TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL HISTORY RECORDING

Accession number S00941

Title (225/NX73) Finlay, Charles Hector (Major General)

Interviewer Connell, Daniel

Place made Deakin, ACT

Date made 10 May 1990

Description Charles Hector Finlay as a major general, including service as a lieutenant colonel with the 2/24th Battalion, interviewed by Daniel Connell for The Keith Murdoch Sound Archive of Australia in the War of 1939-45.

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 2 of 90

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CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 3 of 90

Identification: This is Side 1, Tape 1, of the interview with Major-General Charles Hector Finlay. The date is the 10th of May 1990 and I am Daniel Connell, the interviewer.

If we could start out by discussing your family background, Major-General?

Well, really the situation is that my grandfather came out here with his first three children - wife and first three children of course - and settled in the Grafton district in northern New South Wales, and in fact was one of the pioneers of that district; took a very large part in activities there. He was, had a law degree and was very prominent in all sorts of civic affairs, as well as sort of running his own property and everything.

Where was the property?

Just out at Southgate, south of Grafton, and he got himself involved in a sugar mill (laughing) at one stage and so on, but anyway my father was born in Grafton in 1866 and grew up there and then the family dispersed - as rural families do these days - and came down to the city. My father worked here in Sydney - he was a building contractor - and I was born in 1910, just between Chatswood and Roseville. A perfectly normal boyhood in Sydney.

Particularly large family?

Oh well, I was one of five children.

Eldest? Youngest?

I was the second youngest. In those days - 1910 - the time of the first world war, Chatswood was virtually up in the bush, north of Sydney. I played a lot of my boyhood roaming the bush and so on, swimming over in Middle Harbour, near where the Roseville Bridge now is and, well, that's about all there is to it. We used to take excursions over to the beaches at Collaroy and Narrabeen, and I thought Sydney was probably the ideal place for anybody to have their boyhood.

Where did you go to school?

Chatswood and North Sydney High. Ah, I went to North Sydney High in 1923 and then I went on ...

Were you a good student?

Ah, about the only prize I won at North Sydney was the language prize. (Laughing) I got the highest pass in the state in the Intermediate in 1925 I think it was, in French, and went on to Duntroon in 1928 and won the language prize there.

Just before we go on to Duntroon, the first world war .... Had any of your close relatives been involved?

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 4 of 90

Oh yes. I had a lot of cousins and uncles that went to the first world war. Ah, one of them they used to call `Lighthorse,' no, what did they call him? `Hellfire Jack'. He was Gilbert Finlay from the west. He was a cousin of mine. He was a light horseman there and then the cousin, Beverley, and there were quite a lot of them. They came back. They were sort of of my generation but they were older, because I was only about eight, or seven or eight, then. But they visited us after they came back on leave or at the end of the war.

What sort of attitudes were there to the war and to the army, within your immediate family?

I find it difficult to remember at age eight, you know. Everybody thought the Germans were quite frightful and had to be defeated and that it, it wasn't quite a holy war, but it was a necessary war. There was no opposition to it in my family. Those that could go all went.

(5.00) What I guess I'm getting at, you might say that some families have got a distinct military tradition. Other families, even though they've perhaps been involved in enlisting, have a more civilian style of ....

We had no military tradition really, to my knowledge. Ah, none of my uncles were regular soldiers or had served in South African war or anything like that. But, there was no military tradition. They had purely civilian tradition. Ah, and what made me enter the army was - or want to enter the army, perhaps I should put it that way - was that both my brothers, the elder brothers, were commissioned in the CMF - you know, the military as it was - and the new adjutant for the 18th Battalion in Sydney - in Willoughby, that's where it was - had just come back from India and he came to our place and was talking with both my brothers. I was doing my homework I think, and I heard this new adjutant talking about life in India, because he'd just come back. And I'd been reading, you know, what the devil's the name ... that author, the famous author, Indian, wrote about India thing ...

Kipling?

Kipling. I'd been reading Kipling and so on, and I had my ear cocked to what was being said in the next room, and these stories about India really interested me and I said, `That's for me', you see, and applied for Duntroon the next year. And I got in in 1928 and ....

That must have been very early in the history of Duntroon, was it?

Oh no, Duntroon was started in 1911. I'm talking about 1928. Ah ....

I know. I guess I was assuming that because Parliament didn't really move to Canberra until '27, Duntroon - the activities of training officers would have taken place earlier than that.

Oh well it was all part of the Kitchener plan, you see. Duntroon was .... Although Legge and others put up a proposal for a military college, the government didn't do anything about it until Kitchener came out and gave some firm recommendations on the subject, at a stage when the early indications were that there would be a war in Europe, you see. A lot of people don't realise how far ahead that war was foreseen. Duntroon was started then, but I was in the seventeenth class at Duntroon - one per year. CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 5 of 90

It must have been one of the most established parts of Canberra in that case, if it had been going for that period of time?

Well it was Canberra, until somebody decided after Duntroon had been functioning, somebody decided that it was the site for the Capital Territory.

I see, right.

Oh no, no. You read the history of Canberra, you'll find that that is so. Bridges selected Duntroon with the object of having it away from the distractions and temptations of a big city. And that's why he picked it half-way between - well not half-way - between Sydney and Melbourne, and then the government said, `Well, it's going to have a city alongside it, so away we go'.

Duntroon was well established then. It had it vicissitudes after the first world war, when they wanted to close it down. They said the war to end all wars had happened, so we didn't need a military college. But fortunately they kept it going.

What was there when you got there? It was, you know, thinking of what's there now, very established ....

Oh it was quite well .... It had been established eighteen years by the time I got there - or seventeen years. But the cadets' quarters were fibro-cement, big long fibro-cement huts, individual room for a cadet and so on. And of course the classrooms were more or less the same, because Bridges wanted to build the RMC where the present ADFA is - Australian Defence Force Academy - and he sighted the temporary college - temporary for eighteen, no, temporary for thirty .... I've forgotten how many years, but the permanent buildings weren't built until '36-'37, so it's twenty-five years before he got the permanent buildings and not where he wanted them. That's why the RMC between 1911 and 19.... Well, it went to Sydney in '31 - but it was working under temporary conditions for over twenty years before they got some permanent buildings, and then not where they, where Bridges wanted them originally.

How many cadets were there then?

When I entered the college, there were seventy-seven cadets at the college.

In how many years, three or four years?

Four in those days. But then, of course, in 1929 when the Depression came upon us, the services were amongst the first to be cut, and of course the RMC was moved to Sydney under very restricted conditions, and very low strength. Of course Jervis Bay suffered the same fate and was moved down to Flinders Naval Base. That was in 1930.

I did my last year at Duntroon in Sydney, and I must say we hated it. We didn't have the facilities or anything there, because in those days we used to do a lot of horse training, cavalry and riding, and that was our principal form of recreation on weekends. Take a horse out from the stables, take a haversack lunch, and ride down to the Cotter or over to Pine Island or CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 6 of 90 somewhere like that and ride back. You could virtually walk from the Powerhouse Ford - 1928 when I came here, you could virtually go from the Powerhouse ford straight up Red Hill without any obstruction, no houses built or anything like that. There were a lot being built all round the place, but there were a lot of vacant areas in Canberra in those days.

The curriculum. Could we talk in some detail about the curriculum, because it ...

I'll come back to that later too. Ah, well the curriculum in my day was such that it equated - started at sub-matriculation - but equated to about, to a partially tertiary course. For instance, those cadets who perhaps could go on to the university, would be given credits at the Sydney and Melbourne universities to equate with a second year, part two studies, go to university. The engineer cadets used to go straight into third year Engineering at Sydney University and, well, you could do the same in the science course or .... That's provided your pass at Duntroon was adequate. So that really it was a partially tertiary course. And of course, the intermingling of military and academic training throughout the whole year had disadvantages which came out later, and which I'll discuss when I'm back, when I'm commandant. (Laughing).

At that particular time, what was the philosophy behind, say, the military side of the training? What basically were the people in charge of Duntroon hoping to achieve with the cadets?

Well the idea was that you trained a young officer, trained a graduate, to be capable of fulfilling the duties and commands and responsibilities of a subaltern - a platoon commander in an infantry battalion or cavalry troop or artillery battery or what, you see. And the big thing about it, which was quite wonderful from the military point of view, as opposed to what goes on at Sandhurst or anywhere else, any other military college, we were trained in all arms.

We had to train in cavalry, infantry, artillery, do basic signal training, basic engineer training. We didn't bother with the army service corps or any others - the non-fighting arms, or corps - but that really was a great help because then you had infantry officers, cavalry officers and artillery officers who all knew a little bit of each others, or quite a bit or each other's duties and responsibilities. So that helped quite in a strong way. Ah, no other military academy or military college to my knowledge, at that stage, was doing that.

In terms of discipline, was it a place where, ah, how strict was the discipline? Was it a place where there was discussion encouraged, or a place where people were encouraged to essentially accept what they were told? Artificial dichotomies, I know.

No, well the point of it was that discipline was very strict indeed. On the basis that nobody knows the power of discipline, unless they've been submitted to it themselves, and I stressed that quite a lot later on in life. There was plenty of freedom for discussion on, you know, in lecture periods, but outside the lecture periods there was purely drill and military training. Ah, you did as you were told, period.

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 7 of 90

(15.00) So I mean, you'd take very detailed orders on things like that, but on the other hand, what? You could disagree about the cause of the first world war in the history class?

Oh yes. Well, the military history was quite a major subject, and all the problems and reasons for decisions were aired and argued about, and you know, why Kutuzov lost to Napoleon and all that sort of thing. And of course in those days, military aviation was very elementary so that that aspect of army/air co-operation didn't get very much airing, back in the late twenties. It gets a lot of airing now, you see, of course. But ...

What about naval?

Very little. About the only combined operations that anybody did any study on in there was at Gallipoli, and that was generally agreed to be, you know, (laughing) a 'b'-awful mess, and not to be followed. I mean, except the lessons to be learned from it. But of course, quite inadequate planning, quite inadequate equipment and so on, and being rowed ashore, towed ashore and then rowed the last little bit of distance and, compared with what we see in amphibious operations now, of course. But there was no, virtually no co-operation with the navy except when they came up and played with us cricket and football, or we went down there. But ....

There's quite a lot made of the anti-authoritarian traditions in the Australian Army in the sense, I'm thinking of the first world war, the legend of the Digger. I notice in one of the cuttings that I was reading in preparation for the interview, there's a reference, for example, to you seeing a Digger ask Churchill for a cigar and getting it. Now, that's a tradition that Australians value very highly, and I'm just wondering how it comes through, how it affected officers?

Well, you know, discipline is a funny thing, and it has different connotations for different people. The reason, I think, for the name the `Australian Digger', has and had in the first world war, and has in the second world war and elsewhere, is that his, his discipline still allows him to think and not do things automatically. The battle discipline in the second AIF in the Middle East, was fantastic. That's why the Australians at El Alamein and elsewhere, Tel el Eisa, always got their objectives, whereas the, some of the British and the South African troops didn't, because their battle discipline was inadequate. Now that, well by that I mean that the absolute private soldier, even in a section, understood what was required of him and what his duty was, and didn't have to wait for the section commander or platoon commander to order him to do something else, you see. He'd go and do it himself automatically. Tons of occasions I've seen that happen.

Is that because things were being explained to him, or because he's thinking for himself?

Because he's thinking for himself. By and large, he didn't have the sort of discipline - which is an entirely different thing hammered into him on the parade ground - the way, for instance, the Brits do. Ah, the Australian, well in both wars we didn't have time to do that sort of training, even if it was thought to be necessary. And the result was we had free thinking enlistees - volunteer enlistees - who thought the war was their problem and treated it as their CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 8 of 90 problem, even though they sort of, naturally, obeyed the orders - the broad orders - but the individual actions on a battlefield by a private soldier can be done at the free thought of the private soldier, if he's got the right attitude to the war. The average Australian in the first and second world war certainly had that right attitude.

Is that something that was discussed in officer training, this business of encouraging the right combination of independence and discipline?

Well, it's part of the ...

I'm thinking of the twenties, not now.

(20.00) It's, oh, it wasn't so firmly expressed or coherently thought out in those days, but nowadays and certainly in the second world war, it was quite normal for the officer to explain absolutely fully to his troops under his command before an attack what was required of them and what the object was, so that the individual troop can commit an act that will help the achievement of that objective, whereas if he doesn't know what he's doing and hasn't been communicated thoroughly what the objects and everything, he doesn't know how to help, doesn't know how to help his platoon commander. He wouldn't know what to do if his platoon commander or second platoon commander was killed, unless he knows what the full object of the action is. That's a very simple way of putting it, but that is where the digger was better than a lot of other soldiers.

At Duntroon, what was the relationship between, say, senior cadets and junior cadets?

(Laughing). Well, the junior cadets were kept in a suitable state of humility and, you know, respect for their seniors. At times it got out of hand, but never very seriously, although the thing is there's been a lot of ruckus over, perhaps the last what, about fifteen years ago there was a lot of strife over it. It depends entirely on the senior cadets and once, if they're properly briefed and threatened with instant death if they let things get out of hand, they perform, you see, and that sort of thing is kept under control. Well, sometimes it gets out of control, but I'll discuss that when I'm talking about the commandant.

Right, but just talking about your own experiences, can you remember how back in '28 ...

Oh well, we had silly little tasks, you know. I can remember being told to go down to the canteen and pick up the block shaving paper. Of course, I didn't realise that there was such a thing, but anyway I obeyed and went down to the canteen and asked for the A-block shaving paper, and the canteen manager bent down and he picked up a huge roll of wrapping paper like that, and gave it to me. And I thought, `Christ, I know I've been taken for a ride here, (laughing) but what can I do?'. So I took it back up to the block and showed it to one of my seniors and said, `Here's the block'. He said, `Too coarse, take it back'. Well, that's the sort of silly task we used to be set, and the other one was, you know, `Go down to the riding master's office and ask for the key to the half-passage'. Well, if you know anything about riding horses, you know that a half-passage is a gait - G-A-I-T - a gait of a horse. You make it walk half-sideways and half-forwards. And of course, you'd go down and ask (laughing) the riding master for the key to the half-passage and he'd blow you out of his office with bad language. CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 9 of 90

And you'd go back and say (laughing) that the riding master wouldn't give it to you. And of course, everybody kept their face straight, but that's the silly ...

Those are things that, very first few days at Duntroon, when you couldn't possibly know anything. You are if you're told to do that, and then the other thing was every cadet was supposed to take some athletic activity after four o'clock in the afternoon. You know, either practising hockey, cricket or what. And, oh running, you know, doing some athletics training. And one of the tasks that used to be set was to run up Mount Ainslie and carve your name on the trig point there, the triangular wooden trig point, you see. Well, of course, this poor silly cadet, young fellow just (inaudible), he would run up (laughing) to Ainslie, Mount Ainslie, carve his name on the trig point, and if he'd only thought for a few moments, he'd realise that the senior cadet who'd sent him up there to do it wasn't going to go and do the same chore himself to see whether he'd done it, so he could have easily come back and said, `oh yes, you'd done it', you see. Those were the sort of silly things we used to have set us to do, and then of course, the other trick they had, you see, was to, when a cadet got his first extra drill. That meant half an hour extra on the parade with a full rifle pack and everything. And ...

That was a normal thing or a punishment?

(25.00) That was a punishment. That's an official punishment. A senior cadet would say, `Well I'll help. I'll pack your pack for you.' So, and of course, the average infantryman's pack should not exceed fifty-two pounds on his back, you see, and this is what .... You should have your spare clothing and towels and spare this, that and the other thing in it, and it's the sort of pack you carry in battle. Well the senior cadet would then put, you know, shell cases, all sorts of heavy equipment. (Laughing). The poor cadet would arrive, fourth class man, would arrive on the defaulter's parade with this pack weighing about a hundred pounds, you see. And then, of course, he'd be ordered to march and `Left, right, left, right. Smarten the pace. Left, right, left, right, left', and of course he's getting round with about a hundred pound pack on his back. But there was no really harmful things done, that apparently were occurring about fifteen years ago.

Was it a place where you felt relaxed, part of a warm social group and it was a welcoming group? Or was it a place that perhaps yourself, you felt a bit out of it, you felt a bit lonely?

Oh you certainly felt lonely, except within your own class, in your first year. See, once the first year is over, then you're sort of welcomed and patted on the back and you're a member of the corps of staff cadets, or you know, a fully recognised one.

First year is definitely probationary?

Well, first year .... Well mind you, I don't suppose it varied very much for some of the worst aspects of fresher training at university. A lot of people don't realise the degree to which some fresher training at universities extend to. That's something I pointed out to a few people when I was commandant, that back in, certainly in the twenties and thirties, when I was talking about my fourth-class training, there were some very dangerous practices got up to in fresher training in universities. But everybody conveniently forgets that when they talk about `how terrible this brutal treatment is at Duntroon'. But, anyway, fourth-class training is going CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 10 of 90 on. You, no matter how you try and stop it, they'll always .... The junior class will always, just like fags at boarding school or elsewhere, you really will never stop it properly.

So, this was after the war to end all wars. What was the feeling within the general community towards people like yourself, who were training to be part of the army? Was that regarded as an unfashionable thing to do? Was there actual hostility?

No, not a bit, no. The Australian Army was so small in those days, particularly the regular army, that the prestige of the regular army with the CMF was very high indeed. In many cases the CMF people would have, you know, would have liked to, if they'd known about Duntroon, many of them would have liked to have applied for it when they were younger, and sort of they didn't learn about it really until they were too old.

Did you wear uniforms on leave?

Only travelling to and from the college. You went in civilian clothing, of course, as soon as you got home. But, you were on leave. You don't want to wear uniform. You've been wearing it every day for the previous 348 or 330-odd days. You don't want to wear uniform any more than that.

When you went to, say, church, would you wear uniform to church or a suit - when you were on leave?

Well I would wear a suit. God, you'd be the object of great curiosity if you wore (laughing) uniform to church in those days.

Your graduation. What was that, '32?

'31.

Do you have any particular memories?

Not really. In those days you applied for the corps you wanted to enter, you see, and those who were good at maths and had got high passes in maths, physics and chemistry, they all went to, they all put in for engineering. Well, I passed reasonably in maths, physics and chemistry, but I wanted to be light horse.

END TAPE 1, SIDE A.

BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE B.

Identification: this is side two, tape one, Major-General Finlay.

Well you see, when you put in for whatever corps you want to do, you, of course, naturally you had to have the appropriate passes, qualifications and adaptability for that corps. I put in my first choice cavalry, because I was brought up with horses and I loved horses, and my second choice signals. I don't know, I was quite good at signals, signalling. Actually, I don't CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 11 of 90 know whether my own capacity for languages has helped me learn and retain Morse code, but I thought my second choice would be signals, but I got my first choice - cavalry - that's what I wanted.

I mean, even in the first world war, the horse didn't play as big a role as, well, a lot of cavalry people would have hoped, and tanks were the new form in 1918 that was beginning to emerge. Was that the form of cavalry that you were also ...?

Well, you will recall, of course, that tanks were not invented until later in the war and the role of the cavalry in European warfare, of course, as initially conceived, was that they would be, you know, great mobility, get round the rear of the enemy and shoot up their line of communications and all that. But that was brought to a sticky halt by the extension of the trench warfare from border to sea, you see. And so that the cavalry could not be used the way they were initially conceived, except when you got out to the Middle East and had the desert, you know, the Palestine campaign running up through Syria where, if you read Chauvel of the Light Horse, you will get an amazing concept of the extent to which mobile forces can be used and are almost, you know, conclusive where you can't close your flank off. But of course, the introduction of the modern tank has ruined, you know, stopped that, except the famous charge at Beersheba was probably the last .... It wasn't the last charge because I'll tell you about one in the second world war. But that one I'll deal with later on in the Middle East.

But in the early thirties, you still saw a significant role for the horse in future warfare?

Oh yes, yes, as long as your flank wasn't closed off the way it was in the trench warfare in France, and ...

Did you think that tanks would be, well perhaps not tanks, but armoured vehicles, would be replacing the horse?

Oh yes, everybody did. Everybody recognised that, that the horse could not be used in the presence of tanks. You see the whole thing was utterly vulnerable. But mind you, tanks take quite a long time to build and they didn't have the massive production lines in the thirties that they had, were brought about by the world war, of course, except that Germany went ahead and did a massive production of tanks before the war so that she had all the tanks in the world and nobody else had any worth speaking about. But there was still a role for the cavalry, particularly areas like the north-west frontier.

(5.00) I was just thinking that. Was it the ... going back to the original reasons that you joined Duntroon - those romantic myths of India - were they part of your thinking in going into the cavalry?

No. What dictated my entry into cavalry was that I liked horses, period, and I liked riding. And, mind you, the end point of that was that service in Australia was - for the cavalry - was always up country, and you had a freedom and wide long distances, you see. A regiment would be raised - for instance the 13th Light Horse Regiment was raised from Berwick right through to Orbost - that was about 250 - 300 miles or more. It must be more, yes. You were travelling and meeting people and living an open air life which one doesn't in the city. CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 12 of 90

Of course there were competitions, mounted competitions, which were a lot of fun, and you used to train, you would train .... Each individual troop used to train to take part in a competition that was Australia-wide. The Forster Cup, for instance - presented by Lord Forster, the former Governor-General - and each troop within a regiment would have to compete within its regiment until the regiment arrived at their champion troop. It involved coming into action, you know, firing fifteen shots at targets, riding over hurdles with pack horses and machine-guns and everything like that, and generally a manoeuvre exercise. Once the regimental champion troop was selected, then that troop competed against the regimental champion of all the other regiments in Victoria, for instance. You know, the same type of manoeuvre in action exercise, and then compete against .... Then the one from the state would compete against the champion from the other states until you arrived at the champion troop in Australia. And that, actually, was one of the best forms of training for cavalry you could possibly get.

I was just thinking, it sounds like if you were thinking of exercises with a peace time army, a way of directing their energies and focussing them to a target, so it's not just endless manoeuvres for no particular purpose, it seems a very good way of doing it.

Well it used to test activity in, you know, in moving into an attack, coming into action, bringing their guns and everything and the riflemen into action, getting the lead horses away, taking on the targets and, of course, the scores. The number of bull's eyes as against outers that the rifle fire and the machine-gun fire got on the score on the rifle range when they came into action, that all counted and so they had to be good shots, they had to be able to manoeuvre their troops and sections and generally carry out the duties required of them in a mobile manoeuvre, or mobile action. And it was a very good exercise, a very good competition that. That's why, generally speaking, I always claim that the light horse were better trained than the infantry at their own particular activity.

You graduated in '31, what ... late '31?

December '31.

And how soon after that were you appointed to be an ADC to the Governor- General?

Oh, about eighteen months. Oh, wait a tick - end of '32 - it was only about a year.

So during that year you spent your time, what, on general ...?

No, no. I was with the 1/21st Light Horse as the acting adjutant quartermaster because the adjutant quartermaster, Morgan was in fact, you know, detached to be the instructor in cavalry and equitation at Duntroon, which was in Sydney in those days - that's 1932 - and so I had to do the same job.

I had to do the adjutant and quartermaster's job but of course I was only posted as the acting adjutant quartermaster, so that was .... And their headquarters were in Sydney and they had troops at Bulli, Kangaroo Valley, Nowra, Milton and up at Hornsby, Berowra, Parramatta and CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 13 of 90

Camden. Ted Onslow was the commander of the Camden troop. We had, oh well, quite a good regiment. CO was the manager of NRMA (laughing) ... but that was my first appointment, out at Duntroon.

(10.00) How were you finding the military life? You hadn't had any second thoughts or a feeling that, you know, `Maybe I should have been a lawyer' or anything like that?

Well look, I was asked this question after the war by another graduate at Duntroon who got out and he asked me hadn't I thought of getting out. I said, `Look' - this is when I was DMI of course - I said, `Look. I've never had time to lose interest or be bored. I've always had too much to do and every job I've had has been an interesting job. I've never contemplated getting out. I chose the life of a soldier and I'm enjoying (laughing) it and I've no intention of getting out of the army.' So, but that's the answer I give to your question. Life was far too interesting, I had far too much to do and I was interested in my job.

When the prospect of going to the Governor-General, was that something you applied for or was it something that came out of the blue as an order?

I'll tell you this confidentially - I wouldn't like it published - but when I, as I say, I was the acting adjutant of the 1/21st Light Horse, and I was living in the mess in barracks in Sydney. I was having a very very good life, you know. I suppose I wore a black tie, oh, four or five times a week partying and going round and, you know. Anyway, I was bidden, I was called up to the, to my senior officer's office in barracks one day. He wasn't a very pleasant person. He was very sardonic and in many ways a nasty so and so really. Anyway the phone rang and I said, `1/21st Light Horse, Finlay speaking'. `Come and see me'. I didn't have to ask who was speaking, I knew bloody well who was speaking. It was O.V. Hoad - Ossie Hoad, the son of a former chief of general staff. Anyway, I thought, `God what have I done now?'. Anyway, I put my 'Sam Browne' on, took my stick and straightened my cap and went up and saw him. Knocked on his door, `Come in'. Went in, saluted, `You sent for me sir?'. `Yes Finlay'. He had the other senior officer in the division sitting on a chair alongside him, which would be unusual - almost like a court of inquiry. Oh he said, `Come in Finlay. Sit down.' I sat down. `Have a cigarette'. Was quite unusual. I thought, `Oh Jesus, this is the, this is the end'. And he said, `Army head... I have a signal from army headquarters which reports that Lieutenant N.R. Forrest, the ADC to the Governor-General, has asked to be returned to regimental duty. Army headquarters have instructed me to inquire whether you will volunteer for the job.'

Had he told you the job, what the job ...?

Oh I'm sorry. `.... has retired from .... asked to be returned to regimental duties - ADC to the Governor-General - to be, has asked to be returned to regimental duty. Army headquarters have asked me to inquire whether you will volunteer for the job'. And I thought, `Oh God', you see. He said, `Here is the signal' and gave it to me and I read it. I re-read it and tried to marshall my thoughts and I thought, you know, `I'm ... God, I'd have to buy about three or four new suits, and dinner jacket's starting to look scruffy with all the partying I've been doing in Sydney'. My tails were in fair trim so I didn't have to bother about them. And I sort of looked and I thought, tried to cover all the possibilities. And he said, `Well?' I said, `No sir'. CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 14 of 90

`Why not?' `I don't think I'm fitted for the duties, sir'. `Army headquarters apparently think you are' - (laughing) the obvious inference, `I can't think why' you know, the obvious feeling.

Anyway, about half an hour discussion then took place in which my contribution was about `Yes sir' or a `No sir' about five minute intervals, and when it was all finished a signal was sent saying I'd volunteered for the job (laughing) and that's how I became ADC to the Governor-General. But I must say I had to go for an interview then with the Governor- General and Bracegirdle, and so Charles Spry who was in my same class at Duntroon and was in Sydney as a young adjutant of an infantry battalion, he'd been ...

(15.00) Is that Spry of later of ASIO?

ASIO.

Yeah.

Director-General, Security. Anyway, we were called up and interviewed at the Australian Club in Sydney, and I remember I was asked about my background and schooling, and you know, everything that anybody's asked in an interview. And then the Governor-General said, `And now Finlay, about sobriety. Do you drink?'. I said, `I have a drink when an occasional brother offers promotion, sir, and that sort of thing'. `Oh' he said, `I'm very glad to hear that you're sober'. Anyway, I compared notes with Charles Spry afterwards, and he said when he was asked that question he said, `I have one when I feel like one' (laughing). I got the job. Well that's it. You asked me whether I applied for it. I didn't apply for it. I had it foisted on me.

Sir Isaac Isaacs, could you describe him? Presumably this was your first meeting with him?

Oh yes. Oh well, I'd seen ...

Apart from ...

I'd seen him on a graduation parade in 1931, that's the first time I'd seen him. Well actually, of course, I regard him as the man, the highest intellect I've ever come in contact with. The sharpest and most highly honed intellect. He was quite amazing. Had an absolute grasp of almost every subject you could possibly raise with him, spoke eleven languages. I have seen him greet the Greek Archimandrite or whatever he was in those days, in modern Greek, and then talk to the Papal Nuncio in fluent Italian ...

And Latin as well of course?

Oh yes. And, but he used to say the Poles were the best linguists in the world, and he was, his father was a Polish Jew, migrated to Australia way back early in the last century. And he was quite amazing, I say unreservedly that he was the acutest intellect I've ever struck. I was starting to realise the quality of intellect then .... I didn't realise the force of it until I started to see Isaac Isaacs in action. So, that's my impression of Isaac Isaacs.

What sort of duties did you have? What were your duties as ADC? CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 15 of 90

Oh well I had quite a few secretarial duties, you see, regarding the ADC's, the Governor- General's outside appointments, the trips to, interstate trips and all that sort of thing, organising those. Then of course attending the Governor-General at any function, in case he just, whatever he needed or anything, or taking any notes for him, or carrying his notes and having them handy. But mind you, his intellect was such that when even the most complicated address, he never used notes.

Why do you think .... Well, was he the sort of person that would talk to you in a relaxed conversational way? I mean, did you get an idea of the private man?

Oh, to an extent. You've got to realise, of course, that he was about seventy .... He was about seventy-seven when I was appointed to his staff, and I was, in those days I was twenty-one, and he would talk to me on different subjects, but one thing that helped, of course, was that he was such a fluent linguist. When there weren't guests for lunch, he used to, or they used to - she was another fluent linguist, 'Her Ex' - and they used to talk French or German or Italian at the luncheon table. And of course, I in fact, I could cope because I spoke French fairly fluently myself, I could cope in French, but I started to learn German and Italian, in a very elementary way, and I've followed it up with German and Italian since, so that was interesting. And of course, he had a very good sense of humour, really quite acute sense of humour. I could go on with examples of that, but I think that's ....

(20.00) Can you remember one, just as an example?

Oh well, I remember one, a trick he played on Bracegirdle. He said it was a naval problem, you see. And he said, `This man is in a boat, a rowing boat, it's completely overcast, he can't see the sun. All he's got in the boat with him - he hasn't got a compass - but he's got a lanyard, a jack-knife on a lanyard'. And he said, `the chap, he knew there was land a day's row to the north of him' and he said, `so he stood up in the boat, twirled the lanyard round his head and released it, and away it went, plop, into the ocean. He stood up and he measured nine-0 degrees like that, and he set off and he rowed in that direction'. And he said to Bracegirdle, who was a naval captain at the time, `How did he know that was north?'. And of course Bracegirdle scratched his head, of course, trying to bring all his naval knowledge to it and had to admit defeat. And Bracegirdle said, er, the Governor-General said, `Well, didn't the jack-knife go west?', you see. `Well, nine-0 degrees from west is north'. And that, you know, of course Bracegirdle he did it as a trick, not to embarrass Bracegirdle, but I didn't pick it up either. But that's the sort of thing. He had this quite acute sense of humour and some of the stories he told are really some of the best. I've repeated them plenty of times.

He'd been appointed .... I understand the English were somewhat - oh, not the English - the King was somewhat surprised when the story that I've heard is that instead of the normal range of nominations from the Prime Minister, which would normally be a range of, you know, British nominations, he was the only one presented as the choice. What do you know about that story?

I understand, well of course, that occurred at a time when I wasn't at all interested or even thinking about selections of Governors-General, but I heard afterwards that there was quite an exchange between the King and Scullin through, of course, what is now called the Commonwealth Office - I don't know what it was called, the Colonial Office I suppose, the CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 16 of 90

Dominions Office perhaps in those days - quite an exchange over Isaac Isaacs' appointment. And I gather the King wasn't at all pleased - old George V.

Because he was Jewish as well as being Australian, wasn't he? I mean, was it a factor?

I think it was but I have no knowledge of that, of course.

That wasn't discussed ....? The reason I bring it up is I was just wondering whether that was the sort of thing that, you know, might have been discussed among the staff, or there might have been stories about it in the inner circle?

No. I have no .... I think once he was appointed, it was very carefully .... Any reference to that sort of thing, about the Jewish side of it, was very carefully avoided because nobody ever raised it thereafter, or certainly after I became involved. But ...

What did you see of the, obviously the Imperial connection, given that the Governor-General represents the King as a vital part of the job, was that something that you saw a lot of?

Well naturally he opened Parliament and did all the things that the Governor-General has to do, and with very few exceptions he was welcomed very clearly and accepted as the Governor-General. Mind you, most of the state governors at that stage were all imperial appointments - Sir Leslie Wilson in Queensland, Sir Philip Game in New South Wales, Sir Winston Dugan in Melbourne, also Sir Alexander Hore-Ruthven in South Australia, but there was no governor in Western Australia at the stage. The former Premier was acting as Lieutenant Governor - Sir James Mitchell I think his name was. But all the others were imperial appointments, and of course they had to acknowledge the seniority of the Governor- General, which they did without .... This Philip Game was all very punctualesque, and he used to meet the Governor-General, salute him and everything with all due decorum, because Philip Game's a bloke like that, of course. But so did Winston Duggan and the others. They accepted him as the Governor-General and as their superior.

Talking of Sir Philip Game, who had been involved in that ...

It occurred before I got on to the Governor-General's staff.

(25.00) But was that sort of thing discussed? To my knowledge, that's the most overt political act by a governor or a Governor-General since Federation?

Well Lang, Lang gave the governor no other choice, just the same as - what's his name? - Whitlam gave Kerr no other choice.

I'm not disputing, I'm not suggesting that he did the wrong thing, but it was a very open .... He was forced into a very open action. I'm just wondering whether that was discussed.

Oh that was an enormous amount of discussion at the time, and ah ...

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 17 of 90

But within, when you were there with the Governor-General?

Oh no. It was never discussed at any stage then. I think there was a little bit of protocol that actions by governors are not discussed in the Governor-General's residence. But at that stage I was still a very junior officer and I wouldn't have .... Well Bracegirdle wouldn't have seen fit to make comments on it to me at that stage.

You mentioned conversations at the dinner table in French and German. What sort of topics?

Oh ordinary sort of topics here in Australia, you see. They were not .... I can't remember any sort of international topics. Really, almost chit chat, just common sort of family discussions. Just the sort of thing we'd be discussing in English, but in order to maintain the practice in French and German, they would discuss it and, you know, quite often for my benefit when I was still just learning German, they would explain what they'd said, you see. So, it all was part of a learning. They were deliberately teaching me a new language but, at the same time, practising their own.

You'd been an active cavalry officer, and that had been something that had attracted you about the army. How did you find this three years, which is quite a long time?

About two-and-a-half it was. Oh yes, but really I saw parts of Australia that I would never otherwise have seen in a very short time. I mean, sort of, over to the west and it was one of the first trips, and all down through the wheat belt. You used to have to take about ten or a dozen stiff shirts there, and a cabin trunk of uniform and evening clothes, you know. white tie, tails, black dinner jacket, dark suit and bowler hat, light suit and soft hat, you see, that sort of thing. The rig for each activity would be laid down in the program, so you had to take, you know, light suit, light day suit, dark lounge suit, black tie, white tie, blue uniform, khaki uniform, breeches and boots, slacks and shoes and that sort of thing. So you ended up, you went off on a train with, you know, a cabin trunk, of steel, tin trunk of uniform and clothes and everything, because there was no way you could have your white ...

Did you have a batman?

Oh well, the .... I didn't have a batman, but a footman was allotted to me at Government House. When we went off on the train on tour, the Governor-General's valet used to look after that side of things for Bracegirdle and myself, you see. And of course, Her Ex used to take a lady's maid. As you went round all touring some of the areas round the states, you're only in one town for part of a day, so you couldn't leave your laundry behind or anything. That's why you had to take about ten stiff shirts.

How big was the group that would be travelling on a trip like that?

Well, just the Governor-General, Her Excellency, Brace-Girdle, myself and the Governor- General's valet and the lady's maid. And you had, you know, you were always in a vice-regal car. It wasn't, you didn't have to do this in ordinary (laughing) train carriages. And of course in those days, you had to transfer, because of the change of gauge, you had to transfer from the four foot eight and a half Governor-General's coach, into the state coach in Victoria, CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 18 of 90 which was six foot ... five foot three, then in, they go across to South Australia and then they have to change into the South Australian state coach on a three foot six gauge. And then back into the Trans- Continental four foot eight and a half. The thing that's really laughable ... you'd have to go away for three weeks or more ...

END TAPE 1, SIDE B.

BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A

Identification: This is tape two, side one, of the interview with Major-General Finlay.

Right. So you were there for two and a half years. I come back to the question, how did you feel about the job? I mean, was this, this is really quite a detour. I mean, you hadn't really, at the time of signing up for it, you hadn't really wanted to go, and it's quite different from what you'd previously been thinking of in the way of cavalry.

The situation is that when you're a soldier, you don't choose jobs and you don't lobby for them or anything like that. You do as you're told and go where you're sent. And having, been asked directly did I volunteer for it, I said, `No', but I was still told to go and do it. Well, that's the life of a soldier, or any serviceman. For instance, on the other foot, you can advise somebody against, advise your senior officer against an action, but once he's taken his decision and says, `Yes', then you've got to obey and carry it out loyally and fully. And there's no, it's not a question of disliking or feeling it. Mind you, inevitably, because of the strangeness and newness of it, one was quite excited and interested in, well, and the opportunity to see so many different things and, as I did. It's one of the jobs, as I said earlier, I've never had time to lose interest because, having been given the job, I found it quite interesting and in a way demanding, and therefore there's no way I wanted to get out of it after I'd been told to do it.

Why do you think you were chosen for it?

I've a nasty feeling because I said I'd have a drink on the occasion of the promotion of a brother officer, and Charles Spry said he had one when he felt like. And that's ...

Well that's the short list, but how did you get to the short list? I mean ...

I don't know. I didn't, I don't know who else was involved or considered or anything like that.

In terms of your longer term military career, this was presumably seen as a very positive thing to happen to you?

Oh I would think so, yes. In fact, that was the first time I've ever thought of it that way but I would think, at that stage, of the various young officers that were available, (A) to be on a short list; and (B) eventually to be chosen, you've got to accept as a positive step, quite clearly, hm. But this is the first time I've thought of it that way.

How did you leave it? CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 19 of 90

Well army headquarters asked, drew the .... Well Bracegirdle was the Military Secretary. Army headquarters wrote and said, `Finlay is required to do his training in India, you know, towards the end of '35, and it would be appreciated if he could be released from duties so as to at least spend some more time on regimental duty before going to India'. Brace-Girdle wrote back and said, `Well, really, we've got the Duke of Gloucester's visit coming up in a month or so's time. I would be very reluctant to accept an untrained and junior ADC for the Duke of Gloucester's visit, so could we hold him over till after the Duke of Gloucester's visit?'. So army headquarters said, `Yes', so that was that. And the Duke of Gloucester's visit ended just before Christmas in 1934, and I was released back to regimental duty in January '35.

Was it normal for cavalry officers to go to India?

(5.00) Oh yes. You see, the situation with the Australian Army in those days was that it was basically CMF, basically Militia personnel, and we only had a very small regular army, which was called the Staff Corps, it's job being to be the staff and training of the Militia. Now, the one thing we couldn't get during that type of training - well, that organisation of the army - was regimental duty. That is, training our own, getting our own command training in commanding platoons and troops and living a regimental life the way a regular regiment does. What Australia used to do - was send the graduates from Duntroon within a few years of their graduation to India to a unit of their arm, so that they have about a year or fourteen months training in that, in a regiment, so that they, learn to command a troop. I fortunately spent some time commanding a squadron in India. But that's where we used to get our regimental training. Now that we have a regular army, of course, officers get their own regimental training in their own regiments. And that's you see, unless you understand the organisation of the Australian Army before the war, you mightn't understand why we were sent to India. But, and of course, in some cases, they went to England.

Was this the first time that you'd left Australia?

Yes, I hadn't been out of Australia before that.

And well, could you describe what you found?

In India? Well, the best part, not the best part of it, but one of the nice parts of it was the sea trip on the P & O liner going to India, and then of course, I had to do a 2,000 mile trip from Bombay by train up to Risalpur in, or really now Sherah was where I got out, up on the north- west frontier, and then joining the regiment.

This was presumably - I'm just trying to think - one of the few places in the British Empire where you could actually have some sort of active service?

Ah yes, although at that stage I'd have to think round the place, but there was the possibility of active service there, and in fact there were two separate operations that went on in the north- west frontier when I was there, and that was the Mohmaund operations at Loe Agra and then also the Nahakki operations.

Could you spell those two places for the sake of the transcriber?

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 20 of 90

(Laughing). Well the first one is Loe Agra - that's up on the north-west frontier - and the second is Nahakki, N-A-H-A-K-K-I.

And Loe Agra is L-O-E one word, and then second word A-G-R-A.

Hm. But the, oh, you're far too young to have known any of this, but the Nahakki operations were really quite an amazing one because there was a VC, DSO and an MC awarded in the same company - the company, I might add, was virtually annihilated. Attacked by, overwhelmingly by Momount tribesmen during the night, and they fought up a tremendous fight, went on and on and on, and nobody could get to them because they were in these great craggy mountains and the ... It's most unusual for a VC to be awarded in, other than periods of a recognised war, but this wasn't a recognised war, it was just a tribal action. But that was in 193... it was '36.

Were you involved at all?

I wasn't involved. I was ... we were just in the, you know ... we were about, oh, about ten miles away is where we were, but this action took place at that place called Nahakki.

And what, were you involved in the subsequent operations?

Not really. I wasn't. My part of it was that I just got myself set up as an observer. You see, the 14/20th Hussars (inaudible) with whom I was serving, they were not ordered into the action, but I managed to wheedle my way up as an observer, just to see what went on. But you couldn't, you never saw very much from back where I was, except that that action did take place during that period.

The operations of the British Army, what sort of impact did that have on you, coming from Australia with extensive experience in the Australian Army. How did you find the British Army?

(10.00) Very, very professional. The big thing about the north-west frontier is that the British regiments are kept on what's called `war establishment', whereas back in England and back here in Australia, the units are kept on `peace establishment'. That means they've only got about half the strength they'd have on war establishment, and this was the only - well it was the first opportunity I'd ever seen of a unit at full war establishment. The full strength of about seven hundred and ninety six men, or I've forgotten the actua..., but it'd be of that order, whereas back in Australia you're dealing with a regiment that's got .... You were jolly lucky if you got anywhere near 300.

And in terms of its operations. I mean, what, okay, the size was double. What other differences were there? For example, the way in which they were organised?

They were organised the way we would have liked to have been organised. Absolutely every job filled, every man knew his job, everybody was fully trained, whereas back here in Australia we had a lot of very partially trained people, you see, and we were not getting at that stage the ability to train them thoroughly, except the light horse with their exercises, where CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 21 of 90 they used to do those out of scheduled programs. See, the scheduled program would never allow enough time to do the training you'd like to do. But those competitions - the Forster Cup - they were, the troops used to do them in their own time, and elect to have extra parades. But they were still very, we weren't fully trained, whereas the regiments you were dealing with in India on the north-west frontier were fully trained, complete war strength and it was, and everybody knew their own job.

An Australian. What was the, ah, .... Fitted in completely, or slightly different?

No, I took command of a troop straightaway and the .... I took command of a troop of which the British troop commander, he was off attending the long cavalry course at Saugor you see, so there was a ready troop with a, you know, with no officer so I walked straight in, took over command of that. Then in India of course, in those days, the British officer used to get six months home leave every two-and-a-half years. It'd be a bit much to keep him out there without that, although they got a little local leave. Well, they got this six months leave every two-and-a-half years and a regiment's tour of duty in India might be eight years, you see. Anyway, during this period I was there, my squadron leader took his six months leave, his two-and-a-half years - I've forgotten where the second-in-command was - and so I actually as the senior subaltern, because the other British subalterns in the same squadron were junior to me, and I took command of the squadron. I commanded it for nearly six months, which was very, very good experience to me.

The mess. Was that the same or different?

Very much more formal. The Staff Corps mess in Sydney, for instance, which of course was a very old mess, that was fully organised and properly conducted mess, whereas the light horse regiment's mess was a very much a sort of marquis tressel table sort of thing. But the British, the 14/20th Hussars mess was a very rich mess. They had fantastic silver and tables and furniture and everything, and of course you had servants there, and of course you dressed for dinner every night - mess kit - and Sunday night supper was a black tie. That's the only relaxation of full mess etiquette, and it was quite an experience.

Did you go on leave while you were there?

Not while I was in India, no. Oh, only a few days. I went up to Gulmerg, went up to Srinagar up in Kashmir, but only for a matter of a few days, because really the .... I was not entitled to any leave. I hadn't had any great backlog of leave because I'd just come to the regiment and the other officers of the regiment who had backlogs of leave, well they got priority, and fair enough. That didn't worry me.

You were there what, about a year?

(15.00) Fourteen months actually.

And you returned to where in Australia?

I came back and went to the 13th Light Horse in Sale. But an interesting aspect .... We were talking about Charles Spry, because he was serving just across the river with the Prince of CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 22 of 90

Wales Volunteers, I think it was, and he and I both came home together, you see. We went together and came home together in the same ship. We took a bit of leave and wandered our way round down central India and down to Bombay, taking in Agra and Delhi, the Minar Qutb which is a most interesting thing. The difference between a Minar and a Minaret is, of course, is the Minaret's a relatively small one, but the Minar is a hell of a tall one. And that's the famous sight to see in India, is the Minar Qutb. But Charles and I went and got aboard the same ship and returned to Australia. But he and I were being quite close all through our career, because we've, we were the same class, you see, and served in India together and so on.

Australia at this stage, well generally world wide, I mean, what was the feeling in terms of the prospect internationally, politically? Was there a feeling beginning to develop by this stage in the thirties that war was a prospect?

I think it is recognised that something had to be done ever since Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany in 1933. Actually, this occurred while Isaac Isaacs was Governor-General and that received a lot of discussion and concern. Isaac Isaacs was very, very concerned about what was going to happen. He foresaw probably as well as anybody the ultimate outcome of this situation in Germany.

Did he also, was he also conscious or thinking particularly of the situation of Jews in central Europe?

Well yes. Well not necessarily in central Europe, because that didn't occur until the war, but Hitler's anti-semitic utterances at that stage were a matter of great concern, but he was talking then about ... everybody's thinking then about Jews in Germany, not necessarily about Polish Jews or Czechoslovakians or so on. But he foresaw as well as anybody, I think, as clearly as anybody, that the war or something was inevitable there.

Was he a practising Jew, if that's the right way to put it? A religious ...?

No, no.

What sort of services did he attend?

About one a year. He ...

I suppose it would have had to be a Church of England, given being the Queen's representative?

No, no. Well at that stage he was completely ecumenical, the way all of us have to be these days, because he attended functions at cathedrals, but normally he'd send somebody to represent him. But the only, occasionally he went to the synagogue in Sydney for some special occasion. I attended him there, and of course I didn't know anything about the Jewish religion, and of course the first thing I did was take my hat off when I entered the synagogue - you must never do that. It's a pretty tall hat, you see, and it was. I put it back on, because I was wearing morning coat and stripey bags, and there was I all the time itching to get my hat off, because a tall hat has usually got a very hard rim, and it was getting quite painful sitting there with this hat on, and having hymns sung in Yiddish which I didn't understand anything CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 23 of 90 of. Of course the ladies are not allowed into the main part of the synagogue, they're only allowed up in the gallery. I'm not .... It's criticising the Jewish religion, that's the way they do it, but to me it was quite an experience. But I would, there's no really honest way you could say he was a practising Jew. He wasn't.

So, coming back to 1936, there was a feeling that there was a war in the offing of some sort. You were returning to Australia. I am just wondering how this feeling is beginning to affect your perception of the job and what people are wanting you to do, the resources that are available to you?

Not really. I was just glad to get back to Australia. Mind you, at this stage - I think it's '35 - while I was in India, Mussolini had attacked and over-ran Abyssinia and there was a bit of a war there for a while. We were all wondering whether that was going to flare up into a world war one, but generally speaking, at my level, I was only too glad to get back and get to my next job and get into it.

(20.00) What .... Your next job was ...

Adjutant quartermaster.

Adjutant quartermaster ...

13th Light Horse in Sale.

What were your duties?

Well, actually running the regiment, doing preparing the training programs, going round each troop on parade days and checking the standard of training. You had an RSM, an RQMS and a warrant officer instructor and they all went off to parades, you see and you took it in turns, you see. You had to plan which instructor went to which parade to supervise that, and to do one yourself, here, there, and then turn it all around and next month go to the ones that you hadn't been the previous month, and send the RSM and the instructor to the other ones. The whole function of the adjutant is in fact to run the regiment and the CO is a farmer, living thirty miles away, and he can't be buzzing in. He comes in for annual camps and things like that, and the odd course one has to go to in Melbourne, that sort of thing. But, well the adjutant just .... It's almost impossible to detail all the duties involved, but you had a full time job. It was quite a full job.

There was no talk within army circles of, you know, `There's a war coming. We need to sharpen up, prepare. We need to think about what sort of actions we might be involved in'?

No. Well that didn't really come in and get going until the Munich crisis in 1938, and that's when I remember I got orders to raise another squadron, you see, raise another squadron in Gippsland. (Short interruption in interview). Well of course the impact of the Munich crisis in Australia was pretty great indeed. Everybody realised, `Well, it's coming' because you know, Hitler has just pulled the wool over Chamberlain's eyes and really he sort of outwitted Chamberlain, I think, and most people recognised it was on because, well they had the Dolphuss affair after that, the Austria and CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 24 of 90 everything. One realised that there was, this mad man was going ahead and reason had been abandoned, so that's why the Australian Army - well, the Australian Defence Force - for the first time since the second world war (sic) really, suddenly ...

First world war.

First world war, suddenly got, realised how really weak we were and we must do something about it, see. The only part I had in that, of course, was to go and raise this extra squadron for the 13th Light Horse. So I galloped round, I made more speeches in a week than I've ever done since, and we raised the general enthusiasm and pro-military training round the southern Gippsland area - Yarram, Foster, Welshpool, Berwick, I've forgotten some of the other places - we had no difficulty.

There were so many people wanting to volunteer that I said, you know, `I can only take for the Light Horse, I can only take those who have a horse'. You see, they used to pay horse hire for the horses that the troops used to train with, but I got so many applications from people who didn't have horses who wanted to join the army, that I had to prepare and take all the lists, the names and everything and send them down to the infantry division - I think it was the 3rd Division, the 3rd Infantry Division - in Melbourne and they raised another infantry company in the south Gippsland.

And at this stage - we discussed this question earlier - but at this stage, what sort of war did you think you were preparing for?

(25.00) Oh we thought a European war in which, of course, the mobility would be provided by tanks, not cavalry, and one in which aircraft would take a lot, a much bigger part. And fortunately our air force was probably the best maintained of the forces - oh, the navy wasn't too bad, but the army had been very badly neglected in the interim period between the first world war and the second world war. The air force were in pretty good trim. They, well you see, they have to be regular. They had citizen squadrons, but they had to have good, strong, regular element in the air force to maintain the planes and keep the flying training going, you see. But generally speaking, that is about the stage that Australia suddenly woke up and said, `Yes, it's on'.

And in terms of the role, it was essentially seen Australia would be, what, sending an expeditionary force? Acting in support and under the command of British officers? Senior officers, I mean.

No, well really, well just the same ...

First of all Monash was a fairly senior officer.

Yes, but in any, any war of that nature, there's got to be one supreme commander, and the way the Yanks did it when they came in, of course they were pouring so many divisions into it, of course, they insisted having an American commander. Well, just the same as we sent a division to the Middle East and there was a British commander, namely Wavell - and a very distinguished commander at that - commanding in the Middle East, of course, naturally the Australian division would come under his command, within limitations of course, only of operational command not administrative command. And this question of coming under CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 25 of 90

British officers, it's got to be looked at in its, in it's proper perspective. But at that stage, of course, nobody could foresee what way the war would go. I think we all thought we were going to the, to western Europe, not to the Middle East, just the same as the first world war they thought they were going to western Europe. But ...

Had Japan spoken up at all?

No, Japan wasn't thought of in the general public as a threat.

They'd been involved in China since 1930.

Yes, but China was so remote and everything, nobody foresaw that Japan could do what she did at that stage. It wasn't until Japan started to get interested in joining the Axis that then something people started to realise that Japan could be a threat. By that time we had, well we had the bulk of our troops overseas. The 8th Division was sidetracked into Malaya and, but the rest of it was all in the Middle East at that stage. And then, of course, Italy came into the war and closed off the certain part of the Red Sea, because they occupied Eritrea which was part of Abyssinia, and they could have aircraft based in Eritrea which could sink the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth and that sort of thing, carrying troops to the Middle East, so that's why one part, one convoy out of Australia had to go to England. But I don't, I can't put my finger on when it became .... Japan's situation became alarming. I would think it was somewhere around towards the end of 1940, when they started to indicate that they wanted to belong to the Axis.

END TAPE 2, SIDE A.

TAPE 2, SIDE B - BLANK

BEGIN TAPE 3, SIDE A

Identification: This is the beginning of the second interview with Major- General Finlay. This is side 1 of the third tape of the series of interviews with Major-General Finlay. The date is the 22nd May 1990, and the interviewer is Daniel Connell.

Perhaps just recapping a little bit, in 1939 what were you expecting to happen? I mean, it's after Munich, things are beginning to change in Europe. What were your personal expectations?

Well I think pretty well, everybody knew there was, a war was coming, but we hadn't any idea of how it would go, what it was all about. Particularly after Munich, it was quite obvious the Germans were .... Well they were going to have a row with Poland, and they wanted the Sudetenland back, that sort of thing. So everybody with any ability to study the situation realised a war was coming. So, but we couldn't, nobody could guess what form it would take.

How well prepared was the Australian Army at that stage?

(Laughing) Almost, not at all. The Australian Army, of course, was completely Militia except for the staff, who were to train and train them and administer them. At that stage, up till CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 26 of 90 about 1938, they were only doing six days training per year plus another six days in camp, so a total of eighteen days, no, a total of twelve days in a twelve month period, which of course is quite impossible to train anybody up to the standard of fitness for war at all.

But that later began to change?

Oh well, they raised more troops, as I mentioned, but didn't increase the actual level, actual number of days training to any great extent.

Just thinking of your personal situation, I mean it must have been a fairly major, fairly frequent topic in the mess, `What's going to happen?', `What are we going to do?', `What's your likely personal role?'.

Well, it's, we discussed what Germany was doing and how, what was happening in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Of course in September '39 when war did break out, I was on the staff of the central training depot and the commandant was Major Fullerton - I think he might have been a colonel - Lieutenant-Colonel Fullerton then - and so we all sort of - there was about four of us there - we all volunteered, immediately set out our message of volunteering off to army headquarters and sat back and waited.

This is for the AIF?

Hm?

This is .... You were volunteering for ...?

In any, in whatever capacity the military board saw fit. You know, quite unqualified volunteering, and then of course nothing seemed to happen for quite a while - about a month or so. Anyway ...

Well Menzies used the phrase `business as usual', didn't he? He tried to dampen down, because there was a great flood of people trying to enlist in those early days.

(5.00) Yes, well there was no machinery to enlist them you see, and under the law that existed in those days, the Australian Army could not serve overseas - this Militia force we had. So a separate force had to be raised. Menzies, of course, volunteered at least a division straightaway, and offered them to the British government, and then somebody had to .... Well they immediately proceeded to form a headquarters of an AIF Division, because as I mentioned, the Australian Army - the CMF - cannot serve, or could not serve, overseas then.

Anyway, that was formed and well, Blamey was named as the commander, the senior staff officers were named, but you can't create a divisional headquarters overnight. And the division was slowly formed in about a month. The appointments of certain officers were named in the, you know, the commander of this brigade and that brigade, this field regiment and so on. Then in October 1939 things started to take shape. You know, the unit, right down to the units were formed. I remember I got - I think it was on the 22nd October - I got a message to report into Victoria Barracks in Sydney and on the - no, this is the 12th of October, that's right - which I did. I was medically examined and enlisted and became CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 27 of 90 adjutant of the 6th Divisional Cavalry Regiment - a unit that had not been formed. It wasn't in existence. So I had to move that night. I went straight down to Melbourne and reported to Colonel Rowell who was the G1 of the Division, and he said, `Well, you're adjutant of the 6th Divisional Cavalry Regiment'. I said, `Where is the regiment to be raised sir?' He says, `From the twenty-six light horse regiments in Australia'. So that regiment was raised from Queensland right round to Western Australia and Tasmania, and of course the work involved in raising the regiment all over the place is very much greater than the work involved in raising a regiment in Sydney or Melbourne.

Just for future reference, because even something like that will have changed even now or in fifty years time. If you could just describe the mechanics of raising a regiment. I mean, in 1939, what did that mean?

Well the first thing was we had to create a headquarters. I was given an office in 441 St Kilda Road in Melbourne. I didn't have anybody but myself. I was told that my CO, who was Colonel Ferguson ...

As an adjutant, what were your duties as an adjutant?

Oh, principal staff officer, virtually the administrator, and trainer of course in the Australian Army. The CO was Colonel Ferguson, a farmer from Benalla, but he wouldn't be available for another three weeks because of settling up and arranging for his farm to be run in his absence. So I had to get off my tail and get round and get everything going. I managed to get ....

The first thing I decided was I needed a lot of people, or certainly some, with mechanised experience, because they were, everybody was being raised from light horse regiments. So I arranged for the appointments of the quartermaster who was the quartermaster of a mechanised artillery unit, and he was known to Colonel Ferguson because Colonel Ferguson had been a gunner before he had been a light horseman. And he was appointed, and he recommended a few other mechanised people, so I got them enlisted and appointed to the regiment. So that gave us a little bit of a nucleus of staff and everything.

Then of course we had to contact all the states where the recruiting personnel were all, nearly always, occupied the showgrounds in each major city, and find out how many volunteers, how many cavalrymen or there were volunteers, and how many wanted to be in the 6 Div Cav. So we got them and then there's the appointment of the troops, you see.

There were two troops to be raised in Queensland, a squadron less two troops in New South Wales, and of course they enlisted the officers for those. Then you gave them the responsibility for getting the volunteers together, getting them enlisted and getting them all into the squadrons and troops round the place, you know, round the various states. Then you start to get all sorts of equipment going and as we had no tanks or carriers in Australia, we were issued with utility trucks, you see, to use as the fighting vehicles for training purposes.

You expected to get tanks though, didn't you, eventually?

(10.00) Oh yes, but we didn't have any tanks in Australia worth speaking about in those days. But we got a few light tanks for training, and that was later in the November when we CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 28 of 90 concentrated - the regiment concentrated - in Sydney, not in Sydney, in Ingleburn. That'd be about the 4th November, 4th November the regiment, all the troops enlisted round the various states concentrated in Ingleburn and were able .... Then we were issued with a couple of tanks for training. The Vickers light tank, I think they were Mark IIs in those days. It was armour about a quarter of an inch thick, which would scarcely keep out a rifle bullet. But then we went to work and trained on those and, well, we reached the best standard of training we could.

What sort of training were you doing? I mean, were you wanting open country ...?

Oh well, manoeuvring with trucks as though they were tanks, but in the meantime, training them - the personnel - on tanks. But for troop training - we never got to the stage of squadron training - for troop training we were using the utility trucks as though they were tanks, for manoeuvre purposes.

What communications with tanks? That's presumably a fairly important part of tank warfare.

Oh yes. Each tank has its own wireless set and the crew of a tank usually consists of a driver, who was also a driver/operator, and then there's a gunner who's a gunner/operator, because he has to be able to operate the wireless set as well, and then there's the officer command, in the tank. Well no, there isn't an officer in every tank, but there's a sergeant or a corporal, you see. There are usually in a tank troop, there'd be three tanks, and the officer commanding the troop is in one, the sergeant in another and the corporal in another. They are the crew commanders of those tanks, but the officer of course has to command all three tanks, and give his orders over wireless and so on.

Did you have radios for the utility trucks?

Oh yes. After a while. We didn't have them first. They didn't come issued, come with radio sets in them. But anyway, on the 10th January we embarked for overseas and we weren't quite certain - certainly the troops weren't quite certain where they were heading. They thought they were heading for the Middle East, but thought it'd only be a matter of time before we went on to Europe, you see.

Did you have your tanks at this stage? You were getting them ...?

No, no, we got them issued in the Middle East - tanks and carriers. They weren't, the regiment was made up of tanks and carriers. Each squadron had two tank troops and three carrier troops, and the manning of the carriers was the same as I've mentioned in the tanks. And of course, each carrier had a radio set, and it was .... But anyway, we went then to ... disembarked at El Kantara on the Canal, moved up to Palestine and continued our training there.

Now, the tanks that you finally got issued with, what were they?

They were Vickers light tanks Mark IV - that's two marks after the ones we trained in in Australia. They had been loaned to the Egyptian Army by the British, but taken back from CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 29 of 90 the Egyptians by the British and handed to us. I don't know what the arrangement was that the Egyptian Army had with the British, whether they were just on loan, but we were given them to train on, and we actually went into action with them at the end of 1940. But they were really not battle-worthy against the German tanks, so they were withdrawn and quite a few British Crusader tanks were issued. They were a very, very fast tank with a two-pounder gun, whereas the light tank only had a heavy machine-gun and a light, heavy machine-gun and a medium machine-gun.

So, perhaps .... Later in 1940 you say you went into action.

In November 1940 the 6th Divisional Cavalry Regiment was the first regiment into action - first Australian regiment into action - in the second world war, in the army. There were odd air force people had been to action before us, but of the army the 6th Divisional Cavalry Regiment .... A Squadron was seconded at that stage, or put under command, the rest of 6 Div, but they didn't take part in the action round Giarabub in November '40. Their first action was in January '41 at Bardia - Bardia, Tobruk and then on. That was A Squadron, but the rest of the regiment was down at Giarabub containing the Italian fort there. They had quite a complex down there at the Siwa oasis and in the end they took part in the capture of it later on in March '41 when elements of 18 Brigade were sent down to - 2/9th, wait a tick ... yes that's 18 Brigade - to capture Giarabub but that's .... They harried Giarabub and cut off their supplies and really played havoc with the 'eyeties', and the 'eyeties' were very panicky by the time they gave up and got out, or were driven out.

(15.00) Well, before we come to that, just a couple of other basic questions. You were operating - the 6th Div now - you were operating under the overall command of Wavell? Is that right?

That's right. Well Wavell was commander-in-chief.

Right. Now, in practice .... What I am wondering about is I'm just trying to get some information about the way the armies integrated, the ways the different nations integrated their armies together.

Well, at that time the force operating in Egypt was called Western Desert Force. I think O'Connor was commanding it. He was a lieutenant-general, but he was under the command of Wavell, who was the commander-in-chief. Of course Wavell had to command the operations down in Abyssinia and in East Africa, as well as anything that was going on in Iraq and Iran, and eventually the commander-in-chief, Middle East, had three separate armies under his command, you see. But there was an intermediate headquarters which was called British Troops in Egypt - Headquarters, British Troops in Egypt. They were, O'Connor and the Western Desert Forces fighting under BTE; the other one was, the Palestine command, I've forgotten what that was called - TNP, that's right, something British Troops Trans-Jordan and Palestine. That was another subordinate command under Wavell. But obviously the commander-in-chief can't command individual actions. He has to have subordinates under him to, like you know, any way down in the chain of command. Well I don't know that there's anything more I can say, except that's the way it worked.

I mean, in practice, how much contact did you have with the British, on a day to day level? How often would you have a direct contact? CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 30 of 90

Oh well, very little, because in Palestine we were under the command of headquarters AIF in Gaza, and then of course in, when you went up the desert, well of course you had an Indian division and a New Zealand division and later on, of course, the South African divisions came up. But you had no more contact except through divisional headquarters working under corps headquarters. The corps headquarters, or Western Desert Force headquarters, was a British headquarters, but it had an Australian division, an Indian division, a British division and eventually a full New Zealand division, and the only people who had much to do with the Brits were the people who were at the corps headquarters and divisional headquarters in contact with each other, receiving and carrying out orders.

Effectively it was a case of British methods were being used in all of the places you've talked about to such an extent there was no problem in integrating?

Oh no. Well you see, all the armies of the British Empire, as it was then, they all trained on the same system. They all had the common staff training, common tactical training, so that there was no, confusion as there was later on when the Americans came in with their system. But no, there was no confusion with working with the British, Indians and Canadians - well they were Canadians then.

Were you mixing .... I'm just trying to get to the degree of integration. Socially, were you mixing in each other's messes? Was there a program of exchange or just an informal ...?

Ah, I don't think you understand quite what goes on (laughing) in a battle. You don't have much chance to .... Your mess is a truck with a tarpaulin extended out the back and dug in where necessary.

I'm not talking about battle conditions so much. I'm talking about, say, the early months in Egypt because, as I understand it, you didn't go into action until late in 1940.

That's right.

So, it's just those early months I am trying to talk about at the moment.

(20.00) Well, the early months in Palestine were entirely in an Australian area. We had no British divisions or British brigades or anything, except further north in Palestine there were some, but we didn't .... We, you know, what leave we got the troops spent in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and there was very little, very little mixing and socialising between the messes at all. In fact, you were so placed that there was very little between the Australian messes. Ah, after all, we were at, I've forgotten the name of the place now, but then down further, about fifteen miles further south, was the 16th Brigade at Julis with its three battalions and artillery regiment and so on, and then about another twenty miles further down there was Bcharre and Madjlaya where there were Australian Brigade groups, but it's a little difficult to liaise socially when you're twenty miles, fifteen and twenty miles away. Qastina was the first place I was trying to think of.

How do you spell Qastina. CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 31 of 90

Q-U-A-S-T-I-N-A.[sic]

Now, you've got in your regiment, you've got a lot of men who have been part of the Militia before the war ...

That's right, hm.

... but how do you go about the business of actually turning them into a fighting force? You referred to the fairly low level of training a while ago in the interview.

Well you go to work on them and train rigorously, train them in their arms capacity, arms skill, driving tanks, radio training with the radio sets, manoeuvring as troops, manoeuvring as squadrons and you have to set exercises for all this. Firstly, you've got to improve their individual training to such an extent that they are capable soldiers. That is, and that takes quite a long time. Then you've got to train them as individual teams in a tank or a carrier, do troop training, then you've got to train the troops to act as a squadron under the command of a squadron leader, and then later on you've got to train the whole regiment to train as a team with the squadrons all acting under the command of the regimental commander. But that all takes .... And we had a long time. We didn't leave Palestine until August 1940. We'd been there since February training hard, carrying out manoeuvres, all up round central Palestine and (laughing) I was going to say `frightening Christ out of the inhabitants', but that's the whole program of training when you raise a regiment. You've got to make sure that each individual is a competent soldier, understands what he's doing, then you've got to make sure that each group of individuals can act together as a team in a troop. And then of course, you've got to do the same with the squadron.

Were the Italians seen as the enemy that you were training for at this stage?

Oh no. We weren't training particularly against the Italians. We were training to be competent armoured unit, or mechanised unit rather than armoured. At no stage did we .... The Italians, of course, were the immediate enemy because they were, they'd invaded Egypt, and had to be thrown out. But later on, of course, the Germans came in, but I don't know that one consciously trains against a particular enemy. You train just to be competent soldiers and capable of taking on anybody.

You don't sort of try and, well, at that stage you don't try and find out about a particular tactic and work out counter-measures for it?

Well those tactics are known and you've got to train to counter everything, whether an attack in flank guard, whether rearguard or anything like that. You train for every possibility and well, that's the basis of the whole thing. A trained unit has to meet almost any situation.

That first action, you described your regiment being involved in the first action of Australian troops in the second world war. Could you describe that?

(25.00) Well the first action, really, was when the Italian Air Force had bombed them when they arrived and were harrying Giarabub. But the first casualty, the first AIF casualty in CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 32 of 90

Egypt, was a member of B Squadron of 6 Div Cav who was wounded when the Italian Air Force strafed their positions you see. But the rest of the regiment were moving round intercepting supply transports coming in from round behind Giarabub and manoeuvring well round and, of course, running into running fights with them. And they wrought a good deal of havoc with the Italian supply lines and of course they came under artillery fire from the Fort - and that's where the CO was wounded actually - by shelling from the Fort of Giarabub. But that was all, you know, November 1940 onwards. The next action of the Australians were in of course was Bardia in January '41.

Now, when you were immediately going to go into action against the Italians, what were the expectations then? I mean, they subsequently developed a reputation for, well for not at that stage being very effective soldiers. But what was the feeling at the time?

No, they weren't fairly effective soldiers (laughing), let's face it. But they had weapons and could, as long as you, if they could have a go at you from a distance, they could cause casualties. When it came to close infighting, they didn't like that at all and, well, as you can appreciate as happened later at Bardia, they gave up very readily, although you had to invade their position. Of course, until you got right up close to them, they would still keep firing at you, so they had some effect that way, but as for dogged determination, it wasn't observed very often during, from the Italians, the way it later was, later on was, from the Germans.

So, I mean, did that produce a change in tactics, a change in the way people conducted their tactical campaigns?

I don't think so. You launch an attack based on the soundest principles of the tactics of attack, and if you run into solid opposition, well you've got to carry out manoeuvres with your troops. I mean, bring up further Bren guns on the flank or do whatever's necessary, but it, it doesn't really involve any change of tactics, 'cause those are tactics you're trained for anyway. You expect to have to do that if you run into a determined enemy. You expect to have to fight your way forward and do it by manoeuvre, bringing up your reserve company or your reserve platoon round the flank, bringing further fire in against particular strong points, that sort of thing. That's the standard tactic that you would employ whoever it was against.

At this stage you were still the adjutant?

No, at this stage I had, well it was about this stage - November '40 - I went off and did the staff college, and when I came back from that I was made Brigade Major of the 21st Brigade of the 7th Division, which had arrived in the Middle East in the meantime.

END TAPE 3, SIDE A.

BEGIN TAPE 3, SIDE B.

Identification: side 2, tape 3, the interview with Major-General Finlay.

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 33 of 90

Yes, so talking of tactics and the way in which the units operated. Now, you were saying that there was a lot of initiative on the part of both NCOs and ordinary soldiers.

That's right, yes. Well, in your training, attacking anything on foot for instance, as in infantry, which a mechanised unit might have to do some time or other, in many cases when they fired on a machine-gun post or something troubles a section advancing, it's quite likely - certainly in the Australian Army - that two men on the left flank might then sort of move without even - just getting the nod from the section commander - move round to bring extra fire from a different direction on the post that's troubling them. Now the Australian soldier, private soldier, is quite likely to do that off his own bat, whereas in many other armies it's .... The rigidity of the training is such that they have to wait for the section commander or the platoon commander to direct them to do that, and that's part of the meaning of what I said about the Australian soldier being, having more initiative than some others - certainly more initiative than the Brits normally showed - and certainly more than the Americans.

Now you weren't involved in Greece and Crete, I understand?

No.

But did that affect you in any way, those actions? Did they, did you have to undertake different movements because other people were going off to Greece and Crete?

Well, round about April 1941, when we were in the Western Desert at Matruh, we got orders to move round to Syria and - this is the 7th Division less one brigade, because that brigade was in Tobruk. Anyway we moved around, did quite a long march from the Western Desert right back through Egypt, round up through Palestine to the northern border of Palestine with Syria and the 25th Brigade came as well, and 7 Div headquarters. And to complete the division, an Indian division was brought in up on the right flank, up through Iraq really.

The trouble there was the Vichy government was supplying pro-German elements in Iraq through northern Syria, and this had to be stopped. So Wavell had to take troops from his highly strained Western Desert front and put them up through Syria to try and, to stop that, to stop the movement of supplies and equipment through northern Syria down to Iraq. And of course, that was - I've forgotten the exact date, but I think it was early in June, the first week in June - we crossed the Syrian border and invaded Syria.

We were told that there were so many friends in the French Army that it wouldn't be necessary for us to wear tin hats; you could wear the Australian slouch hat so that you could be recognised as Australians, and the French were going to surrender. That was the biggest laugh that ever happened. (Laughing.) We very soon had to change the slouch hat for the tin hat because the French didn't surrender at all. They put up a, you know, this was .... Well the intelligence we got was that they would surrender, but they didn't.

(5.00) That campaign, which is not very well known, but when I have heard it described, I've normally heard it described as quite a fierce campaign ...

Oh it was. CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 34 of 90

... what you are saying now.

Yes. The French sense of honour is such that they couldn't surrender. Pretty inexplicable people really, but they fought very fiercely and gave us a lot of trouble. It took six weeks to finish the campaign off. But the funny thing was that the code name for the invasion of Syria was called `Exporter', and to cover the identity of the division doing it, it was called `AustDiv Exporter'. And the Germans, the Vichy French thought, `Good gracious me. This is a new division they're putting in on us. Their 7th Division, we know the 7th Division's left the Middle East, has left the Western Desert, where are they coming in? They might even land, make a sea landing', because Brits had a pretty strong naval force there, including Australian ships. And they held back thinking that they were going to be clobbered with a seaborne invasion by this 7th Division, because this division that was attacking them was the Exporter division.

Anyway, the deception worked, because by the time they'd manoeuvred themselves into a corner, trying to resist the 7th Division, it was too late for them to use whatever reserves they had, you see. And anyway, we fought our way up the coast. They gave a lot of trouble in the Merdjayoun area, where they counterattacked and disrupted the 25th Brigade quite severely, but a special force was gathered together under Brigadier Berryman, as he was then, and they counterattacked there and eventually drove the French back to Jezzine..

In the meantime, the coastal brigade was fighting its way steadily up the coast, and that was the 21st Brigade which I was with, and eventually we fought the battle of Damour which broke through and exposed Beirut to immediate occupation, so the French surrendered then.

Were you involved in the surrender at all? Did you ...?

Not I. I had .... All I know, all I remember of the surrender was that General De Gaulle came out and held a levee at the Grand Sarrail, which is the headquarters, a big public building, and everybody thought they were going to be given a glass of champagne. We passed, went along and we were introduced to General De Gaulle and we passed out the other door. And General Lavarack was furious. (Laughing.) He took us all to the Hotel Normandy and bought us champagne there. But everybody thought it was pretty poor effort on De Gaulle, having captured his country back for him - or one of his dominions - back for him - well, for the French - he didn't even give us a drink. These are only the senior officers that were called into the Grand Sarrail, but you know ....

What about prisoners? When French prisoners were taken, what sort of relationships occurred then? I mean, how ...?

We had a force of Free French interpreters with us, you see, and I spoke French fairly fluently, and I talked to some of them. But, you know, I heard one senior officer being interrogated by the interpreter - by the Free French bloke - and he, this senior officer was saying, `But why would you attack us?', and the interpreter pointed out - well, he was more than an interpreter, he was a senior French officer - pointed out that the Vichy Government was sending supplies through to Iraq and that's why we had to take them out. And this other, the French officer who had been captured, he sort of couldn't believe that. When it was proved to him, he just burst into tears. CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 35 of 90

Anyway, they were given the option .... All the forces who surrendered in Syria were given the option of joining the Free French, and it was quite amazing the number of them who wouldn't. I don't know why, whether De Gaulle was held in some disrespect with the Vichy Army, but they wouldn't .... We thought a lot of the Vichy French in Syria would, you know, join the Free French and that would strengthen the forces in the Middle East, but they wouldn't.

(10.00) That naval action where the British Navy sank a large section of the French Navy, was that something that was affecting French attitudes?

It was way down the other end of .... It came much later.

Oh, that was later was it?

Yes, that was more just before the invasion in late '42 of North Africa, you see. Well, they were trying to ensure that the French Navy came over, because if they came out of their port and proceeded into naval actions, they were pretty strong naval force there that would have given a great deal of trouble to the North African landings, because they were interned, more or less, but they were still activated and ready to take action. When they wouldn't, then of course the Brits had to go in and neutralise them and that's what that action was about, because to have a naval force in the area hostile to the landings in North Africa under General Mark Clark, that would have caused a hell of a problem for the invasion forces. So they had to liquidate them. Iran was the naval base. They were just destroyed, or I won't say `destroyed', but severely handled in the base while they were still at anchor. So the French didn't like that either.

The Germans coming into the war ...

The Germans started the war.

Well, the Germans started the war, but the Germans .... I am just thinking of the local area, the Middle East, where the Italians had effectively been running that show for a while, and it was in a sense when they collapsed that the Germans came in. Is that a fair description of what happened?

Well, the Italians were driven right back to El Agheila which is over ... you see, that part of the coast of North Africa consists of the Western Desert of Egypt, and from there on in its Cyrenaica, and from there on it's Libya. Now the Italians were driven completely out of Cyrenaica and of course it was a severe defeat for the Italians, and the Germans .... Hitler had to, virtually had to come to the rescue of the Italians in North Africa, and that's when Rommel was sent in with his forces, and he was supposed to be under the command of, oh, I've forgotten the Italian commander in North Africa, but he was supposed to be under the Italian command, but he sort of took things into his own hand. He was told not to advance before a certain date, but he advanced immediately virtually, and took ....

In the meantime, the 9th Australian Division, which was the last division to arrive in the Middle East from Australia - some of it went to England and had to be brought back, you know, later on - it had been sent up to Cyrenaica to complete its training. You know, bring it CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 36 of 90 right up to divisional training. I spoke to you about regimental training, then brigade training, and then divisional training, so that the division can operate as a .... And that's why 9th Division was there. It was, had been sent there to complete its training. Well of course, Rommel attacked and took everybody by surprise, and this untrained division, the 9th Australian Division - or incompletely trained division - was forced into Tobruk and then put up one of the spectacular performances ever, and held Tobruk for, oh, I think it was April right through to December, so that's six or seven months. Held Tobruk for six or seven months against everything that Rommel could throw at it.

The Germans coming in, did that produce significant changes in the way you went about operations? I mean, you'd been dealing with the Italians and ...?

No. If your training is sound, it's sound for any enemy. You don't change tactics because of different enemies.

(15.00) Well at the very least, you were involved in a retreat or a consolidation, as opposed to an advance, against the Italians weren't you?

Oh well, those aren't tactics, they are phases of warfare, you see. If you're forced into a fortress situation, well then your entire action is defence and counter-attack, to regain anything that's lost. But all of that, if your training is sound, you will have covered that in all your training. So there's not really a change in tactics because of a different enemy.

What about morale? I mean, things hadn't gone all that well in Greece and Crete, to put it gently ....

Well that's an understatement but still, no, the morale, I don't think you can affect Australian morale, or to that extent, British. Later on at El Alamein I'll discuss another aspect of morale, but the best one I can quote to you is when, Auchinleck in an unguarded moment - mind you, by this time, Auchinleck had replaced Wavell - Auchinleck in a thoughtless moment said, made a gross statement that, `Tobruk can take it', and he got a very bitter signal from Morshead saying, `Please change that to "Tobruk can give it"' (laughing) and Tobruk did give it. They knocked the Germans about.

The Germans created a salient in the defences, but Morshead closed the salient off and held it, and mind you, in Tobruk there were British units as well as Australian. The Australians were the main ones - 18th, 20th and 24th Brigades, that's right - no, 18th, 20th, 24th and 26th Brigades, because the 18th was from the 7th Division that was rushing up to, was on its way to Greece as I mentioned, and it was rushed up, but it got there first and the 21st Brigade, which I was with, was coming up also. But Rommel closed Tobruk off, so there was no point in going any further than we'd sort of stabilised at Matruh. But this question of morale. I've got the utmost faith in the morale of the Australian troops. It doesn't matter what the situation is, they don't lose morale, they fight on. But I never ...

Wasn't it something that as an officer you consciously thought about?

Not really. You don't think about morale. You do your best to ensure that the general feeling amongst the troops is maintained. But ...

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 37 of 90

How do you do that?

Oh, training, exercising, it's a very, very hard thing to define. In fact, morale itself is very hard to define, or very hard to express.

Well, just taking Greece and Crete for a moment, now how was that presented to the troops? How was it discussed? How was it dealt with? I mean ...?

We received the BBC news. We heard it all from the news and it was just unfortunate that we'd lost that particular part of the action. The morale of the troops, of course, is demonstrated really by the troops in Greece who got away into Crete and then went on fighting the German parachute troops in Crete and dealt them so much harm that they really - the Germans - never really attempted a big parachute landing again. Their parachute unit was pretty severely put out of action in Crete by the Australians and New Zealanders, and that of course, if there's any change in morale, that helps morale when you realise the enormous number of casualties they inflicted on the German paratroops. `They're not as good as they thought they were', these para... these Germans. And actually that was expressed by the Germans themselves. They admitted it was a, a wrong decision on their part to put the paratroops into Crete - their own paratroops of course - and that, by damaging the German parachute division so badly, it prevented its use in the invasion of Russia almost immediately. It wasn't, the parachute division never recovered in time to take part in the Russian invasion. That's generally recognised that the defence of Crete which of course the Germans eventually took over, was a very severe handling of the Germans. It wasn't an easy win on their part at all.

(20.00) Action, as other people have described it to me, produces all sorts of, in some ways, unpredictable developments in terms of its effect on different people and I've had people describe to me how leadership qualities emerge in individuals that you perhaps hadn't picked six months before as a potential leader, and other people who perhaps seemed like good leaders, become a little less impressive when the pressure is really on.

Well, I agree with you there. I'll quote a case of a company commander in a battalion in Syria, when they were attacking through a fairly high crop. You know, a crop about, I don't know whether it was oats or what it was, or barley. And they were counter-attacked by the French tanks. I came into the middle of this and tried to .... But the first thing when an infantryman is confronted with a tank, he's got to get out of the sight of the tank. Well of course, in this crop, the tanks started machine-gunning and the troops all went flat. And of course they were hidden because the crop was higher than them. And I came up to the company commander to find out what the situation was and he said, `Oh Christ, the company's been wiped out. Where is it?' you see. And he became for a while, I think, an ineffective leader. He didn't realise that his troops had all gone to ground and, you know, and the crop hid them, which was a good thing for them because the tanks couldn't see them to shoot at them. Anyway, the tank attack was repulsed by artillery fire and of course the company, which only suffered a few casualties, was all there. But this officer lost his, well he was terr.... He was shattered when his company almost disappeared in front of his eyes, because they all went flat.

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 38 of 90

On other occasions, you find somebody who is not a leader suddenly in a moment of severe strife, suddenly jumps up and rushes a machine-gun post with grenades and everything and Tommy guns, and throws the grenades in, fires his Tommy gun and actually captures a machine-gun post. Well that's the sort of things VCs are given for. But whether that's true leadership, or impulsive personal action, is another matter. Well, there were cases where the officer is killed or wounded, and the squadron sar-ma. or company sar-major takes over, or the troop sergeant takes over immediately and leads the .... But of course, you'd expect some leadership from a sergeant, I'll admit, but on the other hand, there are many cases where individual men have gathered up troops that have been dispersed by machine-gun fire, got them going again, formed them into a unit even though they might come from different sections. That's the sort of thing; that occurs.

How was it handled? Say, in the case of, not so much, perhaps, well, in the case of a temporary aberration, such as you were just talking about with the company commander, would you counsel him later about, or basically, I mean, how would that be handled by ...?

(25.00) Ah well, the answer is he isn't counselled. He gets up and suddenly, finally realises his mistake and carries on, and that gets his morale back if he has lost it and it also, I hope, strengthens his leadership so that he isn't counselled. There's not much opportunity to counsel him later, because you're going on with the war.

Well how do you get rid of, say, someone who's less efficient than someone else who's nearby who would obviously be more efficient if they were in that position? In a war time situation, how do you deal with those ...?

Well, quite often they're sent back to the training battalion, see. Every unit or division in war has a reinforcement training depot, and if you're worried about an officer's actual battle leadership or battle capacity, you send him back to the training unit to take command of something there and he just finishes his war training the reinforcements, sending them up forward. That's just one way of doing it. Of course if it's blatant incompetence, well in some cases he's just sent back to Australia. That's what they ... `Services no longer required', `SNLR', you see and of course they were called snarlers. But very few officers were involved in that. Troops were. Odd troops were sent back as snarlers and they were just bad types who just weren't wanted in the unit.

Edward Bean, in his diary, talking about the first world war talks about a situation where an officer - he doesn't name the person - had been, you know, totally compromised in some sort of way, revealed as inadequate, and what the officer did in that particular case was that he applied to join his own regiment as an ordinary private. Is that the sort of thing that ever happened in the second world war?

That's almost impossible. It wouldn't work. I don't know ...

I can see enormous problems.

I don't know ...

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 39 of 90

Maybe he was .... I'll admit, in the case of Bean, he may have gone to another unit. But Bean does talk about a case of an officer applying to be a private.

Well he's reached the stage where his commission would have to be cancelled, and he couldn't possibly serve with his, the same unit. He'd have to .... I have no knowledge of any such case and I don't think it would be even considered nowadays.

Right. Any cases of cowardice in action, sort of where people would be charged, inadequacies in combat?

I've never struck a single case in any of the divisions I fought with. I fought with 6, 7 and 9. I never struck a single case of cowardice. There may have been some that I don't know about, but you run into cases where they haven't got their objective and they stop short of their objective, and the only case I know is one of those, and actually had to be kicked along and made to go and take their objective, but that was more or less a misunderstanding on the part of the, the commander of the unit. He thought this particular company had got its objective, but it hadn't.

How would they be kicked along? I mean, how ...?

Well, you just go up and order them on, order them forward. I was involved in that. I had to order them forward. What happened was, one battalion got its objective here and the other one got its objective there, and these two were patrolling to make contact with each other. They were supposed to join up with the middle battalion. The middle battalion hadn't got there. Well, they'd reported that they'd got their objective, so I went forward to find out what the hell the situation was and pointed out to the CO that the patrols across where his troops ought to have been hadn't contacted anybody. So he went forward and we just had to chase them, chase the companies, get the companies going again and get them up to their objectives. That's all that happened, but it was really more a misunderstanding than any question of cowardice. There's no question of cowardice in that one. It was a .... The company commander may well have believed he'd reached his objective, but he hadn't, and in the desert there's no features you can make. It's got to be done by a number of paces quite often, and that was one. But it wasn't cowardice though.

Was communications difficult? Was everybody connected by radio or how was all that done?

Not in an infantry battalion. They haven't got the ability to carry all the sets that are now available. There were no walkie-talkies in those days. I'm talking about the Western Desert in 1942.

So, what, are they using runners or telephone lines?

Yes, telephone lines. A signal, you know, company signallers go forward and they phone back, and every now and then the shell fire cuts the line and that has to be repaired. But that's the only communication that was available, and in an infantry battalion in those days you didn't have .... There'd be a set at company headquarters, and a set at battalion headquarters of course. But the platoons and troops - forward troops - didn't have radio. They sent messages back by runners. CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 40 of 90

END TAPE 3, SIDE B.

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 41 of 90

Identification: This is tape four, side one, of the interview with Major-General Finlay.

The lead up to the battle of El Alamein. Well perhaps before we get to that, the impact on the troops in the Middle East of what was happening in the Pacific, the entry of the Japanese into the war and, in retrospect, when I have looked at the newspapers and have read about it, it always seems to me to have been something that must have been a most terrifying experience for someone who was concerned - perhaps not at a personal level - but about the safety of Australia and Australian society. So I am just wondering how all that news, the fall of Singapore, the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, how that period was affecting people in the Middle East?

Well, really it didn't affect the troops very much at all. They could not believe that Australia was in any real danger. You know, Singapore of course came as a shock, and of course the occupation of Thailand and French Indo-China and all down there to Malaya was still apparently very remote. Everybody was a bit concerned that the 8th Division had been lost, but the threat to Australia didn't seem to be terribly real to us in the Middle East because we didn't think .... Nobody thought the Japs could do it.

Well, do you think that there was a threat? I mean I get the impression that people did think there was a real threat.

Oh, a hell of a lot of people in Australia thought there was a threat because, actually ...

Military people too, not just civilians?

Oh military people recognised the threat. In fact, that's why the Coastwatching Service was created and very wise action on the part of the Naval Director of Intelligence, who thought up and realised the necessity to know where ships were going and that sort of thing.

Was that [inaudible] or someone ...?

No, that was Commander Long, 'Cocky' Long. He was the father of the coastwatching plan, and it paid dividends. But that was created .... The planning for that was created well before the Japs came in, thank goodness, and it was able to be implemented.

In that period, one of the famous sagas of dispute, I guess is one way of talking about it, between Churchill and Curtin about the recall of at least some of the Middle East divisions, the 6th and 7th. What did you see of what was going on there? Presumably you weren't privy to the actual telegrams.

Oh well, we didn't know, we didn't know what arguing was going on in that matter. All we knew was, well, I would think we expected to be called back. Ah, and we were just waiting, and then of course eventually the 6 and 7 Divs and the 1st Corps were despatched back, but we didn't .... We thought they were going back to Australia. And apparently the plan was that they should land in Java, which fortunately they didn't - except a few units did and they were over-run and captured. CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 42 of 90

But they eventually got back to Australia, were redirected and I gather that Curtin vigorously opposed Churchill's plan to land them in Java. He wanted them back to defend Australia, because by that time the Japs were getting down. It was about August '43 I think the first Jap landing at, in New Guinea took place. That would be ...

That was earlier than .... August '42 was the Kokoda Trail.

Hm?

They captured Rabaul in January '42.

(5.00) Yes, but they didn't, they didn't, oh well .... Yes, I'm talking about the attack on New Guinea which took place at, not Wau, what's that peninsula just south of Lae?

Salamaua?

Salamaua. That's where they first time they landed in New Guinea was, I think it was August ....

'42.

August '42 hm. Well that's why Curtin wanted them back in Australia, but the 6th and 7th Divisions had left the Middle East by February '42. The Japs came in in December '41, that's right. Well, of course, we - the 9th Division - we all thought we'd be going also. But, well we did another year in the desert and saw Tel el Eisa and El Alamein through.

Among the troops there weren't any, well there wasn't concern about getting back, you didn't think? Basically people were just doing what they were ...?

I would think there was, but it's not a, the troops weren't agonising over it or .... They were there and they wanted to end the war and that's all. They recognised that they would probably go back sooner or later, but it wasn't, there was no upset or worry or concern amongst the troops about that. They had their job to do and they were doing it to the best of their ability.

Well the lead up to the Battle of El Alamein, was this a battle that was discussed well in advance, or did it come as quite a surprise?

No, no. Really, you've got to realise that Tel el Eisa - the Tel el Eisa fighting - which some people call the first battle of El Alamein, that was quite heavy from July, August, September right through, and the .... An eventual attack we recognised would come - an attack on our part - because we were whittling the German strength down. The convoys from Italy across to Tunis were having hell torn out of them. Rommel was running out of petrol. He couldn't keep his tanks going. He was getting desperate. And everybody knew he was going to make a final burst to try to get through to Cairo.

But roundabout that stage, about August I think it was - August '42 - Auchinleck was relieved and Montgomery and Alexander .... Alexander took over as Commander-in-Chief and Montgomery took over as Commander of the 8th Army. CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 43 of 90

Auchinleck was relieved against his wishes was he not?

Well I would think any commander who is relieved is against his wishes.

Unless he's promoted.

Well that isn't being relieved of his command. No, Auchinleck was, Churchill considered he was running out of ideas and was probably tired, which would be true because you're getting, you know, fighting a war at a very highest level is a twenty-four hour problem, and you don't get much sleep in it. But anyway, he was sent off as Commander-in-Chief, India, and Montgomery and Alexander took over. I think Alexander was probably the greatest soldier to emerge from the, on the Allied side, from the second world war. That's as the overall command. Montgomery was a very, very good tactical commander.

Anyway, as it became apparent that Rommel would try to attack round the south, Montgomery and Alexander between them created a very, very clever deception plan, losing by accident in the desert maps marked with the good going through and, you know, so that .... And the good going were shown was really the bad going, and of course, when eventually Rommel attacked, his tanks bogged down, he got into awful trouble, and they had pre-empted his attack because they had strongpoints all down through this bad going, about thirty miles south of the coast you see, coming round the southern flank. And they shelled hell out of him, you see, and apart from his tanks being bogged, he was having them knocked out by shellfire. And eventually he was forced to withdraw, and he'd lost a lot of tanks and he'd lost a lot of strength and didn't have enough petrol.

(10.00) And then Montgomery set to work and planned El Alamein then in very great detail with the enormous amount of tank reinforcement he'd received and everything, and the plan was unfolded carefully by Montgomery. He addressed all divisional commanders, told them the plan, and forbade them to discuss it with their brigade and battalion commanders until he said so. And then he went down and he talked to all the brigade commanders, told them the plan, told them how, what he intended to do. And in the end he actually had a conference of battalion commanders and told them the plan.

I don't think any force has gone into a battle anywhere with it right down to the troops. The battalion commanders were allowed to tell the troops the whole plan just before the attack. And I don't think any force has ever gone into an attack with absolutely everybody knowing the full plan. And it worked tremendously well. The Germans fought very hard indeed, but we .... The plan worked, and Montgomery kept at it, even though Churchill was getting worried that he hadn't broken through, as you have probably read at odd times. But ....

You mentioned Alexander as a great commander. Now, among military people that may well be known, but you'd have to say that among the public it's not his name that's spoken of. Montgomery dominates the ...

Alexander was the absolute opposite to Montgomery. He was quiet, reserved. Montgomery was flamboyant, wanted to, you know, had to wear a beret with two badges on it, that sort of thing. And he wore an Australian hat for a while in the desert. But Montgomery was the showman, but he had the great tactical ability, and he had the view that the troops must CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 44 of 90 believe in their commander. Therefore, they must see their commander. And that's why he sort of toured round amongst the troops, making sure they knew what he looked like and he was their commander.

Whereas Alexander was, he was one level higher - because Alexander at that stage had three armies under his command, not just Montgomery, 8th Army - he had the 9th Army in Syria and Iraq way over in Iran, and he had the 10th Army with mainly Indian troops, or troops from India. So that Alexander, although he came up a few times and met the troops and so on, he was the more elevated reserved commander, he had to deal with governments and diplomats and so on, whereas Monty was concerned with commanding an army, troops.

What was the measure of his greatness? I mean, the things you described ...

Who?

Alexander.

Alexander.

I mean, okay, he had to do this political work. But you went a bit further than that. You were praising him more highly than just saying he did a reasonable job.

Well, he commanded the evacuation at Ostend from, you know, the evacuation from France back in 1940, and although I can't say how accurate it is, but he was the last man to step .... He made everybody else get off first, and then he stepped into the boat and went off. But it was his command of that withdrawal to Dunkirk - I said Ostend, but Ostend is quite close to Dunkirk - he commanded that withdrawal to Ostend against the German attacks, kept the whole thing, everybody a coherent force, and eventually got them all off.

Now, he also commanded in Norway. Although that was a defeat, it was very skillfully organised and he also commanded in the north-west frontier of India when I was serving up there as a brigadier. He achieved a remarkable feat up there in defeating the Mohaunds in the shortest possible time. It almost rocked the old people who can't, you know, can't dispose of a campaign as quickly as that (laughing).

But Alexander .... And of course, Eisenhower, when he was being made commander-in-chief - Allied Commander-in-Chief - Eisenhower recognised this and he suggested it should be Alexander, not him. But of course, the Americans wouldn't have a British commander over American troops, so Eisenhower got it. But Alexander then commanded the whole of the Mediterranean, you know, and the Italian campaign up through Italy and ...

(15.00) There were American troops in that of course.

Oh yes, but he was the Allied Commander in Italy. I'm talking about Eisenhower being the Supreme Commander, Allied troops in Europe. But he, well my opinion, and I've seen a lot of him before the war and during the war, in my opinion Alexander was the greatest commander the Allies had. And I'll stick by that.

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 45 of 90

So your own role in the battle of El Alamein. Could you describe, from a personal point of view, how those days went for you?

Well, the point of it is you've got to go back a little bit, because after the Syrian operations, which I fought through as Brigade Major, 21st Brigade, I was made DSO 2, 7th Division. That is the second senior staff officer in the, on the operation side of 7th Division, and I carried out a reconnaissance of the Turkish frontier, because at that stage people, they were afraid that Germany might come down through Turkey.

How did you carry on a reconnaissance?

Oh well, you take a staff of gunners, signallers, the odd infantry commander with you and engineers, and we did it, we did the whole patrol, the whole reconnaissance, on the top of the Lebanon mountains, which of course is a range of 10,000 feet. We did it all mounted. I was, I think ...

Horses.

Oh yes, I think I was given the job because I was a cavalryman you see. Anyway, we did a total reconnaissance of the whole of Northern Syria across the Turkish front ...

This effectively, in a sense, it's not behind enemy lines, but it's sort of away from Allied troops?

No, well the point of it is you, well, you're part of Allied troops. You're forward reconnoitering, but anyway I had to write a reconnaissance report on that, and I think the defence of Northern Syria was based on that reconnaissance report.

But then just at the end of '41, I suddenly found myself posted to Auchinleck's staff as a G2 staff duties. I was responsible for all the equipment and everything, the distribution of it, the recalling of it, the re-equipping the divisions and so on. That was from December '41 through till about early June '42, and that's, you may recall, is when Tobruk fell. Morshead had held it for, ah, I've just forgotten .... Six, seven months really, and the South African division which went into Tobruk, didn't hold it for twenty-four hours. I've never seen a man .... I was at a conference in which the news came over. You see in a novel, `His face darkened ....'. I saw Morshead's face darken when they said Tobruk had fallen, only a day after it was attacked.

So, anyway, I was recalled then to the 9th Division to be .... Morshead said to me, `I don't want you to think you're forgotten, but in keeping with my policy for having reserves, I'm going to retain you in the Middle East', 'cause I thought I'd be going back to Australia when I was released from Auchinleck's staff. But anyway, I went back up the desert as Brigade Major of the 26th Brigade then.

What was the function of a Brigade Major?

He's a senior staff officer of brigade, you see. He's responsible for all aspects of operations and he also controls all the staff work of the brigade. But anyway, we left Northern Syria at a high rate of speed, we took all the divisional signs off the vehicles so that the Arabs couldn't CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 46 of 90 identify us. Then we streamed right down on a - quite a forced march - down through Syria, Southern Palestine, round across the Sinai Desert, up through Cairo and we were ....

(20.00) At this stage, Rommel had chased the 8th Army back to El Alamein, and so we had air force vehicles, all sorts of vehicles, coming south from Alexandria to Cairo and it was terrible trying to get through. And I remember at one stage a bit of a blockage - this is at night time, driving in the dark, you see, because you couldn't risk air attack with lights on - and I remember two convoys going either way were jammed. And I remember a British officer saying, `What troops? What are these people going up the desert?' And somebody said, `Oh it's the Australians', and this Brit officer - well Brit, I don't know if he was an officer or not, I couldn't see in the dark - he said, `I didn't think there were any left in the theatre'. `Oh', he said, `Yes'.

Anyway, we fought our way up - not fought, because it was, oh, a struggle trying to get the convoys up, and eventually arrived up just behind El Alamein, and then were given orders to attack and capture Tel el Eisa. Now, Tel el Eisa was a feature, it was about twenty-seven feet above sea level in a low, flat desert, you see. And there were three points on it, twenty-seven .... We used to call them western and eastern point twenty-seven, and then there was a twenty-seven in the middle. In other words, it was just a low hump like that, and we were given the orders to attack and capture that because those humps gave observation over the whole of the El Alamein position, which brings into question whoever designed the El Alamein position, which I gather was designed the previous year and planned and the anti- tank ditch was dug while Tobruk was still occupied by the Australians. Anyway, we attacked the Tel el Eisa - I think it was the 10th July 1942 - and captured it. We did a silent attack, which was - silent night attack - and we took everybody by surprise. They were asleep and we captured, oh ...

This is on foot?

Oh yes, yes. Captured all the ...

Could you just describe how you'd go about, how you, and your role, how you did a silent attack?

Oh I was a brigade major. I had to write the plans for the attack and issue the orders under the direction of the brigade commander. And then, when it's launched, you go out and supervise and make sure. There were tanks coming up to support the second phase of the attack. They got bogged in some of the .... They got off their right route and got bogged in some of the salt pans just inside the, just in from the coast.

It was held by the Germans?

Tel el Eisa was held by Germans and Italians.

Right. How many?

Well we killed a lot and we took over a thousand prisoners, and we captured a lot of transport. But most significantly, we captured Rommel's intercept section. And Rommel never won a battle after that. That was the great mystique of Rommel. He had this perfect CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 47 of 90 intercept section which translated all our signals and sometimes Rommel had British orders before the troops - British troops - had them. But that was a tremendous capture that was, to capture that intercept section.

Were you divided up into, what? Company strength, battalion strength, people disguised ...

Two battalions.

... black faces?

No, oh ordinary camouflage. It was done at night. But you have two battalions, the 2/24th and the 2/48th and they attacked westwards, and the 2/48th took the eastern point two seven, and the 2/24th went up the coastal strip, captured the intercept section up there and then turned west, no, turned south really and captured the other peak, slight hump, of Tel el Eisa, and did it all in - it was done in a silent attack, so no gun fire, no artillery fire in support. You just moved silently into their lines and ...

Knives, or what?

Hm?

Knives or bayonets?

Oh rifle and bayonet, rifle, bayonet, pistol, grenade, everything.

Right.

The ordinary equipment of an attacking force, but you do it silently without artillery fire. Anyway, we captured the thing really quite easily, surprisingly easily, and captured a large number of prisoners, transport, guns and also more particularly this intercept section.

Now, did you know the intercept section was there when you went in?

(25.00) We didn't, but GHQ did. That was one of the things they wanted us, why they wanted us to attack it in a certain way. But when it was captured, of course, it got us tremendous pats on the back and (laughing) eulogising by the GHQ and the people concerned. 'Cause they could find where that intercept section was by, with their direction finding equipment and interception, their own interception. They could find where that interception section was, and they knew it was there. And well, there it was. It was one of the feathers in the cap of the attack. Anyway, we held Tel el Eisa thereafter.

The Germans reacted very strongly, counter-attacked violently. At one stage they sent - about the 12th of July I think it was - they sent the whole of the 90th Light Division in to attack on the 2/24th Battalion front. Now there were nine battalions of infantry in that 90th Light Division, and they attacked on a one battalion front, and Brigadier Ramsay, the Commander of Royal Artillery of the 9th Division, was given the divisional artillery of the two divisions south of him to go to work on the Germans. And they really tore.

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 48 of 90

They really caused heavy casualties in this mass attack by the Germans. I think they lost twenty-two tanks that late afternoon. The Germans used to always attack out of the setting sun, you see. Very hard to see them in the desert. But they shelled absolute hell out of the Germans, and the Germans' tanks went, had to keep going to avoid the shellfire, whereas the infantry in the personnel carriers, they were being blown to pieces. They couldn't get out of it, so that the infantry never married up with their attacks, with their tanks. When the tanks arrived at the objectives .... That's one of the best principles of defence. You must divorce the infantry from the tanks. We did that in that attack. And that set the Germans back on their heels pretty solidly.

Was it that action that got you the OBE?

Oh, I don't know, I wouldn't know. It just came after a period. It was certainly while I was .... No, I got an MID for Tel el Eisa. The OBE came at Alamein, after Alamein.

So that was in the lead up to Alamein? El Alamein?

Oh yes, but it was quite a few months ahead you see. July, August, September, and El Alamein was 23rd of October. But Alamein was not undertaken .... Although Montgomery had been planning it even while he was planning to defeat Rommel in the south, he'd been planning El Alamein for the final break-out, and all, every deceptive method was used that was possible. I mean, trucks with cardboard shapes over to make them look like tanks were parked overnight up in the northern sector. There was tanks with frames over them to make them look like trucks were parked down (laughing) in the southern sector. In other words, the whole idea was to make, to confuse the enemy as to where the attack was coming, 'cause they knew it was coming.

Anyway, I told you, the plan was explained right down to the private soldier, and then on the 23rd October 1942, at twenty minutes to ten, a barrage of nearly a thousand guns opened on every known identified gun position on the German side, and then having done that for about twenty minutes, then the gunners dropped onto the enemy infantry, and the advance took place. The result was that there was practically no worthwhile defensive artillery fire, because all the guns, all the gun positions had been knocked out, shelled for twenty minutes before the attack started, so that most of the guns were really damaged or the personnel killed or wounded. So that we didn't get very much defensive artillery fire on the attacking infantry at all.

The problem was the minefields, of course. We had to go to a tremendous length to plan the mine field breaching. The engineers did a wonderful job there. The Commander of the Royal Engineers of 9th Division, who was Brigadier Risson - oh, he was Colonel Risson then - he designed the method for breaching minefields which was used by the British and Allied forces for the rest of the war, and that was first implemented at El Alamein. Used to ...

END TAPE 4, SIDE A.

BEGIN TAPE 4, SIDE B.

Identification: this is side two, tape four, Major-General Finlay.

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 49 of 90

Sorry, if you could just go back a sentence or two. Just describe the way the minefields were dealt with please?

Well, the idea was that they used aluminium cans, like the sort of soft drink cans and things like that, with a torch light and a battery fixed to them, and they were .... So that the light showed through the empty bottom of the can, and they were attached to angle iron pickets driven into the desert. See, once the minefield is cleared, you know, the actual engineers go in, a sweeping team, and they lift the mines, get them over to the sides of the gap, and then they put in these, hammer in these angle iron pickets with a torch showing through the bottom of the can backwards towards the advancing infantry. More particularly, towards the advancing transport supporting the infantry. And those angle iron pickets are set at about fifty yards distance, right through the minefield, with the light showing back. They can't be seen from the enemy; they can be seen from the attacking infantry point of view. And that was first tried at El Alamein and that's where the .... It was adopted thereafter by, for minefield breaching by the Allied forces right through the rest of the war. It was an Australian engineer commander who invented it and implemented it and it was, you know, a hundred per cent successful.

What was your own personal role during that, you know, the key day or days of the battle?

Of El Alamein? Practically no sleep whatsoever. Well I went at one stage 105 hours with only eight hours sleep in the middle. And, well, you don't get tired .... There isn't time to sleep with things happening all the time. Well, you're on the go all the time, that's all there is to it.

What were you doing?

Hm?

I'm just trying to get more specific, a more specific picture of what was happening.

Well, you know, as each phase of the battle happens, you prepare for the continuation of attack the next night, because it was done on a moonlight night, so that you could see enough without being seen well enough. And, well, as soon as that particular objective is captured - you've got to get everything all consolidated so that they can defend themselves against counter-attack - and then you're planning and issuing the orders for the attack the following night.

If it's not the same battalion, it will be another battalion you see. Because the 2/24th and 2/48th attacked here and then there had to be an attack by the 2/23rd to turn right and go up that way, and you've got to plan and issue the instructions for all this during the day - you're in the dug-out in the desert. Then you've got to implement it that night, and of course you've got to keep in touch, make sure they get their objectives, take action if they run into trouble and that sort of thing, so you just don't get any sleep, that's what it amounts to.

Even for the people getting more sleep than you, it does suggest a picture .... I mean, presumably the people, the Germans, were even more exhausted. But it CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 50 of 90

suggests a lot of very exhausted people. I mean, are you getting mistakes out there? I'm not saying on your part, mistakes. (Finlay speaking over Connell).

(5.00) Well, after all, a battle is an exhausting business, if you keep up with it. If you don't keep up with it you're either killed or captured. Everybody was exhausted, but you see where you use one battalion or two battalions for this particular phase of the attack, and they capture it and then they're dug in, in a defensive position, they have their own quick minefields they lay across their front so that a tank, it's hazardous for tanks to go at them. Then, while the other one's doing that, these people can sleep - eat and sleep. They've got sentries, you know, so that if any attack comes they wake the others up.

But then the brigade major, for instance, and some people on the divisional staff, they're working and planning the next move, which has to take place that night, the next night, and then when they've got their objective and reorganised and consolidated and everything, just by dawn - because you've got to get the vehicles that come in with them, bring their supplies and all that sort of thing, you've got to get them out again because there's nothing like being caught, vehicles being caught for the forward area in daylight. They get worked over very quickly. But then you turn your attention, you have to do the attack for the other battalions then. And it's, that's why you go without sleep for long periods.

You taking many casualties?

Oh yes, we had quite a few casualties, particularly Italians. The Germans used to try and strengthen defence. They used to intersperse Germans' and Italians' units in the defence in the line. But the Germans didn't surrender willingly, whereas the eyeties did. Mainly eyetie prisoners, but the Germans .... We had a lot of German prisoners too, but they didn't give up at all easily.

At this time, I mean, there's no .... It's all just work, work, work. So, how .... I mean, in a sense, how did the battle sort of end? Is there a basic moment?

Oh yes. Well, it was when Rommel decided he couldn't, he'd had it. When Montgomery burst through eventually in the centre, he'd drawn all the, with the attacks going up in the north, Rommel had been moving his reserves up to try and counter that, and then when he - Montgomery - reckoned he'd got enough reserves up there, Montgomery punched through the middle and came round behind him. And that's when Rommel took off. Well, he took off and somehow or other the Germans managed to commandeer all the transport and left the Italians on foot, so that the Germans went bolting off down the coast road westwards, and the Italians just had to be scooped up and shovelled back into trucks and taken back as prisoners- of-war.

Do you remember a specific signal coming through that meant the turning point had been reached? Or was it just something that gradually became clear over a period of time?

Well, it became clear the moment the tanks in strength had broken through the middle and were in behind the Germans. That's when .... And then Rommel just simply ordered the Germans out, and they started pouring back in trucks and then the great race started of trying to get our mobile forces round, keep going westwards and then turn up behind the Germans CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 51 of 90 so that you bottle, you hope to cut the Germans off. But unfortunately, luck played, came into it, and heavy rain delayed the British mobile force. With no tarmac road they were just going over desert trying to beat the Germans on the road and turn up, turn north behind them. But heavy rain bogged them for about three or four days and the Germans got away - or quite a lot of them got away - shall I put it that way.

Were you involved in .... You mentioned interrogating a French officer before. Were you involved in, say, interrogating the Italians? I was just wondering what they were saying about ...?

No, I never had anything to do at that stage with interrogating any of the prisoners, because they were scooped up and got out of the way as quickly as possible, because you're not allowed by the Geneva Convention to involve prisoners in actual fighting after they've surrendered. So they had to be got out of it quickly.

(10.00) What were the main forms of intelligence that were being used on the Allied side?

Every conceivable way.

I'm thinking, for example, of, you know, the famous 'Ultra' intercepts. I mean, this is something you wouldn't have known then. How were they sort of knowing what the Germans were doing to the extent that they could?

Well, the point of it was the Ultra system was successful. They knew, just as the Germans, and due to our bad signal security, the Germans knew more about our future plans than we knew about them, but that was eventually - after it was discovered how bad our security was - that was tightened up and stopped. But the damage was done as far as the Germans were concerned, because we'd captured their intercept section, and their intercept section, all the documents and things that we'd captured, showed very clearly how bad our security was. Rommel recognised he was done, because he was down south on a reconnaissance when the second gun fire of the second phase opened at Tel el Eisa, and he said, `What's that?' And one of his staff officers who was on the phone, the wireless, from up north, said, `It's, there's an attack up in the north'. Rommel said, he used a very bad, some very bad language, and said, `We're done. We're done for'. Ah, because he knew where that intercept section was. It was too far forward, of course, but it was brought forward to get a broader spread of its radio coverage of all the 8th Army headquarters and the corps headquarters signal stations, you see. And it also was able to cover Cairo as well, but had he stayed back the Tel el Eisa feature would have minimised, or would have dampened the reception. Well, there it is. But, where you said, `What form of intelligence was used?', well you used absolutely every form you can; intercepts, captured prisoners, captured documents, interrogation of prisoners, but you don't limit ...

I am not suggesting you limit, I was just wondering which in practice turned out to be most useful of all the ways that were available?

Well, really, and because of hindsight, obviously the intercept was the best, the most accurate, because you are ....

[Inaudible. Connell talking over Finlay]. CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 52 of 90

Ah, well that's [inaudible]. That is intercept. Intercepting is communication and changing it. 'Ultra' was only the code name for it. But you see, if you can intercept a commander talking on a telephone, there are verbal codes, but you learn those quite quickly. For instance, `Sunray' used to be the code name for the commander, and `Sunray II' was the second in command. See, `Sunray calling Sunray II', you know the commander is speaking to the second in command. That's if you know the code.

So, at the end of the battle, it must have been a great moment, but there must have been a fair bit of chaos around?

Well, not really. The situation, of course, the 9th Division having done a very large amount of the fighting in the north, had quite a few casualties of course. But we were, the troops were bitterly disappointed they were not included in the pursuit. See, they thought they ought to be tearing after the Germans (laughing) and having another go at them, and a lot of the troops were very, you know, felt they were being done out of the fruits of victory or something, that they weren't allowed to go screaming after the Germans in what we called `The Pursuit'. But, knowing the situation, it's in the last battle, last battle of El Alamein was where 9th Division was involved. Charles Weir, who commanded the 2/24th Battalion was knocked, and I was appointed commander 2/24th Battalion in the last phase of the attack. So I sort of brought the 2/24th Battalion back to Palestine and then brought it back to Australia. But that's, well, that's the one you're going to get on to later on. But to say again, what were you going to say?

(15.00) Well I was going to say, in terms of the different types of commands that people can have in their career, and I'm just thinking most careers have the sorts of distinctions I'm talking about, but a battalion commander, there's a degree of independence, presumably, that a battalion commander has that, say, perhaps a more senior person back in headquarters doesn't have, or a company commander. Well, a company commander is probably also psychologically an important moment in a person's life.

Oh yes.

Is this a fair way to look at that?

Well, to a soldier to have command is real ambition. That's tremendous, to be given command of a unit. Practically every soldier wants that, rather than - I'm talking about a regular soldier - rather than staff work, you know. It's all very well being a teacher and an administrator or a planner. The real element of army career is to have a command. I know that's the same in the navy, and the navy have their own ship. But the real thing in an army, or any of the services, is to have a command, not to be an administrator or a staff officer or a teacher or that sort of thing.

Even if that's more senior in rank?

Oh well, I know plenty of people who would prefer a command than to have a staff job. Well, at least, he can't be too much senior anyway. You mustn't tempt people, you know. But some staff jobs, of course, can be frustrating and angry-making when you can't get the CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 53 of 90 supplies or the equipment that are coming, should be coming forward and aren't, and you're getting blamed. You don't want that sort of thing to happen.

Just looking at the way in more peaceful times, say after the battle of El Alamein, the way the mess operated. Now, you know, the concept of the mess is a lot more than just the place where you get your food and your drink, isn't it? I mean, what is the, could you describe the significance of the mess from an organisational point of view?

Well, it's the fellowship, the cohesion, in a way, although I said it's hard to define morale, it's a boost for the morale. The most wonderful thing when you come out of action is to set up the mess again, you see, get it going again. And the officers who've been out commanding their companies and troops and platoons in the battle don't see each other except perhaps at a command, battalion commanders' conference when the company commanders are to come together. But generally speaking, have all the officers together and the sergeants all have their sergeants' mess, you see. Ah, it's, it's like coming back home after a tough old period. Get the mess going again, because that is the home of the officers and the home of the sergeants in war time - and of course in peace time too, when they're single officers anyway, in a regular unit.

Is it also a place where perhaps a commanding officer such as you were at this stage, can perhaps in a slightly more relaxed atmosphere, sort of take note of what people are thinking about and worrying about and ...?

Well he takes part in all those discussions and tells them what he thinks about, but it's really like your own family home, that's what. For the officers it is the home of the officers of the unit, and they can discuss things. You're not supposed to talk shop in the mess, but quite obviously it does happen, particularly after a battle when everybody starts telling their, recounting their experiences and that sort of thing.

What are the other rules of the mess? You're not supposed to talk shop ...?

Oh, religion is another thing. You mustn't, you shouldn't talk religion because that can create divisions, you know. Ah, but shop of course does get talked. There's no two ways about it. You can't stop people reminiscing about what happened on that particular attack, and what happened somewhere else. But it's also a place for relaxation. I mean, in peacetime of course, there's always the billiard table and the tennis courts, but in war time, it's merely where you eat really, because you sleep in your tents and that sort of thing.

And, just thinking of that situation in late 1942, what were the range of activities that were available in your mess?

(20.00) Oh very little. There's usually ping .... When the mess is in a hut, there's usually a ping pong table, but if the mess is in a marquis, of course, that isn't always possible. But generally speaking, there are recreational activities. Say, in the afternoon, you can play volley ball and that sort of thing. I learnt volley ball ... the first time I played volley ball was in the war (laughing) in the afternoons, particularly just playing in boots and socks and a pair of shorts, or in some cases underpants, because nobody, oh they had shorts in the Middle East. CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 54 of 90

But that's the sort of thing. It's a relaxed atmosphere and, well, it's a good thing. Have everybody together in a relaxed atmosphere and, oh, discuss their own ideas and everything.

The move back to Australia, how did that happen? Suddenly? Expectedly?

Oh no. It was planned and we moved down. We went back to southern Palestine from the desert and we were there for, oh, I suppose all through December, January. Then we sailed in February. We moved, you know, to move a division of 13,000 people back about 700 miles by train is quite a staff job. I must mention one thing before we left. We held a ceremonial parade on Gaza airstrip to give Alexander the opportunity to farewell the division. He asked for the opportunity to farewell the division, and of course there's no parade ground capable of taking a division, so it had to be done on an aerodrome. I'll never forget the 9th Australian Division assembled on the aerodrome, and frontage was eleven hundred yards from the right flank to the left flank. And when Alexander arrived, Ramsay - the senior brigadier - was commanding the actual parade ...

That's about ten kilometres isn't it?

Oh no, no, eleven hundred yards.

Oh sorry (inaudible).

About 1.5 kilometres.

Getting my noughts mixed up.

Anyway, when Alexander arrived on the parade, Morshead greeted him, you see, and then Alex.... Ramsay gave the general salute and walked forward to meet Alexander, who was going to inspect, saluted him and said, `9th Australian Division; thirteen thousand seven hundred and forty-five on parade Sir; we await your inspection'. I wonder how many times (laughing) anybody's been told there were thirteen thousand on parade. Anyway, Morshead inspected the division in a jeep - you know, the way you've seen them now - but it wasn't done, nobody had seen it done previously, and he drove the full length of the division standing up in a jeep saluting the division. That's what he thought about the 9th Australian Division. I was pretty impressed with that. He drove the full eleven hundred yards with his hand up at the salute and that was his farewell. He made a speech and said how proud he was to have the 9th Australian Division under his command and so on.

But there's one thing that really I'd like to get on the record. We .... Co-ordinating the movement, drill movements and the rifle movements of a division of that size is almost impossible. But behind the saluting base there was one of those tall framework things that they have on aerodromes for, you know, where there isn't a building for the operation staff to watch. And we had a fugleman, that's a man who leads - has a flag - and he leads the actions. There was a fugleman up there, but he was behind everything. Nobody could see him, because they were all looking at the parade. And on the command, `The Division will present arms', you see, he had the thing up there and the commander then says, `Present arms'. And of course they can't, everybody on parade can't hear that, but they look at the fugleman and as soon as he flaps the flag down, they all go into the first movement, and then he flaps the second up and the second movement, all timed on this fugleman. I heard guard's officers say CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 55 of 90 they'd never seen, they were stunned at seeing a whole division as far as you could see either side going bloompt, bloompt, bloompt with their rifle movements - three movements in the present. I don't know whether they eventually discovered that it was all done by a fugleman behind them, standing up on this high tower with a big green flag. They were amazed at the precision and drill of the 9th Australian Division. But that was done .... I don't know whose idea that was but it came off tremendously well.

(25.00) So, the move back. What did you think you were going back to? Did you think you were staying with your battalion or what was going to happen?

Oh yes, well having got command of the battalion, I was expecting to go into action with it back in New Guinea or somewhere. Anyway, we came back to Australia and were given leave. Then we reassembled in the various states, and the Victorian units, of course, they marched through Melbourne and along Collins Street, and the salute was taken by the Governor and 9th Australian Division was feeling very proud of themselves.

Then of course, we moved up to the Atherton Tablelands to commence training for the jungle there. You're talking about changing in training, well that's when we did have to change, was to accommodate change from desert tactics to jungle tactics. The principles are all the same, but you've got to do it differently (laughing) in a jungle. So I said, you don't change tactics to meet an enemy, but you certainly have to change tactics to meet the difference in terrain. That was the case with the Western Desert and New Guinea.

END TAPE 4, SIDE B.

BEGIN TAPE 5, SIDE A.

Identification: this is the beginning of the third section of the interview with Major-General Finlay. The date is the 31st May 1990 and I am Daniel Connell. Side one, tape number five.

Right, we finished the last interview, Major-General Finlay, talking about your arrival on the Atherton Tablelands with your battalion from the Middle East, so if we could take up the story from there.

Well, our purpose for being there, of course, was to retrain for the purpose of going up and fighting in jungle warfare, which we had no experience of course, where the desert was quite different. And they had to train .... There was dense jungle available in and around the Atherton Tableland, so we had to do exercises up there to prepare ourselves for the fighting in New Guinea that was to come later on.

What were you being told about the fighting in New Guinea? I mean, I'm just making a distinction between what was in the paper, say, and what was coming through to you through the military sources.

Oh, well as I never saw what was in the papers (laughing), I can't make a differentiation there, but we were kept informed through intelligence sources, you see, what the position was and what progress was being made with a particular attack and that sort of thing.

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 56 of 90

This is early '43 is it not?

Yes, April-May '43. We were training on up there, and the Japs were being steadily driven back after Buna-Gona and ...

Was this before the Battle of the Bismarck Sea?

Oh no. The Battle of the Bismarck Sea was quite early on. No, that had happened. I'm not sure of the exact date, but it was of the order of 1942 at some stage. The Japs landed at Buna- Gona ....

I thought that was fairly late in '42.

Oh about August I think wasn't it? I was still in the Middle East so I can't give you a precise date, but when they ran into strife there, they attempted the Battle of the Coral Sea, attempted to come round the south-east point of New Guinea and come up from Moresby, and that's where the Battle of the Coral Sea took place.

(Inaudible). The Bismarck Sea ...?

I'm sorry, the Bismarck Sea.

That was when they tried to get a large number of troops across from Rabaul to reinforce either that or Japanese forces.

On Milne Bay do you mean?

Yeah.

Frankly, I've .... Not having been here in Australia and taken part in those actions, I haven't got them properly in order in my mind, because we didn't get back till early '43. But I frankly don't know whether the Battle of Bismarck Sea took place before the Battle of Coral Sea, because Coral Sea's when they came round the south-east point and tried to go directly from Moresby. Bismarck Sea, of course, the, I suppose went down about - well, I'm only guessing - but to support Milne Bay and Buna Gona, I think. They both were defeated so, and the Japs were defeated at Buna Gona and driven up, back up towards Wau, and then of course the plan to land and capture Nadzab and Finschhafen were being brought to fruition, and we were all being prepared for that, you see.

The 7th and 9th Divisions to go in, the 7th Division went to capture Lae, Nadzab, and the 9th Divisions to come in on the flank of Lae, Nadzab and then also capture Finschhafen round the corner in the Huon Peninsula. But that's what our training was all aimed at, you see. And of course the difference in tactics was quite remarkable because virtually it's one man to one man, and your enemy is only a few feet away at some stages in the jungle fighting, whereas of course we'd been used to being able to see the enemy miles away and take them on by artillery fire and machine-gun fire, but that isn't possible in close jungle warfare.

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 57 of 90

(5.00) Does that change the role of officers and NCOs? I'm thinking, if you're operating in larger units, an officer can exercise control, but if you're operating one to one, a person is having to ...

This more or less emphasises the point I made about Australian troops. That, because of the jungle warfare, and eventually Australian troops were recognised as the finest jungle troops, jungle warfare troops, because you had, your individual man was capable of taking decisions and thinking the situation clearly, and taking on his enemy on a one-man-one basis, you know, and also following it up with the, when he killed that fella. But that is the change of tactics. Of course, you've got no tanks to support you and artillery, heavy weapons, are very difficult to get into the jungle except by air lift and that sort of thing, so that it was very much an infantryman's battle, section to section, company to company. And that is the difference in the whole, the tactics of the difference between conventional warfare and jungle warfare.

How long did you stay with the battalion?

Ah, well in the midst of proceedings, oh it was about May 1943, Sir Leslie Morshead was given command - he was the 9th Division Commander - he was given command of the 2nd Corps, which was going - two divisions - which was going to do the Lae-Nadzab-Finshhafen landings. He went and inspected his headquarters up in the Atherton Tablelands, and practically none of the staff of the headquarters had any operational experience. So he arranged for them to be posted and he brought officers with battle experience in onto his headquarters, and unfortunately, I was one of those. I would much rather have stayed with my battalion, but I had to, because I was staff trained and had quite a bit of staff experience, I was brought onto his headquarters as his G1, General Staff Officer First Grade.

At that stage were you assuming a particular responsibility for intelligence?

No, no responsibility whatsoever for intelligence. I was operations at that stage. I hadn't run into intelligence work at all in the Middle East. I didn't particularly want to either.

What were your feelings? Before you got involved what were your feelings about intelligence work? As a soldier in the field, what did you think about those shadowy figures?

Oh well, our main criticism was that they never gave us the information early, quickly enough. You know, you have things happen and then you get a message saying it's going to happen. And they were regarded as, you know, backroom boys and not particularly with it on the whole. Later on, when one got a better knowledge of it, of course, you realised that absolutely everything that took place on your front wasn't the only things they were gathering information about. However, all of that, I'll probably get back onto that when we get on to the intelligence side of things myself.

Well, there it is. We drove the Japs out of Lae and Nadzab and drove them up the Markham River and the Markham Valley, and went round and took Finschhafen .... But that side, I've sort of jumped the plan now. We had to move up to New Guinea and take over all this responsibility in New Guinea see, when the corps headquarters and the two divisions moved up.

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 58 of 90

Why, was it because Morshead had been successful in the Middle East that - well, that's an obvious reason why he might be chosen - but, just a little bit surprised that they wouldn't be having someone who had had New Guinea experience at, say, the head of that operation.

(10.00) Well, why not? The point of it is that you have people like Mackay and Herring, who'd been fighting in New Guinea for the previous two years - well not two years, but certainly one year - and service in New Guinea, operational service in New Guinea, wears people out. And Rowell, of course, had had his row with Blamey and he was in England, but Herring and Mackay had been fighting, commanding in New Guinea and they were back in Australia on leave, exhausted. You know, loss of weight and taking aspirin and so on, and you can't have people up in New Guinea for very long as I think you'd know, particularly under the arduous circumstances. Morshead was a very capable lieutenant-general of the right rank and everything, so he was I would think the obvious choice then.

Within the Australian Army at that time, was there a tendency to be a bit of a division between, say, Middle East types and New Guinea types? I mean, was that a distinction or was that just something that I've dreamed up?

Oh I don't think there was much distinction there. 9 Div, of course, came back from the Middle East with a great reputation of course. A lot of people thought, `Oh, they're too cocky. They'll be cut down to size.' Well of course, that didn't happen. But there wasn't much division there, except, those who came back from the Middle East didn't have a very high opinion of those who hadn't joined the AIF. Some of them were sent up to New Guinea absolutely green with no training and made, didn't do so well against the Japs and that, and of course, when the trained, properly trained and experienced troops came back and went in, of course, they went into something they hadn't seen before, so the whole situation was very difficult in that 1942 period. But as I've constantly said, the Australian soldier is a very adaptable man, and he was able to overcome the situation and create his own tactics and beat the Japanese at theirs.

In terms of running military organisations, creating esprit de corps is obviously a very important part of what officers try and do, but the distinction between creating esprit de corps and creating a sense of competition between units vis- a-vis their reputations is a fairly fine one. Was, in terms of actually getting troops ready for the business of going into a very difficult experience and fighting in those sorts of situations, was this sort of thing discussed? How strongly would you encourage competition within the army between units, you know, notions of ...?

We didn't really adopt that approach.

Some military organisations do?

Quite often in peace time, not so much in war time. But we just went ahead with our training and trained and tried to get our units up to the best possible standard of training in the new environment as we possibly could. I don't think there was any, no deliberate competition devised to try and create a sense of competitiveness amongst the troops, but ...

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 59 of 90

Well what about the Americans? You've made a number of rather strong remarks at different times about the Americans, mostly so far off tape, but you were now having to deal with a situation where MacArthur had overall command, and you were having to deal with Americans in large numbers in Australia. How were you finding it?

I don't know that I'll answer that question. (Laughing) No. There were a lot of Americans in Australia, of course, and Australia had become a, well the base for the South-West Pacific operations, so necessarily with MacArthur's headquarters in Brisbane, there were a large number of Americans and of course there were the American Air Force here and American Navy in our, using our bases. And, hell, we wouldn't have got anywhere if they hadn't come in.

(15.00) General MacArthur, of course, had very little to do with the forward troops. He didn't even know how bad his own, some of his own troops were. I've forgotten which division it was - 41st I think, 41st Division - American division, was pushed into New Guinea with possibly even less training than some of our Militia units had. And they were very bad indeed. Some of their tactical concepts were open to question. I mean, this business of putting down a rolling mortar barrage, and then the move in and occupy it. Well, they found that that didn't work because the Japs used to just fall back a bit, and then come back into their positions and the American infantry would try and take them over and get shot up very severely.

(15.00) General Eichelberger at one stage actually asked for Australian troops and caused MacArthur intense annoyance by doing so?

I'm not aware of that at all. I do know that General Vasey, at one stage, when the 162nd US Regiment was under his command for an attack, when his G1 asked him, you know, had made out the 'sitrep' for the day, which is sent back to headquarters at the end of the day's play, I know Bill Robertson, who's senior staff officer of staff office, said, `I've got the situation report sir, for the Australian sector. What shall I say about the 162 Regiment?', which hadn't advanced an inch, made no progress at all. And George Vasey said, `Hebrews 4, Verse 16' or something. Don't look that up because I may be misquoting the text. And Bill Robertson said, `I beg your pardon, sir?'. He said, `Hebrews 4, Verse 16'. So Bill Robertson had to go back and find a Bible and he found out that this `Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today and forever'. (Laughing.) That's what he had to put in his sitrep. But really I don't want to dwell on the shortcomings of some of those early American troops, because really the shortcomings are some of ours, some of our troops that went in early into New Guinea were quite horrendous really. They weren't trained, and their leaders hadn't proper training, yet they had to go up and face up to the Japanese because that's all we had available here in Australia at that stage.

You mentioned that the early operations in the Middle East proceeded smoothly because the Australian troops, like the Canadians and South Africans and New Zealanders, had been basically trained within a British system, so there was no serious dislocation involved in bringing them together. But in this particular situation, going into Nadzab and Lae and places like that, you were involved in using and co-operating with American troops in all sorts of different ways, or their aerial support and things like that. Two allies, but CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 60 of 90

could you comment on the different systems and how they graded up against each other?

No, well actually, quite a lot of that had been worked out and, you know, staff systems had been looked at and we learnt something of the American staff system so that we, if we had to send a signal to an American unit, we knew, we understood some of the terms they used. For instance, in a British order you say, `The 21st Australian Brigade will attack and capture Wau' say, or something like that, whereas the American way of saying that is quite different.

What would it be?

Oh well, frankly I can't remember now, but some of the things - they used to use a term which we never used, and that is that something was `mandatory'. Well, that means that you will do it. We just simply say, `Such and such a formation or unit will move to Wau' or wherever you're talking about, and the date. We don't say it's mandatory to do things. Anyway, that's only a very ordinary difference. I can't remember all the differences because it's getting on a fairly long time ago.

What about the level of technology? They were bringing enormous material resources into the waging of war.

Well, it was no more than the fact that they had the resources. Had we had the same resources we'd have used the same methods. Had we had the landing ships and the transport aircraft, we'd have used them just the same as they did. But, you see, we didn't have them. We had to rely on them for transport aircraft and shipping, to move our troops and of course the specialised landing craft that they had. Had we had those, we'd have used them in exactly the same way so there was nothing very revolutionary there, except that we didn't have things we ought to have had if we were in the middle of a war.

Were you socialising with the Americans?

You didn't get much chance to socialise in New Guinea.

(10.00) Well, mixing, whether in the pursuit of work or pleasure?

Well, you see, you see them .... Later on, when I was on an American headquarters, of course you see them a lot there, but only in the headquarters and back at .... And of course we had our own mess in the Philippines - the Australian section. But socialising, it just doesn't happen in war in that sense, unless you're all back in a base area like Cairo in the Middle East, or Brisbane in Australia. They tend to keep to themselves and I suppose we tended to keep to ourselves.

What were the steps that lead you to be appointed to military intelligence?

Well that is rather a funny one, but during the operations in New Guinea when our headquarters at Dobodura and the Nadzab and Finschhafen fighting was going on, it became apparent that although the Japs were .... We were driving the Japs back, and we'd cut off practically everything, stopped them getting their supplies, it became apparent every now and then that they were getting supplies. So General Wells, who was the Chief of Staff to General CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 61 of 90

Morshead on the Corps Headquarters - he was called the BGS - Brigadier, General Staff - he said to me, `Well Basil, you, I want you to do a 'Q' intelligence study of this. I'm not satisfied that the intelligence people tell us they're getting it through porterage, coming down native porterage.' He said, `I'm not satisfied with that, and will you do a 'Q' study' - that's a logistics study - `and try and see what it's all about?'

I sort of put my thinking cap on and called for all the signals that had come in over the past month or so, and it became apparent to me, after studying these signals, that every time .... Shortly after there was a submarine sighting of Cape Gasmata in New Britain - I don't know if you know, oh, you'd know your geography - it became apparent that there was some re-supply up on the Huon coast, the Rai coast it's called up there. And so I thought, well `Hell, this submarine ....'.

Thirty-six hours after the submarine was sighted off Cape Gasmata, there was usually some evidence that the Japs had got some fresh supplies. So I said to General Wells - oh, Brigadier Wells then - `I'm going down to see Commander Oom at Oro Bay'. He commanded the light naval facilities, you know, the PT boats and the MLs, which - one has radar and the other has asdic or sonar. And they used to patrol together, you see, and the radar picks up anything on the surface and the sonar picks up anything underneath. I said to him, `Well look, I'd like to ask you to put a patrol, a combined PT boat/ML patrol on the Rai coast, you know, when I give you the word'. And he said, `Yeah, I'll put one on immediately'. I said, `No, I don't want that. I've got, there's a particular reason we must have it on, you know, at a particular time.' So he said, `Righto'. Anyway, a few days later up came a submarine sighting from Gasmata - Cape Gasmata - it was one of the coastwatchers inland, you see.

What, they had to do a surface exit from ...?

Oh well, they, for speed purposes they would [inaudible] and there wasn't much aerial surveillance, and if there were, of course, it would only be reconnaissance. It wouldn't be bomber attack, and they could dive and get away from it that way. But, so up came this sighting, this signal, so I went down to Commander Oom and said, `Here Tom, can you put it on tonight?' and he said, `Yes'. The early morning signals came in the next morning and there we are, we've got a 4,000 tonne submarine offloading supplies up north of Fortification Point - I can't remember the exact point it was.

So everybody was very happy and thought that was tremendous, but oh, about ten days later .... Apparently General, well Brigadier Wells had told the DMI that I'd been responsible for getting this submarine. Next thing was Brigadier Rogers was up in Dobodura and he came in and saw me and said, `Would you like to undertake intelligence work?'. I said, `Sir, I'm a regular soldier. I go where I'm told, I go where I'm sent and do as I'm told. I've never lobbied for a job and I've never refused one.' `Oh', he said, `I'm very glad to know that'. Anyway, the next thing I knew I was posted to Intelligence down in Brisbane.

(25.00) In charge of it?

No. Oh no. I was posted down as .... My only job was I was put in charge of what we used to call the `miscellaneous funnies'. That's like the, oh, the Translator Interpreter Section, the `Z' Special Units, the Service Reconnaissance Department - all those units that do clandestine, clandestine operations, intelligence work, propaganda for FELO - Far Eastern Liaison CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 62 of 90

Organisation - and then the Allied Geographic section which was the one responsible for getting together all the geographic information about beaches and gradients and hinterlands and so on. In fact I was called GSO1 (Intelligence) SIO, which was Special Intelligence Organisations. Anyway, one of the units I had, one of the organisations I had to deal with and co-ordinate from the point of view of the Director of Military Intelligence was Services Reconnaissance Department, or the operative arm of which is `Z' Special Unit, or was, of course.

`M' Specials as well?

No, `M' is a different unit. `M', that was the coastwatchers and ...

But you were looking after the `M's too, were you?

Only insofar as the liaison and co-ordination for the DMI's point of view was concerned. But `Z' Special Unit of course was a unit of the Australian Army completely, or completely under the control of the Australian Army, whereas some of these others were under the control of Allied Intelligence Bureau, you know, and more or less the American Army. Anyway, after about a few months of that, it was decided that I'd be more effective if I actually went down and became part of SRD and commanded `Z' Special Unit myself, you see. So, round about ...

Why was that, why did that feeling build up?

Well it, it was felt, well the DMI felt he wanted me in `Z' Special Unit, because there was .... `Z' Special Unit was really under the direction of a British officer in SRD - the Director of Services Reconnaissance Department - and ...

It hadn't it been operating very well? Was that the suggestion?

Oh well, there were certain aspects of lack of co-operation, shall we put it that way, between this British officer - Colonel - and Brigadier Rogers, and he said, `Look, it would be handled better if I was made commander of `Z' Special Unit'. So that happened, and I then took command of `Z' Special Unit, and that was about, oh about June '43 I think. Wait a tick, no it'd be June '44. So I went down to Melbourne and started running `Z' Special Unit ...

END TAPE 5, SIDE A

BEGIN TAPE 5, SIDE B.

Identification: This is side two, tape five, Major-General Finlay.

Right. `Z' Special. In 1944, what sort of operations was it undertaking?

Well of course, you may recall, if you've heard of it, the principal operation, which caused, was regarded as the most enormous success, was the attack on Singapore, by the Krait, and the sinking of 37,500 tonnes of Japanese shipping in Singapore Harbour. That was the most successful exploit. But we had ...

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 63 of 90

What was the date of that?

Oh that was late '43.

Right, and, but by this time in mid-'44 was the role changing?

No, the role was the same. We had troops, you had parties in New Guinea, in Timor, in Borneo and we had parties on American submarines, one of which, of course, was the famous occasion when the American submarine commander was able to signal his headquarters and say, `I've sunk a train'. (Laughing.)

What was that story?

Well, he had a party of saboteurs, two Australian saboteurs, on the ship - on the sub - with fol boats, and they, after observing Camranh Bay in Indo-China, they realised that there was a very good target, a bridge - a railway bridge - which crossed the river that leads into Camranh Bay. So they got into their fol boats at night and paddled up to Camranh Bay, up to the pylons of this railway bridge with their explosives and everything, and the bridge was heavily guarded at both ends by Japanese, you see. They climbed the pylon in the centre of the bridge and set a fuse on the line, an explosive charge on the line, to be detonated by the train passing over it, and of course then paddled, sort of climbed down the pylon, paddled back to the submarine, and then observed from periscope level. In due course a train arrived and blew itself up and fell into the river and caused a hell of a chaos, and this submarine commander was able to signal that he had torpedoed a train, you see.

Right.

But that was .... We started using those parties on British submarines and we had a couple of successful things that way, you know, capturing natives from islands and bringing them back to Australia for interrogation about what the Japs were doing and all that sort of thing. And the Americans got the idea too, and they started taking `Z' Special Unit parties onto, on their submarines.

What, they didn't have their own similar types of people?

Well later on. Of course, the situation when the Americans came out to Australia, they had even less knowledge of what we call `special operations' than the Australians had, because we had the help of the British and the British .... A party that had been sent out to Singapore to organise left-behind parties and that sort of thing, they came down to Australia, and that was where SRD was started. But the Americans didn't even understand what it was about, although they later on got their own organisation called OSS going. But, what do we call it ...?

The CIA - later.

The CIA later, but OSS was Office of Strategic Services, they used to call their clandestine unit.

(5.00) That was General Donovan wasn't it? CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 64 of 90

I wouldn't be sure at that stage.

But in your area, I've got some idea of the situation that existed in Papua New Guinea, but in Indonesia and Malaysia and places like that, what sort of local networks were you able to co-ordinate with or have contact with?

Very little, because the Japs brutalised their occupied countries and actually later on, of course, they .... Quite, several of our parties were betrayed to the Japs by the natives, because the natives were terrorised into telling the Japs everything, 'cause they knew damn well that if the Japs discovered they knew something like that - they knew there was an Australian or an Allied party - they'd, the Japs would kill the natives, burn their villages, you know, and kill their families and all that sort of thing. That went on quite a bit, so that there was no way we could really rely on the local population.

You see, after all, you've got to realise that we were a small number of white faces in a totally Asiatic - including Japanese .... The locals, the local people of the country concerned were Asiatic, the Japs were Asiatic, so a white face was very easily recognised. We did have some Malayan policemen who we used in Borneo and they were very good, behind the lines with the Dyaks. They wrought some pretty good mayhem against the Japanese later on when the invasion of Borneo began. But otherwise, it was a very different proposition to special operations in Europe, where you had, you know, an Englishman who's indistinguishable from a German, just looking at him, and a Frenchman, or Belgian or a Dutchman, or a Norwegian; whereas in Malaya, Burma, Thailand, Indochina and Indonesia, a white man is an unusual sight at that stage.

The aim of the operations, was it, you've mentioned sabotage. Was that the main function?

Well no. Well, one thing .... The total object of special operations is one, to encourage the local people to resist the occupying forces, to set up networks, to damage the Japanese war effort where possible and it's the sort of thing that went on in Europe all the time, you know, blowing up things - German installations - creating resistance movements, countering collaboration, that sort of thing. In other words, it's another means of defeating the enemy - helping to defeat the enemy.

Well just looking at `Z' Special, could we just talk about how they went about some of those things you've just talked about? You've said that initially there were very few networks or contacts that they could call on.

Well nobody back in, before 1941, before December 1941, the extent to which the Japanese could over-run and occupy territory all down to the south-west of Japan was so really greatly underestimated that nobody had made any plans to counter such a thing, as one does in Europe, you know - and did in Europe with the undergrounds in Norway and Holland and France and so on. And as a result, of course, there were no parties left behind, nothing was done.

About the only thing that was done by a very very good bit of foresight was the creation of the coastwatching service in the Solomons, in New Guinea and New Britain and New Ireland. CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 65 of 90

And that was largely due to the wisdom of the Director of Naval Intelligence, before, you know, before the Japs came in. And of course it was a tremendous help for reporting the movement of Jap ships and Jap aircraft and that sort of thing. But, as I say, nobody was ready for it. The Japs over-ran the whole of South-East Asia virtually, and Indonesia quite quickly.

(10.00) So how did you go about building up those networks?

Well, we were able to find people who had lived in New Guinea before the war. Old Townsend of the Sepik - I don't know if you've ever heard of him. And of course there were people who were, who had worked in Borneo before the war and in Malaya. They had got out when the Japs over-ran the place and many of them came to Australia, so we embodied them into `Z' Special Unit and used them. We had a very strong, very good team in Borneo and we made up - there was Gort Chester there and Bill Jenkins - they all had lived in Borneo before the war. Well, they were inserted by aircraft drop, by submarine and that sort of thing, and joined up with people they knew before the war, particularly some of the Malayan policemen in Borneo. And that's how you go about doing it.

They trained and mobilised the Dyaks, who were so, they were a pretty bloodthirsty group anyway, and they hated the Japanese, the way the Japanese had destroyed their villages, taken their crops and all that, and they were only too willing to be guided into how to attack the Japs. They were given rifles and everything, but they were very poor shots. They were far better with blow pipes and poison darts. And they accounted for a lot of Japanese. That was the Semut party - S-E-M-U-T - Semut. But that's the way ....

They were inserted, they were trained and of course they were people .... Where possible, we used people who knew the territory, knew the area they were going into, and they were trained in all sorts of miscellaneous bits of mayhem which enabled them to blow things up and so on. And well, they, particularly .... The classic one, of course, was the famous operations against the Japanese in Borneo in June '45 when 9th Division attacked at Brunei Bay. That's where the ...

Just taking that as an example, could you describe the role that `Z' Special Unit played in that operation, as an example of the way ...?

Well, the `Z' Special Unit personnel, who were dropped into Borneo by air, into Central Borneo - and they had their supplies and their rifles and everything dropped in with them - they trained the Dyaks and tried to create them into an orderly group, which was almost impossible, and only made possible by the fact that there was some former .... We had some former Malayan policemen who had served in Borneo and were able to inject a little bit of discipline into the Dyaks, but then, when ....

They only did minor local attacks on patrols and things like that, but when the 9th Australian Division attacked at Brunei Bay, of course they went into full scale operations at the, in the rear of the Japanese, and by the time the whole thing was finished, they'd killed over sixteen hundred Japanese and dispersed and disrupted the Japanese attempts at counter-attack and that sort of thing, and it was really a very successful operation that one. We had our failures, of course.

What were one of the failures? CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 66 of 90

Oh well, there was Timor, when the Japanese captured one of our parties and somehow or other got their hands on the authentication signal and were able to force this party to send signals, you know, full signals back to Australia. That was an unfortunate one, but that happened ...

What sort of impact did those full signals have?

Not very much because we realised quite quickly that something was amiss, and that they had been captured.

Can you remember how you realised that?

Oh, signallers have what they might call a fingerprint, and if your signaller back at base recognises that something is wrong, the signalling signaller, it's not the same signaller - that sort of thing. But, you know, first of all there's doubt, and then you have to, then you set a trap by sending a particular signal that, in which there's a code word that the operator - the true operator - would know, but the false operator - a Jap operator - wouldn't know, and when that isn't picked up you know that something's wrong, so you then go very carefully and don't send any important messages or anything like that. But you keep the thing open in case you can pick up some information.

(15.00) And feed in disinformation?

Oh yes, a certain amount of disinformation is fed in, but the Japs in fact were quite clever you know. They weren't dull at all. But that's one of the failures and then, of course, we had a party in before the Balikpapan landing that was betrayed and captured and killed. And then we had another party in, we called the `Python party', in Eastern Borneo which we were trying to find out what was going on in the Jap prisoner-of-war camp at Sandakan, and if possible get some prisoners out. But that party, three of that party, were betrayed to the Japs and the Japs executed them, but .... They had a phoney trial, but they executed them. But the other, rest of the party escaped into the Moru Archipelago [sic], Sulu Archipelago and got up into the Philippines, got up that way, got out that way. But others were chased round and had to be evacuated by submarine which took, in some cases, took a couple of months, but there it is.

What sort of contact? Was that the only time that you tried to have contact with prisoners-of-war?

Oh no, we had other attempts, but ...

Was it mainly getting people out, or were you actually trying to establish a regular means of communication with them?

No, its .... Well at that stage, we were trying to get them out, or see whether we could get them out. But the big thing of course, is you've got to get the information, got to find out what the situation is, and that's what the initial party goes in for. But they had to, they had to be very very careful because the Japanese terrorised the locals and you had to be very careful who saw you and who knew you were there. CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 67 of 90

The conditions that came out into the open after the war, the appalling conditions on the Burma railroad and things like that, were they known during the war?

Oh I think so, yes. There were people who escaped from the Burma railway, you know. But what the Japs did, as soon as they discovered the `Python party' - that's the code name we had for that party - just near Sandakan, the Japs decided the best thing to do was to reduce the ration of the prisoners-of-war so they wouldn't be able to fight if an attempt was made to release them. That's why they were reduced to very low rations and were in such a terrible state when eventually the Jap commander of the 37th Division became a bit worried, thinking the place would be attacked - because this was getting up into 1945 - and he ordered that the Sandakan RANAU march, which of course turned out to be a death march.

Two thousand, there were 2,000 prisoners-of-war in the Sandakan prisoner-of-war camp - British and Australian - and at the end of the march there were only six survivors. Anybody who was too weak to go on was shot, and it was one of the worst atrocities the Japs committed of course, just as, certainly the equal of Burma railway treatment.

Asia before the war had been in a sense a mosaic of European colonies, whether we're talking about the Dutch or Malaya, and certainly I'm aware that the Dutch were making very active plans for what they were going to do when they went back there, and I don't doubt the British and French were doing the same. What sort of role, what sort of connection did you have with those political plans?

Well, frankly, some of the objects of getting people into Borneo and into Malaya were with the object of ensuring that when the Japs were beaten everything could be picked up again quickly. We were not particularly concerned with the Netherlands colonies. The Netherlands themselves were, of course. They wanted to get their hands back on the oil that was there at Balikpapan and elsewhere. But they had an organisation they called NEFIS for Netherlands Forces Intelligence Service [sic] under Colonel Spoor and they had parties operating into Indonesia, but I don't think they were very successful. They lost quite a few parties and they had one big Netherlands submarine that they used to try and use, and I think that one, I'm not sure, but I think that one was sunk fairly promptly, which hindered their efforts after that.

(20.00) Did you have much, I mean apart from just vaguely knowing of their existence, did you have much contact with them?

With NEFIS?

Hm.

Oh yes, they worked .... We exchanged intelligence and they worked closely with us where it was necessary or where it became convenient to do so. But we worked quite closely and exchanged intelligence information that affected each other. If they got information that affected Australian operations they passed it to us, and if we got anything that affected their, we passed it to them.

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 68 of 90

What about Malaya? What were you doing on this area ...?

No, we weren't doing anything about Malaya, because that was in the hands of India. They had a force, a thing they called Force 136 I think it was, and that was a clandestine operations unit like `Z' Special Unit.

Do you know what the attitude to .... The resistance fighters in Malaya, many of them were Chinese communists ...?

That is so. Actually, they were some of the best resistance fighters you could find. They were some of the very few that were there, you see. The Thais and the Indo-Chinese and the others were so terrorised by the Japs that they wouldn't co-operate, because they, if they co- operated with a special force section or inserted party, they - the Japs - would kill them.

But the Chinese in Malaya weren't having a bar of that. They just went bush and gave all the trouble they could. The fact that they were Communists, of course, didn't emerge until after the war when, well just the same as Tito - Tito's communists became, well not quite anti- Allied, but until the Germans were defeated, because they were co-operating with the British, the British were supplying them with equipment and things like that, after Mikhailovitch was knocked out. But the fact that they were Communists, of course, didn't matter at that stage because, after all, Russia was on our side.

But at the same time, the people who were most concerned with re-occupying those colonies, couldn't have welcomed, I mean the role of Communists in the third world was already fairly well known as the favouring of independence.

Well, you know, necessity makes strange bed fellows, any more than the fact that we knew the Russians were Communist and would, and had a policy for world communism and world Sovietisation, but we still fought with them, we were allied with them. So where these Chinese were the only real ones offering any resistance to Japan, well they were supplied and helped and of course they gave trouble later on, but that's another matter.

Were you directly involved in the Malaya operations? I mean you mentioned the Indians - well not the Indians, but the British operating out of India - were handling a lot of the clandestine work. Did you have any connection with them?

No, we had no connection. We only did, we put one party in, but that was after I had left `Z' Special Unit. We put one party in to help them, at their request, but we landed that party in on Eastern Malaya, you see.

So your sphere of influence, if that's the right word, covered which areas? I mean, you excluded Indonesia as basically Dutch and then Malaya ...

Well, we did put, see, after all, we put parties into Timor, but that was because it was convenient to do so and there were Australians already there - Gull Force (sic) - some of the, you know, who were escaped from the Japanese when the Japanese captured Timor. They were co-operating with the locals in Timor so we put parties into Timor to help them, try and help them. It wasn't a very successful operation in the long run, but we got people out, and CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 69 of 90 were able to get very good intelligence information. But from the point of view of defeating the Japanese there it wasn't a success.

(25.00) So, you operated in the Philippines?

No. MacArthur wouldn't have a bar of Australians in the Philippines. The only Australians who operated in the Philippines were some who escaped from Sandakan and got up through the Tawitawi and up through the Sulu Archipelago and operated with the Philippine guerillas.

So North Borneo was a major area for you was it?

Oh yes. Well, it was, North Borneo was British, it was in our sphere of influence and MacArthur didn't want to waste any resources on it. He had enough on his hands in the Philippines and so, well, that's all ....

What about New Guinea? Did you operate ...?

Oh we had parties in New Guinea, hm.

What were you doing ...?

FELO, which was associated with SRD. That's FELO - Far Eastern Liaison Office - which was the code name for the propaganda unit, you know, contacting the Papua New Guineans and encouraging them to move away from the Japs and actually supplying them with food and things like that so as to compensate them for the loss of their gardens, which the Japanese had taken in many cases. But the big thing was propaganda, keeping the Papua New Guineans hating the Japanese and actively prepared to do things to help us.

Were you involved very much in active discussion of what the political set up should be in South East Asia after the war?

Absolutely not. It was no part of a soldier to do that. It was merely, our job is to defeat the enemy. Any aspect of the political rehabilitation of South East Asia or any of those occupied countries was of no, wasn't the province of a soldier at all. Although we helped tremendously after the Japs were defeated, because we had `Z' Special Unit men in Borneo who had lived there before, and they were able to restore order quite quickly. Well in time, well before the official administrative parties, or governmental parties, came back to Borneo, the `Z' Special Unit personnel were really running civil affairs in Borneo for about a month or more after the Japs surrendered.

Come the end of the war, where were you at that time?

The end of the war I was in Morotai, but I wasn't with `Z' Special Unit then, because in January '45, when the, a quite strong section of planners - Australian section under General Berryman - was put to .... We joined on to the US headquarters and was to move up to Manila and continue planning from there - move up to the Philippines anyway. General Berryman asked for me to go onto his planning staff and go up to Manila with his planning section that was to be attached to MacArthur's headquarters.

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 70 of 90

We went into Leyte first, soon after the capture of Leyte Island. Then after about a month there, we then, Mindanao, not Mindanao, Manila was captured rather more easily than the Americans expected. We'd actually planned for an Australian division to go into the north of Luzon - that was to be the 6th Australian Division - but MacArthur didn't want Australians in the Philippines, unless he had to. He was afraid the attack on Lingayen Gulf might prove more difficult than it did, and that's why he was prepared to accept the 6th Division in Northern Luzon, but when Lingayen Gulf went so easily and he captured Manila quite easily, the, Aparri landing up in Northern Luzon for the Australians was cut out very quickly and an American division was substituted.

We handed the detailed plans over to the American division which they said they'd never seen such complete plans in their lives. (Laughing.) That's a commentary on their planning, but still. But that's when I left `Z' Special Unit was in January '45. We went first to Hollandia, then to Palau - only for a day or so - and then to Leyte after, you know, pretty much that had been cleared. There was still fighting going on down in the south of Leyte Island then, but we moved in then.

END TAPE 5, SIDE B.

BEGIN TAPE 6, SIDE A.

Identification: tape six, side one, the interview with Major-General Finlay.

Right. Sorry, if you could just give that last sentence again, which we missed. You said you were moving to Manila but we didn't actually get that recorded on the tape. We got the bit ...

No. From Leyte we moved to Manila. I wouldn't be sure of the exact date but I think it would possibly be about late April or early May that we moved into Manila. I'd have to look it up because Manila had to be cleared, but I think it was possibly early May, and went on with our planning work there. We did all the OBOE planning - that's the code name for the Borneo landings at Tarakan, Brunei Bay and Balikpapan.

We did have plans for doing Bandjarmasin south of Borneo, Surabaya and Batavia, but .... They were OBOE 4, 5 and 6 I think, but we had no troops to do them. We'd used up 6th, 7th and 9th Divisions, and MacArthur wasn't interested in giving us any shipping or for anything to recover the Netherlands Indies for Holland, so that ended that.

We finished our planning and in June '45 I was permissioned from General Berryman. I signalled him - he was in Morotai at that stage - I signalled him from Manila and asked permission to go in with the Balikpapan landing, particularly as we had no troops. We'd finished our planning. So he signalled back and said, `Yes', so I went down to Morotai and went in with the Balikpapan landing.

In what sort of function? I mean ...?

Observer.

Right. CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 71 of 90

Just as an observer, and there we are. That was a very interesting landing, all done by American landing ships with Australian troops and our tanks. It's one of the few occasions when tanks had a reasonable job to do in the south-west Pacific, because we'd used them unsuccessfully in New Guinea - certainly in Buna Gona, that was totally unsuccessful - they were using American light tanks. But we used infantry - British infantry tanks - in Finschhafen and there was a very successful use of them in jungle warfare, albeit very tough mountainous country. But then, of course, there were, Balikpapan was very much more open type of country there's plenty of jungle around, but the tanks could be used successfully there and were used, so used.

The Balikpapan landing was successful. We were afraid the Japs were going to use the oil in channels running along the beach landings and we thought they might flood those with oil and set it all alight. It would (laughing) make a landing very difficult. So the enormous bombing program was undertaken in which the oil tanks and all the possibility of using the oil as a defence mechanism was ruled, was knocked out very heavily. And then of course, the naval bombardment as well as, took over from the air bombardment and the ships shelled the areas there, and there was very little .... They'd certainly knocked out the very heavy coast guns the Japs had built up round Balikpapan. They were all knocked out very severely. But the landing was successful and the Japs driven inland, and eventually - shortly after that of course - they surrendered.

One of the comments that's been made to me by a lot of people that I've interviewed, and I've interviewed scores of people really - soldiers and also civilians - about this period in the second world war, a strong feeling that a lot of that fighting, particularly in New Guinea, was unnecessary. The feeling that MacArthur was island hopping - I'm sure you've heard this particular line before. What was your feeling about that?

Well really, I found it quite extraordinary from a technical military point of view that you drive your enemy out of the positions, drive them into the jungle, deprive them of their supplies and then move on without mopping them up. Now technically, that is militarily unacceptable. You must not leave enemy unmopped up, because they can emerge where you least want them to and do a lot of damage.

(5.00) But the critics were arguing that basically they didn't have any mobility, they had very limited sort of ammunition. They were basically prisoners on those islands.

Well this is right, but I would have doubted that that would be a criticism, because that was actually the correct decision because MacArthur established, round the islands where he left those Japs, strong light naval facilities and aircraft, so they couldn't be reinforced, they couldn't be resupplied. Then he moved on, leapt his way up - island hopping - and I .... At the end of the war when he achieved his object, very successfully, one's got to admit that his tactics were right.

The people I'm talking about didn't criticise the tactics of island hopping and cutting them off. What they criticised was the notion of .... There was a feeling that a lot of the fighting, say, in Bougainville, in the Sepik, was CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 72 of 90

unnecessary, that these troops were immobilised and that Australian lives were lost unnecessarily in going after them.

Well, one agrees with that. I consider the fighting in Bougainville quite unnecessary. By all means, you've got to have old strong points so that they can't come in and take over the towns and start running the place. You've got to keep them in the jungle, but why attack them? Why attack them and use up Australian lives, as it was left to the Australians of course after MacArthur moved on. Why not just keep them bottled up and don't keep attacking them?

Now you're having in mind the position that Aitape and Wewak I take it, also, which could well be said to be the case, although I don't know that, I don't know why they attacked. I don't know why they killed either. I think probably to keep the morale of 6th Division going, because 6th Division was one of our most famous divisions and why it was given that job at Aitape/Wewak I just can't understand when one of the lesser divisions surely could have taken that on.

Was this discussed? Did senior military officers such as, you know, you were one, you were mixing with ...?

Oh I wasn't senior in those days. I mean, I was only a lieutenant-colonel in those days, but I have no doubt that it ...

I mean, the troops seem to have been discussing it.

Of course they would. If you were given what is obviously a second-rate job, when you knew you were a first-rate force, you'd discuss it, but it's a very difficult one. It would have been discussed by MacArthur and Blamey and the Chief of the General Staff and the Director of Military Operations at army headquarters, and General Berryman I suppose - as the chief planner - but I don't understand why the 6th Division was used there. But a division had to be used there.

But the other thing you've got to realise is that towards the end of the war, Curtin - the Prime Minister - was on Blamey's back trying to get him to reduce the number of troops required and to start demobilisation so that industry and the national economy could get straight again. And after all, the Japs hadn't been defeated, but it was obvious that they were going to be defeated, and routine or constant calling for recruitment, enlistment, was going on and Curtin wanted it, to say, `Well damp it down. Surely we don't want, now that we've practically won, we don't want to be raising more troops do you?' So there's that aspect too.

You're suggesting that Blamey was effectively giving the troops a role. If they had been sitting sort of fairly quietly, just keeping a watching brief throughout New Guinea and other places, then the argument for recruiting more would be even more ...?

(10.00) Well of course, when you say that these Japanese troops cut off and everything, they're still capable of making a hell of a mess and there was still reason to, sort of, harry them and give them no peace, even though you don't necessarily do a full scale attack on them. Because really, at that stage, they were virtually guerilla warfare, and you don't, there's CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 73 of 90 no way you can made a full scale attack on guerrillas who just fade into the night and disappear, only to pop up somewhere else. But, well, there it is.

You can .... It can be said that there were, in 1945, there were certainly some unnecessary fighting when the Japs could have been just simply contained, but it's easy to say that now. Apparently it wasn't apparent that that was the case then.

The lead-up to .... I mean, peace came fairly rapidly. There was an expectation, was there not, that Japan would be invaded and would have to ... there would be very severe fighting involved in that.

Well, knowing the Japanese as fighters, they would fight to the absolute death on their homeland, I'm pretty sure.

Is this something you were planning for? Everybody was gearing up for this massive last ...?

Oh yes, yes. The plans were in hand for the invasion of Japan.

Australia was going to be involved?

No, we had no troops left. You see, our troops were all committed. There was no way the 7th and 9th Divisions, or even the 6th Division, could be relieved, reorganised, fully brought up to strength and be ready for an invasion of Japan. I'm quite certain that wouldn't have happened. But you see, when, by the time the invasion of Japan was coming up, it wasn't just with half the south-west Pacific area. There was the whole of the central Pacific and the north Pacific, and all the naval forces that had already been fighting round the northern part of the Pacific, that were combined under MacArthur for the attack on Japan, so that really, Australia's contribution, if it were possible, would still be only a very small part of it. It would come in as a later reinforcement, because our three AIF Divisions were already fully spread over Borneo and Western New Guinea, and would take an awful long time to get them out, regroup, reinforce, retrain and then move them up to the northern Pacific. That would be just not on, certainly not in a time frame that one would want the Japanese to be knocked out.

When peace did come, what were your priorities, your tasks? You had this enormous war machine spread all over the Pacific.

At that stage I was still regarded as an intelligence officer and I was posted as G1 Int when I came back from Balikpapan. I occupied this job as an intelligence officer, Int, you know, G1 Intelligence, on what was called Advanced LHQ at that stage. And my task was to get, collate all the information we'd got, get all the records and everything, get it all back to Melbourne where army headquarters was, so that it could all be stored, collated and made into a really worthwhile library of intelligence back in Melbourne for post-war purposes. Anyway ...

What were the post-war purposes?

The maintenance of the best records you could conceivably have. You don't throw things away just because they required them in war. You need absolutely everything that you know CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 74 of 90 about all the areas over which you've fought, and which intelligence has been collated and reported upon. You need all that to have an adequate record, such as we didn't have at the start of the war. We knew nothing about the area where we had to fight in the Pacific.

Was there an expectation of independence wars post-second world war? After all, that's what did happen. Indonesia, Indo-China, Malaya ...?

Everybody more or less realised, certainly Indonesia, there wasn't much love lost between the Indonesians and their Dutch overlords, and that was shown up pretty promptly as soon as things happened.

There was a lot of Australian sympathy for the Indonesians as I read it?

(15.00) Well, there it is. There was, I think, and I think it would probably be mainly left wing sympathy I think, but the Indo-Chinese of course were less than enamoured of their French overlords, as was demonstrated fairly promptly. I can't remember, there wasn't very much hostility except for the Chinese guerrillas, the return of the British to Malaya in Singapore, or Borneo. Actually, the Bornese were only too delighted to receive the Brits back. It was quite amazing (laughing). The Japs had left such a lasting impression on them.

Thailand, of course, had sat on the fence throughout and was never really captured or occupied, although there were, they were occupied. But somehow or other, Thailand seemed to retain its own sovereignty, even though they had Japs on their territory. But Burma's another matter. I don't, I think the Burmese wanted independence probably more than the Malaysians and Singaporeans, but ....

Were you involved in any of these discussions? For example ...?

No. Oh no.

For example, in Indonesia ...

That'd be totally political and governmental, it wouldn't be military.

They were trying to use Australian troops. The British wanted - Mountbatten - wanted to use Australian troops in Indonesia at one stage, did he not? Basically to deal with the rebels fairly early on and, as I understand it, had trouble with the troops and they didn't co-operate, and eventually I've heard it said that he actually used Japanese units, which had been surrendered.

Oh I don't know where on earth you heard that.

Well I'm just getting your reaction.

I doubt that very strongly, and there was no question of Australian troops being used in Indonesia at any stage. There were Australian troops used in British or Sarawak when the Indonesians tried to do the confrontation later on. That was in the '60s. But I don't know whether you made that up or not but ....

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 75 of 90

No, no I have read that. I'm not saying it's correct but I have read it. I remember ...

I would doubt it very very strongly indeed. I can't deny it because, but I can doubt it very strongly. (Laughing.)

So, your personal life. After August 1945, where did it head?

Well, September '45 I was repatriated to Australia, posted to army headquarters as, on intelligence, and flew back to my wife and family in Melbourne.

How long since you'd seen them?

Oh about a year. And then, a year before that again, with, and about three years in the Middle East you see. But I was one of the, probably one of the longest separated people during the war, because I had, went away with the first contingent in the Middle East and returned with the last in February '43, went away in January, returned February '43; had three weeks leave with my wife and went straight up to the Atherton Tablelands and then New Guinea and didn't come back from there until - that'd be '43 - didn't come back from there until February '44, and then back up into - what do you call it? The Philippines and Borneo and all that sort of thing. So I had a very long separation - about three very long separations - in the war which, I think, I can claim must have very nearly been a record. But still - other than the poor prisoner-of-war of course, who might have been captured early on in the Western Desert and not got home until after Germany was defeated. But, oh that's that.

So you came back, and in the peace time army, you were involved .... Fairly rapidly, you moved to Canada did you not?

Well actually I was, as I say, I was on the Director of Military Intelligence in Melbourne and well, my job there was to continue the job that I'd been doing in Morotai. Getting all the records back, collating and concentrating all the information that the miscellaneous funnies - as I called them earlier on - had got, and getting them into the right hands and, you know, collated into a proper intelligence record of all the areas we knew about, all the activities. Then the Canadians asked the Australian Army to propose an exchange of officers and I was posted off to Canada as the Australian exchange officer. I worked in the Canadian Army as though I were a Canadian and a Colonel Watsford came out from Canada and worked in the Australian Army as though he were an Australian.

(20.00) What was the purpose of that exchange?

Oh just exchange liaison.

What, armies that might have to work together in the future should, on a regular basis ...

Well we worked, we both on the British system, staff system, and it was terribly easy. We could move straight into each other's army and act as part of it. But oh no, that's gone on, but not with the Canadians; going on before the war with the Brits, you see. We had instructors at Camberley and other schools in England, and they had instructors out here at RMC and so CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 76 of 90 on, just on exchange duty. But the Canadians came into it and said, `What about us? We'd like to do an exchange with you', so I was sent over on that.

And Canada. I mean, was it .... You mentioned it was a British system, but American influence was very strong. Was that an influence on their army or not?

No fear. The Canadians didn't like the Americans, and if you wanted a punch in the nose, you could suggest to a Canadian that he was dominated, or over-dominated, by American influences. Just the same as an American would get a punch in the nose if he suggests an Australian was over-dominated by British influences, that sort of thing. But, oh no, the Canadians were not influenced strongly, although they planned jointly - and I was on the planning staff in Canada.

They planned jointly with the Americans and the Americans had co-ordinated defence plans for North America and for, against possible attack - Russian attack - through the western direction, you know, coming in from Russia, attacking eastwards down through the Antarctic into North-Western Canada. Their plans were very well co-ordinated, and of course they had, Canada had a section in NATO - a couple of divisions in NATO - and, with the Yanks, and their planning was a bit, it was fairly joint there. But to suggest that the American influence on the Canadian Army was at all marked, it would be a mistake, it wasn't. They were still very British in their staff system, their way of fighting and that sort of thing.

Now, presumably planning for a conventional warfare against the Russians - we're talking about the late '40s - this is before the Russians became clear they had nuclear weapons ...?

That's right. Well, Russia had .... You've got to realise, of course, that Lenin and Stalin had preached that the only, the whole object of the Soviet was the `Sovietisation of the world, to wake', I'm quoting Lenin now, `to wake the sleeping giant that is China and through that' - and that is what they mean about their communisation of China - `and through China, communise south-east Asia'. Now that was their plan, stated clearly in Lenin's book.

Now do you wonder people wanted to know why Russia wanted such enormous conventional forces? That's brought about the creation of NATO to stop Russia's plans. Now a lot of people don't see, a lot of people don't read Lenin or Stalin, but if they did they'd understand the, not paranoia exactly, but the genuine fear of what was going to happen in Indo-China and in Europe and in the Middle East.

And there was an expectation they could attack, what, through Alaska?

Oh yeah, well that's one of the defensive plans we had to prepare for. And you've got to realise that Russia had enormous forces, enormous - actually still has - enormous conventional forces. That's why, of course, the Americans and the Allies have had to concentrate on such advanced unconventional weapons to nullify the enormous superiority of the Russian conventional forces.

(25.00) This was the time when the Americans ran down their forces quite considerably, did they not? CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 77 of 90

Yes, well everybody wanted to, and Russia was hoping they would. That's why they maintained their forces at the strength they maintained them at.

What, the Russian forces didn't decline at all?

Well they must have declined some, because I think they had ten million in the Russian forces by the end of the war, but they pulled it down to .... I don't know what their strength is now, but I would suspect it's over a million conventional forces. Well now, I just don't know why people want a million, a million personnel in the armed services if they're not going to, not planning to use them, because after all, they're pretty costly commodities - armies, air forces and navies - and Russia is continuing the building of her submarines now. Why? You'd have thought, but anyway, you're putting me into fields that I should be out of, I should be forgetting about.

During this period, it must have been .... The Korean war must have been indicated fairly strongly?

Yes.

And did you expect to get involved in that?

Well, it was .... We were talking about Canada. I returned to Australia in January '49 and I was posted to Adelaide then as a Chief of Staff, Central Command, then very shortly afterwards in 1950, brought over to Melbourne as Director of Military Intelligence. So I was involved in what was going on there, with all the information about what Russia, what Russia's plans were and so on. After all, they'd been written fairly clearly, just the same as Hitler wrote Mein Kampf and nobody took any notice of it. But we were starting to realise that we better take notice of what Lenin and Stalin were saying about the conquest for the world.

Anyway, I had to, I had a lot to do with the planning and the forecasting of what was going to happen in Indo-China and actually, I think I told you we .... It was the Joint Intelligence Committee here in Australia that created the domino theory - or created the expression the `domino theory'. With the plans that China had and Russia had, it was quite obvious that Indo-China would fall some time and the French were handling it very very badly indeed and that if Indo-China went, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and right down to Malaya then, and that is South-East Asia if you like. And that's what Lenin was writing about.

END TAPE 6, SIDE A.

BEGIN TAPE 6, SIDE B.

Identification: side two, tape six, Major-General Finlay.

Granted the ambitions of the Russians and the Chinese, the actual conditions .... I remember Chifley was making, made some speeches at this time, basically saying that conditions in these countries of poverty et cetera, CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 78 of 90

basically creates the environment where these considerations become very important. What was your feeling about those sorts of attitudes?

Well, it's all very well talking about poverty in these countries, but for thousands of years they had lived their own lives, farmed their own, grew their own rice, grew all their own food and it was our impact on them with our way of living that in many cases brings about this question of the terrible poverty. After all, Indonesians, for instance, they have always been able to pull a paw paw off the tree and eat some bananas until we came along, until the western world came along and started to live on top of them and talk about the incredible poverty. Many of them lived quite happily just as, I'm sorry to say, our own Aborigines used to live in reasonable harmony with life in Central Australia until we arrived and introduced them to grog and all sorts of other things.

This question about this incredible poverty that Chifley's talking about, I just wonder whether he's thinking of it as from a western point of view or from the old point of view of the people that used to live here for centuries. Now I don't know whether I'm being radical in that or not, but there is a degree of thinking to be applied to that statement.

Within Australia, you were involved in military intelligence. What sort of liaison did you have with what you might call civilian intelligence - ASIO for example?

Well ASIO was a reasonably recently created organisation. It had a judge as its first director, but then the .... My predecessor as Director of Military Intelligence became the Director- General then - Brigadier Charles Spry. Now, whether we had .... That's about the only civilian intelligence there used to be - well there was.

The External Affairs, as it was then, relied heavily on the Director of Military Intelligence for their foreign information, and we used to have .... They used to consult us on matters of which, concerning European countries and Asian countries with a knowledge, so as we could have access to our sources, and of course, the representative of the Department of External Affairs was in fact a member of the Joint Intelligence Committee. He used to come down from Canberra to Melbourne to sit in on the meetings and discuss and add to the [inaudible] projects and [inaudible] all the information that was available.

But they of course, in later years, built up their own more specialised political intelligence section, and the Director of Military Intelligence isn't involved in that now, because they've now created the Office of Intelligence Assessments [sic] is it called? I've forgotten. It's combination navy/army/air force/External Affairs, not Ex... Foreign Affairs now. That's the central intelligence organisation of the Australian Government now. But it took a long time to get there.

(5.00) Were you hearing about the lead-up to, say, the Petrov affair?

Ah, I knew it was going on as a matter of personal secret information, but we were not involved in it at all. Actually, it came to fruition just after I moved up to Korea and Japan in November '53, that's right, and Petrov defected just after I got there. I had known it was going on, but only just by personal information at a very high level, because the Directorate of CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 79 of 90

Military Intelligence and ASIO worked very closely together. But we had no hand in it. In fact, you know, it'd be quite wrong for us to have any hand in it at all.

What was your feeling that the Labor Party, about the Labor Party perspective that it was essentially a beat-up related to Menzies' needs, in terms of elections?

Well I have only one word for that and it's (spelling) C-R-A-P. There it was. It wasn't .... They claim that his eventual defection was timed to suit Menzies politically, but that's absolute rubbish. Petrov's defection was made at his decision and his timing, but it's absurd to ....

I mean, it's the sort of thing you would expect a political party to charge the other political party with, just the same as they're doing it now, claiming that the timing of all sorts of things are to try and boost the Government's chances of re-election. Every government does it, and I don't blame the Labor Party for doing it. It injured them enormously, but, well, you've got to blame that on somebody, so you blame it on Menzies. But there's no justification for that claim, anymore than there's justification for a hell of a lot of things that are claimed politically anyway.

You'd moved to Korea, and you were in charge of the ...?

No, I was the Commander of the Australian component of the British Commonwealth Forces in Korea, although I had, I didn't have any direct command over the navy and the air force. But on matters that cropped up of an administrative nature, from the navy and the air force, I, you know, had from a command point of view, had them within my jurisdiction. But generally speaking, I commanded the Australian - the army point of it - completely politically, completely administratively, but the navy and the air force were only very loosely under my command as parts of the Australian component of BCFK - British Commonwealth Forces Korea. That was my job there.

And were you part of .... What was the Australian role there? I mean, were you part of the discussions ...?

Oh well, not in the actual operation discussions, you see, because that was the General Nat Murray, General Murray commanded the British Commonwealth Division, which included the Australian Brigade and the Canadian Brigade and the British Brigade. Of course he took his command, his orders operationally for the actual conduct of battles from, down from the UN headquarters, which was, I've forgotten who commanded then - Matthew, General Matthew somebody or other. Ridgway was it? I can't remember. But my command was virtually an administrative command of the Australians up there. I spent my time between Kure in Japan and up in the Injin River where the divisional headquarters was, batting backwards and forwards making sure the troops got what they wanted, you know.

(10.00) The contact that you described to me before with the French in Indo-China, was that in the earlier period when you were Director of Military Intelligence?

That was when I was DMI. That was '52, 1952, when the French were making an awful botch of Indo-China (laughing) I thought. CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 80 of 90

Tell me about your contact with them at that time. I mean, that's a fascinating ...?

Oh well no, it was the ... I think I've described it when I asked General Salan why he wasn't, you know, when he would try and cut off the supplies from China from up through north through Haiphong and those places. And, `Oh', he said, `that will come later'. Well of course, he left it a bit too late, really, because any, militarily, any commander would go straight to the source of his enemy's supply and stop it. You'd think so, wouldn't you? Well I thought so. Anyway, I asked him about it and he thought it was going to come later. Well he fluffed the whole thing, I consider. It was a complete misconduct of the operations by Salan, all this business of trying to bring guerrillas to a major attack, to a major showdown. Guerrillas don't work that way.

It's been the passion of regular soldiers for a long time hasn't it, to get, when confronted with guerrillas to get them to act like, well ...?

Well, like conventional forces, but you can't. They cease to be guerrillas, and the General Giap, who was the guerrilla commander of the .... This Vietcong was the last .... No, Vietcong was the .... The Viet Minh were under the original force, and they built it up into the Vietcong, and General Giap was the commander of that and he wrote a very intelligent manual on the co-op, on the operation of guerrilla forces. And General Salan would have done well to have read that.

You mention, this was, I think we talked about this before, but I think it was off tape. You mentioned that he was very interested in Australian wine?

That's right (laughing), yes.

Could you tell us that story?

Oh, well it all .... After the German occupation of France and quite a lot of damage to the vines, the French wine industry fell apart - well it didn't fall apart, but it was at a very very low ebb - and one thing that, of course, is necessary to keep the morale of the French troops in good order is to give them some wine. Let them have wine as part of their ration. And to do this, of course, they moved their .... When they moved their re-occupation forces out to, you know, China there was no wine, so they had to buy wine from Australia.

Oh, General Salan seemed to think some of it was good, but I suspect some of it wasn't as good as all that, but then neither is some of the vin ordinaire you can buy in France. So they would have to drink it and like it, I suppose. But he commented that some of the Australian wine was very good and he was surprised at the quality of it. Quite possibly that's the wine that got into his mess, I would think.

You had more a chance to observe the French once again, I think, a few years later - only three or four years later - when you were in Britain, and the Suez crisis came up?

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 81 of 90

Oh no, it wasn't the Suez crisis, it was before that. They had, question of, you know, this straightening out of colonies and the freedom and independence of some of these subjected people came up. And I was at the Imperial Defence College at the time and the French have a similar establishment they call the L'Ecole Supérieur de Guerre, which is their superior war college. And they sent a team over for joint discussions - a team of their students over for discussions with our students - and of course all the students of the Imperial Defence College didn't speak French, but fortunately I did, so I was able to sit in on these discussions and have discussions with them.

The thing that emerged from our point of view, of course, was that the French were taking great umbrage at our giving India and Singapore and Malaya and Burma independence when it was upsetting their colonies. They took the attitude that all the trouble they were having in their colonies in Indo-China, in Algeria, in Tunisia and elsewhere, were the fault of the British in introducing this stupid idea of independence for colonies. So, that's the principal thing that the discussions with the French left me with - that they were very upset that they were having trouble with their colonies because we were giving ours independence.

(15.00) Well, dealing with Nasser was another episode in terms of the problematical third world, one of the new leaders from an area that had previously been a British colony. You were in Britain at that time. Can you remember, what do you remember of that?

Oh well, well of course Nasser was getting bobbily about the Canal, and about the Palestinian, about Israel, and apart from that, he decided that he would nationalise the Canal, which of course had run for, I don't know, about sixty or seventy years by a consortium of British and Egyptian .... Well, they weren't governmental things, they were really like government instrumentalities I suppose. He suddenly nationalised the Canal and threw everybody into chaos, with the results that Britain and France (laughing) took him on and tried to stop the nationalisation. But that caused a lot of chaos. Well of course ...

You were at Australia House at that time were you?

Ah, oh yes. I'd left the IDC then. I was at Australia House then. One's got to go, got to stop confusing .... The Jews came into this at about the same time as the .... They advanced through the Sinai Desert in conjunction with the British and French, and of course the Americans held their hands up in holy horror.

It was all a bit of, was it not, a bit of a charade in the sense that there was much more collusion between the British, French and the Israelis than seemed to be the surface in the public. Didn't the Israelis advance and then get ordered back, but all in a way that had been orchestrated before?

Well, it'd only be the United Nations that could order them back, but the hypocrisy of the insistence of the Americans in the United Nations that the British and French stop the whole thing, when one looks at such things as Nicaragua and Panama. The United Nations hasn't called upon them - the Yanks - to withdraw from there at any stage. But it was the Yanks' insistence in the United Nations that went the other way when it didn't, when it suited them. But still, that's, that's very political so I shouldn't be talking about it I suppose.

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 82 of 90

Talking of political subjects, one of the things that I found very interesting looking at the list of different positions that you'd been in, was your membership of the Military Board. Now I hadn't actually come across the Military Board before, but I understand it's a combined civilian/military officers' board. Is that the case?

Well, it consists of the Chief of the General Staff, who is the first military member; the Adjutant-General, see these are all terms that are our of date now. The Adjutant-General, who was the personnel member, he's the second military member; the Quartermaster-General who's the third military member; and the Master General of the Ordinance who's the fourth; and the Deputy Chief of the General Staff is the fifth military member. Now it is chaired - or was chaired, because it doesn't exist now, it was chaired by the Minister. It had, the civilian members were the Secretary of the department; and presumably the Minister; then there's a secretary - a civilian secretary, public service secretary - who has no vote, of course. He's merely, he merely records the proceedings.

So when you say it's combined military and civilian board, it's only in the sense that the Secretary of the Department is one member, as against the total army hierarchy who are the other five members, and the Minister who doesn't always attend anyway, particularly when the Military Board is deliberating something upon which it must advise the Minister. It's inappropriate therefore for the Minister to be sitting in on the discussions.

(20.00) Is it, or was it, essentially the organisational form that was used for civilian direction of the military forces? Is that the function that it played, that transition between the two? Or has that happened in different ways? I mean [inaudible] the army.

[Talking over Daniel Connell for last few words]. No, no. The Military Board as such is responsible for the military direction of the army. Now, the civilian - the secretary - his responsibility is political and financial aspects. He can't comment or he can't make any recommendation about military decisions. He merely refers the political and financial aspects of those decisions to the Minister. And if the Minister doesn't agree with them on financial or political grounds, that's his prerogative, but the actual detail, or any detail of a military decision is essentially that of the military members. But the civilian, the secretary, is responsible for advising the Minister on the political and financial aspects of any decision or any course that's to be taken.

Well, perhaps just to take a hypothetical example, to get the division of responsibility between the different, between the government and the armed forces ...

Now, before you go any further, I am talking of the days when a Military Board existed. It doesn't exist now, although naturally they meet in committee, but the Chief of the General Staff is responsible now for all military decisions - on the advice of the other members of the hierarchy - and the civilian - the secretary - has still the same requirement to represent the political and financial aspects to the Minister.

But now there's no Minister for Defence you see, no Minister for the Army, so it has to go to the Minister for Defence through the Secretary of the Defence. The Secretary to the CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 83 of 90

Department of the Army is a minor civilian posting now, so it goes to the Minister of Defence where the Secretary to the Department of Defence and the Chief of the Defence Force - who at the moment is General Gration - they are the two advisers to the Minister.

Well, just to take an example where there is a suggestion of political involvement, and that is in Vietnam. Now, how much ...?

Well that's totally governmental. That would be a Cabinet decision. You may recall that the Americans asked Australians to go into Vietnam, and they asked on a government to government level. It wasn't the advice, it wasn't on the advice of the military side of things here in Australia that that decision was taken. It was taken at a government/Cabinet level.

Actually, I was thinking of another level further down. For example, the original decisions about the type of involvement. I mean, after the decision had been taken in principle, the decision about the type of involvement that Australia would have in the war in Vietnam ...?

It would merely be the question of whether we send a brigade or a battalion. There was certainly no question of sending a division. It'd be a question ...

Where they would serve? That question?

I wouldn't think that would even arise. That'd be an agreement governmentally, with the .... As we were serving as a very junior partner, it'd have to be the decision of the American commander on the spot as to which area would be allotted to Australia, as if we were to have naval and air force and ....

There's no suggestion that the Australian troops would have been, say, involved further in the north in some of the more ....?

Ah, I had no hand in that. I wouldn't know. I would believe that it was just simply an agreement arrived at with the American commander as to where the Australians would be allotted. That'd be perfectly normal in any operation, that the senior commander would allot the areas. In fact, you try and avoid mixing them, if you could.

(25.00) Would there be political involvement from the Australian Government in those discussions?

Oh, only at a very broad approval level, not in detail. After all, your conduct of operations in war has got to be left to the commander, the commander on the spot. If you haven't confidence in him, well you remove him. So it's, there's no way ....

See, a political decision caused the shemozzle between Blamey and Rowell in the second world war, all because a politician panicked and didn't have the experience and knowledge to accept competent advice. So that sort of advice shouldn't come into it. If you have politicians putting their fingers into the way you conduct operations, you may as well give up, get out of it.

CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 84 of 90

One of the rumours that, I guess, wanders around academic circles talking about Australian involvement in Vietnam, was that there was political pressure to keep the casualties down. Casualties were politically - I mean, this is fairly cynical talk - that casualties were politically very difficult to handle and basically the Australian Government didn't want .... Well, hopefully they don't want high levels of casualties anyway ...

Do you know what that sort of comment makes me feel? I'll tell, like going up in a sheet of flames. How the hell can you go into war and say, `Oh but you mustn't have any bloodshed'. I've heard that said before, you know, `Oh no, no, no, no, no. I don't want any bloodshed.' In the middle of a war! How in the hell are you going to capture an enemy position or defeat your enemy? Keep the casualties down, heaven's sake. Of course any commander's terribly conscious of the security of his own forces, but when you have to capture something and fight an enemy, you certainly keep the casualties down, but you can't, you can't change a plan so as to avoid casualties or something like that. So that's laughable really.

Well, it could - I'm not supporting this position - I'm just saying it's something that's frequently said and I'm wanting to get your reaction to it.

Well you heard it (laughing).

Okay. So you're saying it didn't happen during the Vietnam war?

I have no knowledge whatsoever of it and I would think the commander would tell him to go and jump in the lake. If they weren't satisfied the way he was conducting operations, then replace him. That's what any commander worth his salt would say, 'cause he, having his own humanity, or his own capacity as a commander questioned, and that'd be my reaction to it.

Conscription, of course, was another very controversial aspect of Australia's involvement in Vietnam. What was your, well, your personal feeling about that?

I thought Australia, conscription before any involvement in Vietnam was a very very good thing. It made something of a lot of young men who would otherwise be drifters or, not no- hopers, but would get off on the wrong track. I had grounds to admire some of the young men that came out of that. But as far as the Vietnam war was concerned, this, what do they call it? Preferential drafting? What do they call that?

[Inaudible].

Lottery.

The birthday lottery.

Something like that. I think that was wrong. I think actually national service should have been universal, but not necessarily military. Now there's a lot of things that can be done by national servicemen - conscripted if you like - in the north of Australia as civilian actions. And only those who want to go into the army or the navy or the air force could be selective - selective national service - and that at the moment .... CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 85 of 90

There's a very strong case for that now, here in Australia at the moment. I saw Alf Garland soliciting it a while ago, that, you know, doesn't have to be military, it's just service to your country. And that's my view on national service. Ah, I think, I don't like what was done in Vietnam - that's as you say, the birthday lottery.

END TAPE 6, SIDE B.

BEGIN TAPE 7, SIDE A.

Identification: this is tape seven, side one, Major-General Finlay.

Just talking about conscription. Again, now, I'm serving up a bit of the attitude of the time to get your reaction. There was a feeling in some circles that the army after the conscription, or the national service, got under way and there were, there began to be sort of people like White, I remember, and I think Townsend was another name - conscientious objectors - who were court- martialled and imprisoned, that it became rather an embarrassment for the armed forces. What was your feeling about that?

I don't think so. As far as the armed forces are concerned, conscientious objectors don't mean anything to them. They're odd-bods and queers that we all run into in every walk of life but I don't see if a person is a conscientious objector, many of them join the medical corps. They're not required to bear arms and they're not allowed to bear arms, but then they're serving a humanitarian purpose. And I would respect that kind of conscientious objector a lot more than the ones who were causing, cause all the trouble by sort of going on a hunger strike or whatever they do.

You were at Duntroon during the early part of this period. If we could talk about Duntroon for a bit. You'd started off in Duntroon, you'd come back to Duntroon. When you came back, what were your ambitions, your aims? A very important post ...?

First, my first aim was to create the course at Duntroon, turn it into a fully tertiary post- matriculation course. At that stage, and for all its previous time, it'd only been partially tertiary, because matriculation was not a requirement for entry. I took the view, having reached reasonably high rank myself and having met and seen people at high levels and the requirement of them that life makes, I decided that - well I was convinced - that a senior commander had to have the highest intellectual qualifications and intellectual achievement that could be got.

I really, I believe, because after all a senior commander has sometimes, has to deal with politicians, clever and highly educated extremists, highly educated religious leaders for instance, like having to try and cope with the Mufti of Jerusalem or Archbishop Makarios or something like that. And it appeared to me that the preparations, the educational or intellectual preparation of the future leader wasn't being given the right, being brought to the right level. And that's the first thing I had to do, I considered, was to get the RMC course into a fully tertiary post-matriculation course of full university standard.

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Well, of course, I went there in early '62 and I sort of got hold of my co-ordinating staff officer, who was a Major Pugh - as he was then, Roy Pugh - who was a highly qualified engineer with considerable achievement behind him. I set to work and the first thing that struck me, of course, was that the - this is '62 I'm talking about - the brochure dealing with entry to Duntroon for 1963 had already been published. That set me back a bit, because that meant that for 1963, of course, they would still have to admit non-matriculants, you know, the fourth year, fourth year and that sort of thing, but not actual matriculants.

(5.00) And of course, to get, to even start talking with the university about recognition of the courses, the first thing I had to do was establish that they were matriculants to start with. So that meant that I couldn't do anything until the 1964 course, and I couldn't even talk to university when, particularly Manning Clark, who was a very difficult person to deal with. He couldn't believe that anybody could study under conditions of regimentation.

Anyway, we got the thing off the ground and in the 1963 selection, without consulting anybody, I just simply made the minimum requirement for entry matriculation of the state of origin. We seem to be hearing (laughing) a lot about state of origin recently. So I couldn't start talking to the university until I was able to show them that the minimum entry was matriculation.

That's when we started working with the Australian National University. Sir Leonard Huxley, the Vice-Chancellor, and Doctor Burton, the Principal of the School of General Studies, were both very pro co-operation and help. But Professor Manning Clark, who was the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and thus had political science, English, literature, language, social, everything under him, he was violently opposed to it. And in a committee meeting just simply sat up there and said, `How could any student possibly study under the conditions of regimentation that exist at Duntroon?'. And with, I think he must have been a bit of a tyrant, because all the professors of the sub-faculties like, not sub-faculties, but faculties like English, political science and so on, they all cow-towed to him and just simply defeated it in the professorial board.

So I turned to the University of New South Wales then, and Sir Phillip Baxter's remarks to his professorial board, which I sat in as an observer, were `I believe this university has a duty to help Duntroon'. He looked firmly round all his professors and he, I think he was a martinet of even stronger character than Manning Clark, because the next thing we know we got full co- operation from them and we established the, what they call the Faculty of Military Studies at Duntroon. It was, of course, based on an engineering course, an arts course and an applied science course, which was a reasonable start.

These, the sorts of things that Manning Clark was going on about, did the University of New South Wales ask for any changes in the way in which classes were conducted, or anything ...?

The best thing I can do to quote to, is to quote to you Professor Ayscough. During these discussions before we'd arrived, you know, even though discussions were going very favourably, we invited the professorial board of the University of New South Wales to come and live in at Duntroon and spend several days just talking to cadets without any member of the college staff or any military personnel about. Getting their views and asking them what, you know, exploring their scholastic processes and so on. CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 87 of 90

Anyway, at a plenary session back at the end of the two days, they were all giving their comments, and Professor Ayscough, who was a Professor of Applied Science at University of New South Wales, he said, `Frankly, I find it difficult to discover what this University has to offer Duntroon'. Because we had some, in the senior classes, some very well adjusted strong personal characters and who talked to the professors frankly, and told them what they think, and what their views were. Anyway the University of New South Wales said, `Right, it's on'.

And I was very pleased, I must say I was very pleased to go to the first graduation after the course was introduced and have, see graduates of Royal Military College being granted honours degrees in engineering and the standard was very very high indeed, compared, you know, compared easily with Sydney University and Melbourne University for their honours degrees. They came back and did a fourth year, of course. They did an extra year after graduating, but they did their extra year as an officer.

And I was very pleased to see when they created the Defence Force Academy, that the Defence Force Academy took over the RMC academic course holus bolus. I was talking to the rector at the Defence Force Academy the other day and I asked him what modifications they'd made in the course, and he said, `Practically none'. You know, the whole course is - I am talking about four or five different academic courses - but the whole course as it was conceived.

How did that change the character of Duntroon at all?

Not very much really. You see, throughout the ...

I presume you meant that the people going through were slightly older if they were coming in at, say, matriculation level rather than fourth.

Well the age limits were, must have turned seventeen by the March of his year of entry, and not have turned twenty by the March of his year of entry. You see, that was the age bracket. They might have altered them since for all I know, but the .... I've lost my trend there, what was I going to say?

Sorry, I was just asking about whether or not (Finlay talking over Connell).

Yes, I know, I know, you asked me what differences had to be made. Now, in the old RMC course, of course, the academic and the military year started together and ran all mixed up for the whole year. Now, fifty-two less six is forty-six, so that's a forty-six course year, so, but with the new course on the recommendation of the University of New South Wales, which we accepted, we broke the military year and the academic year into thirty-three week academic year, and then a thirteen week military year on either side.

Now, there were, there was one unit of military work in the academic year per day, but it was by agreement with the University, it was to be a unit - I'm talking of a period of study, either a lecture or so - it had to be a unit with no study element in it. In other words, it had to be drill, physical training, rifle training, weapon training, something like that, so that it was merely a matter of physical instruction rather than us having a study element in it. Now that was agreed with the University, because they, they didn't want any interfering study element - non- CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 88 of 90 academic study element - in it, like military history or military law or anything like that, which have to come in the military year.

What, they were trying to create a systematic, what you might call a university atmosphere within their part of the year?

[Inaudible] a systematic, purely academic year. They were quite happy for one day a week - one hour a day I mean - to have just these drill periods in it, physical training and so on. Because you've got to .... They've still got to have a tiny little bit of discipline of drill discipline or rifle training discipline or something like that, otherwise their drill becomes shoddy if they go for thirty-three weeks without being on the parade ground, you see.

And we, anyway, it worked very well and the whole thing was, worked very well. But, well that was my principal aim when I was posted to Duntroon. It was my personal aim; I wasn't told to do it or anything, although the moment I got it going, everybody was all very happy and ...

There wasn't any opposition?

(15.00) Oh no, no opposition whatsoever, you see, because it was a much better arrangement than the air force had, where they've had that every pilot had to be a Bachelor of Science. Now, he must have, quite possibly have a reasonable background of science to handle the high technology, the technology of the planes he's using. But there are a hell of a lot of people who have a capacity for higher intellectual development who don't get on at all well with science or that sort of thing, you see, or find with people who don't like maths and physics.

Anyway, the course at Duntroon, which I negotiated with the University of New South Wales, has been accepted by the Defence Force Academy and it's very highly regarded. So I feel quite happy about that.

Right, well just as a final question. A life time in the armed forces, obviously no regrets. How do you feel looking back? How did you feel on retirement?

Oh, very happy. I'm glad I've achieved a few things, and I regard the course at Duntroon as a principal achievement and I got the chapel appeal going and got the chapel built. I got the, a pre-school, a really good pre-school centre built out of self-help, all within the resources of the college, and I opened the golf course. Those I claim (laughing) are my monuments at Duntroon.

After you officially retired from the army, you got involved in the RSL. Now, that in a sense is a, well, how would you describe the role of the RSL in the Australian community?

Well it's a very strong body. There are over a quarter of a million members of the RSL and I would think fifty per cent or sixty per cent of those are married and, so that you could add another potential 200,000 and you've got a very strong lobby. Now, the RSL regards its role as being the care, protection and looking after those who didn't come back and their widows and dependants. They've achieved an enormous lot in keeping the government to their CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 89 of 90 promises in that. At the moment they do over a million dollars a year of charity work, which isn't recognised. They support quite a few of the emerging countries in a number of ways. We bring over young medical students from overseas to Australia to give them certain clinical training. We send our young fifth-year doctors over to work in some of the over, you know, developing countries, and all of this isn't known.

The majority of people think the RSL is what goes on in that club in Moore Street or here, there and everywhere. They are people play two-up on ANZAC Day. That's not the RSL. Those are autonomous clubs that use the name RSL to get membership and things like that. Some of them were very good. Some of them aren't so good, but that is not the RSL.

The welfare side of the RSL is a very important aim and, as you say, a very quiet aim but something that perhaps creates a lot more newspaper coverage is the involvement in politics periodically. I mean, it's always been a part of Australian life, the political presence, what is your feeling about that?

Well, for many years the RSL, the RSL by definition and by its own charter is apolitical. Now, when the Government decides that they will dispense with repatriation hospitals and put all repatriation patients into the general hospitals, the RSL speaks up. Now, in that sense, of course, you claim it's being political.

No, actually what I'm thinking of, for example, I mean I think that's very legitimate use of politics ...?

You mean immigration?

Immigration is the classic one at the moment. At an earlier time it was an organisation that often campaigned for a higher degree of defence spending. I'm not criticising those things. I'm just saying ...

(20.00) That's part of, part of its concern about the .... After all, if this country - now I'm quoting something I said in a speech many years ago - if this country is not prepared to defend itself adequately, then we will have betrayed the people that we are professing to honour on ANZAC Day. You see, now possibly I'm being political there. I made this in some remarks, it was at Yass actually many years ago after the war, or after I'd retired actually, and I was criticising the, in effect, the quite severe defence cuts that were being implemented - it might have been by the Whitlam Government, I'm not sure. That'd be about the time, in the early seventies. Whitlam got in in '72 didn't it?

Hm.

Yes. Well, and as I said then, after, you know, if we are not prepared to defend, if this country isn't prepared to defend itself, then we are betraying the people we profess to honour today, and I'd say that again if I'm confronted with the opportunity.

Well that's fairly closely related to the war service and connections of the members. Immigration is going another step further. What was your feeling about the immigration debate, and I'm thinking of the resignation of Sir William Keys? CHARLES HECTOR FINLAY 90 of 90

No, you're referring to Sir William Keys and the row over his, shortly after his retirement, and this came about when he signed the condolence book for the Japanese emperor. And his successor as President of the RSL criticised that action because he considered the emperor was, you know, responsible for the atrocities - some of the atrocities at least - that were carried out by the Japanese, or the Japanese action during the war. And Sir William Keys, of course, counter-attacked quite vigorously on the subject and threatened all sorts of things, but Brigadier Garland apologised for suggesting that he was interested, because of his business arrangements after his retirement. That was the trouble, you see.

I was thinking .... Looking at the role of the RSL, what's your feeling with regard to the broader range of questions, moving beyond defence into, well, recently, immigration for example?

Well the situation is that the RSL has always in its charter allowed itself the role of worrying or caring for the future of this country, and particularly, quite largely, looking at it from the point of view of future defence in the context that Australia is an Asian country. Now we are very - I'm talking about myself as a member of the RSL - we are very concerned that we are being swamped by Asiatic migration and the extraordinary thing is that quite a lot of restrictions are being placed upon British immigration and other European immigration, whereas what we fear is that sort of the open slather that's being given to Asiatic immigration. In this regard I consider that the RSL has a legitimate right to open its mouth and say what it thinks about this, because of its quite serious impact on the future of Australia.

How do you feel about the situation of the armed forces in Australia today? I mean, it's a complicated post-Gorbachev world almost, although the man is still in his post. It's a complicated world. How do you feel it all fits?

Well, the situation is the complications have moved to the Pacific. There's quite a bit of instability in the area we live in here. After all, there's been a coup in Fiji, there's trouble in Vanuatu, the French - former French - colonies; Indonesia is in a pose of friendship at the moment, but you may remember that a few years ago Indonesia was not so friendly to Australia. You've got the somewhat unstable situation in India and Pakistan which could boil up, and added to that ...

Papua New Guinea?

Hm?

Papua New Guinea.

Oh Papua New Guinea is unstable at the moment. It looks as though it could fly apart with Bougainville going one way and the rest of Papua New Guinea going another way. And to suggest that we here in Australia are in, have no defence problems, is putting blinkers on yourself, I think. And it's a matter of some considerable worry to a lot of us, not just me as a retired soldier, that everybody seems to think the Pacific, the area we live in this country, this part of the world, is all hunky dory and nice and peaceful. It has the potentiality of not being, and that's what worries a lot of us. (25.00) END TAPE 7, SIDE A.