The immense quantities of records generated by twentieth-century military bureaucracies have proved a boon for historians. Personnel records in particular have allowed detailed analysis of the social composition of military units or specific cohorts of soldiers and officers. In Australia, the pioneering study in this field was Lloyd Robson's ‘Origin and character of the First AIF’. Similar work has been used to good effect in Dale Blair's Dinkum Diggers, Joan Beaumont's Gull Force and Peter Henning's Doomed Battalion. As Pat Brennan has demonstrated in his short study of Canadian battalion commanders in the First World War, the analysis of demographic data derived from personnel records can illuminate more than just the social composition of a military force. It can also highlight trends in promotion and the policies behind them, training practices, and even the nature and influence of the battlefield environment.

This book is underpinned by detailed statistical evidence derived from the personal service records of 276 officers who commanded Australian infantry battalions during the Second World War. This evidence clearly illustrates that Australian infantry battalion commanders were drawn overwhelmingly from a narrow social stratum – the educated middle class – and that, in keeping with the general attitudes of social responsibility of that class, most had served in the militia before the war. The service records reveal the citizen soldiers’ continued dominance of command appointments throughout the war as well as highlighting promotion policies that kept regular soldiers at bay. The data relating to the officers’ military education charts a steady professionalisation of the business of command, for both regular and citizen soldiers, resulting in a correlation between appointment to command and attendance at centralised schools of instruction. The strain of command on the battlefield is also readily apparent in the steadily declining age of battalion commanders and clusters of battalion commander casualties that coincide with the AMF's most trying operations.