Sir Thomas Daly And Australia’s Military Commitments – From Tobruk To Vietnam

SIR THOMAS DALY AND AUSTRALIA’S MILITARY COMMITMENTS – FROM TOBRUK TO VIETNAM

JEFFREY GREY

Biography is a demanding and exacting form of historical writing and much harder to do effectively than, perhaps, it looks. I think every serious historian should try their hand at it, for it provides wonderful instruction in humility and the limits of the possible. In contrast to both the United Kingdom and the United States, not many public officials in this country write their memoirs, nor do many keep personal papers. Daly was no exception, and I was lucky that he had willingly submitted to interview with a number of historians during his long retirement, and that these interviews were accessible. Creating a picture of what happened is relatively easy, explaining why it happened and why it matters is something else entirely.

I want to start by telling three stories, or perhaps paint three word-portraits, to illustrate something about the historical continuities that have always existed for the Army even in times of major military effort. All three involve Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Daly at different stages of his long and eventful career.

The first involved the preparations of the 2/10^th Battalion before the Balikpapan landings in Borneo in July 1945. Daly took over as CO in late 1944 with the task of reorienting the battalion for an opposed amphibious operation after a lengthy period spent fighting in the close country of New Guinea. Daly was well aware of the problems that such an operation presented, and based his training program to take account of the difficulties faced by the US Marines in the early amphibious assaults in the Central Pacific in 1943-44, in which they had suffered heavy casualties through being held up on the beaches by the Japanese defences. The first time his soldiers actually saw an LST was when they boarded them at Redlynch for passage to Morotai and onwards voyage to Balikpapan itself; during the eight month work-up phase before this they practised embarking and disembarking using chalk outlines on the pavement.

The second took place more than a decade later. By 1959 Daly was in the middle of his term as GOC Northern Command in the rank of major general, and in that year was tasked by the CGS, Lieutenant General Sir Ragnar Garrett, with conducting an exercise – Grand Slam – in central Queensland that would bring together the regular battalions of the 1^st Infantry Brigade, then scattered between Enoggera, Singleton and Puckapunyal. It was designed to put both the brigade and battalion headquarters through their paces, but apart from concentrating the units concerned was conducted in the parsimonious manner usual in the 1950s: as Daly’s GSO1, Lieutenant Colonel Derek Sharp later recalled, there was artillery participation but no armour even though the exercise plan had specifically called for it:

One day, when Tom was due to arrive at Exercise HQ a few days before the action started, I got hold of a twelve-year-old boy from a nearby farm and between us we dressed his billy-cart up to look like a tank. At an appropriate moment this “tank” rattled past Tom, who was standing with a group of us beside the road looking at maps and air photographs, with the young driver waving and shouting “I’m a tank”. Those of us who knew Tom well knew that the angrier he became the quieter his voice became. On this occasion he turned to me and in nothing more than whisper said “get rid of that thing. Sharp”.[i]

The third incident concerned the preparation of the early battalions readied for service in Vietnam in 1966-67, by which time Daly was a newly-appointed CGS himself. The bloody-minded non-cooperation of the RAAF in this is well-documented; despite the fact that the new Iroquois troop-carriers had been acquired by the government in 1964 specifically for the purpose of cooperation with the Army, the Air Force and successive Chiefs of the Air Staff specifically declined repeated requests for use of the aircraft in the training cycle. When 1RAR arrived in Vietnam in mid-1965 the soldiers had never practiced embarking and disembarking with the actual aircraft the Americans deployed in such abundance. The following year 7RAR, preparing for deployment to Vietnam in April 1967, was forced to use chalk outlines of aircraft once again in order to familiarise the soldiers with procedures and skills they needed to acquire.

Some things don’t change. The Australian Army, in particular, is very familiar with the economic cycle of “boom and bust” that characterises defence spending in liberal democracies, and is equally familiar with the consequences that almost invariably flow from this. Across an Army career that spanned 41 years from Staff Cadet to Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Daly (as he became) acquired plenty of experience of both.

Daly joined the Army and entered RMC Duntroon at the beginning of 1930, just as the worst effects of the great Depression began to bite hard. In his second year at the College, RMC was moved to Sydney and the Canberra facility closed as an economy measure, but contrary to popular belief the Army had been starved of resources for a decade already following heavy reductions in the Defence budget in 1922. Any minor gains the Army achieved by the late 1920s as a result of the defence development program whose main beneficiary was the RAN were wiped out in the further reductions of the early 1930s. Daly wondered whether he had made a wise choice of career, but his first preference – to read medicine at the University of Melbourne – had been ruled out because of the cost. Pay and conditions languished, but for young regular officers there were at least limited opportunities for professional and practical development. As assistant adjutant of a militia light horse regiment scattered across rural western Victoria and South Australia, he virtually ran the unit on a day-to-day basis; in 1938-39 he went to India on attachment to a succession of British cavalry regiments, valuable not least for the exposure to mechanisation that the British mounted arm was then undergoing and a process that had stalled in Australia for lack of resources.

The Army that went to war in September 1939 was less capable than (and equipped almost identically to) the one that had returned from the Great War in 1919. Daly’s experience in staff and administrative roles led to his appointment as adjutant of an infantry battalion (the 2/10^th) and then as brigade major of the 18^th Brigade. He had a very fortunate war. The indisposition of the brigade commander meant that Daly virtually commanded the brigade attack on Italian fortified positions at Giarubub while his months in Tobruk during the siege honed his understanding of both defensive tactics and the realities (and limitations) of modern mechanised combat. A succession of increasingly senior staff positions in North Africa and then in New Guinea culminated in command of the 2/10^th Battalion for the assault at Balikpapan, the largest amphibious operation ever undertaken by the Australian Army. At the time of his appointment, in late 1944, he was the only regular officer in command of an infantry unit. After the war he made good the deficiencies in his (theoretical) military education with courses in the United Kingdom (where high-flying Australian officers were sent to gain perspectives that our own small and intellectually cramped environment could not provide) and again exercised command at the brigade level, in Korea, in his own right.

The decade or more between the end of the Korean War and the commitment to Vietnam from 1965 was a lean and difficult one for the Army, again. The National Service scheme introduced in 1951 for politico-cultural reasons had no overseas service obligation, added nothing to capability and distorted the Army’s budget and force structure. Korea was fought by an Army that was structured, trained and largely equipped along the lines of the Second World War, and by the mid-1950s this was largely obsolescent. Technological solutions were believed to hold the key both to survival on what some assumed would be an atomic battlefield and to reducing defence outlays through reductions in personnel while increasing firepower; survivability and lethality were to be acquired in the Australian Army’s case through a radical new organisational structure, the Pentropic Division. This was modelled on the US Pentomic structure and reflected a belief that with an anticipated British withdrawal from “East of Suez”, the Australian forces would need to operate along American lines in order to partner effectively with their US counterparts.

Unfortunately, the US Army abandoned it just as we implemented it (the habitual closeness of relations between the US and Australian armed forces that we now take largely for granted did not exist in the 1950s), and no-one else used it which was a problem while we continued to operated in Malaya/Malaysia as part of an integrated Commonwealth brigade. The restructuring of the Army in Australia led to the wholesale collapsing of CMF units – many with long lineages and deep roots in local communities – which remains a malign legacy within the Army Reserve to this day. The one positive was that it enabled a substantial modernisation and re-equipping of the regular Army that was substantially overdue.

 Daly noted of the commitment to Vietnam that the Army “wasn’t prepared for this kind of commitment – it never is. It wasn’t prepared for Korea, but the Army has to do these things when the government wants them to do it”.[1] Nor, despite the fact that the first regular battalion to be sent to Vietnam was based in his command was Daly apprised of the move until it had actually been decided. Nor, indeed, did the Defence Committee (comprising the service chiefs, Secretary and Minister for Defence) discuss the Vietnam commitment until April 1965 – the point at which it was made. The initial commitment strained the organisation, and subsequent increases and expansion of the force were piecemeal and episodic. Rather than creating a balanced force with a rational force structure and committing it to war, the Army was forced to cannibalise other parts of its establishment in order to meet the needs of the task force in Phuoc Tuy province. It had been forced to sustain the two-battalion commitment to the Korean War in 1952-53 on the same, improvised basis. In both cases the fielding of a self-contained force was simply beyond the Army’s means, at least initially.

Historically the Army has embarked upon wars from a very low base of preparedness, and built from there. In 1914 the system that had been put in place to generate an Army when needed was found unsuited to the task, and had to be abandoned and replaced by a different model from scratch. After the war a committee of senior generals produced a plan for the future needs of the Army at ministerial direction, only to see it shelved with the budget reductions of the early 1920s. The outline Plan 401, drafted in 1922 in the face of the Chanak Crisis, was dusted off in 1939 and formed the basis for the initial expeditionary force dispatched at the end of that year, but the raising and sustaining of forces both in Australia and overseas was improvised once again – with considerable attendant waste – and only supplanted by a rational (and smaller) force structure from late 1943.

As in 1918, by 1945 Australia possessed land forces of proven capacity able to carry out government policy effectively and efficiently; as in 1918, so in 1945 these forces were quickly dismantled at war’s end and reduced drastically in size (which was entirely justified) and in capability (which was not). The postwar occupation of Japan required the maintenance of a skeleton organisation which, once again, had to be rapidly augmented in 1950 to meet the needs of Korea. Even before the final withdrawal of troops from Vietnam in 1971, the government was looking at reductions in the Army’s establishment in the face of considered professional advice from Daly and others; although he was long retired by then, the 1980s and early 1990s saw the progressive degradation of the Army in terms both of strength and capability, such that when the need to intervene in East Timor emerged from a clear blue sky in the second half of 1999 the Army was only just able to meet the tasks which government gave it.

It is not an exaggeration to say that had any part of the Indonesian military establishment sought to contest the Australian intervention there would not have been a great deal we could have done about it. And now, as we comprehend the end of a decade plus of overseas deployments and a high operational tempo with the completion of the drawdown from Afghanistan, we seem fated to repeat the cycle at precisely the point where through considerable expenditure of resources we have fashioned an Army once again capable of giving effective expression to government policy.

The Army of Daly’s time and that of our own day are very different organisations in many key respects. One thing they share in common for the time being is the experience of a protracted conflict that was and is poorly understood by the electorate with whom the political level has generally failed to engage in explaining what our forces are doing, and why. In other respects, comparisons between the Vietnam War and either of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are generally fatuous, and wrong. In few if any matters are there any real points of commonality or meaningful comparison. The political climate in Australia is very different today from what it was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and popular attitudes to the military bear no comparison, in some ways precisely because of a particular reading of the treatment accorded to Australian soldiers in Vietnam and after their return.

Daly was intensely frustrated by the apparent refusal of the government to defend the Army in the face of vitriolic public criticism, and worse. His view of the Press (though not necessarily of individual journalists) became increasingly jaundiced across his time as CGS: on one occasion after the Tet Offensive was launched in early 1968 he described “the lunatic hallucinations of the daily press which have achieved transcendental levels in the past week”.[2] He was even more appalled by the dishonest and misleading reportage of what became “the Civic Action affair” in March 1971 and which resulted in the fall of the prime minister, John Gorton, and significant political damage to the Minister for Defence, Malcolm Fraser. The hostility and machinations directed at Gorton by certain members of the Press Gallery have few more recent parallels, at least in this country. Daly tried hard to keep the Army out of it, aided by the fact that he neither courted the press nor, in almost any circumstances, did he brief “off-the-record”. The growing unpopularity of National Service was a partial explanation for the increasingly tense relations between the senior ranks of the Army (who, it should be noted, had opposed its re-introduction in 1964) and the government which was, in Daly’s view, “extraordinarily sensitive to any kind of criticism of the administration of the army that affected national servicemen”. But it went well beyond this, perhaps understandable, sensitivity to domestic opinion in a climate where the government seemed increasingly beleaguered. Daly mostly declined requests to speak or write on the Army’s role in Vietnam after 1967, following a request that some remarks he had prepared be cleared with the prime minister, Harold Holt. “It is not for Service officers to engage in public controversy”, he acknowledged, but the unwillingness at the political level to defend the Army and its conduct of operations in Vietnam meant that the argument went by default: “over the years”, he reflected, “the army has become conditioned to not talking to anybody”.

It bears repeating that the Army of today is in many respects a very different entity from that of the 1960s, much less the 1930s when Daly first entered it. There are recurrent themes in our military history as well as continuities (and ruptures). The greater centralisation of Defence policy and functions and the greatly enhanced authority of the Minister and Secretary of Defence (which occurred largely after Daly’s retirement) have brought benefits but have not precluded the sorts of inter-service rivalries and arguments over budgets, roles and responsibilities, and equipment programs that were a common feature of the sector in the 1950s and 1960s (and 1920s and 1930s). The role of the Chief of the Defence Force as the principal uniformed advisor to government is vastly expanded over the situation in which Daly could describe its precursor as “not a position of power . . . a token uniform within the system”. But some of the issues and problems would strike him as very familiar: the continuing search for a realistic role for and expectations of the Army Reserve, issues of pay and conditions, separations for service families and the ‘churn’ of the posting cycle and overseas deployments, and the costs (in all senses) of remote basing of substantial parts of the Army around Australia for essentially political or electoral reasons.

Daly retired from the Army in 1971, and went on to make a major contribution to the modernisation and professionalization of another major national institution – the Australian War Memorial – as a widely respected and admired Chairman of the Council. He had been an ex officio member as Chief of the General Staff, which doubtless gave him awareness of its problems, and as Chairman he successfully advocated to government for increased budgets and staffing as part of a process of bringing its practices into line with contemporary museum and archival practice. He held a small number of directorships, and maintained links with the Army through a succession of regimental colonelcies, as a trustee of the Infantry Corps Museum, and through his quiet influence and undoubted authority as one of the most distinguished Chiefs of the postwar era.

Let me conclude where I began, with some (borrowed) observation on biography. Reviewing a recent biography of Karl Marx in the pages of The New Republic recently, Peter Gordon observed of biography as an historical genre that

[B]iographies come in two kinds. The first and more conventional kind portrays the hero as an exception, a genius or a rebel against his time . . . We are all familiar with the exceptional biography because it has been and remains the most popular genre on the market—alongside that other study of the dead, the murder-mystery … The academic biographer, like the logician, loathes the exception. One cannot leap out of one’s own time, so even the rebel only rebels in the ways his time allows. The second kind of biography does away with all talk of unique gifts. Where the first lionizes, the second historicizes; it shows the protagonist as a specimen of his age. The payoff here is complicated: historical instruction, obviously; but underneath the respectable goal of learning about the past, we read an exemplary biography also because it unties us from that past. Its covert message is that the dead have no claim upon the living. The hero belonged to his time, not to ours.[3]

Daly avowedly belonged to his time, and his time is not ours even if it resonates with us. I would argue that it is the very fact of that resonance that continues to make the study of history in all its forms of continuing value in our own times, or as Gordon says elsewhere in the review just cited: “Historians are faced with a special challenge in an accelerating society that dispenses with the past like a used paper cup. All things are evanescent, but that does not make them obsolete.”