Beginning on a wage of £1 per week in 1934, Lesley Long was the first woman employed by the Commercial Union Insurance Company in Hobart, Tasmania. Long’s pay gradually increased to £2/10 per week and after five years of saving she was able to fulfil her dream of sailing to England in May 1939. Having found a job and a place to rent in London, Long spent one night each week and her Saturdays volunteering at Guy’s Hospital. Having been a member of a VA detachment in Hobart since 1934, Long was eager to continue as a VA in London. When war was declared in Europe only a few months after she had arrived, Long’s voluntary work became more important to her. But it also brought an end to her chance to holiday in Europe as she had planned. As the situation worsened and wartime restrictions in London began to take effect, Long said to herself, ‘What am I doing here? I might as well get home.’

At the conclusion of the war, Major General Roy Burston, the Army Director General of Medical Services and Chair of the national VAD Council, wrote, ‘The past seven years have brought about a complete change in our attitude towards the employment of women in the armed forces.’ Throughout the war Burston supported the employment and development of VAs and then the AAMWS in the military. Their indispensability had been recognised. Yet, with the end of the war, AAMWS were discharged and Burston’s suggestion to maintain a cohort of women ready to serve in the event of a future war was, as he wrote: ‘…that the [civilian] VADs provide an organisation under which this training could be most effectively carried out in peace time. In addition, it is felt that there would be many advantages in maintaining the [civilian] VADs with their tradition of service which has been built up over the past 30 years or more.’ The war had provided an environment for women to expand their job opportunities, and it gave servicewomen space in the military to demonstrate the value not only of historically female dominated duties but of women’s labour generally. But the end of the war effectively erased this recognition.

Honouring her strong character and sense of service, Alice Appleford was awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal in 1949. Administered by the International Committee of the Red Cross as the highest award for a member of the nursing profession internationally, part of Appleford’s citation reads: ‘No one who came in contact with Major Appleford could fail to recognise her as a leader of women. Her sense of duty, her sterling solidarity of character, her humanity, sincerity, and kindliness of heart set for others a very high example.’ Before her marriage to Sydney Appleford, Alice had achieved a distinguished career as a nurse. Known then as Alice Ross-King, she had trained at Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital and in November 1914 embarked for Egypt to serve with the AANS. Awarded both the Royal Red Cross and the Military Medal, Sister Ross King became one of Australia’s most highly decorated women of the First World War. The Florence Nightingale Medal in 1949 added to her deserved accolades, but this medal was awarded for her contribution during a different war and to a different service. Although a trained nurse with a dedicated career to the profession, it was Alice Appleford’s interest in training and organising VADs, those not technically part of the nursing profession, during the Second World War that saw her receive the Nightingale Medal.

Kathleen Best was a nurse to her core. Completing her training at the Western Suburbs Hospital in Sydney in 1932, Best went onto train in midwifery before holding leadership positions at several Sydney hospitals. In May 1940, she began her military career, joining the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) as Matron of the 2/5th Australian General Hospital (AGH). Breaking ground as the youngest matron of the AANS, Best soon demonstrated her strength of leadership and character. By 1942, she had seen service in the Middle East, had led her nurses of the 2/5th AGH through the evacuation from Greece, and had been awarded the Royal Red Cross for her courage and efficiency. Best’s service abroad with the Second Australian Imperial Force (AIF) early in the Second World War made her well versed in military organisation. Showing her understanding of the effective operation of the military medical service, in January 1943 she stated, ‘Every position in a medical unit is important for ultimate efficiency ... and every girl in this service is helping to save lives’. In this statement Best was not referring to the nurses of the AANS; the ‘life-saving’ work Best was referring to was that being undertaken by the Australian Army Medical Women’s Service (AAMWS).

The wartime priorities for Australia shifted during the summer of 1941–42 as tensions in the Pacific increased, with Japan and the United States entering and quickly mobilising for war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. With the sinking of the HMAS Sydney off the West Australian coast in November 1941, Australia’s concern for the Indo-Pacific was already mounting. When Singapore then fell to the Japanese on 15 February 1942, and with it 18 000 Australian troops captured, Australia felt the situation worsening. With the first bombing of Darwin in February 1942, soon after the fall of Singapore, war had reached the nation’s shores, and the threat of invasion became immediate. Australia then withdrew its troops from the Middle East, where the majority had been serving, and the defence of its own territory dominated the nation’s consciousness. This sparked a change in attitude for Australia which caused a rapid growth in service enlistments, including with both the civilian and Army VAD organisations.

On 14 June 1943 the full strength of 84 civilian VAs were withdrawn from service at the Sydney Hospital. The Sun described their removal as owing to the ‘disagreeable attitude’ and protest arising from the trained nursing staff. Deputy Controller of the New South Wales civilian VAD, Dorothy Wilby, demanded that the voluntary service of these women ‘should be recognised by civilian nurses’, and threatened that if civil hospitals did not want the help of the VAs they would easily find work elsewhere. These women did not return to their voluntary duties as orderlies and hospital assistants for four days.

The AAMWS training school in Yeronga, Queensland, was established in November 1942. Set on a five-acre property, the location for the school was the former home of a Brisbane doctor. With an intake of just 27 students, the school’s first course was used as a trial to familiarise women with Army organisation. The AAMWS had only recently been established as a military service and so the newly enlisted women were drilled, taught to salute, and lectured on Army organisation and operations. Regarded as a successful exercise, the course would become known as ‘rookies’ and was continued in Queensland and implemented throughout the other states. Before the school was moved to Enoggera in August 1943, 642 AAMWS passed through Yeronga undertaking one of the eight three-week so-called rookies’ courses. A Toowoomba school teacher before the war, AAMWS officer, Lieutenant Florence Fuller established the Yeronga school as its first chief instructor. ‘Our ambition is to make recruits into good members of the AAMWS’, declared Fuller. Supported by other training staff, including AANS nurse, Patricia Chomley, Fuller explained that their objective was to train AAMWS so that, ‘when they get to their units, they know how to pull their weight’.

Jessie Laurie commenced her affiliation with nursing in 1939, joining the Dugan VA Detachment in Adelaide. Eager to volunteer for the Army when the opportunity came, Laurie was one of just 24 South Australian women to serve in the Middle East as a VA during the war. A clerk in her civilian life, Laurie was first allocated to general duties in the Middle East with the 2/1st AGH and then the 2/6th (shown in Figure 7.1). While with the 2/6th AGH, Laurie was assigned to the service of Major George Halliday. An ear, nose, and throat (ENT) specialist, Halliday ran a clinic for troops in the area and Laurie was selected to work as his assistant. After the Australian forces were withdrawn from the Middle East in 1942 and redirected to the Pacific Campaign, Laurie, now a Private in the AAMWS, joined Halliday as his assistant and helped staff his small mobile hearing clinic in Far North Queensland for troops camped on the Atherton Tableland.

It was a common assumption during the war that VAs and AAMWS servicewomen wanted to be nurses, and it was this desire that motivated them to join this service rather than take up one of the other available wartime opportunities. As Sheila Sibley confessed in 1943, before she began her work as an AAMWS, she was ‘dreaming dreams’ of becoming ‘an angel of mercy, the wounded man’s guide … the Rose of No-Man’s Land’. Sibley imagined that she would ‘float down the wards in my nifty blue uniform, and tender sighs would float right after this war’s Florence Nightingale’. Both Hitchcock and Sibley suggest there was some truth in the assumption that VAs and then AAMWS saw themselves as akin to, or aspired to be, nurses. Like Hitchcock, Sibley’s references show a clear association with the nurse in her understanding of the VAD and AAMWS. But Sibley admits that once she joined her first military hospital, she learnt the reality of the AAMWS’ work and conceded, ‘better leave that noble figure in my imagination.’

Writing encouragingly with the aim of providing constructive feedback in 1979 Mary Critch asked of Enid Herring, ‘Is ‘They wanted to be Nightingales’ a title for the finished book?’. Both were former members of the AAMWS working on their own separate compilations of the VAD/AAMWS in the Second World War. Critch, however, was alarmed by Herring’s choice of a title, and put the question to Herring, asking: ‘Is it not rather embarrassing to the hundreds of AAMW [sic.] who worked as General Duty and Mess Orderlies, as clerks, cooks etc and never saw the inside of a ward?’ Referencing Florence Nightingale, the woman noted for her humanitarian efforts during the Crimean War and cited by some as shaping modern nursing, Herring chose to perpetuate the stereotype of VAs and AAMWS. The First World War myth that all VAs either aspired to be nurses, or already saw themselves as nurses, was a common perception that tainted the VAD and AAMWS in the Second World War. While writing her own account of the VAD/AAMWS, Herring could have chosen to debunk this myth. However, she claimed its truth.

The Australian Army’s commitment to the war in South Vietnam unfolded gradually over several years. It commenced with the deployment of the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV) in 1962, followed by the arrival of a small Australian force headquarters in Saigon and the 1 RAR battle group in 1965, and completed with the establishment of the 1st Australian Task Force (1ATF) in 1966. The task force initially consisted of two infantry battalions with supporting arms and services, deployed to Nui Dat in Phuoc Tuy province under the operational control of the US II Field Force Vietnam (IIFFV), and a logistic element at the nearby port of Vung Tau. As 1ATF operated separately from the established Australian Army divisional structure, it received additional intelligence resources that would not usually form part of a task force, including a detachment of the Divisional Intelligence Unit and a small signals intelligence capability. In addition, the headquarters of 1ATF had assigned a senior intelligence officer of major rank, a captain intelligence officer, and a small battle intelligence, or order of battle staff.

Journalist and historian Mark Dapin argues that ‘every stage of Australia’s Vietnam War has been misremembered and obscured by myth'. This is not unusual. Much of Australia’s military history is coloured by storytelling and the perpetuation of legends. Several myths, legends and falsehoods have also grown around the conduct of operations of the Australian Army’s intelligence personnel during the war in South Vietnam. These range from simple fabrications and ‘storytelling’ to an attempt to deflect criticism from those responsible. One of these relates to a particular allegation of torture and the mistreatment of a prisoner by Australians during the Vietnam War.

When hostilities in the Second World War ended on 15 August 1945, the Australian Army became responsible for an area extending from Nauru and Kiribati in the east, through to Sulawesi and Borneo to the west, and including the Solomon Islands, Timor, New Ireland, New Britain and New Guinea. Army Intelligence Corps members supported each army formation's headquarters through detachments of the Allied Translator and Interpreter Service, Field Security Sections, Air Liaison Sections and Army Air Photographic Interpretation Units. Each army headquarters and infantry battalion were also supported by its intelligence sections, often commanded by Australian Intelligence Corps officers, with other ranks from one of the arms. In addition, Intelligence Corps personnel continued to operate several specialist intelligence units that supported the army even while reducing in strength.

At the end of January 1968, the VC and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) launched their Tet Offensive, a series of coordinated attacks on more than one hundred towns and outposts in South Vietnam. These attacks aimed to foment rebellion among the South Vietnamese population so that they would revolt against the corrupt South Vietnamese regime and break the United States’ resolve before peace talks. In response to this offensive, the US and South Vietnamese forces commenced a massive operation, Toan Thang (Complete Victory), which aimed to destroy the remaining enemy involved in the Tet Offensive and prevent fresh enemy forces from moving towards the capital, Saigon. In these objectives neither side obtained complete success. In April 1ATF became part of this operation with its infantry battalions conducting ‘reconnaissance-in-force’ operations to block enemy infiltration routes. In May, the task force changed its concept of operations by deploying several units outside Phuoc Tuy province into Area of Operations (AO) Surfers, which had been sub-divided into battalion areas of operation Manly, Newport and Bondi. Artillery located at Fire Support Bases Coral and Balmoral would support these tactical areas.

The action at the Long Tan plantation on 18 August 1966, about six kilometres east of the Australian base at Nui Dat, was the Australian Army’s most significant and costliest single-day battle during the Vietnam War. Eighteen Australians died in action, and 24 were wounded. Over the years, several myths and accusations have emerged about the battle. This includes the role of some senior officers, the number of enemies that faced the Australians and the number killed, and even the timings of the battle. Some of these myths were reinforced, and new ones were created through the Danger Close feature film. Among the myths and accusations are claims of an ‘intelligence failure’ and post-war statements by the task force commander, Brigadier Oliver Jackson, that he did not have good intelligence. From an intelligence perspective, the various claims related to how a large enemy force could have approached within a few kilometres of the 1ATF base at Nui Dat without the task force’s intelligence detecting it.

After the Second World War, the Australian Army changed from one mainly comprising part-time citizen soldiers to a new generation of Royal Military College-trained officers and professional soldiers, and it witnessed the reraising of the Australian Intelligence Corps. As such, it became part of the army’s first combat deployment of the new Australian Regular Army and its transition from jungle warfare to occupation duties in Japan, to conventional action in Korea (1950–53), and then back to jungle warfare and counterinsurgency operations with the Malayan Emergency, Konfrontasi with Indonesia and the Vietnam War. The Cold War was also dominated by Australian Army operations in a combined arms and joint environment, operating as part of a multinational force and often within a multinational command organisation.

There can be little doubt, and it is arguably conventional wisdom, that the role of intelligence in the Malayan Emergency was critical to the success of the British counterinsurgency campaign against the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Indeed, according to the author and unaccredited ‘official historian’ for the Emergency, Anthony Short, ‘intelligence was the key that locked counterinsurgency in place’. This view is endorsed by Lieutenant-General Harold Briggs, the Director of Operations (1950–51). He emphasised the importance of intelligence in his plan for the counterinsurgency in Malaya, known as the Briggs Plan. Briggs’s replacement was General Sir Gerald Templer, a former British Army Director of Military Intelligence (1946–48). Templer was well versed in intelligence processes and understood that an integrated and efficient intelligence system was ‘undoubtedly one of the greatest battle-winning factors in counterinsurgency warfare’. More recent authors argued that the Emergency had a far-reaching influence on the development of military intelligence. Historian Rory Cormac, for example, concluded that the Malayan experience marked the beginning of the need for coordinated intelligence assessment by integrating all intelligence resources, civil and military, and ensuring all sources were exploited.

On 18 August 1971, the Australian Prime Minister, William McMahon, announced that Australian forces would commence a phased withdrawal from Vietnam. In effect, this phased withdrawal had already started. When 8 RAR completed its tour in October 1970, the Australian Government decided not to replace it. By then, Phuoc Tuy province was quiet, and the enemy was close to being defeated. The two VC battalions that had operated in Phuoc Tuy, D440 and D445 Provincial Mobile Battalions, were significantly understrength and had either left the province or become inactive; highway 15, the main supply route through Phuoc Tuy from Saigon to Vung Tau, was open to unescorted traffic; the people increasingly separated from the VC; and both VC and NVA were suffering from low morale and severe food shortages, and had difficulty recruiting from within the province. The task force’s intelligence teams reinforced this picture through analysis of captured enemy documents and the interrogation of prisoners, which ‘told of shortages of men, key cadre, food, medical supplies, ammunition and weapons’.

The Korean War has been called the quiet war fought by a silent generation. Perhaps, more correctly, it should be described as the most remembered ‘forgotten’ war in history, with Google listing about 18,600,000 results. Indeed, aspects of the conflict have been forgotten. Even 70 years on, the literature is quiet on intelligence, with few historians or authors even discussing intelligence's role. Battlefield intelligence has been almost entirely neglected, except for the occasional mention in some American and British regimental histories. As Australia played a minor role in the Korean War, it is unsurprising that the part played by the Australian Army’s battlefield intelligence has hardly been mentioned.