AUSTRALIAN MILITARY
Monash and Chauvel: How Australia’s two greatest generals changed the course of world history tells the story of the emergence and dominance of these brilliant Australian soldiers, who commanded the two most effective armies in defeating the Germans and the Turks in the Great War.
Monash and Chauvel follows the extraordinary campaigns of the two most outstanding battlefield commanders of the First World War across all the Allied armies: John Monash and Harry Chauvel.
John Monash commanded the Australian forces on the Western Front at the most critical time of the war, 1918. With his German Jewish heritage, Monash was an outsider who had risen to his position through his ground-breaking military achievements. Almost uniquely among Allied generals on the Western Front, he learned the lessons of past failures and devised the tactics that allowed his Australian troops to break through the stalemate of trench warfare, masterminding crucial battles, including Amiens, Mont St Quentin, Peronne, and at the Hindenburg Line that broke the German Army in France.
In the war against the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, Harry Chauvel led the 34,000-strong Desert Mounted Column. Chauvel was an Empire man, who considered himself as British first, Australian second. His attitude changed in the course of the war, when he realised he would have to ignore the directives of his British superiors and take the initiative in planning battle tactics himself if he was to defeat the Turks. He did this at Romani in the Sinai in August 1916; at Beersheba on 31 October 1917; and in the final 1918 drive to push the Turks right out of the Middle East.
Monash and Chauvel’s impact on the war was immense and, in this fascinating and compelling account, bestselling author Roland Perry does full justice to their extraordinary careers and the soldiers under their command.
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The two most outstanding battle commanders on the Allied side at the Western and Middle Eastern Fronts were Generals John Monash and Harry Chauvel. They met and formed an unlikely bond in the cauldron of Gallipoli and went on with their armies to be dominant in the two biggest Fronts of the 1914-1918 War. John Monash, on the Western Front in Europe at the peak of the deciding year 1918, commanded the Australian Imperial Army (AIF). It had 208,000 soldiers (more than six times Australia’s current Defence Force), and was the biggest single army Corps of twenty on the Allied side. Monash saw himself as Australian first and second. He viewed the war on the battle-fields as that between two systems: military dictatorship and emerging democracy. His German lineage meant fewer ties to the British Empire and a real sense of Australia’s needs as an independent fledgling nation. Monash’s background also made him more aware than any other Allied General of what was at stake. |