Summer 2018 Edition of Reconnaissance

Editor's Comment from the Summer 2018 edition of the Society's quarterly magazine, Reconnaissance.

Welcome to the Summer 2018 edition of Reconnaissance.

One of the more colourful events of the Society’s year was Dennis Weatherall’s entertaining lecture on the enigmatic U-2 Spy Plane Incident. In this edition we present the text of Dennis’s talk. When it comes to shadowy Cold War intrigue, this incident had it all ─ technical virtuosity, paranoia, deceit and vindictiveness. How could the American military-intelligence establishment combine the U-2’s technological brilliance with such basic operational incompetence? Was it hubris or something else that led the CIA to pick a faulty aircraft for their most audacious overflight of Soviet territory? Did the CIA seriously expect pilot Gary Powers to commit suicide if he fell into Soviet hands? And after it was all over, how could such an exceptionally talented pilot die because the television helicopter he was flying ran out of petrol?

Over the course of a year marking the centenary of events in 1918, Reconnaissance presented a number of interesting articles on aspects of the First World War. The Autumn edition contained our Patron’s address on the career of Lt-Gen Gordon Legge and Lex McAulay’s piece on Lt J “Jack” Scanlon. Our Winter edition presented “Feeding the Beast” on supply and logistics by William Westerman and Ian Littler’s “The Last Man at Gallipoli”. Then Robert Muscat’s “Monash at Hamel: A Brilliant Student Outshines His Master” featured in the Spring edition. This time we complete the year with Don Smallwood on the understated and distorted role of Indian troops in the British forces, Dr John Haken on how Australia Post stamp issues have commemorated the centenary, and, exposing Imperial Germany’s grand ambitions in the Pacific, Bruce Gaunson rebuts the notion that Australia had no strategic interests of its own at stake.  

Amidst all the interest generated by the centenary of 1918, we may have lost sight of the fact that 2018 also marks the 75^th anniversary of events in 1943, the hinge year of World War II. The year also saw the peak of suffering in one of the darkest tragedies to befall Australian soldiers in wartime, their forced labour as prisoners of the Japanese on the infamous Thai-Burma railway. In his recent book The Lost Battalions, Tom Gilling tells the story of how some of them ended up on the railway, enduring a brutal regime of endless and capricious beatings, crushing around-the-clock travail, hunger and rampant untreated diseases. Too many of them lost their lives and the survivors were reduced to skeletal wrecks. I review the book in this edition of Reconnaissance.

Finally, I would like to join the Acting President in paying tribute to Major-General Gordon Maitland who passed away on 17 October. A short obituary appears in this edition of Reconnaissance. He will be remembered for many things, including his contribution as a highly accomplished military historian. His books include Tales of Valour from the Royal New South Wales Regiment, The Stories of Australia’s Flags, Honours and Awards of the Army, The Second World War and its Australian Army Battle Honours, and the “magnificent” twin volume The Battle History of the Royal New South Wales Regiment.

Editor, Reconnaissance

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