AUSTRALIANS AT WAR

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33448, 1 February 1974, Page 20

AUSTRALIANS AT WAR

The Six Years War. By Gavin Long. Australian War Memorial and the Australian Government Printing Office. 518 pp.

The title of this general history of Australia in the Second World War emphasises, rightly, the protracted nature of that conflict. The dust jacket and an introductory note by the chairman of the board of trustees of the Australian War Memorial make clear the even more protracted nature of the task of writing the official history of that war. Gavin Long presided over that endeavour until his retirement in 1962, when he gave himself full-time to the completion of this book. The 22 stout volumes of the official war history published or commissioned under his aegis stand as a record of his achievement as general editor of the series. Of* those 22, three, dealing with aspects of army history, were written by Mr Long himself, and show him to be a master of that particular aspect of the war effort in Australia. This last work of his, an abridgement of the full set of war histories, offers us. however, an even more remarkable achievement than the others. For here, within the not over-large space of 500 odd pages, is condensed the entire Australian war experiences of six years.

What is so remarkable about Mr Long’s book is not his grasp of the broader outlines of the 1939-45 war, or even his lucid delineation of them, but his ability to combine this broader view with an enormous richness of detail. Whether we are studying the intracacies of warfare in New Guinea or the conduct of the North African campaign, we are simultaneously aware of the broader implications of what is happening and of the detailed movement of particular units.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the chapters dealing with the struggle for New Guinea. Because of the forbidding nature of the terrain

(surely some of the worst fought over in the Second World War), actions more often than not took place with isolated companies or even platoons fighting equally scattered Japanese forces for the control of a ford, a junction in a trail complex, or a ridge. To be able, as Mr Long consistently does, to capture the feel of this kind of warfare yet convey the part each small incident played in the whole, is to be possessed, as the author

undoubtedly was. of very considerable organisational skills and equally powerful gifts as a writer. Another factor contributing to the success of “The Six Years War” is Mr Long’s rigour in dealing with the broader allied war effort. The temptation when dealing with, say. the early and calamitous stages of the Pacific war, is to devote time to important but not Australian actions — e.g. the Japanese invasion of the Philippines or the Battle of Midway. These temptations Mr Long resists. He tells us just so much as is needed to put Australia’s part in the action into true perspective and leaves it at that. One thing it is necessary to do in this connection though, is explain and illustrate the relationship between the Australian high command and those allied leaders under whom the Australians had to work. In this respect Mr Long is commendably outspoken, sparing not even the exalted, such as MacArthur or Churchill, in his attempt to get at the truth.

Mr Long died in 1968. having completed his concise history, save for some checking and the selection of illustrations. Its publication was delayed to allow two more volumes in the larger series to appear. Its appearance now climaxes the efforts of the Australian War Memorial war history section, and provides a onevolume history of the Australian war effort which must remain, for our generation, the standard work.