WAVELL'S DEPUTY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 99, 16 May 1941, Page 3

WAVELL'S DEPUTY

Sir Thomas Blamey's Career

BLAMEY, C.B., C.M.G., D.S.0., the first General Officer Commanding selected for @#he 2nd A.LF. and recently appointed Deputy Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, under General Sir Archibald Wavell, revealed himself in the Great War as a soldier with both brains and initiative. It is sometimes wrongly thought that he is an "office soldier," his brilliant record as Chief of Staff to General Sir John Monash having*to an extent overshadowed his earlier service. As intelligence officer on the staff of Sir W. T. Bridges in 1915, however, he proved himself on Gallipoli both courageous and resourceful, and steady-handed on night patrols when it was necessary to shoot. Like many other Australian officers, General Blamey was originally a schoolteacher. In 1906 he was appointed to the pefmanent forces, and before the outbreak of war in 1914 he had passed through the Staff College, Quetta, India, served with various regiments on the North-West Frontier, and travelled in the Balkans and Middle East. He was attached to a territorial division in England in August, 1914, when he was summoneéd by cable to join General Bridges in Egypt. > Several decorations came to him during the war, but the greatest recognition | [ cs: SIR THOMAS

was not made until some years after, when his chief, General Sir John Mone ash, published his volume "Australian Victories in France in 1918." Sir John Monash feproduced in his book the battle orders drafted by General Blamey: "Some day the orders which he drafted for the long series of history-making military operations upon which we collaborated, will become a model for Staff Colleges and Schools for Military Instruetion," wrote Sir John Monash. "He possessed a mind cultured far above the

average, widely informed, alert, pre hensile. A Staff College graduate, but not, on that account, a pedant, he was thoroughly versed in the technique of staff work and in the minutie of all procedure. ... Blamey was a man of inexhaustible industry and accepted every task with placid readiness, Nothing was ever too much trouble." Such is the man who commanded the Australian Army Corps in the Middle East, and is second in command under General Wavell,