ON April 25th, 1915, when the 1st A.I.F. landed on Gallipoli, a ‘dark, dapper, little schoolmaster’ was second-in-command of a company of the 2nd Battalion. According to the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–18 this young captain was in the forefront of the battle to gain a foothold on the ridges above Anzac Cove and, in the bitter fight that afternoon to hold the hill the Anzacs named ‘Baby 700’, he took command of a platoon that fought to the last. He was one of the very few surviving officers in this sector at the end of that costly day.
It is as well that he lived through it, for one year later the captain had become a lieutenant-colonel, commanding the 33rd A.I.F. Battalion at the age of twenty-six. Now he is Lieutenant-General Sir Leslie James Morshead. He well earned both his knighthood and his lieutenant-generalcy by his gallant conduct of the defence of Tobruk Fortress which he commanded from the Easter week-end until October 23rd when the G.O.C. 70th British Division, Major-General R. M. Scobie, took over from him.
Morshead is a citizen-soldier in the Monash tradition. Although between the two wars he was a business man, who rose to be Sydney manager of the Orient Line, his peacetime soldiering was no mere hobby; it was an all-absorbing spare-time interest. Even when he went to Britain on holiday in 1937 he spent much of his time visiting British Army Training Schools and attending manoeuvres. He was thus able to keep in touch with developments during a period of great change in Army thinking; his mind remained youthfully receptive to new ideas. Youthful, too, in appearance, at fifty-one he looked nearly ten years younger, and set himself the same rigorous standard of fitness that he demanded of his troops.
In his history of the first A.I.F., Dr Bean has a graphic character sketch of Morshead whom he then described as:
A battalion commander marked beyond most others as a fighting leader in whom the traditions of the British Army had been bottled from his childhood like tight-corked champagne; the nearest approach to a martinet among all the young Australian colonels, but able to distinguish the valuable from the worthless in the old Army practice . . . he had turned out a battalion which any one acquainted with the whole force recognized, even before Messines, as one of the very best.
And Bean’s estimate is as true now as when it was written.
Right through his military career Morshead has been a fighter. After six months on Gallipoli, he was wounded and invalided back to Australia. At home he was soon given command of the 33rd Battalion, formed it, trained it, took it to France and commanded it right through with rare distinction, particularly at Messines, Passchendaele and Villers-Bretonneux. By the end of the war he had been wounded twice and mentioned in dispatches six times, and he wore the ribbons of the C.M.G., the D.S.O., and the Légion d’Honneur.
He did not return to teaching, but even to-day in civilian clothes he might pass for a schoolmaster. He is still something of a martinet, as Bean observed; precise, meticulous and straight to the point, he is now known to his troops as ‘Ming the Merciless’, because he is never content with anything but the best and is a strict disciplinarian. He is, however, just as critical of himself as of his men. One day, speaking to me of the fighting early in May, he said: ‘I didn’t handle my tanks well. I should have kept them concentrated and used them all together. I didn’t know as much about handling tanks then as I do now.’ Another time, discussing something I had written about one of his battalions, he said: ‘You’re making excuses for them. Don’t excuse them: they didn’t do well.’
Much of this self-criticism was explained by his own modesty. No persuasion of mine could induce him to record a broadcast, although every other senior A.I.F. commander had done so and he freely allowed his brigadiers and other members of the garrison to record broadcasts about operations. He helped correspondents to obtain a first-hand and accurate picture of events, but insisted that the importance of Tobruk and the difficulties of operations and living should not be exaggerated. He wanted his men to get their due, but no more. He read nearly all dispatches by correspondents before they were sent to Cairo, and read them very carefully – even to the extent of suggesting grammatical alterations. He disliked slang and one time suggested that a Digger in a broadcast should talk about ‘men’ not ‘chaps’ and about ‘devitalizing’ minefields and not ‘delousing’ them.
I can see him now coming out of his office with a script of mine in one hand, pencil in the other, glasses on the bridge of his nose, and saying to me: ‘Just a moment, Mr Wilmot. There’s one thing here that’s not quite right.’ He fixed me with a stern look; we might have been in the classroom – and perhaps we were.
Morshead is no airy military theorist; he is a hard, practical commander. A stickler for accuracy, he gives close attention to detail, though he never loses himself in it. Before making a decision he likes to master all the facts, study all the implications and see his final position clearly and exactly. This characteristic proved valuable at Tobruk, where several times a precipitate decision might have been costly. Morshead had the courage and patience to ‘wait and see’ and then to decide. He is not a man of swift, bold or spectacular decision, but once he has made up his mind on the right course of action he sticks to it.
It is popularly believed that the Australian soldier chafes under strict discipline, but Morshead has always held that without it there is nothing to bind the strong individuality of the Australian soldiers into an organized fighting force. His troops have responded to discipline because they have proved its value in battle. Captured diaries showed that after the attack of April 14th the Germans were amazed at the discipline of the men who fearlessly stood their ground after the tanks broke through.
Although holding Tobruk was a defensive task, it was actually held by offensive tactics. From the first days Morshead ordered active patrolling of no-man’s-land and regular raiding of enemy posts. In his own words, ‘I determined we should make no-man’s land our land’. I remember his being incensed on one occasion by an Australian newspaper headline, which read: ‘Tobruk can take it.’ ‘That’s one of the most dangerous phrases coined in this war,’ he said. ‘We’re not here to “take it”, we’re here to “give it”.’ Because he instilled these principles into his men, they kept the initiative and gained a moral ascendency over the enemy which they never lost.
He inspired everyone in Tobruk with the firm conviction that there could be no yielding; that if every man fought without flinching the garrison was invincible. When the Germans forced a salient in May and made it extremely difficult to hold the original perimeter on either side of it, some of his advisers suggested withdrawing from the Red Line to the Blue Line in this sector. ‘I couldn’t listen to these counsels of fear,’ Morshead told me. ‘We will never yield a yard unless they take it from us.’ Nor was he content to see the enemy remain in possession of any ground we had once held. Any other spirit might have lost Tobruk.
Tobruk might also have been lost if the General had not been so thorough in supervising in detail the strengthening of the defences and the building up of reserve supplies. He was unrelenting when he had to deal with anyone who, he was convinced, had let him down. One senior staff officer was packed off to Palestine for a mistake which, in less serious circumstance, might have brought only a rebuke. He would tolerate no inefficiency, no slackness. He could demand this of his staff and his troops because he demanded it of himself. Both in Tobruk and out of it he lived austerely. The troops admired him because they knew that he had been through it as they had, and that before he was thirty he had commanded an infantry battalion in the line for three years.
They knew that he did not direct the defence from the security of the deep tunnels in the escarpment near the Pilastrino road, which housed his H.Q. He regularly visited all parts of the perimeter, and examined for himself the positions in the Salient. He was most critical of the amount of work which had been done on these posts and his criticism struck home because he spoke from personal observation.
The possible hostility of his troops would never deter him from any course he believed necessary. In Tobruk as the stalemate dragged on and boredom increased, so did gambling. Troops were frittering away their savings at two-up schools of doubtful probity. Morshead banned two-up and took severe disciplinary action against those who disregarded the order. The ban was most unpopular, but the troops respected the man who issued it.
Between the two World Wars Morshead rose to command an infantry brigade in the A.M.F., and when the 6th Division was formed he was one of the original brigade commanders. But his brigade (the 18th) went to Britain, and there he was able to work with those who had learned much from the fighting in France before Dunkirk.
In January 1941 he arrived in the Middle East with his brigade in time to be an observer at the capture of Tobruk. Six weeks later he was appointed to command the 9th Division, which was to garrison Cyrenaica, and complete its training and equipment. But, as we have seen, he had barely moved his men there before he had to extricate them from a most perilous situation. His quality as a divisional commander was established at once. At the very outset his division would probably have suffered crippling losses had it not been for his foresight in anticipating Rommel’s outflanking move; his tenacity in battling against Neame and going beyond him to Wavell regarding the withdrawal of the 20th Brigade from the El Agheila area; and his excellent control and direction of his troops during the withdrawal.
Back in Tobruk, from the beginning of the siege, he was responsible for the defence of the perimeter, and after the Easter Battle, when ‘Cyrcom’ H.Q. moved to the Western Desert, he was in complete command of the Fortress. Thus from being a brigade commander in March he found himself virtually a corps commander in April. Though still only a Major-General he had under him more than a division and a half plus a number of Fortress troops, R.A.F. and naval personnel. From commanding 2500 Australian soldiers, he had risen in a few weeks to command 25 000 British, Australians and Indians; soldiers, sailors and airmen. But Morshead made his task easier for himself by building up a first class staff.1
As his ‘G.1’ he had one of the ablest staff officers and most colourful characters in the A.I.F., Colonel C. E. M. Lloyd, universally known as ‘Gaffer’. Big and bluff, Lloyd has a manner that is a strange mixture of bluntness and friendliness. His initial bluntness springs from a dislike of humbug and a desire to come straight to the point; but those who stand up to him and have something to say find him most approachable. He is no respecter of persons and is essentially a realist who sees a job to be done and goes about it in the most direct way.
His capacity lies in his ability to make an immediate decision, his readiness to shoulder responsibility and the fact that he never becomes ruffled. Although a permanent soldier, Lloyd found time to graduate in Law at Sydney University. This, and his keen interest in non-military affairs, have given him a breadth of outlook that life in the Regular Army tends to discourage. These qualities have made him an outstanding staff officer and he fully deserved his promotion between 1940 and 1943 from Major to Major-General. This rise carried him from a second-grade staff appointment on 6th Divisional H.Q. to the key administrative post of Adjutant-General of the Australian Military Forces. When he became a general he was the youngest officer of that rank in the Australian forces, and the first of those, too young for service in the last war, to attain it.
The thorough staff work that Morshead demanded was an important factor in his success as a leader. At Tobruk he made his name as a fighting commander in defensive warfare, renowned for his determination, thoroughness and guts. A year later at El Alamein he was to be greeted by Churchill with the warm tribute – ‘Well done, Morshead! You’ve stemmed the tide again.’ He showed there that he was – if anything – even more able and successful in command of an attacking force. His troops have complete faith in him. In Tobruk he won their respect and admiration; to-day they worship him. In Morshead Australia has found another fine citizen-soldier – a man with a profound sincerity, honesty and strength of purpose and with more experience now as a fighting commander in this war and the last than any other Australian. In April 1941, however, this reputation was still in the making.
_____________
1 The principal officers of this staff were: Chief of Staff (G.1.), Colonel C. E. M. Lloyd; Chief Administrative Officer (Assistant Adjutant and Quartermaster-General, to quote his official title), Colonel A. P. O. White, and later Colonel B. W. Pulver. Other branches and services were commanded as follows: Engineers, Colonel J. Mann; Medical Services, Colonel H. G. Furnell; Signals, Lieutenant-Colonel D. N. Veron; A.S.C., Lieutenant-Colonel J. A. Watson; Ordnance, Lieutenant-Colonel A. L. Noton.