One of the dramatic and defining events in Australia’s evolution to independence and control of its military forces came in May 1918 when John Monash became the first Australian to be appointed commander of the entire Australian Army Corps.
Monash was a Jew of Prussian ancestry, an engineer with a wide intellectual range, a citizen soldier before the war with technical ability, administrative command and personality drive — traits that carried him during the Great War to the apex of power, a knighthood bestowed by the king and a prestige that he craved.
The men in line knew that with Monash, the war machine behind them would work. He was never branded a “butcher”. He brought a scientific mind and passion for co-ordination to the task. The governor-general, Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson, privately branded him a “competent Jew” — a reminder of his outsider status by heritage. He was ambitious and forceful but had to earn every promotion and honour.
In a famous letter to his wife, Vic, Monash wrote: “To be the first native-born Australian Corps Commander is something to have lived for and will not be forgotten in Australian history; and the appointment will give me a unique and unimpeachable standing both in England and in Australia …
“My command is more than two-and-a-half times the size of the British army under the Duke of Wellington or of the French Army under Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo. Moreover I have in the Army Corps an artillery which is more than six times as numerous and more than a hundred times as powerful as that commanded by the Duke of Wellington.”
Read the article by Paul Kelly in The Australian.