AUSTRALIA’S ARMIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 August 1940, Page 6

AUSTRALIA’S ARMIES

AT HOME AND ABROAD “CIVILIAN SOLDIERS." OFFICER’S SKETCH BROADCAST. The stout individuality of the Australian armies has, since the Great War, been a byword among military men the world over. The word “Digger,” with all that it means, has been incorporated in every language. The spirit of the Anzac volunteers has become a living legend. And the Australian armies of this war have assumed. naturally and easily, the old tradition.

A sketch of the Australian army type was broadcast recently by an Australian staff officer. It mentions that Australia's home defence force is now approaching in number a quarter of a million men, that an Australian Army Corps has been trained for service abroad, and that Australian troops are standing by in England and Palestine. “These are not the only men who fight in 1940 in the uniform of the King and of the Australian Commonwealth,” says the officer . “Australia has a fighting Navy which has in this war, by sinking the Bartolomeo Colleoni, fast Italian cruiser, already proved the reputation the Australian Navy won by its famous smashing of the Emden at Cocos Island in the last war. And Australia has an Air Force which is building up rapidly by tens of thousands into proportions never contemplated before. “Air minded as Australia is, yet it is by the men of her army that Australia will always be known to the world. A sailor is a sailor in whatever port or sea you find him, and airmen, too, arc a race apart. “But somehow the citizens of Australia’s army remain citizens still, whether they are simple privates, colonels hot from staff instruction and full of drill book efficiency, or generals who have been either school masters or soldiers all their lives before.

"You will find, for instance, in the A.I.F. a man who won in the last war a commission and the Victoria Cross, the highest distinction a soldier can hope to own. He enlisted under an assumed name in a State of the Commonwealth remote from his home — and as a cook. There is a lean, grey colonel who resigned his important office as the head of the Tropical Service in Australia's Mandated Territory to take up his job in a citizen's army. “There are in one group in a Queensland unit four friends, one an opal miner from Coober Pcdy, one a humble ‘bottle-oh’ from Woolloomooloo, one a journalist with a name not unknown, or undistinguished in three or four capital cities, and one a rising young barrister from Brisbane. They enlisted in a group because they had been ‘cobbers,’ as they put it. ever since they left school, and while separation is all right in peace even in such a country of wide open spaces as Australia, they felt that in war time they should present a united front.

"The trouble is that the marine, dealer, who is the youngest of the four, is developing such undoubted ability and efficiency that he is already marked down for promotion, and it is doubtful if his ‘cobbers’ can cope with .him in common sense and that unnameable quality which distinguishes a leader from his fellows. So separate they must, or the Army loses a good officer.

"The Australian army does not lack good officers. There is no officer class in Australia, and there is no way to the top in the Australian army except by hard work. All the officers are selected for their competence and not for any reasons of social prestige or pull.

Today, you may find many a private soldier who is obeying the orders of his .former office boy, thus indicating that it is not necessarily wealth or civil status which marks out the man fitted to command in war. “The Australian army is democratic, not in the sense that Jack is as good as his master, but in the sense that its personnel, officers and men alike, are inspired by a common ideal, that of maintaining and defending the values of a democratic society. Subordination and discipline find their place within its framework and are accepted as the necessary means of true- freedom. Here you have democracy of equals, governed by a unique and equally unequivocal” desire —to see the best done to each by each. "In the A.I.F. you have men from every walk of life —you have street urchins from Sydney, you have boundary riders from the bush, you have

lhe people from tne Kangaroo country. Ihe men of the overland telegraph, the sons of the soil wherever they may be. in the Mallee, in the back of Bourke, in the heart of Kalgoorlie, in a thousand places. “There are other reasons which go Io make this army perhaps something greater than most other nations can produce in such a time. We have men above the average—strong, stable, in-

scrutable men whose approach to any phase of human activity is different from the ordinary—mon who havelived in ihe outback and have taken lheir livelihood where they have been able to find it. “It has recently been said by German and Italian propagandists that Australia will not send further troops abroad and is not to recruit any more men for the fighting services. Nothing can be further from the truth. “In fact the changes recently intro-, duced mainly involve a change in the |

' training operation required to provide adequate forces both for home defence and for service overseas. In the words of the Prime Minister (Mr Menzies): ‘The allegation is obviously a misrepresentation of the decision taken to consolidate the existing A.I.F. and to refrain for the time being from taking’ fresh recruits into it. This decision was not due to any feeling that Australia ought to reduce her war effort, but was made because we have had such an unprecedented rush of recruits. Australia will play its part in this war wherever it seems necessary and to the full extent of its capacity.’ ”