Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/October 2017/Book reviews




 * By Nick-D

Guarding the Periphery is an ambitious history of the Australian Army's post-war colonial force, the Pacific Islands Regiment, from the unit's formation in 1951 until the independence of Papua New Guinea (PNG) in 1975. It's the first solo book by historian Tristan Moss, and is based on his thesis on the same topic.

I found this to be a fascinating book. Moss ruefully notes that virtually all aspects of Australian military history are regularly miss-labelled 'forgotten', but he makes a strong case for the PIR actually being little remembered. While the regiment represented around 20 percent of the Army's infantry strength throughout its history to 1975 and had a unique role and structure, it is rarely included in histories of the Army. The book provides an important introduction to the PIR's history, tracing the decision to form the unit, the highlights and lowlights of its first decades, and the experiences of the Papuan New Guinean and Australian soldiers who served in it. The last-mentioned is particularly well executed, as Moss unpacks the slow transition from the shockingly racist way the PNG soldiers were treated until the early 1960s (for instance, the Army refused to issue them with boots despite the regiment regularly patrolling through some of the roughest country in the world, in the mistaken belief that the PNG soldiers didn't want or need footwear) to a position of equality by the time of independence. Although the final chapter is a bit brief, the discussion of the Australian Army's mixed legacy for the Papua New Guinea Defence Force also makes for interesting reading. As the book forms part of an Army-funded series, it reflects well on the service that it was willing to support a work which provides pretty robust criticisms of its practices and their impact on Australia's nearest neighbour.

The book's greatest weakness is that while Moss made good use of the reminiscences and personal records of the Australians who served with the PIR, there's relatively little on the perspectives of the PNG soldiers, who always made up the vast majority of the unit. This may reflect a lack of records and the comparatively short life expectancy in PNG, but it would have been good to have explained this imbalance. However, as Moss makes good use of the available records to illustrate the experiences of the PNG soldiers, it's not a major flaw.

Overall, Guarding the Periphery will be a rewarding read and useful reference for people with an interest in Australian military history, and Cold War-era colonial militaries more broadly.

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 * By Hawkeye7

The battlefield that confronted the diggers in 1918 was very different to that of 1916 and 1917. Instead of a cratered moonscape, there was lush vegetation and intact trees. The reason was the German Spring Offensive, which had driven the British Expeditionary Force from all the ground it had captured in 1916 and 1917 and a whole lot more. To diggers from rural areas, the farms looked like they held a bumper crop. The Germans held the front line with as few troops as possible in order to amass a reserve of 31 divisions for the next big attack. The front was therefore a series of machine-gun posts. Neither the time nor the manpower was available to construct continuous trench lines, pillboxes, or barbed wire obstacles.

In this environment, individual diggers and small groups began spontaneously raiding the German outposts. Jordan calls these raids "stealth raids". They were quite different from the "formal raids" of 1916 and 1917, which were more like miniature battles, involving artillery barrages and machine-gun support. Raids were but one means of harrying the Germans; there was also sniping, gas attacks, artillery harassment and interdiction fire, and minor attacks. A major problem facing the Allied high command was determining which German divisions were in the front line, and which were available for the next German offensive. For this information they required, ideally, German prisoners, but in a pinch dead Germans would do, as their epaulettes would identify which unit they belonged to.

The full story can be found in Charles Bean's Volume VI – The Australian Imperial Force in France: May 1918 – the Armistice (1942). It's free, being out of copyright, but it's a thousand pages long, and therefore quite off-putting to all but the military history tragics. Furthermore, Jordan argues that the story of the stealth raids gets lost in the chronological narrative amongst the accounts of the major battles. This book concentrates on the stealth raids, building up a clearer picture of them; it's full of accounts of derring-do by unlikely characters, and there are heroes aplenty.

By its nature, the stealth raid was a product of individual initiative. The raids were often spur-of-the-moment things. They were frequently audacious, and carried out in broad daylight, but Australian generals incorporated them into their operational art in a form called peaceful penetration. Jordan is careful to distinguish the two; one emanated from the bottom up, and the other from the top down. John Monash's threat to the diggers was simple: capture the German front-line positions by stealth, or a formal raid or attack would be ordered. Formal raids were detested by the diggers as being costly and frequently unproductive. The stealth raid could also be used as an adjunct to an attack. In one instance, a key German defensive position was captured beforehand by a stealth raid, clearing the way for the formal attack.

The effect was devastating. Although the Australians were but five of the BEF's sixty divisions, between May and August 1918 all five were in the line, and they held a quarter of the BEF front, including the entire frontage of the British Fourth Army. German outposts were sited so that each was covered by fire from its neighbours. If one was taken, then its neighbours could be attacked from the flank or rear. A series of stealth raids on 11 and 12 July by the 1st and 4th Battalions captured 1,000 yards of the German line and took 120 prisoners and 11 machine guns. This cost the Australians two men killed and two wounded. Nine German divisions had to be withdrawn from the Australian front to be rebuilt, reducing their reserve by nearly a third.

The big mystery is why the practice of stealth raids remained restricted to the Australians and New Zealanders; efforts to train American and British troops came to nothing. The Canadians remained wedded to the concept of formal raids. Between May and August 1918, the 2nd Canadian Division conducted 27 formal raids that cost 2,767 killed and wounded. Jordan has no answers, although he notes that 60% of stealth raiders were from the country, as opposed to 30% in the AIF as a whole. (I do know, however, and will discuss in an upcoming Op-Ed.)

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Various books on the Vietnam War