The Military History Society of NSW

From the Editor Winter 2023 Issue of Reconnaissance , the quarterly magazine of The Military History Society of New South Wales  Welcome to the Winter 2023 issue of Reconnaissance . At the end of this year’s Anzac Day season David Martin presented a lecture to our Society’s May meeting on the topic: “The British Army’s Steep and Bloody ‘Learning Curve’: which facilitated the AIF becoming such an effective fighting force on the Western Front in 1918”. This addresses the most contentious question emerging from World War I studies over recent decades. Lined up on opposing sides of the question are those who insist that Britain’s conduct of the war was a bloody saga of incompetence ended by American intervention and those who argue that by dint of persistence and ingenuity the British ultimately prevailed over unprecedented difficulties to fashion a formidable war machine capable of crushing the German Army. For this issue of Reconnaissance , Dr Martin returns to the central question b