Lavarack: Rival General is the story of one of Australia's most senior soldiers and yet one of the least known. Chief of the General Staff and in command of thousands of Australian troops in battle during the Second World War, Lieutenant-General Sir John Lavarack is relatively unknown in the annals of the Australian army.

Lavarack was head of the Australian army from 1935 to 1939, during the critical years before the Second World War. In 1940 he dropped a rank to go to war, fighting successfully in the Middle East as a division and corps commander. Indeed, he was the first Allied comander to stop Rommel's advance across North Africa. But none of his virtues or abilities could save him from the effects of personal antipathies.

Field-Marshal Sir Thomas Blamey saw Lavarack as a rival and so, like other able Australian generals, Lavarack was ruthlessly consigned to obscurity. In the 1940s, the Australian army at war had become Blamey's personal kingdom and Lavarack, perceived as a threat to the throne, was eliminated. Whether soldier or politician, no-one who knew Lavarack was ambivalent about him. He had a fiery personality, but he was also a man of many accomplishments: intelligent, well-read, professional and courageous. Whether he was loved or loathed, he was respected for his abilities both on and off the battlefield. Lavarack's obscurity was born of jealousy, insecurity and paranoia.

Review

Reviewer: Michael O'Connor

Ferociously ill-tempered, arguably disloyal and a strong persecution complex are predominant qualities ascribed to Lieutenant General Sir John Lavarack in this volume in the Biographies segment of the Army Military History Series. From this unpromising material, Brett Lodge has crafted a very readable biography of one of Australia's least known World War II generals and placed him in his historical context.

Lavarack was a direct entry officer joining the regular army in 1911. A gunner, he studied at the British Army Staff College at Camberley until World War I broke out, following which he served in staff appointments in the British Army and the First AIF.

Lavarack's strongest claim to notoriety or fame, depending on the point of view, came during his service as Chief of the General Staff from 1935 to 1936. Lavarack was an outspoken opponent of the Singapore strategy, which saw the limited defence funds available devoted largely to the RAN while the Army developed as a force to defend Australia against raids. As early as 1929 when he was Director of Military Operations and Intelligence, Lavarack insisted that the Army should be structured to defend Australia against invasion by Japan. He clashed with his fellow student at the Imperial Defence College, Frederick Shedden, who was to become Secretary to the Department of Defence when Lavarack was CGS.

His term as CGS was not a happy one. He fell out with both Shedden and the government which was committed to Singapore. Lodge records that the government and Defence Minister criticised Lavarack for failing to adhere to policy but implies that the minister was wrong in failing to listen to his chief military adviser.

Lodge clearly identifies with the current historical orthodoxy that the Singapore strategy was wrong, therefore the invasion strategy was right. A more sardonic estimate might be that they were both wrong and that the seemingly interminable debate does little more than conceal the reasons why both were wrong. These would seem to be a mixture of inter-Service rivalry, the lack of any independent intelligence analysis capability and the culpable failure of governments to provide for defence in a world clearly lurching towards war. The search for scapegoats should not blind the reader to the real failures of the time nor should it prevent a more searching analysis of the faults in the Army's preferred option. That the options existed is clear; what is less obvious is that neither received the resources to make them work.

In the event, Australia went to war with its generals, regular and reserve, squabbling over the spoils of command. Lavarack sought the highest command but when this went to Blamey, he accepted a step down in rank to command the Second AIF's 7th Division. It is a sorry commentary on Australia's absurd approach to providing an army that Lavarack simultaneously held the rank of lieutenant general in the Australian Military Forces and major general in the AIF. One wonders for which rank he was paid.

Subsequently Lavarack commanded 1 Aust Corps and, after returning to Australia, 1 Aust Army. Later he served as Head of the Australian Military Mission in Washington and, post-war, as Governor of Queensland.

A constant theme of the book is the assertion that Blamey had no time for Lavarack and went out of his way to sideline him, demean his command achievements, especially in holding off Rommel's initial attack on Tobruk, and finally to post him to the 1st Army backwater, responsible for home defence after the Japanese had been pushed back.

Lodge notes that Blamey did not want Lavarack as a senior commander, allegedly for character defects. Whether those defects were any more disabling than Blamey's is not clear; what Blamey may have been concerned about was his record of disloyalty which was repeated during the war itself. Lodge describes this in such compelling detail that, despite his distaste for Blamey, it is difficult to condemn the Army's C-in-C.

Lavarack's career showed some remarkable pettiness. He agitated for his own promotion, for better appointments, even for a knighthood. He seems to have been a competent commander although Lodge suggests that the initial Tobruk defence was the high point of his military career. Even the successful Syrian campaign where he successively commanded 7th Div and 1st Aust Corps seems to owe more to the junior commanders and especially Berryman. Of course, in this campaign, Lavarack was cursed more by the grandstanding and typically incompetent intervention of the British General Wilson, the one general who had the worst war but the greatest rewards - promotion to field marshal plus a peerage for a record of consistent failure!

What is clear from this and other biographies is that the Australian generals were an unlovely lot. However capable they may have been as commanders, disloyalty, indiscipline, naked ambition and backroom politicking aimed at unseating the C-in-C were common characteristics. Perhaps the extraordinary thing was that, far from punishing all of the guilty, Blamey certainly gave preference to some that he would have known were plotting against him. Perhaps he had no choice; no army can afford to be too profligate with its generals in time of crisis. But perhaps Blamey really did pick the best soldier commanders for the key jobs.

Like the author's earlier book on Gordon Bennett, this is a useful contribution if only because it highlights the shenanigans of a bunch of remarkably self-centred individuals. The two major weaknesses are the failure to recognise that both alternative defence strategies in the 1930s were wrong and that Blamey's treatment of Lavarack could be explained by something more substantial than personal paranoia.