RECONNAISSANCE Summer Issue 2025

 

This is the "From the Editor" column of the Summer 2025 Issue of Reconnaissance, the quarterly magazine of The Military History Society of New South Wales.

Welcome to the Summer 2025 Issue of Reconnaissance.

From our English inheritance of mistrusting over-mighty standing armies and calling on civilian reserves in times of threat, the concept of volunteer soldiering or militia service was implanted in the Australian colonies by the mid-nineteenth century. Interest in this form of defence intensified after the withdrawal of regular British troops in 1870. Since militiamen or reservists remained, primarily, civilians who served on a part-time basis, some degree of overlap between their work status in civil life and their military service was a natural development, as it was deep into English history. Many regiments and sub-units adopted identities associated with the occupations, professions and institutions to which their members belonged, as well as, of course, the locations they were raised in. It is in this social context that units made up of students at particular universities came into being.

In the cover feature of this Reconnaissance, Al Kelly reminds us that one of these, the Sydney University Regiment, commemorated 125 years of continuous service last month. Al traces the Regiment’s development from a company-sized unit established as the University Volunteer Rifle Corps on 17 November 1900 to a rapidly expanding body more than twice the size which contributed 60 percent of its membership to various regular units in World War I, and later 900 members across most theatres of World War II. Post-war, members continued that fine tradition in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Cambodia, East Timor, Afghanistan, Sinai, Rwanda, and the Solomon Islands, and the Regiment developed one of the Australian Army’s most modern officer training programs. More recently the Regiment provided valuable aid to the civil authorities in Operation ‘Sovereign Borders’, bushfires and the covid pandemic.

After a highly successful career as a lawyer, Brendan Bateman had a hankering to write history, a subject he studied and loved at university. Initially, the fruit of this passion was a book about fallen World War I soldiers of St Mark’s Catholic parish in Drummoyne, Sydney. Now he has followed up with Drummoyne’s Great War, a three-volume work chronicling all ninety-five men commemorated on the Drummoyne War Memorial. We are grateful that Brendan contributed for publication in the last issue of Reconnaissance the first installment of a three-part series about one of those men, Robert Henderson, and the second installment appears in this issue. Robert served with the 13th Battalion AIF at Gallipoli and later on the Western Front, where he was fatally wounded.

Next in the magazine is a lively account of Queenslander Charles Oakhill‘s daring escape from German custody on the Western Front by Darren Prickett, the author of Crawl to Freedom: Australian POW Escapes of World War One (2024). Oakhill was serving with the 10th Machine-Gun Company AIF just west of Morlancourt when the escape played out in May 1918. Then Dr Tom Lewis OAM contributes an eye-opening article detailing how Australia’s home defence – that is on home soil − in World War II came at an alarmingly high cost in lives. A large proportion of them were American servicemen. Also in this Reconnaissance, Dr John Haken presents another of his in-depth historical profiles of an Australia military unit or formation, this time the Supplementary Reserve made up of Construction Companies which helped fill the void in the Army’s engineering capacity following the Second World War.

Finally, I express my appreciation for some very fine book reviews by John Hall and Dr David Martin of Phillip Bradley’s Inferno, by Dr Jan McLeod of Peter FitzSimons’ The Courageous Life of Weary Dunlop, and by Dr David Martin of Albert Palazzo’s The Big Fix, Laurence Rees’ The Nazi Mind, and David Kilcullen’s and Greg Mills’ The Art of War and Peace.

Editor, Reconnaissance

Reconnaissance is available to members of The Military History Society of New South Wales. The Society's main website is here: https://militaryhistorynsw.com.au/