Working in the Shadows of War

On October 3 last, at the Chief of Army’s annual history conference in Canberra, a book was launched which interests me as much as any hopeful new pilgrim daring the perils of print in years. The author is Colonel Graeme Sligo, a serving professional officer. His book is titled The Backroom Boys: Alfred Conlon and Army’s Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, 1942–46.

The dual stories of Alf Conlon and his oddball unit are extraordinary, and at a first hearing could invite rubbishing as a collection of army fairytales. (“Nice yarn, mate. Now try pulling the other leg.” “That’s got to be a load of codswallop. The Nips were knocking on our door then. Life was for bloody real in those years, pal. And anyway, shenanigans like that don’t happen in the Australian army.”) And, with high scepticism, just so might I have reacted myself, if it had not been for two things.

First, alongside the footsteps of Sligo the informant (the “raconteur”) can be heard the firm tread also of Sligo the stern historical scholar. He has researched all these strange matters minutely, and sets out his conclusions for you to share. Nothing taken on trust or rumour here.

Second, by one of those fortuities which wartime seems to multiply, I served under Alf Conlon for the best part of two years, towards the end of the Second World War. At first I was located at his HQ in Melbourne’s old bluestone Victoria Barracks in St Kilda Road; later in his “branch office” in the grounds of the Royal Military College, Duntroon, at the Directorate’s Army School of Civil Affairs. Though my rank was humble—lieutenant—my participation allows me to say that Sligo hits Alfred’s style, interests and working methods off to a T.

For one who came to exercise such a powerful but unobtrusive influence, Alf Conlon had no silver spoon sustaining him in his youth. Growing up in East Sydney, son of a tram conductor, only his native intellectual distinction and qualities of personality led him on successfully, first to famous Fort Street High School, and then to Sydney University (BA, 1931). He was still on campus, seemingly a permanent installation, when the Second World War broke out eight years later. He was heavily involved in student politics, a brief Trotskyite, a member of the Senate, representing undergraduates; holder of a minor university administrative post of “manpower officer”; participant in the controversies around John Anderson, Sydney’s “subversive” Professor of Philosophy.

In April 1942, with the rank of major, he was appointed to lead a small group of “scholars turned soldiers for the duration of the war”, a Research Section which reported to the Lieutenant-General in Charge of Administration, General Wynter. While General Thomas Blamey was abroad, commanding Australian troops in the field in the Middle East and Greece, and later also in Papua, Wynter was the most senior army officer commanding here at home in Australia.

This team contained professionals, from anthropologists, through cartographers, econ­omists, geographers, lawyers to zoologists. They inquired into and reported on any matter the LGA committed to them—topics which might range from malaria in Papua and New Guinea to topographical studies of terrain over which the army might one day have to fight. Their range of trades and their variety of interests made the Research Section look like the Odd Job Squad, which indeed it was.

General Blamey returned from campaigning, and settled into his rightful Victoria Barracks domain. His heavy and complex duties were now summed up by his two main titles. As Commander-in-Chief of Australian Military Forces, he became responsible directly to John Curtin, Prime Minister and Minister for Defence. As Commander, Allied Land Forces, Southwest Pacific Area, he reported to the Allied Supreme Commander, the flamboyant American Caesar, General Douglas MacArthur.

Blamey’s return to Australia was no hero’s return to a bed of roses. A powerful move was afoot to undermine him, to abolish the very post of a one-man C-in-C and return the army to the “safer” control (read “bureaucratic constipation”) of a Military Board. Labor was in government, and most ministers feared and hated Blamey as the very archetype of their class enemy, about as likely to agree as a cobra and a mongoose. (Relations between Blamey and Curtin remained on a proper basis.)

A lesser matter facing Blamey’s now-settling-in Australian office was the future of that group of pointy-headed intellectuals apparently inherited from the LGA. Persevere? Tidy up by closing them down? Blamey had a long interview with Alf Conlon and viewed him in the flesh, while Alf’s “troops” sweated anxiously for his return, to learn whether they still had jobs. They did. Moreover, they had been raised in status to a full-blown Directorate, responsible to the C-in-C himself. Alf had been promoted to lieutenant-colonel. The interview had been a long one for brisk-as-a-bee Thomas Albert Blamey, though much had been accomplished. And the first hint had appeared between these curiously subtle men of a rapport which would far transcend the narrower concerns of the army.

Dangerously poised always at Blamey’s back was Frank Sinclair, civilian-bureaucrat Secretary of the Department of the Army in Canberra; Alf described him as “an official not discommoded by principle”. But to be fair, we should accept that Blamey, a former Chief Commissioner of the Victoria Police who was sacked in disgrace in the 1930s, was himself no stranger to the king-hit, the low blow, and the stiletto discreetly applied in some dark corner of the passage.

The scope and adroitness of Conlon’s unusual mind, applied to most worldly conundrums, meant that Blamey soon became inclined to consult him for advice on anything. The “Research and Civil Affairs” brief proclaimed in the director’s title might well have been changed to “Omniscience”. Such power is given to no mortal. And although Alf suffered his defeats from time to time, he won more of his encounters than I would ever have believed possible.

Army “civil affairs” seeks to provide acceptable principles for the control, government and relief of civilian populations whose ordinary government has failed, often as a consequence of war. The field had been highly developed by the British and the Americans in their recent reconquest of Europe; the USA in particular had created a most impressive specialised School of Civil Affairs at Charlotteville, in Virginia, and offered places in the course to their Allies for selected officers. Alfred—with Blamey’s support—secured positions for a number of Australians. They included the Directorate’s Major James Plimsoll, postwar head of our Foreign Affairs Department; and lawyer Professor George Paton, later Vice-Chancellor of Melbourne University.

This was Alf at his best. He had immensely raised the level of Australian expertise in a discipline of real value in our Pacific region.

The Conlon Directorate’s one attempt to apply “civil affairs” actually in the field was anything but an unqualified success. It accompanied the 9th Australian Division (the victors of Tobruk) on its campaign to re-occupy British Borneo from the Japanese who had held it throughout the war. The Brits had sent out one of their civil affairs units to begin the restoration of civil government; Alf believed an Australian unit would be more effective, and gazumped the rival British Borneo Civil Affairs Unit by entangling its personnel in military establishments in Australia. Meanwhile, an Australian civil affairs unit, trained chiefly in Papua New Guinea standards and assumptions, went into the field.

There was operational confusion, and diplomatic surprise was expressed at this supposed revelation of Australian ambitions of territorial expansion northward; darkly jocular references were made to the coming “Conlonisation” of the Pacific. As to the calibre of the men Alf sent on this adventure, I knew most of the officers quite well, from having studied with them or taught them at our own Civil Affairs School in Canberra. They were an outstanding group. I feel less confident about the British rival team, the BBCAU, several of whose officers I got to know in Melbourne. They seemed to me little better than drunken bums, whose main reason for being out here was to be early in the line-up for jobs when the postwar civilian government of Borneo resumed. (Hard upon their arrival in Australia, their acronym was being interpreted as Bludgers, Bastards, Cunts And Urgers. I never saw any proof that Alf was the author of the joke.)

As the war drew towards its atomic climax, personal relations between the Australian Commander-in-Chief and his Director of Research and Civil Affairs drew closer, and touched increasingly on subjects of national significance, not military ones only. One such was the creation in Canberra of a National University, intended as a richly endowed institution of postgraduate research. The “first paper on the University’s file” was a recommendation from Blamey and Alf on this matter; the first photograph in the ANU’s massive History is one of Alf and his ever-present tobacco pipe.

After the death of Prime Minister John Curtin, there was little to protect Blamey from the spite and dislike of the Labor ministry, whose determination was to sack their victorious top soldier with a maximum of speed and a minimum of dignity. Alf was a comfort to his chief, as together they made successive refinements to the final letter they knew he would soon be forced to send.

The official Australian History of the War is unkind to Alf. Both the General Editor of the massive series (Gavin Long) and the author of the relevant detailed volumes (Paul Hasluck) under-rate the value of his work. Both these historians I hold in enormous respect and personal affection, and it saddens me that their published work will do little to encourage the interest of younger rising scholars in Graeme Sligo’s Backroom Boys.

Neither Long nor Hasluck would have been attracted to the faintly raffish or “bohemian” quality which still clung to Alf from his university days. After his retirement as Governor-General, Hasluck would sometimes come to stay with my wife and me in our family home in country Victoria. Around the fire after dinner, I would relentlessly raise Conlon’s name, and plead his case for a reappraisal. Over the years, I secured some concessions, but few and reluctant.

The interior “private life” of the Directorate was rich, and probably quite unlike that of any other department in Victoria Barracks. For example, when Alf’s promotion to full colonel came through, he refused to put up the badges of his higher rank: “… make me look an Alick”. There marched firmly into his private office the white-haired, birdlike female figure of a major in AIF uniform. It was Ida Leeson, famous Mitchell Librarian on leave for war service with the Directorate. “Come on now, Alfred. Give me your cap! Give me your jacket!” With which garments she marched out, to return them shortly with the scarlet capband and gorget patches sewn securely into place.

Nor would one normally have looked towards a sombre military barracks for the origin of a world-famous literary hoax. Yet Captain James McAuley and Corporal Harold Stewart concocted the immortal poems of “Ern Malley” at their desks in the Directorate of Research.

Graeme Sligo has equipped his book with a remarkably thorough apparatus of indexes, appendices, notes and references. There is even a “Cast of Characters” with the names of 120 persons great and small who played some Directorate role. The idly curious (most of us!) will enjoy browsing here, and be amazed by who pops up. For example, a brace of Chief Justices: Major Harry Gibbs, later Chief Justice of Australia 1951–87; Colonel John Kerr, later Chief Justice of New South Wales 1972–74, Governor-General of Australia 1974–77.

Such an apparatus is immensely serviceable for readers who lack military background. Many a scholar of established eminence could well consider a more sophisticated apparatus as a means of widening the audience for their own scholarly books.

This short article touches merely a few of the book’s many interesting and still important topics. Alfred Conlon’s Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs was oddball and eccentric but (speaking only for myself) I learned more about life there than I ever learned at school or university.