Reconnaissance Summer 2019 Issue: Editor's Comment

Editor's Comment from the Summer 2019 issue of the Society's quarterly magazine, Reconnaissance.

Welcome to the Summer 2019 issue of Reconnaissance.

Our longtime member Colin Kay DCM saw active service as a Warrant Officer 2nd Class in the Australian Army’s Royal Australian Engineers before acquiring a Bachelor of Arts in modern history. Accordingly he brings an engineer’s eye to some of the recurring problems of military history, overcoming hostile terrain, transporting men and materiel quickly and cheaply, turning landscapes into defensible positions, or replacing indefensible landforms with man-made structures. These challenges have typically been the lot of military engineers, who shared the toil if not the glory of war. In this issue of Reconnaissance, Colin focuses his engineer’s perspective on a watershed in military history, and military engineering in particular. Arguably, it was during the Crimean War of 1853-56 that the industrial revolution made its appearance on the battlefield, ushering in a destructive new era of industrial warfare. Colin looks into the origins and consequences of the railway built by the British for that campaign, the first ever for military purposes − how it spawned new types of relationships between the military and civilian contractors, how it revolutionized the transport of ordinance and other types of materiel in terms of volumes and speed, how it foreshadowed the mass movement of men, and how it raised the prestige and status of the engineering corps.

We also present the third and final installment of Steve Hart’s enlightening personal reflection on the Vietnam War. This time Steve records the operational tasks performed by his unit, 547 Signal Troop, delving into the organisational and technical aspects of the Troop’s signals intelligence work in considerable detail. Steve gives us an insight into the unit’s working arrangements with other components of the Australian Taskforce and counterparts in American signals intelligence, which is fascinating to read about. The US intelligence establishment in Vietnam had high regard for their technical skill. This is a story of how Australians with far fewer resources than the Americans were able to improvise and adapt their limited ground and airborne equipment to develop a highly effective Direction Finding system. On a sadder note, Steve relates how, for various bureaucratic and policy reasons, his men were denied recognition and credit for their remarkable achievements. His pride in the Troop is clearly undiminished.

Manus Island off New Guinea has most recently been in the news for its immigration detention centre. Less well-known is its history as an American and Australian naval base in World War II and subsequently. In this Reconnaissance Dr John Haken’s snapshot fills us in.

Then Graeme Davis fuses the wartime biography of a single Australian digger of the Second World War with a campaign history of his battalion. Lance Sergeant Roy Cooke of Rye Park NSW was posted to the 19th Battalion in Darwin and later, after training in amphibious and jungle warfare, deployed to the Buna-Gona and Wau areas of New Guinea. He finally saw active service in New Britain but a dose of tropical diseases brought him back to Australia for treatment. The battalion had a continuing operational role in that arduous theatre. Graeme’s approach shows how focusing on the experiences of an individual soldier can illuminate the upheavals of a whole unit. 

Finally, this issue presents two book reviews, one by myself on Tim Bowden’s colourful Larrikins in Khaki: Tales of irreverence and courage from World War II Diggers and the other by David Martin on Michael Molkentin’s Anzac & Aviator: The Remarkable Story of Sir Ross Smith and the 1919 England to Australia Air Race, a biography of the surprisingly little known Australian aviator who was a major celebrity of his time.

Reconnaissance is available to members of the Society.

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