1931–1936
Monash died in October 1931, and Savige and all who were politically minded wondered what would happen next. No one could fill the vacuum Monash had left, but someone had to emerge, over time, as a replacement in the collective thoughts of the military and the government.
Harry Chauvel, ranked by many as only second to Monash in the pantheon of the Great War’s Australian generals, had retired from his role as Chief of the General Staff the previous year. He was 66, and was stepping down after a lifetime of outstanding national service. He would still ride his horse every day around the outskirts of the Botanic Gardens in South Yarra, but felt he was too old for the strains of the military caper, which since the war had centred on political in-fighting and backbiting. Though he had dominated proceedings during the Middle East war of 1915 to 1918, and subsequent fighting due to Arab uprisings in Egypt in 1919, he had lost his last battle: to maintain a budget to support a halfway decent army.
That left a handful of notables from Duntroon, and a few ageing generals such as Gellibrand who were past their energetic best.
Blamey, now 47, seemed to have the necessary toughness, even ruthlessness, to command an army if it were needed. He did not enjoy the respect of the rank and file as Monash had done with his winning ways. Nor was he popular. But popularity was not always the factor that made for outstanding commanders. And respect could be earnt, even demanded.
Australia was rudderless in terms of its defence leadership. Yet it was not imperative that a standout commander be chosen. Perhaps, the Federal Government felt, he would emerge when needed. In the meantime, Savige’s stocks would rise with Blamey’s.
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In 1932, a Turkish general claimed that some officers in Dunsterforce had married local girls in Persia and then abandoned them during the force’s evacuation. General Dunsterville denied the allegations. Two Adelaide newspapers republished a London article about the claims, and to hype up local interest, went further, naming Savige in such a way that he could have been construed as one of the alleged offenders. The story was circulated in Melbourne, but papers there covered themselves in their reporting so as to avoid a possible lawsuit.
Nevertheless, Savige was mortified. Lilian was apoplectic, at first accusing her husband of being one of the culprits, which he vehemently denied. She said it explained his lack of correspondence at the time: he had obviously been too busy philandering.
Savige took action and sued the two Adelaide papers for libel, saying that he had been ‘severely defamed in stature and reputation’ by the reporters’ inferences. The papers printed a clarification, saying that they had only been reporting the London paper’s story concerning Dunsterville’s response, but this only served to magnify the tale.
Savige would not accept their response and went ahead with his lawsuit. He sued both newspapers for a combined sum of £6000. He claimed also that he had suffered ‘great pain of mind by reason of the disturbance to his domestic life’, a clear reference to Lilian’s fierce reaction to the reports. His suffering had been increased ‘by doubts excited regarding the status of his wife, his daughter and himself’.1 This was an elliptical way of stating that if the Turkish general’s views were believed then Lilian was not really married to him, Gwen was a bastard, and he was a bigamist.
Lilian’s wrath ensured that he went through with the suit. The presiding judge stated that Savige’s £6000 claim was excessive. But he still awarded him a tidy £875 (a hefty sum equivalent to around $750,000 today). Some believed it showed Savige’s sensitivity over character slights, but it was more about the threats Lilian had made if he did not follow through.
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There was still a lassitude in Canberra towards defence, which matched a lethargy in the militia as Savige worked assiduously to maintain a volunteer force.
To the nation’s north there had been huge warning signs, with Japan making initial moves to dominate the entire Asia–Pacific region. Its military leaders knew they could not do this without toppling and enslaving China, which was bogged down in a divisive internal war between Chiang Kai Shek’s nationalists and Mao Tse Tung’s communists. So Japan invaded Manchuria in northeast China, and caught the world by surprise.
Neighbouring Hong Kong was under British control but was not in a position to intervene. The world peace body, the League of Nations, which had been formed after the Great War, proved impotent in stopping the Japanese.
Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and Australia seemed more concerned with what that would mean to Europe than with what Japan’s aggression would mean to its own region. Hitler had bludgeoned and murdered his way to power, using Germany’s economic woes and the harshness of the Versailles Treaty after the Great War as pretexts for a military buildup.
On 4 April 1933, Hitler’s cabinet passed a resolution approving secret mobilisation plans, and the clandestine conversion of 240,000 factories for war production. The construction of U-boats was begun, again in silence and without media reportage. War ships were built over the 10,000-ton limit prescribed at Versailles. Also on Hitler’s drawing board was an expanded air force, and plans to mobilise a so-called ‘peacetime army’ of half a million men.
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By the mid-1930s, the whiff of global conflict was in the air. It accentuated the developing antagonism between the militia – featuring Blamey, Savige and others of a similar background – and the staff corps of the regular army. Savige, by May 1935, was steadfastly a militia man, with nearly seven years as Commander of the 24th Infantry Battalion. The following month, he took control of the 10th Infantry Brigade and was promoted to colonel.
The staff corps of the regular army consisted of permanent army officers, most of whom had been trained at Duntroon. They acted with a partly justified sense of superiority over the militia because of their knowledge of modern warfare and its new or improved weaponry. But the militia had ‘weight’. It was far bigger than the regular army.
Regulars on the rise believed that, should another war come, they would make better leaders than any of the old guard from the Great War. High-ranking regulars such as Horace Robertson and George ‘Alan’ Vasey reckoned they were better placed to control the information, training and experience needed for battle after serving with the British Army in England and India. They pointed at Savige and said that since the war he had only been on a tour of Europe. How could he control the levers of a modern army in any coming conflict?
It was a debatable point. Savige responded by mentioning his real front-line experience on Gallipoli, in northern France, in Flanders and Persia.
What better preparation could there be for actual combat?
Vasey, though, had been an artillery officer in the Great War, earning a DSO and two mentions in despatches, a record not much inferior to Savige’s. Robertson had been at the Battle of The Nek with the 10th Light Horse. He had further served under Harry Chauvel in Egypt, Palestine and Syria, and had also been awarded a DSO. Both these men had distinguished themselves in the Great War and were expanding their comprehension of all things military in an era of rapidly developing technology.
The issue of difference became more public in 1937, when Major General Gordon Bennett wrote a series of articles making a strong case that permanent staff officers – essentially the Duntroon graduates – were not trained as battlefield commanders. They could not compete with the ‘graduates’ of the Great War, such as Savige, who had real front-line leadership experience. This branded Bennett, Savige and others as critics of the Duntroon staff corps regulars.
Savige antagonised the regulars further by saying that young Duntroon graduates should act as platoon commanders before taking up staff appointments. They could then acquire man-management skills. This upset the regulars even more than Bennett’s remarks.
Savige and co. had a strong supporter in Gellibrand, who cited the classic instance of a militia soldier who had proven himself as a wartime commander: Monash. The successful bridge-building engineer and outstanding lawyer had been a member of the militia for more than 30 years before he joined the 1st AIF in 1914. He too had maintained that cross-fertilisation between civilian work and life made for a superior, more imaginative soldier, who better knew how to handle and lead others. But then again, Monash had been an exceptional, even freakish character who carried on with two professions while making a huge hobby of all things military.
The issue promised division within the forces if Australia once more became embroiled in a global conflagration.
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More than a hint of that possibility occurred on 7 March 1936, when Hitler ordered his new army to march into the demilitarised Rhineland. Australia hardly reacted to this provocation, but Savige registered an undercurrent of disquiet when he received a sudden burst of enquiries about service in the militia. The last war had only been over for 18 years, but it seemed that Australians either had short memories of the atrocities, or long ones of the dangers to their democratic way of life.
Either way, Savige felt a surge of enthusiasm. At 45 years of age, he was a patriot ready to make the sacrifice once more.
To him the Anzac spirit was alive and ready to be reignited.