In All Aspects Ready: Australia’s Navy in World War One

Australian Historical Studies ISSN: 1031-461X (Print) 1940-5049 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rahs20 In All Aspects Ready: Australia’s Navy in World War One Michael Wynd To cite this article: Michael Wynd (2017) In All Aspects Ready: Australia’s Navy in World War One, Australian Historical Studies, 48:1, 130-131, DOI: 10.1080/1031461X.2016.1273063 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2016.1273063 Published online: 01 Mar 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 12 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rahs20 Download by: [University of Florida] Date: 05 August 2017, At: 20:59 130 Australian Historical Studies, 48, 2017 scholarly and popular engagement with Anzac Day – confirms the urge to mark this national commemoration may be ubiquitous, but is not without a degree of ambivalence. Including some more critical voices would have considerably strengthened that important sense of historical contradiction and uncertainty. Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 20:59 05 August 2017 ANNA CLARK University of Technology, Sydney © 2017, Anna Clark In All Aspects Ready: Australia’s Navy in World War One. By David Stevens. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. 469. A$59.95 cloth. What has been lost in the Australian centenary celebrations of the First World War is the part that the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) played in the four years of the war at sea. In the tidal wave of books on Gallipoli, the Western Front, and the Light Horse, it is refreshing to have a volume on naval history as a corrective to the imbalance in Australian historiography. From the declaration of war on 5 August until well after the German armistice, the RAN was on active operations in the Pacific, Atlantic, North Sea, English Channel, Mediterranean, Dardanelles and the Far East. Sailors fought ashore, in the air, and on and below the sea. David Stevens’ book In All Aspects Ready is a valuable addition to the historiography of Australia’s naval contribution to the maritime war and makes the legitimate argument that for those serving in the RAN it was a true world war and the navy was ‘the first ordered into a conflict and the last to relinquish the struggle’(2). This is the first publication of a history of the RAN in the First World War since Arthur Jose published his volume of official history in 1928 as part of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914– 18 series. Stevens has the freedom and resources that were denied to Jose and it is a much richer and deeper history than what was produced ninety years ago. There are plenty of tables and diagrams throughout, such as the individual ships that served and movements of the RAN in the North Sea. As a researcher, I salute any author who goes to the trouble of researching and publishing this information. There are also short biographical sketches of key figures in the RAN at the end of each chapter, which complements the narrative. The first two chapters cover the formation of the RAN, war planning and the Australian Station. Stevens establishes the role of the RAN within the Commonwealth’s armed forces and sets the scene for the wartime operations that followed. At the outbreak of the war in August 1914, the RAN was the only major naval force that the Admiralty could count on in the southern hemisphere. If it had not been for the RAN, the expeditionary forces of both Australia and New Zealand would not have been able to depart for the war and reach their destiny on the slopes of Gallipoli. The chapters following are based around the theatres of operation that the RAN served in: a very useful structure to build the narrative around. These sections reinforce the author’s argument that the RAN truly fought a world war. Stevens also writes very well on the battlecruiser HMAS Australia which was the flagship of the RAN but unfortunately was not present for the three major engagements in the North Sea. She was perhaps fortunate to have missed Jutland and the fate of her sister ship HMS Indefatigable. This book is not an intricately dense academic or a simplistic popular history: the clear writing and careful attention to detail work on both levels. I struggled to find a weakness. This thoroughly researched, single-volume modern history of the RAN deserves a place on the library shelf. Stevens confirms that all naval history is ultimately about those men who operated the ships, and aircraft, served on shore, led the sailors, and fought the ships they served on. Researchers, students and those interested in the wider history beyond Gallipoli and the Western Front of the First World War are urged to read this fine work closely to get a better understanding of the Great War at sea. While acknowledging that a single volume could not contain the whole story Stevens has managed to bring the various aspects of the naval history into a single comprehensive history, which is a magnificent achievement. In All Aspects Ready follows Stevens’ previous work on the general history of the RAN and the history of the RAN in the Second World War. This volume makes a splendid trilogy of Australian naval history that is both academically rigorous but also widely accessible Reviews: Books to the general reader who wants to understand the part Australian naval forces played in the twentieth century. In the end, the First World War was a maritime war and the Royal Australian Navy was indeed in all aspects ready for the demands of that war. This book humanises the men who went down to the sea and the war that they fought. Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 20:59 05 August 2017 MICHAEL WYND National Museum of the Royal New Zealand Navy © 2017, Michael Wynd New Perceptions of the Vietnam War: Essays on the War, the South Vietnamese Experience, the Diaspora and the Continuing Impact. Edited by Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen. Jefferson: McFarland, 2015. Pp. 262. US$39.95 paper. New Perceptions of the Vietnam War is a result of a symposium organised as part of Nathalie Nguyen’s ARC Future Fellowship project on Vietnamese veterans. With its focus on the South Vietnamese government and army, on women, and on the impact of the Vietnamese diaspora on memorialisation, the collection does present some new perceptions of this conflict and its legacies, but the claim to have ‘reinterpreted and reassessed’ (1) the war is overstated. The collection is divided into four parts: War and Politics, Memorials and Commemoration, War and Women’s Writing, and Identities and Legacies. Of these, the first two sections offer the most cohesive approach to both the section and book theme. The essays of the first section, War and Politics, highlight Vietnamese political agency and intellectual traditions, and critique how these are frequently overlooked in the traditional historical narrative of Vietnam, which is focused on the American perspective. The second section, Memorials and Commemoration, explores the politics of memory, and is particularly effective at highlighting the tensions between public and personal memory. This is most pertinent for presenting a new perspective on a war narrative that has been homogenised by the ubiquity of its cultural representations, as is the case with Vietnam. Located in the final section on identities and legacies, Noah Riseman’s essay comparing the impact of Vietnam on indigenous soldiers from the United States and Australia is the standout of the collection, best exemplifying the book’s 131 purpose of a new perception. Riseman’s analysis of these soldiers’ experiences provides a new way of illuminating the domestic race politics of both the United States and Australia. Most fascinating was the connection that Native American soldiers made between their warrior traditions and their motivation to serve in the US military, while for Indigenous Australians the military wage was more enticing, offering a form of socio-economic equality with non-Indigenous Australians not available in other occupations. Although the end of Vietnam coincided with the Australian land rights movement of the 1970s, it was also interesting to learn that Indigenous Australian veterans were less likely to radicalise than Native American veterans, many of whom joined the Red Power movement upon their return to the US. Perhaps most important is Riseman’s contribution to a nuanced, transnational and postcolonial analysis of Vietnam as he draws in a consideration of the soldiers’ awareness of colonised people entering into a decolonising state in a potentially neo-colonial war. Establishing cohesion and diversity simultaneously is admittedly difficult in an edited collection, and in this case some of the editorial choices seemed to undermine cohesion for the sake of diversity. For example, the third section, which examines women’s writing, comprises only two essays. Not only was this far too slight in comparison to the other sections, but it also needed to better signpost the contributions of those essays to a new perception of the Vietnam War; simply locating this within gender felt weak and seemed simply to be an opportunity for Nguyen to showcase her established (and, I might add, excellent) scholarship on Vietnamese women rather than to present a novel dimension to interpreting Vietnam. The collection aimed to be interdisciplinary, but the focus was clearly historical, making Alexandra Kurmann and Tess Do’s highly literary essay on the works of Vietnamese French writer Linda Le appear out of place. As the only non-academic contribution, Robert S. McKelvey’s memoir essay on his personal experiences of Vietnam, while engaging, also sat awkwardly in this collection, even in its location in the section on identities and legacies. Furthermore, as the recollections of an American soldier, it seems to run counter to the collection’s aim to decentre American military narratives of Vietnam. Yet both the engagingness of the essay and the