‘We must…make our mistakes quickly’
—Major-General George Vasey
A tall, popular officer with a sharp intellect and sense of humour, ‘Bloody George’ Vasey flew into Myola on 23 October to drive the offensive forward. Vasey was an unusual general; his quick wit and independent character had happily survived his promotion up the ranks. He seemed cheerfully free of those twin encrustations of power: pomposity and self-importance.
His wit and louche charm were among his most memorable characteristics. Rowell dubbed him Australia’s ‘most picturesque’ general. He was a good-looking man with an irreverent style that might have impeded his rise had not rigid self-discipline and an unyielding spirit formed the core of Vasey’s being. He had a genuine concern for, and mingled with, his men, whose names he took the trouble to remember. ‘He never lost the common touch,’ concluded Raymond Paull.1
One anecdote tells, after Vasey’s escape from Crete, of the commander loping ‘along the quay at Alexandria in the hot Egyptian sunshine…His head of wiry black hair, parted in the middle, was hatless.’ He wore ‘crumpled battle dress trousers…[and] his gaunt leather face, with its clipped black moustache, betrayed nothing of the physical and mental stress immediately behind him. His prodigious vitality seemed unimpaired.’
John Hetherington, the reporter who witnessed this unforgettable sight, asked the brigadier, ‘How was Crete?’
‘Crete, eh! It was all right. It was perfectly all right, except that it was a bloody fuck-up…’2
Vasey had a swaggering indifference to danger, which impressed the troops. If less forgiving veterans remember him as ‘Butcher George’, after the bloodbath of Sanananda, most who fought under him deeply admired his courage and honesty. Veterans recall Vasey striding about Sanananda wearing the red hatband of a general, at a time when officers chose not to display marks of rank. Vasey placed military order ahead of personal safety—perhaps unwisely. When Vasey noticed the lack of officers’ insignia, he boomed, ‘Put back those bloody badges of rank—I don’t know whether I’m talking to the cook or my G1!’3
Some misread his good humour as a surfeit of calm. On the contrary, he had an inner intensity, which showed in his impatience with fools. Vasey took his huge responsibilities seriously, and the discharging of them was a profound concern behind his effusive exterior.
He was bright, too. His quiet mastery of technical detail distinguished him from his peers, both in the army and in civilian life. Brilliant at maths, he passed in the top five at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, and later came third in Australia in his accountancy exams. Yet he wore his intelligence lightly.
He neither stooped to cheap political games, nor let himself be provoked by them. He was simply there—smiling, swearing, advising and soldiering—with a brusqueness and candour that warmed his colleagues and marked him as one of Australia’s finest generals. Not surprisingly, he had many friends.
Born in 1895, Vasey served on the Western Front as a commander in an ammunition column. He saw the horror of the Somme. Sent into battle nineteen times against the Germans, he served with distinction at Pozières in 1916, where 23,000 Australian soldiers were killed or wounded in seven weeks. Though Vasey’s unit had a supportive, not combative, role, his performance won him immediate promotion to battery commander. It was a sign of extraordinary mental toughness in so young a man. He was 21.
In 1921, he met and married Jessie Mary Halbert, whose intelligence and self-assuredness prompted a friend of Vasey’s to inquire, ‘How are you going to get on married to a blue stocking, George?’
‘Don’t worry,’ Vasey replied, ‘I’ll soon have the blue stocking off her.’
He was very attractive to women, and ‘always made women feel special even when they were somewhat plain,’ wrote David Horner.4 It was his good fortune to be blessed with an adoring family, and a string of entertaining letters to his wife reveals a man of relaxed affection.
There is an amused twinkle in the eye of the older Vasey, and a winning recklessness in the way he spoke and wrote. He seemed to enjoy startling people with his wit, which could be carnal, sometimes cruel, and mostly entertaining. When his little boy ‘electrified’ British guests by uttering ‘a fine string of pungent blasphemies’ at a stuffy dinner party in India, Vasey bustled the child out of the room and declared, ‘I just can’t imagine where these blasted little devils get hold of all this bloody rude language’. He was immediately ‘in’ with the British, at the officers’ course at Quetta, and the anecdote is believed to be the source of his nickname.5
The elite Quetta academy did not acknowledge his powers of leadership—they gave him a C. But Vasey revelled in his popularity there, and returned to Australia in 1930 having rediscovered himself: ‘friends saw, in this slim, tall man, now thirty-five and nearing his physical and mental prime, not a new Vasey but the old wartime Vasey reborn.’6
Religious in a loose, conventional sense, Vasey nodded at the Anglican edifice of belief. He did not attend church. Yet he had a strong sense of right and wrong, and never abused his power. He knew instinctively when the rank and file crossed the line. Dismayed by the loutish behaviour of the Australian troops in Palestine and Tel-Aviv in 1940, Vasey issued orders designed to curb excessive larrikinism and obscenities which, he felt, had brought the army into disrepute. One clause amused the men: ‘Obscene language: Strict measures are to be taken to suppress obscene language, the use of which is prevalent both in camps and whilst personnel are on leave.’
It was a touch of sunny self-parody in an otherwise stern list of instructions—Norris remarked that Vasey, ‘had the rare gift of transmitting words usually considered foul into terms of endearment’.7
In other respects, his personal life was a model of rigorous self-discipline—a template for his behaviour on the battlefield. Vasey’s ‘Training for War’ manual issued on 16 March 1940 promoted the novel idea that a soldier’s self-control in peacetime determined his quality in battle: ‘An ill-disciplined army can never succeed in battle, and an officer who cannot control his men is a menace. A man who cannot control himself under peace conditions is unlikely to do so in the stress of battle.’8
Vasey believed the role of a commander transcended staff work and the ability to make tough decisions under duress. He reckoned a commander needed to be with his men, to lead and be seen to lead. This Vasey did, with exceptional verve and guts, during World War II in the Middle East, Greece and in New Guinea, where he would exceed, to the point of collapse, his own high standards of command and play an indispensable role in defeating the enemy.
Amusing anecdotes tumble from Horner’s superb biography of Vasey. During the evacuation of Greece he faced the choice of whether to take two wireless sets or two cases of gin. He chose the gin. Occasionally he cut a dashing, perhaps foolish, figure. Dressed in a white mackintosh, he went within a few hundred yards of German machine-guns during the withdrawal from Greece, ‘to see things for himself, as well as to let himself be seen by his soldiers’. Raking fire forced him back on his hands and knees. At Megara, he chatted in his car while German planes strafed the field. He reassured his companions that the Germans would ignore the vehicle, as only an idiot sat in a car during an air attack.
Vasey had a short fuse in the presence of incompetence. But his explosions of rage were not mere punitive gusts of hot air. He taught through his tirades. The object of his anger came away somewhat the wiser.
He had a tendency suddenly to switch from his ‘wild jovial ways’ into a commander of steel.9 A lazy staff officer at Australia’s HQ during the disastrous Greek campaign had the misfortune to encounter Vasey returning from the front. The officer seemed oblivious to the unfolding catastrophe in the Greek mountains. Vasey let rip with characteristic flair: ‘What in the bloody hell do you think I’m fighting with up there? Cream puffs? Get off your big fat arse and I’ll show you how to run a war.’10
Vasey meant to take the fight to the Japanese with every ounce of his energy and brainpower. He stamped his inimitable style on the New Guinea campaign within days. His written orders were admirably brief, and to the point—an eight-line signal outlined a major offensive.
When he took command of the 6th Division on 23 September, he distributed a new set of instructions for fighting ‘the Jap’. Distinguished by their unusual clarity and leavened with Vasey’s robust prose, they made good sense.
He had a sure grasp of how to deal with the problems that beset Potts, Rowell and Allen, observing, ‘The favourite method of Japanese attack is encirclement. To combat this, small formations, which are stationary, must have patrols out and when the Japs are located attack and kill them. To await encirclement will not lead to success…Because the Jap has established himself in the rear of a unit is no reason to withdraw. Remember that if the Jap has encircled you and got astride your communications, you, also, are astride his’—a direct reference to the disaster at Brigade Hill.
He stated the blindingly obviously on the difficulties of the terrain. That he felt the need to comment at all suggests he sympathised with frustrated attempts by Rowell and Allen to dent the wall of ignorance in Brisbane: ‘War in New Guinea is a combination of jungle warfare and mountain warfare,’ he observed. ‘The Japanese must not be allowed to secure high ground from which he can bring effective fire on our positions.’ The best way of stopping them was a matter of ‘picquetting the heights which overlook the axis of movement’. In this, he and Cullen saw eye to eye.
Vasey urged every man to carry five days’ dehydrated rations, and to act speedily to ensure the Japanese death toll was ‘as great as possible’ before the December monsoons. In a letter to Herring he wrote: ‘We must…“make our mistakes quickly”’.11