Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/April 2023/Book reviews




 * By Nick-D

This book covers the recent history of the Australian War Memorial (AWM) in Canberra. It was written by Steve Gower, who was the director of the memorial from 1996 to 2012 and previously a major general in the Australian Army.

The AWM is an unusual institution in that it is both the premier memorial to the Australians killed during warfare and the main military history museum in Australia. It seeks to be a high-quality museum that presents Australian military history honestly, which can at times cause perceived and actual conflicts with its memorial functions. As a very successful director of the institution, Gower provides a fascinating and often surprisingly frank description of how he and his predecessors have sought to balance these functions. Gower notes the frustrations he frequently experienced dealing with veterans' groups (many of which seem to be poorly run and exist mainly to push narrow agendas), how he interacted with his ministers, and the role of the AWM's board and staff. His detailed descriptions of what goes into keeping the AWM running and the nuts and bolts of the several major building and gallery redesign projects he oversaw were a particular highlight - it is clear that Gower was passionate about his job, and he provides very interesting insights into what works and what doesn't work in presenting military history in museum settings.

The obvious limitation of the book is that Gower is not a neutral party when he discusses the memorial's recent history. While he owns up to many mistakes and misjudgements, there's not as much self-reflection as would be hoped. His discussion of why he sought to exclude the Australian Frontier Wars from the memorial is particularly disappointing, in that it reveals he is ill-informed about the nature of Indigenous and white Australians' military history during the colonial period and wrongly claims that Indigenous Australians haven't experienced discrimination in the military: they were legally barred from enlisting for most of the period until the 1970s! The AWM is only now starting to recognise this key aspect of Australian military history. As Gower was broad (and often progressively)-minded about other aspects of Australian military history, this is an odd blind spot in both his directorship and his reflections in the book.

Overall, this is a very readable work that will be of value to anyone with an interest in how military history museums are run.

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 * By Hawkeye7

It has taken over twenty years for the Australian official history of the 1999 operations in East Timor to appear. This book was delayed for over two years due to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) demanding changes to set the record straight (as they saw it) and there was no official launch when it did finally appear, which was highly unusual. However, the number of people who will read this book will be very small. It costs ninety-nine bucks. It is big and hefty, A4-sized, a thousand pages long, and printed on glossy paper, which allows for lots of colour maps and photographs, but makes it weight 2.5 kg, and my arms get sore after a while.

As far as official histories go though, this one is above average in readability. The intended audience is clearly Australian, and the book is written from an Australian perspective. Other nations will have to publish their own accounts (but only New Zealand has done so). While there are fine colour maps of East Timor, there is no map of Australia to clue foreign readers in to the enormous distances between the locations in Australia that are mentioned. Some familiarity with the Australian and Indonesian political systems is assumed, which most readers will not possess. The results is often a blizzard of abbreviations. Fortunately, the list of abbreviations at the front of the book is unusually comprehensive.

Despite this, there is much in this book for those interested in military history or strategic studies from any country. Studying how the United States handles an operation has limited applicability insofar as it has resources that no one else possesses. In the 1999 East Timor operation, Australia was the lead nation instead of the US, although the latter played a crucial role in applying economic pressure on Indonesia to accept the Australian-led International Force East Timor (INTERFET). US doctrine did not contemplate it being a junior partner in a coalition, so its doctrine said that the first step was to assemble a Joint Task Force headquarters. Had they done so, due to the troop ceiling set by President Clinton, it would have been the sole US contribution, and completely useless. Fortunately, PACOM took a more gung-ho approach than their president or Congress.

The first third of the book is taken up with a history of East Timor, and an explanation of how Australia, Indonesia and East Timor came to the crisis that occurred in 1999. East Timor was a Portuguese colony. During the Second World War, Australian and Dutch forces occupied East Timor to prevent the Japanese occupying it, thereby precipitating a Japanese invasion. They waged guerrilla war against the Japanese for a year before being withdrawn.

For its economic and physical security, Australia relied on:
 * Maintaining good relations with its South East Asian neighbours, Indonesia in particular.
 * Close ties with major powers outside the region, the alliance with the United States in particular.
 * Support for an international rules-based order.

Problems occur when these principles are in conflict. Any state with designs on Australia has to get through Indonesia first. (As indeed happened in 1942.) You would be hard pressed to find two neighbours more different than Australia, a highly developed but thinly populated country, and Indonesia, the world's fourth-most populous country and the most populous Muslim-majority country, but the two get along reasonably well, belying once-fashionable theories that cultural boundaries make for inevitable conflict.

Australia merely expressed "regret" at India's annexation of Goa in 1961, then looked the other way when this emboldened Indonesia to occupy West Papua in 1963. It was no surprise then when, in the wake of Portugal's Carnation Revolution, Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975. Neither Indonesia nor Australia wanted a failed state, and probably a communist one at that, on their doorstep. Only they recognised the Indonesian annexation of East Timor, and it poisoned their relations with other countries. It made Australia's stance on human rights and its support for the UK in the Falklands War in 1982 and Kuwait in the Gulf War of 1991 look hypocritical.

The crisis occurred in 1999 when the Indonesian government (but not the military) decided to write off East Timor. The bulk of the book chronicles how an Australian-led coalition of the willing handled the crisis. It does so in compelling detail. The chronicle of the actual deployment to East Timor commences about 400 pages in. There's a lot of quick thinking and heroism described, even before then, and plenty of lessons for the future. The foreign reader might find the degree of frankness confronting; this is a traditional feature of Australian military history writing.

Although the intervention was hailed as a success in the end, it teetered on the brink of operational, logistical, strategic and political failure. Misplaced political and military priorities that prioritised operational elements over logistical ones, ossification of processes due to a long period of peace, and a chronic failure to hold realistic exercises that actually tested command and logistical systems were the major culprits. Ominously, the operation also exposed aspects of Australian Defence Force culture that needed addressing.

This book is a first-class work of military history. It earns its place among the pantheon of Australian official histories alongside those on World War I, World War II and Vietnam. Unfortunately, like them, while it deserves to be read and studied, I cannot imagine that being widespread. Like many 20th century historians, Craig Stockings is weighed down (literally in his case) by the sheer mass of data he has to sort through.

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 * By Nick-D

The 36th volume in Osprey Publishing's 'air campaigns' series is, as far as I'm aware, the first book to ever focus on the January 1945 South China Sea raid in which the US Navy's main striking force conducted a series of very successful attacks in the South China Sea area. It was written by Mark Lardas, who is one of Osprey's generalist authors.

The lack of a work focused on this topic seemed an odd omission when I was developing an article on it given the operation was among the most dramatic and successful conducted by the famous Task Force 38 during World War II. As a result, I was really interested in this book when it was released and snapped up a copy. I have to say that I have mixed views about it.

On the plus side, Lardas has provided a detailed account of the operation and its results. His focus is the American operations, which likely reflects the available sources. The book discusses the desperate situation Japan was in at the time and the poor quality and disorganised state of the Japanese forces in the region. Task Force 38's operations are then covered in a very useful level of detail, with this being supported by some excellent maps and well-chosen photos. The artworks commissioned for the book are also generally well executed and interesting.

I was disappointed though with other aspects of the book. The narrative on the background to the raid is awkwardly split across several sections of the book, which makes it confusing to understanding the (also confusing) Japanese deployments and strategies. Some of this material is repetitive. The 'attacker's capabilities' and 'defender's capabilities' is focused on the hardware each side used, rather than the quality of the units operating it, which seems a missed opportunity - Task Force 38 was at the peak of its powers, and it would have been more interesting to discuss its quality rather than repeating easily searchable information about its aircraft. The narrative also has some odd omissions. For instance, there's no mention of the odd American raid on Macau, which appears to have been attacked in violation of US government policy towards neutral Portugal (the colonial power). The influence of the raid on Japanese policy in French Indochina also isn't covered, despite it being a key factor behind the Japanese decision to attack the Vichy French forces remaining there and formally occupy it. It's noticeable that the range of sources Lardas credits is somewhat narrower than what I consulted in developing the Wikipedia article, with a focus on military history works and no reference to political history resources, though he notes some excellent-looking sources I missed.

In short, while this is a useful book on this important operation I think it could have been a lot better.

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