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Military myths help nation-building - but is that enough?

By Tony Jacques - posted Tuesday, 24 April 2007


Recent years have seen a steady increase in young people attending Anzac Day parades, Gallipoli commemoration events and trekking the Kokoda Trail. But is it a case of never have there been so many so interested in so few key events with so little learned?

One obvious reason for this increasing participation is growing nationalism and nation-building mythology - even though most of the young Australians who camp out at Gallipoli are probably unaware, among the allies, Britain and France both lost far more men in that bloody campaign than Australia or New Zealand.

However, beyond this over-simplified focus on iconic patriotic events, baby-boomers and their children appear to be fuelling a genuine and perhaps enduring interest in military aspects of history and current affairs, both in Australia and elsewhere.

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This is clearly not manifested in a desire to take an active part in war - as demonstrated by the ongoing recruitment challenges facing the armed forces in Australia and other Western countries.

But the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan has certainly made military strategy a central topic of conversation throughout the country, and has more young people thinking and arguing and demonstrating about war and military affairs than at any time since Vietnam. Unfortunately, it would also appear that much of that interest is confined to short term political events, with limited real understanding of the historic context of war in general and the Iraq War in particular.

Most libraries have a wide range of histories and memoirs about the 1991 Gulf War, which lasted less than a month and saw perhaps 30,000 Iraqi troops killed and about 400 Coalition dead - a large proportion of the latter lost to accidents and friendly fire. (And even these numbers are hotly disputed.)

By contrast the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War which immediately preceded it (and which has a vital strategic relevance to the current situation in Iraq) cost the combatant nations an estimated one million killed. Yet this bloody nine-year war seldom made our evening TV news at the time, and today is rarely mentioned, let alone featured in the standard literature.

While just about every bookshop in Australia now has an extensive display section marked “military”, the great majority of the books remain Western in outlook and thoroughly Eurocentric. There is, for instance, plenty on red-coated heroes facing the fierce Zulus, but very little on the great Zulu wars of succession which were fought a few decades earlier. And it is even harder to locate anywhere a good English language book on the dramatic military campaigns at the birth of Islam.

With such a highly selective diet of information available, even about contemporary wars, it is hardly surprising that many people turn instead to popular culture, especially movies.

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Over the last few years Hollywood has renewed its love-affair with once-popular military subjects, releasing films about recent wars such as Three Kings, Blackhawk Down and We Were Soldiers and the World War 11 dramas, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line and Letters from Iwo Jima. Nineteenth century military exploits were the focus of The Last Samurai and Master and Commander, while growing interest in medieval and ancient military history has produced films including Troy, Alexander, Braveheart, Kingdom of Heaven and even Gladiator.

Likewise, Australian film too is now witnessing a revival of interest in military themes not seen since the golden years of the 1980’s which produced classics such as Breaker Morant (1980) and Gallipoli (1981) and television series like 1915 (1982), ANZACS (1985), A Fortunate Life (1986) and The Sullivans (1976-1983).

After a fallow period, this renewed interest in Australia has seen outstanding movies like Paradise Road (1997) and Kokoda (2006) as well as the TV mini-series Changi (2001) and Curtin (2007), not to mention scores of local TV documentaries exploring just about every aspect of Australia’s military past.

At the same time Australian free-to-air and pay television is now providing a veritable glut of overseas documentary programs about war and warfare, from battlefield archeology and computerised battle reconstructions, to army-life reality programs, dramatised biographies of fighting leaders and the rise and fall of the great military empires.

This flood of material should theoretically contribute to better knowledge and understanding, but there is scant evidence of that. For example, Hollywood has done its best over recent years to convince the rising generation, among other things, that the 13th century Scottish patriot William Wallace had a highly unlikely affair with a French princess (Braveheart) or that Americans rather than the British captured an code machine from a German U-boat (U-571) even though the actual event took place months before the United States entered the war.

And despite the huge volume of factual reports about the present war in Iraq, public opinion surveys in the United States show that many Americans still believe weapons of mass destruction were actually found in Iraq. Who knows what the same survey would show in Australia or Europe.

If the truth about events so recent is so hard to establish, how much more difficult is it to fully comprehend the truth about wars which were fought decades, generations or centuries ago.

The current rising interest about matters military should be supported and encouraged to improve knowledge of the past events, to provide context for current affairs and to help develop well-informed world citizens. But for that to occur, we need to move our focus away from myths and icons and the Hollywood view of history to a proper understanding of the brutal reality.

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About the Author

Tony Jaques is the author of the Dictionary of Battles and Sieges (The Miegunayh Press 2007). Tony Jaques was born in New Zealand and graduated in political science then started his professional life in journalism in New Zealand and London before moving to political speech writing. He now works and teaches in the field of corporate communication and issue management where he has been extensively published. A teenage enthusiasm for World War II became a life-time passion for military history in all eras. He is currently resident in Melbourne, Australia.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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