A Soldier's Soldier : A Biography of Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Daly

Chapter 1 Regimental soldiering

Armies are living entities, human organisations that develop their own cultures and characteristics over time. Some armies have commonalities, but no two national armies are the same, although they might, on occasions, be alike. Field Marshal Lord Carver, a senior soldier and noted scholar of his institution, wrote of the British Army as possessing seven ‘ages’, periods associated with an individual such as Marlborough, Wellington or Montgomery, who dominated or typified a period in the life of the institution.1 The Australian Army was, and is, a ‘British-pattern’ army; it has many things in common with its British counterpart, but is not the same institution. It lacks, for example, a tradition of ‘great captains’, which provided Carver with a useful organising device around which to structure his account of the British Army's history. The Australian Army's development nonetheless can be organised around a ‘generational’ perspective, one that helps to identify both the continuities and distinct differences in different periods of its existence.2

The army emerged from the tangle of confusions that accompanied Federation, the establishment of the Commonwealth of Australia and the gradual development of centralised government at the federal level. The first generation of the army came of age during the Great War and reached its culminating point in 1918, both on the Western Front and in Palestine (the latter often being overlooked). Thereafter it entered a period of neglect and decline that saw the Regular Army, at least, attenuated almost out of existence by the early 1930s. The growing threat of war in Europe and Asia led to the renewal of the army and arguably to its greatest achievements during the latter half of the Second World War, during which its senior leadership functioned at the strategic level for the first time.3 As with the generation following the Great War, this army was quickly broken up and the organisation ‘forgot’ much of what it had learned at such expense during the Pacific War. However, unlike the 1920s, the army's leadership was able to take the organisation forward into a new generation of development and activity, made possible both by the very different strategic circumstances that confronted the nation after 1945 and, ironically perhaps, by a shared memory of the consequences of decisions made by an earlier generation of political leadership.

The third-generation army was characterised by the creation of a regular standing field force in peacetime and the extensive use of that force on operations in Asia between 1946 and 1972. The army developed and extended a professional ethos, one that stood it in good stead during the twenty-five years that followed the withdrawal from Vietnam – during which the army was attenuated once again, if not quite on this occasion to the point of non-existence then, certainly, to a position where its ability to respond effectively had it been called on must be very severely doubted.4 The intervention in East Timor in the second half of 1999 marked the emergence of the current generation of the Australian Army, one that again has been more or less continuously deployed on operations in various parts of the world simultaneously, and whose foundations were laid by far-sighted senior leadership in the mid-1990s, against the political trend of the previous two decades. The generations of the army have thus occupied a ‘boom and bust’ cycle familiar to students of Western armies elsewhere in the course of the twentieth century.

Thomas Joseph Daly joined the Australian Army towards the end of its first generation, gained his experience of the craft of soldiering during its second, and had a sizeable influence upon its development during its third, during which time he came to its head as Chief of the General Staff (CGS). A few of the things he put in train during that period – especially the development of army aviation and the acquisition of helicopter capabilities – have stood it in good stead subsequently, but the army that deployed in Afghanistan or Timor Leste bears few similarities to that in which he spent his entire adult life. Armies, after all, are living entities.