THE LAST BATTLE – AUSTRALIAN SAS, COMMANDOS AND OUR GREATEST VICTORY IN OUR LONGEST WAR

By Aaron Patrick

Pan Macmillan Australia 2025

ISBN: 9781761776533

RRP: $39.99 (PB)

Reviewed by Anne Henderson

In 1966, a DeLuxe Colour film What did You do in the War Daddy? came out of Hollywood. It was a comedy set during the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943. A company of Allied soldiers are sent to take a small town where the Italian enemy is prepared to surrender so long as they can finish their soccer game and enjoy their wine festival. The send up is no doubt a joust at the Italian army.

The movie was also a good sign that the West had shrugged off the tragedies of the Second World War over two decades. But it is a reminder of how different the Allied conflicts in contemporary times in places like Iraq and Afghanistan are for those who fought in them and those who stayed at home. There can be no laughter from the sort of engagement faced by Australian service men and women in these wars. Especially in Afghanistan, as Aaron Patrick has grippingly portrayed in his new book The Last Battle.

What’s more, as Patrick reveals, little if anything is known by Australians of just what their country’s servicemen experienced in on the ground engagement in the many years they served in Afghanistan or Iraq. And, for their self-sacrificing efforts, many have since been plagued by legal investigations into possible war crimes from confrontation with an enemy wearing no uniforms and using humans as shields. Investigations which rely mostly on witness memory years after events happening amidst the chaos of fire power and attack. Patrick’s The Last Battle captures with cinematic effect such moments of engagement where combat can be reduced to individual heroism – a heroism that protected other troops as much as the individual himself.

It is no surprise that the Australian commandos and members of the SAS – in what Aaron Patrick has recorded as the Battle of Shah Wali Kot – were later awarded a record number of bravery awards, including a Victoria Cross, from the five-day engagement in June 2010. In spite of the hugely dangerous and risk taking encounter, there were no fatalities among the small Australian units, even while facing untold numbers of talibs (Taliban fighters), some 100 of whom were killed.

The tragedy for the Australians is that out of such heroism, continuing investigations evolving years later have left the participants facing the prospect of charges of committing war crimes. These investigations have forced men who served heroically – at the request of the Australian Government – into a limbo of uncertainty. Patrick’s analysis suggests that such men deserve better. It is also the reason ordinary Australians have no idea what these servicemen endured in their war efforts. The ex-servicemen do not discuss the time served and have moved back into community life, their service years ghost like in memory.

The setting of The Last Battle revolves around a change in approach to battle ordered by President Barack Obama from 2009 which was called “the Surge”. Sending thousands of extra troops to Afghanistan, the US planned to flush out Taliban fighters who were hidden among civilian populations where Allied troops could not engage them. In 2010, the large southern city of Kandahar was increasingly threatened by the Taliban. Patrick begins his book bringing to life the intense action of an Australian commando group sent to flush out talibs from among the village compound of Chenartu. The idea was to make armed searches of village houses to force the Taliban into the open. It was a tactic that worked as Patrick describes:

The Australians, all breathing heavily after the two-hour climb, couldn’t even hear birds. The morning air wasn’t entirely still, though. The enemy knew they had arrived.

It was not long before the Australian commando unit was under fire. This was a war of cat and mouse. Where exactly the enemy was to be found was the challenge. Patrick sums up the rules:

In a war where the enemy didn’t wear uniforms, the rules of engagement specified that Australians could only shoot unarmed people if they were “directly participating in hostilities”. … If the rules were broken, soldiers risked being charged with a war crime.

In the action of this one commando unit, 25 Australians in the open were under fire from 120 talibs. The entire commando unit was facing an unprecedented engagement. Intense heat, the problem of maintaining supplies of water and ammunition, the danger of friendly fire were all the enemy too. Patrick pieces together the attack – individual commandos forced to fire blind at times from behind a rock or wall, the need to distinguish an enemy combatant from a civilian and at times forced to watch a talib re-emerge joined by children or women used to protect his escape. Aside from the battlefield complications, Afghan police meant to protect Australian units were often lured by fear of the Taliban to betray them. And then there was the need to deal with local warlords like Matiullah Khan, profiting from their ability to control populations.

From all this, Patrick moves to another level of conflict that had a significant effect on what transpired at Shah Wali Kot. Also about to operate in the area was a unit of SAS combatants. As Patrick describes it, the intensity of the competition between the SAS and the commandos added to what would take place shortly after:

The rivalry between the two regiments was legendary. At Camp Russell they operated in a state of semi-permanent hostility. Instead of cooperating, they competed for missions that would bring them the most status within the army, win medals and lead to promotions. The big numerical difference – about 120 commandos compared with about thirty SASR fighters – made the smaller unit more exclusive … Often the two units did not know what the other was doing.

And this was the case when the SAS group E troop at Camp Russell headquarters saw an opportunity to take out a talib leader, known as Musa, whose phone had been tracked to Tizak, an area not far from Chenartu: “Capturing Musa would give E troops kudos among the ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] in southern Afghanistan.” Planning did not engage with the commandos operating nearby at Chenartu. Once on the ground, the small SAS unit, however, found itself trapped between mountains and under attack from heavily armed talibs. The SAS is not equipped to undertake drawn out engagements; the purpose of SAS troops is to complete high risk operations of short duration. Off loaded by Black Hawks at Tazik, E troop decided to fight their way out.

Patrick’s account of E troop’s Tazik battle is detailed and gripping if, at times, hard to imagine details of the location. In Tazik, there were many compounds but E troop’s main target eventually was in taking a mosque, an attack led by Sergeant Philip O’Connor where Ben Roberts-Smith was seen to take daring action that eliminated a number of talibs holding the mosque. To save his SAS troops, Ben Roberts-Smith conducted a solo frontal-assault on a machine-gun position. That action by would eventually earn him a Victoria Cross.

The last quarter of the book deals with the aftermath of the battle – both the interviews to establish heroic action by individuals in the event of recommendations for awards and fall out on return home. Ben Roberts-Smith stood out as exemplary in his display of courage. Others were also singled out. It was back in Australia where divisions about Roberts-Smith’s qualification for a Victoria Cross began when one of E troop’s SAS group added a detail that sought to diminish the gallantry of Ben Roberts-Smith. Patrick writes:

The document was the start of a bitter factual dispute that would persist for a decade, break relationships and distract from the courage demonstrated by O’Connor’s team and the rest of E troop.

Aaron Patrick’s analysis of what would unfold exposes the fragility of memory in retelling action from within the heat of battle, along with a breakdown in army command which failed to deal with human frailty and internal rivalry. The elevation of Ben Roberts-Smith to the highest level of award made him part of an elite when fellow combatants regarded others as equally worthy.

The Last Battle makes no judgement on Ben Roberts-Smith or the outcome of ongoing investigations which have cost the Australian taxpayer $318 million over a decade. Nineteen combatants are under investigation on the basis of recalled testimony of other combatants. That it is taking so long to establish the facts says much for the limits of the available evidence.

For those who ask today of returned soldiers from the war in Afghanistan, “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” the best way to find out would be to read Aaron Patrick’s account of the battle of Shah Wali Kot in The Last Battle.

Anne Henderson is Deputy Director of The Sydney Institute and author of Menzies at War, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Prime Minister’s Award for Australian History.