‘Monash was the greatest strategist in the Army.’
David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of Great Britain
AS THE HUMBLED German Army retreated out of France, Belgium and Luxembourg in the wake of the commencement of the 11 November Armistice, the Allied armies followed on their tail, marching east almost 300 kilometres all the way into Germany itself to become an army of occupation along the Rhine. To assist the transport and supply of these hundreds of thousands of Allied troops, Germany had been forced by the terms of the Armistice to hand over 5000 locomotives and 100,000 pieces of rolling stock.
The armies of France and the United States duly occupied two of the three sectors established along the Rhine, and representative units from the British Army the third. General Currie’s Canadians were stationed on the northern extremity of the British sector, beside the frontier with the Netherlands, which had remained neutral throughout the war. With British corps filling the gap in between, General Monash’s Australian Corps was chosen to occupy the southern part of the British line, just outside Mainz, a German city that had originated as a Roman legion base. Coincidentally, in Roman times, the best troops were always placed on the right extremity of the battle line, and the next best on the left extremity; and so it was with the Australians and Canadians in the British occupation line along the Rhine.
General Monash was not to join his troops. Summoned to London by his prime minister, Billy Hughes, Monash overcame his previously declared reluctance to work in a government post and accepted an offer from Hughes to take charge of the demobilisation and return home of all troops in the Australian Imperial Force. Surrendering command of the Australian Corps to General Hobbs, Monash took up his new post in a London office on 1 December and assembled a new staff to administer the ‘demobbing’ and repatriation of his nation’s army. Expecting this job to last some time, Monash sent for wife Vic and daughter Bertha, and they joined him in England in early 1919.
In the meantime, on 28 December Monash attended a dinner for sixty-eight guests hosted at Buckingham Palace by King George V for visiting US President Woodrow Wilson. At the dinner, held in the palace’s Banquet Hall, Monash sat with author Rudyard Kipling on one side of him and Lord Burnham, proprietor of London’s Daily Telegraph, on the other. Immediately opposite sat South African Prime Minister Louis Botha, artist John Singer Sergeant and Winston Churchill. Monash met President Wilson at the dinner, but had no opportunity to talk at length about the way Australians and Americans had fought alongside each other as brothers at Hamel, Chipilly Ridge and assaulting the Hindenburg Line. ‘My five minutes with the president,’ Monash told his wife, ‘were quite formal.’293
During 1919, Monash led Australian troops on horseback at the 25 April Anzac Day commemoration in London, and again in July’s great Victory Parade through the streets of the British capital. He also dashed off his revealing memoir The Australian Victories in France in 1918, taking just four weeks. By late 1919, it had become apparent that his wife was very ill, and he took her home, landing back in Melbourne that December. The diagnosis was dire – Vic had terminal cancer. She died the following February.
Prime Minister Hughes turned his back on Monash following the war, and no Australian Government post or award was offered him. In August 1920, Monash accepted the job of general manager of Victoria’s State Electricity Commission, resigning all directorships that might conflict with the post, later becoming SEC chairman. He was appointed honorary vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne in 1923, and elected president of the Australian Association for the Advancement of Science the following year, a post that benefited from his innovative mind.
Monash’s daughter, Bertha, married a dentist in 1921, and gave Monash four grandchildren. Meanwhile, Monash brought mistress Liz Bentwich out to Australia. But when he attended the races at Flemington with Liz on his arm, tongues wagged furiously. So, rather than move Liz into his Toorak home and ignite a scandal, he installed her in a suite at the swish Windsor Hotel in the city, where she would live for the rest of Monash’s life. Whilst it was an open secret that Monash and Liz were lovers, she was never included in official invitations sent to the general. In his later years, Monash travelled openly outside Australia with Liz at his side.
First suffering a heart attack at his Toorak home on 29 September 1931, after a series of subsequent strokes Sir John Monash died on 8 October that year. He was sixty-six years of age. His body lay in state at Queen’s Hall in Melbourne’s Parliament House before an 11 October funeral procession wound through the streets to Brighton Cemetery. In that procession, with a quarter of a million silent people lining the route, thousands of his former soldiers preceded his coffin, which was borne on a gun carriage and was followed by his horse, with the general’s boots reversed in the stirrups. Field guns boomed out a salute, as military aircraft conducted a fly-past overhead.
Monash died just as Nazism was beginning its rise in Germany. Within two years, Hitler would be Chancellor of Germany. Within eight years, the tactics pioneered by Monash at the Battle of Hamel, of rapid surprise assaults utilising closely coordinated tanks, infantry, artillery and air power, would be employed by the German Army. They would call it Blitzkrieg, or lightning war.
Ironically, Monash had a close attachment to the swastika, which became the symbol of Nazi Germany after his death. During World War One, each British Army corps commander was required to choose a symbol to represent him and his corps, just as Roman generals had done: Julius Caesar’s symbol was the elephant, Pompey the Great’s a lion with a sword in its paw. British generals tended to choose animals or birds. Monash selected the swastika, then an ancient and mystical eastern symbol. It was the one and only thing that John Monash, the Jewish-Australian general, had in common with Adolf Hitler the antisemitic dictator and genocidal maniac.
Today, John Monash is remembered in Australia via Monash University, Monash Children’s Hospital and the Monash Freeway, all in Melbourne, and scholarships in his name. An equestrian statue of Monash stands outside Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance. His chief of staff during World War One, Thomas Blamey, was Australia’s most senior soldier in World War Two. Becoming Australia’s first and only field-marshal, Blamey worked closely with America’s General Douglas MacArthur in the conduct of the war in the Pacific against former World War One ally Japan. Critics of the way Blamey treated his officers and men during the New Guinea campaign described him as ‘reckless’, ‘shabby’, ‘cowardly’ and ‘childish’.294 The best that can be said of Blamey is that he was promoted above his abilities after Monash’s death, and that he made a better number two than he did a number one.
Despite the many reminders of Monash around Melbourne, in Australia few would know who Monash was or what he did. Unlike many countries, Australia does not have a highly visible military culture. Apart from the annual Anzac Day commemorations, which have taken on a quasi-religious importance to Australians, we don’t go in for military parades. We don’t give military veterans a highly venerated status; even the handful of living Australian Victoria Cross holders, whilst respected, come second to sporting stars in Australian affections. General Monash got that right – Aussies are sportsmen and sportswomen at heart. Which might explain why, when push comes to shove, they make such fearsomely competitive soldiers.
For several years, former Australian deputy prime minister Tim Fischer has led a worthy campaign to have General Monash posthumously promoted to field-marshal. It’s a campaign that has not gathered much interest or traction. Mr Fischer might have better luck if he was trying to have an Australian sporting star elevated to sainthood.
Meanwhile, in France, Monash’s memory is venerated by those who know the history of the Great War. In contrast, in Britain today the name of Monash, the Australian general who showed the British how to fight, does not even appear at the Imperial War Museum, or in official published histories of World War I. British generals get all the British Great War coverage, and credit, not a Jewish-Australian former militia officer. Yet, in 1968, Britain’s Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery wrote of Monash, ‘He possessed real creative originality and the war might well have been over sooner, and certainly with fewer casualties, had Haig been been relieved of his command and Monash appointed to command the British Armies in his place.’295
British Prime Minister David Lloyd George had recognised this fact some time earlier, but not soon enough to implement the change suggested by Montgomery and appoint Monash in Haig’s place. Lloyd George wrote in his 1933 War Memoirs, ‘No doubt, Monash would, if the opportunity had been given him, risen to the height of it, but the greatness of his abilities was not brought to the attention of the [British] Cabinet.’ Only after the war was Lloyd George made aware of what he called Monash’s ‘genius for war’, and learned that the Australian was, in his words, ‘the greatest strategist in the Army’. Lloyd George put the fact that he was not told about Monash’s abilities at the time down to the professional jealousy of generals at the top of the British Army who could not bring themselves to take orders from a man who ‘was a civilian when the war began’. Let alone an Australian, and a Jew.
In the United States, Monash’s Hamel and August the 8th battle tactics are taught in some academic institutions, but, just as General Pershing wrote Monash out of his memoirs, Monash’s skills, and his influential role in the conclusion of World War One, and the fact that American forces of up to division strength fought under the Australian general’s brilliant command three times in 1918, are little known. Just the same, some modern American academics do recognise Monash’s military genius. ‘The greatest general Australia has produced,’ says Eliot A. Cohen, Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, ‘and an equal of any during the world wars.’296
As for the Battle of Hamel, yes, in contrast to the larger numbers of combatants involved in the better-known battles of WWI, it was a small affair. However, the overall numbers on both sides, taking in infantrymen, tankers, artillerymen, pioneers, engineers, airmen, HQ staff, etc, were similar to the number of men who took part in the 1644 Battle of Naseby between Oliver Cromwell and King Charles I in the English Civil War.
And just as Naseby was a turning point in that conflict, Hamel was a turning point in the Great War, a stunning early Allied victory in 1918 and the model for the larger battles of August, September and October that brought Germany to her knees. The Battle of Hamel was also an engagement that cemented an alliance that has seen Australian troops serve beside American troops in every war that America has participated in since 1918, something no other country, not even Britain, can claim.
Perhaps this book will go a little way towards shining new light on General Monash and the other Australian and American heroes of Hamel, without whose genius, dash, endurance and extraordinary courage one of the most brilliantly conceived and perfectly executed battles of World War One, and perhaps of all time, could not have taken place.