Talk:Thomas Blamey

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Even allowing for the great difficulties in trying to condense a lot of information into a small space, I think this entry does not do justice to Blamey's remarkable career and the many contradictions in his character and actions.

There are comments with which to quibble and, more importantly, significant omissions.

Strictly, Blamey did not begin his soldiering career as a citizen soldier, in the sense of militia, but as a school teacher in charge of cadets before becoming one of the foundation staff of the Administrative and Instructional Corps (or Staff) in 1906, which ran a national army cadet scheme.

Although widely believed, there is no concrete evidence to prove the allegation that Blamey was involved in the LNS. There is circumstantial evidence from which it can be inferred on the basis of guilt by association with others who were, or who now are thought to have been, involved in it and similar inter-war organisations. There is much more evidence, from Australian security intelligence source documents, that he was involved in, and probably was the leader of, a similar anti-communist organisation known as The Association after WWII.

The badge [not card] 80 incident has never been unequivocally explained nor determined. The possibilities range from Blamey being the man found by police in the brothel raid who produced the Chief Commissioner's badge 80 to discourage them from arresting him to the man being a friend of Blamey's to whom he had, according to a curiously late and somewhat implausible explanation by Blamey, given his keys for an innocent purpose and the badge was on the key ring. Or perhaps the man was a random thief who took the badge from Blamey's office, given the findings of one of the more sympathetic investigations by police under Blamey's command.

The reference to Blamey's actions as Chief Commissioner of Police against demonstrating workers ignores his longer and much more destructive and bitter internal war with the police union, which perhaps reflected Blamey's antagonism towards communism as represented by trade unions generally as well as a contest for power over who actually ran the police.

The treatment in the main entry of his relationship with MacArthur casts him unfairly as gutless in dealing with MacArthur. He was in fact widely regarded a loyal deputy (which loyalty MacArthur did not return) but not a spineless one, in the difficult situation of trying to represent Australia's defence and military interests while maintaining a delicate balance with the difficult and even more egotistical and ambitious American general whose growing forces were perceived as critical to Australia's survival in 1942, although it is debatable whether MacArthur's forces mattered much, unlike the US Marines on Guadalcanal not under MacArthur's command who made a far greater contribution to the 1942-3 Allied land victories over the Japanese. At the same time Blamey's ambition and desire always to advance or protect himself at the expense of others led to some discreditable conduct after he realised that MacArthur had sent him to Papua during the Kokoda campaign to set him up as the scapegoat if the Allies lost. I do not see how the notorious "rabbit who runs" comment at Koitaki can be related in any way to MacArthur or Blamey's relationship with him. It certainly did not flow from any communication or order from MacArthur to Blamey nor was it relevant to anything else passing between them. It was just Blamey at his clumsy, or maybe nasty, worst. He has a long history before and during WWII of clumsy public and private statements which got him into unnecessary difficulties.

While there is no shortage of material supporting the view that Blamey was ruthless and mean-sprited in dealing with rivals, the main entry about this should be balanced by reference to contradictory material from those, such as Ned Herring, who achieved high rank and served under Blamey, for whom they had the highest regard. While there is much about Blamey to dislike, and even to condemn, the received view of him seems to have been clouded by a rather small quantity of negative events and opinions which obscure his many and fine achievements during a long and highly productive career. It is unfair to the man and unbalanced history to perpetuate this.

The summary of his military career could pay more attention to his outstanding work as a staff officer in WWI and to his excellent work between the wars in helping shape the Australian military forces, although this was not without deficiencies such as his widely shared pre-WWII assumption that Britain's Singapore defence should ensure Australia's defence against Japan, in the absence of other major conflicts, and the failure he shared with other military leaders in various Allied nations to recognise the supremacy of air power in sea and land actions. Equally, the summary does not balance his excellent work commanding Australian forces in North Africa against his deficiencies as a field commander (but not his previous strategic and operational assessments) in the failures in Greece and Crete, nor questions about his personal conduct, or misconduct,during that era, including allegations of cowardice and nepotism in evacuating his surviving son from Greece with much more senior officers. His failures as a field commander in Papua also need to be understood, as do his later successes as a commander in New Guinea.

Despite being the commander, Blamey consistently failed to view the forward positions in Papua (anywhere much north of Port Moresby during the long and critical Kokoda campaign while he tamely relayed MacArthur's ill-informed orders to press on quickly in atrocious conditions which neither he nor MacArthur had seen nor understood, although both of them popped up on the battlefield towards the end at the Gona-Buna battles). In Papua his failure to go forward certainly led to him failing to appreciate the battlefield and its conditions, resulting in unreasonable demands on his subordinate commanders and unfair penalisation for failing to carry out impossible orders.

At every juncture of his career after, and perhaps during, WWI Blamey seems to have put his personal advancement against the interests of others. He was certainly seen as vicious and relentless in getting rid of rivals, although in some cases at least he might well have been correct in his assessments of the weaknesses of others whose advancement he blocked, nothwithstanding that Blamey himself suffered from some of the same problems in the eyes of others.

Like MacArthur, who in a baseless imputation of cowardice was unfairly called Dugout Doug by his troops but for whom he tried to provide well and for whom he probably had genuine concern, Blamey was often held in poor regard by his troops although he was constantly concerned to ensure that they were well supplied. Making sure it actually happened was sometimes a different issue as shown by the consistent and critical supply failures on the Kododa retreat and advance.

Blamey was a great Australian military leader in trying, against often arrogant British superiors and their political masters up to Winston Churchill and later under MacArthur, to maintain the unity and integrity of Australian forces under British command in both world wars, and notably in WWII.

Like many of his contemporaries, I have little regard for Blamey as a man in many of the events in his life and often a great distaste for him as a political general and a lifelong sychophant remoreselessly seeking self-advancement at the expense of his equally well-qualified but politically less able rivals. Nonetheless, unlike many of his contemporaries and later critics, I think that one needs to look at the vast and great range of work he did from shortly before WWI until the end of WWII. It represents one of the greatest positive contributions to Australia by any person, and probably the best contribution by any military person although this was perhaps as much a consequence of the positions which, by a mixture of luck, cunning and scheming, he occupied at ideal times as much as of his undoubted ability in staff, strategic, and political, as distinct from combat command, areas.

No person is perfect on all fronts, and Blamey definitely was not, but despite his many faults he was a highly talented military administrator, strategist, and an outstanding staff officer whose sometimes unpleasant and generally self-centred personal qualities probably gave him the strength and independence to stand against quailing Australian politicians and, to a lesser extent, the self-seeking arrogance, scheming and bluster of MacAthur in Australia's desperate days in 1942.

For all his faults and virtues, Blamey perhaps stands with John Curtin as one of the only stolid leaders who recognised and responded fully to the threats when Australia had its back to the wall for the only time in its history when others were less resolute in the face of advances towards Australia by the seemingly invincible Japanese. Regardless of the many criticisms which can be levelled at him, and MacArthur, from their initial failure to appreciate the significance and strength of the Japanese advance through Kokoda towards Port Moresby and their deplorable command and neglect, in every respect, of the retreat and advance in the Kokoda campaign, the fact remains that victory was won under Blamey's and MacArthur's commands. Whether that victory and the victories at Gona, Buna and Sanananda were because of or in spite of Blamey and MacArthur is a debate to which there can never be a definite conclusion.

What is indisputable is that if Blamey and MacArthur had been more in touch with the battlefield in Papua, and if MacArthur had been less concerned with forcing quick results to gain future advantage in Washington's eyes, the Kokoda - Buna - Gona - Sanananda campaigns would have been better fought with better supplies with better results with fewer casualties among, predominantly, the Australian forces who bore the brunt of the fighting.

Blamey's subsequent career, or lack of it, is more a consequence of MacArthur's own huge self-centred ambition which side-lined Australian forces rather than any deficiency in Blamey as a military leader or commander.

The main entry reference to Blamey receiving his field marshal's baton "on his death bed" is a little florid. He was certainly quite ill at the time he received it on 16 September 1950 at the Repatriation General Hospital at Heidelberg, but he did not die until 27 May 1951 of a stroke which, although he had had one before getting his baton, was a new event unrelated to the earlier illnesses.

To fill in the gap in the main entry about the date of his promotion to major general, according to David Horner in "Blamey" (pp. 107-8) he was promoted around March 1931 upon becoming commander of the 3rd Division, which was a militia unit.

To get a fuller picture of Blamey, David Horner's excellent, detailed and well referenced "Blamey" 1998, Sydney, Allen & Unwin should be read in conjunction with John Hetherington's work mentioned as a reference in the main entry. Among the many other books worth reading to obtain a rounded picture of the complex man who was Blamey, Frank Legg's "The Gordon Bennett Story" 1965, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, provides insights into Blamey's activities, conduct and development from WWI to the end of WWII from the perspective of his rival Gordon Bennett.

Damian Walsh

28 June 2006

Why don't you incorporate some of this into the article, with appropriate sourcing? Adam 11:14, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks.

I haven't contributed to anything on Wikipedia before so I was reluctant to edit someone else's work.

I've amended my initial comment with more material so it can be commented upon with a view to identifying the parts which could be added to the entry.

Damian Walsh 9.50 p.m. AEST 29 June 2006

Ah, editing other people's work, indeed totally rewriting other people's work, is more than half the fun. If you get it wrong, others will correct you. Adam 11:54, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Damian, you should:

• Become a registered user.
• Rewrite this article as you see fit. You obviously know the subject, so get on with it. If others disagree with you, they will say so, and then you can debate it. It's fun. Adam 09:57, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Adam

Thanks for the encouragement.

I'll do it progressively as I need to check some sources and be more precise, and concise.

Damian

[edit] Not worth pursuing

There is no point in providing well-informed content which can be edited by people with no understanding of the subject.

Damian Walsh 8 August 2006

[edit] Extended Digression

I have moved the extensive note from the article regarding the "context" in which one should understand Blamey to the talk page, as it is overlong and does not fit well with the article as it now stands. I feel this should be a note to the Australian Army page, perhaps, with a link there to explicate the issues raised. The passage, though long-winded, has a good deal of merit — this is merely the wrong place for it. Wally 21:13, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

A Note on Staff versus Other Officers

To understand Blamey's skills; criticisms of him; and conflicts between him and other army officers, it is necessary to understand the difference between staff officers and those commanding combat units. It is also necessary to understand an entirely different distinction between Australian Staff Corps officers and Australian militia officers.

Staff versus Combat Commands.

All armies are arranged in similar ways, with the smallest group of about ten to fifteen infantrymen under low level command being incorporated into larger and larger groups with increasingly high levels of command, up to commands which may control hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

A relatively small proportion of soldiers in any army is combat troops, primarily those in infantry, artillery, and armour. For every combat soldier there are many more providing a huge range of support services in the field and in rear areas from communications, ammunition, transport, catering, and medical services to pay and general administrative services.

Staff officers control and support very large combat units, typically of at least 10,000 soldiers, but at policy and planning rather than detailed combat levels which, certainly in the Australian Army in Blamey's time, are left to the commanders of the combat units. Staff officers determine and plan the operations in which combat and combat support units engage. They decide the strategy and objectives to be achieved, and then plan all the support steps and requirements, from the general movements of troops to the last bullet and bandage required and how those items will reach the combat units at the requisite time.

Good staff work can win battles with average troops but bad staff work can deprive excellent troops of victory or subject them to defeat by the enemy. In the simplest example, if the bullets aren't there the best troops at the front can't fire them, and the best troops can then be killed or be forced to retreat because poor staff work deprives them of offensive or defensive capacity.

In WWI, Blamey was regarded by everyone as an excellent staff officer. He consulted with, rather than merely gave directions to, every major combat and combat support unit involved in an attack to ensure that all units involved understood the aim of the attack and that he understood what they needed to achieve the aim. His attention to detail ensured that every aspect of an attack and its prosecution was properly planned and supported. Nowhere was this better demonstrated than at Amiens where, over initial British opposition to the attacks, Australian and Canadian forces punched the first serious and sustained hole in the final German defences in an extraordinarily aggressive and successful advance which was the beginning of Germany's defeat.

Blamey's reputation in WWII is less consistent. This is due partly to his exercise of high command, staff, and occasional and sometimes ill-defined combat commands at the same time, which results in some critics failing to distinguish between his failures and achievements in these different capacities. His work at staff level in North Africa and Greece was at best excellent and at worst competent. His combat command in Greece has been criticised but this ignores his strategic predictions at high command and staff levels beforehand that the campaign was doomed; his preparations alone among all senior officers to identify evacuation points in case of defeat; and the successful evacuation of the bulk of his force from those points in what otherwise would have been a mass surrender of Allied troops desperately needed elsewhere in the Mediterranean theatre and, ultimately, in the defence of Australia after Japan entered the war. Conversely, there is ample evidence of serious failures by him in every capacity during the Papuan campaign (primarily the critical Kododa retreat and advance, and to a lesser extent Gona, Buna, and Sananda) when he professed to be operating at high command levels but was perceived by some of his immediate subordinates as attempting to operate as a combat commander. Subsequently, he was quite competent in a better defined capacity as overall commander during the subsequent New Guinea campaigns. Later, his allegedly unnecessary wastage of Australian troops in the latter part of WWII in seemingly pointless campaigns against contained Japanese troops as the Americans advanced towards Japan attracted contemporary and subequent criticism that he was fighting campaigns for political rather than military purposes. Unlike the Americans who were replaced by Australian troops in areas where the Japanese were contained without aggressive action by either American or Japanese troops, Blamey considered that the enemy should be fought with a view to defeat wherever he was found. During this same time General Douglas MacArthur was conducting his famous "Island Hopping Campaign", in which Japanese forces at places such as Rabaul were isolated and allowed to "whither on the vine" without Allied casualties. Nonetheless, it may seem odd to criticise a soldier for wanting to defeat the enemy wherever he is found, but Blamey's career at the end of the war is clouded by somewhat paradoxical criticisms that he kept Australian troops fighting unnecessarily against the undefeated and still fighting Japanese. A fuller understanding of these issues revolves around complicated issues of Australian versus American control of the war in the South West Pacific.

Australian Staff Corps versus Militia Officers Between WWI and WWII Australia's army was based on a small group of full time professional army officers (the Staff Corps) whose function was to be the backbone of the army and especially to train the part time militia. The militia was to be the basis of an active army if war occurred. Many militia officers, such as Blamey and many of the officers who would be in conflict with him during WWII, had served in demanding and senior positions during WWI. Many of the Staff Corps officers felt that the militia officers were out of touch with developments in warfare, tactics and equipment since WWI. Throughout WWII, there was a perception by some Staff Corps officers that Blamey was preferring militia officers over Staff Corps officers, which led to some bitterness and political intrigue against, and by, Blamey.