Gavin Long and the Second World War Official Histories

“Who is Gavin Long?” asked General Sir Richard O’Connor in November 1950 after reading Long’s draft chapters on the British offensive in the first Libyan campaign in 1940–41. The general thought it a “stirring narrative”. Long was a journalist, war correspondent and historian. He oversaw the 22- volume Australian Second World War official history and wrote three volumes himself. In doing so he also affirmed the “Bean tradition” as the dominant narrative style for Australian military history. 

Born in 1901, Gavin was the eldest of six children of clergyman George Long and his wife Felecie. During the First World War, the Reverend George Long joined the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) as a chaplain. He led the AIF’s education program in Britain and was promoted to brigadier-general in 1919. After the war, he became the Bishop of Newcastle. By then his eldest son had been working as a journalist for several years.

Gavin married Mary Jocelyn Britten in 1925, and had worked for several newspapers before joining the Sydney Morning Herald in 1931. Long was living and working in London with Jocelyn and their two young children when the war began in September 1939. He was appointed as the Herald’s war correspondent and went to France and Belgium with the British Expeditionary Force. In November 1940, the Herald sent Long to the Middle East, where he covered the Australian campaigns in Libya and Greece in 1941. He was recalled to Australia and became the Herald’s defence correspondent, travelling to Darwin and Port Moresby. Two younger brothers served in the AIF.  

Charles Bean, the Australian First World War Official Historian, meanwhile, had been considering the need and practicalities of appointing a new official historian for the current conflict. In November 1942, he suggested the War Cabinet considered a proposal for an “Official History of Australia in the War of 1939–” and recommended Long for the position of official historian and general editor. Bean had made a similar suggestion in late 1941 but the government dismissed it as premature. The War Cabinet appointed Long as general editor of a new official history project in March 1943. Some may have been surprised at the appointment. Until 1942, the most likely candidate to become the official historian had been Kenneth Slessor. 

Official War Correspondent

In 1940, a panel that included Bean and Sir Henry Gullet, the Minister for Information, had selected Slessor as Australia’s Official War Correspondent. A distinguished poet, he wrote for Smith’s Weekly and was well known for his admiration of Australian soldiers. In the First World War, Bean and Gullet were official war correspondents and went on to become official historians; Gullet wrote The Australian Imperial Force in Sinai and Palestine (1923). There was an expectation that Slessor would become the official historian: Slessor thought so too.

In January 1941, on a troopship to the Middle East, Slessor gave a lecture in which he outlined the role of the official war correspondent: “My job is divided mainly into two branches.” The first was as a war correspondent, describing events and the daily life of soldiers. The second was to deal with “the compilation of the Official History of this War, a job on which I am likely to work, either full-time or part-time, after the War has ended.”

By 1942, however, Slessor had fallen from favour. He had alienated senior military officers and he resented the tight censorship imposed on his despatches. He had also lost Bean’s confidence. Bean thought Slessor had not made the most of his opportunities. But Bean and Long had known and respected each other since the 1930s. Both were ‘old boys’ of All Saints’ College, Bathurst, and Bean had worked with Long’s father in establishing the army education service in 1918. Bean admired Long’s “tireless patience”, his understanding of warfare, and Long’s ability to relate to political and military figures.

The Bean tradition

Among his many achievements, Bean established an approach to war writing that has become the convention in Australian military historiography. Bean’s First World War official history was written for the general reader. His narrative emphasised the actions of individual, frontline Australian soldiers rather than tactics, logistics or strategy. Long described Bean’s approach as based on the philosophy that an Australian war history should not be one in which the army was the impersonal instrument of a commander’s will. Instead, the army should be viewed as a group of people. Long consciously adopted Bean’s approach for the Second World War official history, establishing the “Bean tradition”. Long later wrote, “I originated little in the technique of writing the war history. I merely followed Bean’s principles, modifying these to meet the special requirements of the World War II history.”

It was a successful methodology. It was also a pragmatic choice. The war was now entering its fourth year. Unlike his mentor, Long had not had years to reflect or prepare for a multi-volume, multi-author history project before he became General Editor. There is a sense of urgency in his 1943 diaries as the magnitude of the official history project became clear. Long sought or received Bean’s advice on just about everything, from the number of volumes in each series and their contents, to the selection of authors. Long’s diary is an example of their relationship.

I had been compiling a foolscap book on the operations round Damascus in 1941, using the methods CEWB employed, so far as I could recall them. I asked [Bean] whether he found that it was best to make extracts from the papers of smaller units first and work up from them to the higher formations or vice versa. He said that he had tried both methods, and still did not know which was best. The choice was between beginning at the bottom, and thus being able to discard all the inaccuracies that appear in reports from higher formations, and, on the other hand, getting the broad picture from the papers of higher formations and working downwards with some knowledge of which bits of detail were significant. He said again that he had tried to find short cuts but had never succeeded, and, again and again, when he decided to disregard some source or other, he found that he had made a mistake in consequence.

Long adopted many of Bean’s techniques, among them the “map method” of arranging notes from sources such as unit diaries and reports and comprehensive biographical notes. John Balfour joined Long’s staff in 1946 after working with Bean for 23 years. Long later commented how Balfour tutored “all the assistants who have worked on volumes of this history”. As perhaps the most eloquent testimony to Bean’s influence, in early 1944 Long chose the final paragraph of Bean’s final volume as the epigram on Long’s own letterhead. “What these men did nothing can alter now.”  

Official War Historian   

Long had to expand his perspective from that of a journalist writing about an immediate event or specific individual, to now observing and recording Australia’s part in the whole conflict. He needed a comprehensive understanding of what had occurred before he was appointed. He had to organise these events into coherent, well-proportioned narratives; and he needed to select and manage a team of authors and researchers to share the work. Effectively a project manager, he had to scope the project, identify its structure and resourcing needs, and to begin engaging with stakeholders.

Many people told Long that the volumes of Bean’s official history were too long and too slow in coming out. Prime Minister John Curtin, for example, suggested Long include elements of “journalese” to make the volumes popular. Curtin warned against being too specific, as “most people would not read too much detail.” Treasurer Ben Chifley liked the idea of a “potted” history of the war, “something a busy man like him could take up and read; he could not tackle a row of volumes.” Long considered writing a single volume history first, but decided against it. Instead, his aims for the history were:

To crystallise the facts once and for all for any subsequent use;

To establish a story that will carry conviction in other countries;

To satisfy the men who took part that the history is an adequate memorial of their efforts and sacrifices. 

Long presented a provisional plan for a 16-volume history to the War Cabinet in July 1943. A Medical Editor, not then appointed, would plan the medical volumes. The War Cabinet revised an extended plan in December 1945, which was later amended in 1950. The government provided Long and his colleagues with “reasonable access to official records” and decided government censorship would be limited to preventing the disclosure of the services’ technical secrets, as was necessary in the post-war period. 

Identifying potential authors was another of Long’s responsibilities. His view was that they should have some first-hand experience of the events – but not be too closely involved, in case they might appear to be prejudiced in their opinions. Pre-war journalists and war correspondents were naturally on Long’s list, but the team would also include public servants and academics. Not surprisingly for the time, only a few authors had studied history at university. It would be the first book for several of them. (Long had worked on earlier manuscripts, including one based on his impressions as a war correspondent in Libya and Greece, but none had been published.) Lieutenant Commander G. Hermon Gill, diplomat Paul Hasluck, and Flight Lieutenant Douglas Gillison were among the first identified for the project.

Long’s nominations were approved by a special committee that included Prime Minister Curtin and the Leader of the Opposition, Robert Menzies. Long, as General Editor, and later Allan S. Walker, the Medical Editor, received a salary. The other authors were contracted to complete their respective volumes within a specific time, usually four years, with at least one year of full-time work. They were paid in instalments.         

Within five months of taking up his appointment, Long had largely finalised the structure of the official history, nominated most of its authors and was collecting material. He visited numerous units in Australia and the South-West Pacific Area for much of the rest of the war.  

I lived with the units of the 9th Division in the Finschhafen campaign in 1943; spent several months with the American army in 1944: was with 3rd Division units in Bougainville and 6th Division units from Aitape. Later I was with the 7th and 9th Divisions in Borneo.

Long recorded his impressions and observations, and conducted more than 600 interviews with officers and soldiers, collected in headquarters and in the field. They were captured in hand-written notes, and recorded in 134 notebooks and diaries. In addition to unit war diaries and reports, Long actively sought individual accounts from diaries and correspondence. “The personal narratives of competent fighting men are proving very useful,” he remarked in 1944, “especially in one’s enquires about campaigns where the fighting has been so missed and documentary records so scanty that the inclination is to say ‘you’ll never get the truth about it.”

Like Bean, Long thought a truer picture could be established through interviewing many participants and by examining the diaries of individuals and small units, rather than relying solely on accounts of commanders and records of large formations. Long ultimately decided upon accepting the evidence of the “witness” closest to the event. Thus, the report of a company commander was preferred (so far as the experiences of his company went) to the account of the same incident by the battalion’s or the brigade’s commanders.

A mammoth undertaking

At the project’s peak, Long and 13 other authors were engaged in writing different volumes with a team of 10 staff that included researchers, a cartographer and typists. Long was based at the Australian War Memorial. He described his work habit in an interview in 1948:

Sometimes I spend weeks reading, making notes and extracts, and writing nothing at all. When I start writing, I sometimes get as much as 4,000 words down in a day, but on the whole most of us on the actual writing job consider 2,000 words a day very good going indeed.

Long spent half his time on the volumes he was writing, and the remaining time on general correspondence and administrative work. He regularly issued bulletins to his authors. This “Memorandum to Writers” included notes on the history’s style guide, reflections on the craft of writing, information on recent publications, and other updates. Long penned numerous articles, reviewed and approved draft manuscripts of unit histories ahead of publication, and provided advice to the battle honours nomenclature committee. 

“Every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and 10,000 that cannot be recounted,” remarked Long philosophically. Delays were caused by the slow release of documents from Britain and the United States, or the publication of memoirs and despatches. Long had to accommodate his authors’ other work commitments, their resignations and even their deaths.

The acclaimed broadcaster and war correspondent Chester Wilmot, for example, was killed in an aircraft crash in the Mediterranean Sea in 1954. The author of Tobruk 1941 (1944) and The Struggle for Europe (1952), he was working on the Tobruk and El Alamein manuscript when he died. It is tantalising to speculate how, as the most experienced historian on the project, Wilmot may have influenced the approach and style of the official history, had he lived. 

The authors typically completed their volumes living interstate, working part-time on their manuscripts. The commando officer and diplomat David Dexter wrote The New Guinea Offensive (1961) mostly in Colombo and India. Barton Maughan, a decorated El Alamein veteran and mining executive, drafted Tobruk and El Alamein (1966) in Broken Hill. Fortunately, Long had a talent for organisation and encouragement. He corresponded with and visited his authors regularly. His advice was, “Start writing – and write, write, write.” 

Lionel Wigmore described Long’s writing style as “factual rather than flamboyant”. Rather than seeking to impose his views through a strong authorial voice, he preferred to unfold events in a way that encouraged the reader to assess them. The official history aimed to “crystallise the facts”, to establish an Australian story that could be told in other countries, and “satisfy” veterans so “that the history is an adequate memorial of their efforts and sacrifices.”   

Long’s To Bengahzi (1952) was the first volume published. Ian Fitchett, a former war correspondent, wrote in the Age that Long “has done a splendid job and has followed closely the pattern set by Dr CEW Bean.” The Argus’s editor commented that the “official history of the Second AIF that is gradually unfolding shows that one tradition at least is magnificently established.” Subsequent volumes received similarly positive reviews and remained in print for many years. Long wrote two more books for the series: Greece, Crete and Syria (1953) and The Final Campaigns (1963). In 1953, he was award an Order of the British Empire (OBE) and he retired as general editor ten years later

He remained active in retirement. Long was a long-serving member of the Memorial’s board of management (later a trustee), a research fellow with the Australian Dictionary of Biography and the author of many other articles. He battled lung cancer later in life, yet despite the pain, he completed a biography of General Douglas MacArthur. Long died in 1968, aged 67. MacArthur as a Military Commander was published the following year and The Six Years War (1973), an abridged overview of Australia’s role in the war, was also published posthumously. Long had written the manuscript several years earlier but its publication had been delayed to allow for the completion of the remaining operational volumes of the official history.

A.J. (Bill) Sweeting, Long’s long-time colleague and friend, oversaw the publication of the final volumes, the last being S.J. Butlin’s and C.B. Schedvin’s War Economy 1942–1945 (1977). Sweeting also assisted Long with his MacArthur book. A veteran of the campaigns in the Middle East and Papua, Sweeting had worked with Long since 1944 and described him as a modest man. Long used homely phrases to his writers and staff: “too much dressing spoils the salad” to an author fond of colourful prose – or “hard writing makes easy reading” to another. Sweeting’s own contribution to the official history was significant. 

A.J. (Bill) Sweeting, Long’s long-time colleague and friend, oversaw the publication of the final volumes, the last being S.J. Butlin’s and C.B. Schedvin’s War Economy 1942–1945 (1977). Sweeting also assisted Long with his MacArthur book. A veteran of the campaigns in the Middle East and Papua, Sweeting had worked with Long since 1944 and described him as a modest man. Long used homely phrases to his writers and staff: “too much dressing spoils the salad” to an author fond of colourful prose – or “hard writing makes easy reading” to another. Sweeting’s own contribution to the official history was significant. 

An enduring legacy

Australia in the War of 1939–1945 came to 22 volumes, published between 1952 and 1977, containing more than seven million words. The series consisted of seven books on the Australian army’s campaigns, two on the Royal Australian Navy, four on the RAAF’s operations, four books on the medical services, two on the government and the Australian people, two on the war economy, and one on Australian science and industry. The size of the history reflects the scope and diversity of Australia’s war effort. The fighting and home fronts are considered, as are the country’s political, economic and industrial contribution to the war.

Even with dedicated multiple volumes, the official history did not and could not cover everything. Long, for instance, initially considered a publication dedicated to the women’s services, and worked on a general defence policy volume. Both ideas were abandoned as stand-alone studies. An absence, historian Robert O’Neill observed, was a volume dealing with questions of strategy at the level of the Australian government and its advisors. This would have highlighted the major problems faced by Australia during the war, and appraised Australia’s strategic performance. Such a volume could have served as the “central spine” from which the campaign studies could radiate. O’Neill employed this approach for his two-volume official history of Australia in the Korean War (published in 1981–85). Historian David Horner has similarly observed that Long faced the problem of dealing with intelligence sources. Long may never have been informed of the Allies breaking the German and Japanese codes, which only started to be revealed publicly in the 1970s.

Long’s legacy continues today. Subsequent generations of historians, writers, researchers and students, continue to read, cite (or skim) the Australian Second World War official history. It has been digitised and is freely available on the Memorial’s website. We continue tunnelling through what Long called “the mountain of papers” – military records, diaries, notebooks, and correspondence created by the official history in the Memorial’s archives. Long knew that the actions of Australians forces “would disappear from the pages of history if Australians do not record them.”