been used in the struggle’ (the imaginative eye is an essential item in the day-pack). While exploring the roads in the rear of the French position, the Rev. Bean noticed that they were ‘deeply sunken’. This, he thought ‘must have made the retreat of the Young Guard a fearful havoc’. He would pass on his eye for ground and ability to craft a battle narrative to his son.

Young Charlie Bean was about nine during these visits. He remembered that his father had been ‘intensely interested’ in Waterloo — a passion for understanding is another item to pack with the digital camera and compass. He and his brother Jack (who served as a regimental medical officer in the AIF) went with their father and caught the infection from him. In the Hotel du Musée, Sergeant Major Cotton’s old establishment, they spent hours studying what Bean described as ‘relics’ from the battlefield. Bean recalled glass cases containing ‘shakos or helmets and tunics of the Old Guard or the British infantry, some with the marks of battle on them’, as well as skulls disfigured by shot holes and sabre-chips. Twenty-five years later, Charlie and Jack were on Gallipoli. When the historian saw Australians sending home souvenirs of the campaign, he assumed that ‘there would almost certainly be some museum in Australia in which war relics would be presented’. Of course they still are, not just in the memorial-museum Bean founded, but in dozens of local and regional collections in the towns and cities the first Anzacs came from.

One of the most influential Australians in the decade before the Great War was William Fitchett, a Melbourne literary entrepreneur. Fitchett wrote a series of books, notably Deeds that Won the Empire, which expressed and conveyed the values of duty, loyalty and valour that seem to have done so much to inspire the young men who served on Gallipoli and in the trenches of Flanders and Picardy. In 1911 Fitchett also visited Waterloo. Like many before and since — including myself — he stood where Wellington had been, trying to ‘call to imagination the stages of the great fight as he saw it’. Fitchett made the observation that first strikes many visitors to Waterloo today, that ‘the ground … seems to the modern observer absurdly contracted’. Can a couple of hundred thousand men and horses have fought for a torrid afternoon on this tiny field — little bigger than the area of the Parliamentary Triangle in Canberra? And how could 40,000 bodies have littered it at dusk?

All of these visitors — Henry Parkes, Edwin Bean and his boys, and William Fitchett — were seeing Waterloo in person; they were not just reading about it. So there seems to be a tradition in Australia of visiting battlefields. But it has had a tenuous life. Besides occasional ‘pilgrimages’ by returned men and women, and later their families — which are a different sort of battlefield visit — few Australians sought out battlefields between Bean’s return from Gallipoli in 1919 and about 1980.

Students of war have visited battlefields for a hundred years or more. Military academies invented the idea of the ‘staff ride’ as a way of training future commanders when battles were directed from horseback. Officers would ride around the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia or the battlefields of eastern France, looking at where Stonewall Jackson beat the Yankees or where Moltke the Elder beat the French, and ask why and how. They knew that thinking of battles on the spot — preferably in a knowledgeable group prepared to debate and argue about them — was more informative than just reading.

But it’s not just soldiers who can learn from visiting battlefields. A great deal can be learned about the human experience of war by going to the places where it happened. And Australians never quite stopped visiting battlefields. Occasional articles in ex-service magazines and books aroused momentary curiosity, and books like John Laffin’s accounts of his visits to Papua New Guinea and the Mediterranean battlefields in the 1950s suggest that the tradition never quite died out. A few dedicated individuals seriously investigated battlefields, such as Major Andrew Balsillie, an Australian serving in Malaysia. While his field work turned up relics (such as the ‘Singapore surrender table’ which the Australian government obtained for the Australian War Memorial), Balsillie unfortunately published nothing of any magnitude. But Robert O’Neill, the most distinguished scholarly soldier Australia has yet produced (after serving in Viet Nam he became a military historian and strategic analyst of international repute), visited Gallipoli and advised Peter Pedersen on his pioneering visit in 1981.

Not that only military historians feel the need to sniff the ground. Manning Clark’s reflections on his career are littered with accounts of visiting evocative, symbolic or actual sites. While writing his epic History of Australia he visited Shark Bay (to reflect on what early Dutch explorers saw and felt), Norfolk Island (to understand its penal past), Maiden’s Hotel, Menindee, and Cooper’s Creek (in search of Burke and Wills), the Barcoo and Barcaldine (to do justice to the birth of the Labor Party), and many places overseas, including the Seamen’s Chapel at New Bedford, Massachusetts, to ponder the work of Herman Melville and the place of good and evil in human affairs. On his trips he carried pocket notebooks so he was always able to record an observation or an idea. In his Boyer Lectures, A Discovery of Australia, Clark reaffirmed his belief in the worth of the historian donning boots: ‘a historian must also go to the place where the events he is describing took place’.

The modern interest in Australian military history owes a great deal to Ken Inglis, who as a young lecturer in history in Adelaide in 1965 travelled to Gallipoli with a group of returned men and wrote articles about what he had witnessed. While he did not write about the detail of the actions the old men recalled (though he did effectively invent the field of memory studies), his articles showed how valuable it was for historians to pay attention to what were soon being called ‘veterans’. Soon after, a young protégé of Inglis’s at the Australian National University, Bill Gammage, wrote a doctoral thesis (published in 1974 as The Broken Years). Following the advice of Tawney (and Manning Clark), Gammage had based his work not only on the documents but also got his boots dirty visiting the Gallipoli and Western Front battlefields in 1970, where he checked that he had the details correct. Soon after The Broken Years appeared, Patsy AdamSmith published the fruits of her work as a manuscripts field officer at the State Library of Victoria, The Anzacs of 1978, and she travelled to the battlefields too. By 1980 both scholarly and popular interest in military history had visibly quickened. The trickle of Australians visiting battlefields had never quite dried up, but in the 1980s it was to become a perennial flow.

On his return from sniffing the ground for his study of Monash, Peter Pedersen talked to the Memorial’s two or three historians about the field work for his book. Soon after, the Memorial (then in an expansionist phase) published Pedersen’s article, ‘The Ghosts of Anzac’, in its new Journal of the Australian War Memorial. For me Pedersen’s article was a revelation. I had visited only one battlefield at that time, but when I began serious field work I had a clear model of how an historian could respond to seeing the ground on two related levels. Pedersen took an informed, intelligent, intense interest in the configuration of terrain and how it affected the thinking of commanders and the actions of their troops. But he was no mere ‘general staff’ analyst. He also responded emotionally to what had occurred in those places long ago. His ‘Ghosts of Anzac’ article defined a productive way for historians to engage with battlefields, and its spirit permeates the approaches discussed in this book.

(Continues…)Excerpted from A Stout Pair of Boots by Peter Stanley. Copyright © 2008 Peter Stanley. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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