Getting the Army into Order

The Unit Guide: The Australian Army, 1939–1945
by Graham R. McKenzie-Smith
Big Sky Publishing, 2018, six volumes, $209.99
__________________________________

Australia reluctantly entered the Second World War on September 3, 1939, two days after Hitler’s surprise attack on Poland, and it remained a combatant until Imperial Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945. West Australian military historian, Graham McKenzie-Smith says that during that seventy-two-month-long global conflict more than 725,000 Australians, men and women, served in the nation’s Army. The Royal Australian Air Force and Royal Australian Navy together added a further 268,000 personnel, bringing the nation’s total to nearly a million men and women in uniform. Australia’s population grew from 7 million in 1939 to 7.4 million by late 1945, which meant one in every seven Australians was a participant in this global conflict.

Any avid Australian student of those war years will be able to tell you that the Army’s wartime losses reached nearly 19,000 killed with just over 13,000 wounded. What has not been realised until this year’s release of Graham McKenzie-Smith’s unique six-volume boxed deluxe set, The Unit Guide, is that there were 5700 separate fighting battlefield and home-front support units in that Army. This colossal fighting entity’s basic components included the Australian Imperial Force, Australian Military Force (militia), the Permanent Military Force (pre-war coastal gunners), the Australian Instructional Corps (full-time militia trainers), the Staff Corps (full-time officers) and the Volunteer Defence Corps.

The support units were just as diverse, covering a vast array of duties, individual skills and specialist units. They included coastal gunners, cooks, truck drivers, medical staff, cleaners and mechanics.

Because of the frequent renaming of so many units—some having as many as ten such changes—and the many named sub-units, the collection’s units index carries over 13,700 unit titles. And this 3600-page six-volume bound collection has a whopping 1.6 million words.

“Each profile covers what is known of a unit’s formation, role, organisation, movements, operations and place in the Army’s hierarchy, including references to the unit’s War Diary at the Australian War Memorial and an extensive bibliography,” McKenzie-Smith says. “As well as the infantry, armour and artillery, there were engineer, forestry, farming, transport, workshop, medical, survey, dental, postal, butchers, bakers, and records and war graves units.”

His documentary researching also led to visits to several notable overseas sites where Australians either fought or otherwise laboured to help ensure victory was attained. For example, few Australians are likely to recall that 600 Australian Army Engineers formed the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Forestry Companies that saw service in northern England, Scotland, the Northern Territory and New Guinea, during much of the war, at sites McKenzie-Smith has inspected.

Other units included the Leave Train Cooking Sections—there were fifteen of these—whose members cooked for troops travelling across the Nullarbor Plain as well as between Townsville and Mount Isa and Brisbane. “Their staffs prepared meals during each of these long journeys and, come ‘tucker-time’, the trains would stop, so all personnel could alight to stretch their legs and be fed in the open air,” McKenzie-Smith says;

 There were also motor vehicle workshops and Mobile Tyre Repair Sections, since the wartime Army was among the country’s largest vehicle-owning and operating entities. The Army had Field Butchering Platoons, as well as two abattoirs, one outside Darwin, the other near Townsville, both of which are long-forgotten. There was even a Cake Baking Section, located in Lilyfield, near Sydney.

Alongside fighting, or preparing to fight, feeding of the widely-scattered Army’s nearly three-quarters of a million men and women three times daily over six years was a pivotal but easily overlooked task.

Members of these thousands of units would see service in North Africa, Greece, Crete, Syria, Malaya, Borneo, New Guinea and every state of Australia. “Only 409, or seven percent, of the units have a published unit history and until now the descendants of these proud servicemen and women have had nowhere to go to learn what their ancestors had done during the six-year conflict,” McKenzie-Smith says.

McKenzie-Smith has also provided ORBATS (Orders of Battle) for most of the Army’s significant campaigns or locations defended by Australian troops—such as the defence of New South Wales (February 1942), the Siege of Tobruk, the “Bird” forces captured by the Japanese, units on the Kokoda Trail, operations in Borneo, and the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (April 1946), which promise to be invaluable to military historians and researchers. “I have deliberately made it user-friendly, with comprehensive indexes designed for readers without a military background,” he says.

McKenzie-Smith, a retired forester, has been researching Australia’s military history since the early years of his professional career, beginning in Papua New Guinea. During those thirty-five years of research he has examined all unit war diaries, housed at the Australian War Memorial, as well as a vast range of other written sources in order to ensure his set is as complete as the data permits.

To see how McKenzie-Smith sets out unit entries, consider the following. Someone recalls that their grandfather had worked with parachutes in New Guinea, so looks at the alphabetical list of Unit Types in Volume 1 at page 20 (1.020). This shows that Parachute Refolding Platoons and Parachute Maintenance Platoons are listed on page 1.114. There are four such units shown here, with their details on page 5.240 in Volume 5. And here one finds that 1 Parachute Refolding Platoon was formed in Port Moresby in June 1943 and its subsequent history is outlined.

Similarly, if we are looking at what units were situated in, say, the Cronulla area, we look at the Location Index on page 1.196, which points us to the profiles of 1 Infantry Battalion, 45 Infantry Battalion, 55 Infantry Battalion, Cronulla Battery, 130 Coast Artillery Searchlight Section, 5 Field Ambulance and 21 Field Ambulance, which spent time in the area.

As Lieutenant-General Angus Campbell (the recently appointed Chief of the Defence Force) says in his foreword:

It stands among the most committed and detailed research yet produced on the Australian Army; a reference work without peer that will assist military historians, military staff officers, researchers, genealogists, history buffs and the general public navigate their way around such a large and complex organization.