OPENING OF SIR LESLIE MORSHEADWAR VETERAN
HOE. CN3~-A, A C To
26TH APRIL. 1964
Speech by te Prim,; stn~ cer, ',_ tfnS. Robert Me-7APe
Mr. President, Lady Morshead and Ladies and Gentlemen
I rather think. that the ' resident made a slight
understatement when he said that without the women this
organisation culd not exist, because the simple truth, o0
course is that without women, none of us would be here.
( laughter) This is a truth of universal application,
Now, I regard this as a siLngular honour to be allowed
to declare open this building and to declare it open in the
name of one of the great Australians olo our time Leslie
Morshead. I knew him for a great number of years, He was,
a few years before myself, born i~ n Ballarat and as all Ballarat
people will admit, that is no bad 4thing, ( Laughter) He went
to school in Ballarat and then became for a time a schoolmaster.
I always used to say to him: " Where did you get this gleam in
the eye? Where did you acquire this habit of command?" and
he admitted to me that he had been a schoolmaster for a few
years. It must have been terrific.
Then, OA. course, as you have heard, he had a remarkable
record in the First World War and between the two wars, a very
remarkable record in business administration. All the time he
kept up his cuntact with the citizen forces whatever they might
be called from time to time, and in the Second World War, he
became one of the immortal figures of that war, I just want
to say something about him, if I may, in one or two of these
capacities. First of all, he was a great citizen soldier, This is
something almost peculiar to Australia no regular army until
quite recently, men accustomed to responsibility and command in
their business affairs devoting some of their time sometimes
a great deal of their time, to the art of war., It is sometimes
forgotten that whereas many of the groat men in military history
in other countries or most of them, sometimes all of them, were
highly trained professional soldiers of immense distinction
in Australia so mnany of the people we think of from Monash Z
Morshead were great citizen soldiers some might have satd
amateur soldiers but enriched by the whole of their civil
experience and greatly gifted in the command of men.
Early in 1941, 1 was in the Middle East and I went out
to Bardier and Tobruk and Benghazi, and at this time, these
places had just fallen by attack upon the Italians, I very well
remember with some trepidation that the day that I was at
Benghazi there was a little counter-attack by the Italians; it
was fairly near to the event. Leslie Morshead had taken his
brigade to England and had brought it back to the Middle East
and it was the nucleus of what became the Ninth Division. Now
that was an extraordinary piece of country. It must have been
a problem for any rmilitary conmander, because although there
was a defined coastline, an indented coastline, particularly at
Tobruk, the country itself looked to the superficial eye to be
a mere desert. You would wonder how anybody could find cover in
it until you discovered that there were little depressions and
waddies, dongas in the territory; but I would have thought
terribly hard places to defend. Well, at the time I was there / 2
2
which was sometime in January of' 1941, there was no problem of
defence because the wii~ o] e-mov(-mentu was westward to Benghazi and
down towards the bottoma uf the gu-tll anid it was only then that it
was discovered that the Germans under Rcmel had landed, coming
across by the short cut from Pantelaria and that they were massing
themselves for an attack with a Panzer Division hitherto unknown
in the fighting that had gone on. Well, anybody looking at
Tobruk from the ground, looking at Tobruk from the air, would
-have said, well this would be a tremendously difficult place to
defend tremendously difficult, against armourbut there were two
great tings. One was that there was a tremendous spirit in the
men who ultimately withstood the siege of Tobruk when Rommel swept
eastward and the other was that -they Ihad as their commanding
officer one of the very great soldiers of the war, Leslie Morshead,
He could look you in the eye and appear to be fierce
but he was fundamentally a modest man. Ho had the most enormous
qualities, building up the morale of people who were with him,
And so, in the long run, we all know what happened. Rommel came
along, Benghazi fell, Tobruk first of all fell and then didn't and
then was isolated on the flank and so the Fourth rolled eastward
till the day came when the defence of Tobruk had at long last to
be altered, But what from April of 1941 to October of 1941,
Tobruk held out as an isolated post on the side of the wiiole
German advance to the East in country to a lay eye, as I have
said, would appear to present every conceivable problem of defence,
in which defence had to be active and in which defence had to
harry the other man and not get bogged down within a narrow
perimeter, and for those months it held and I will always believe
that one of the dominating reasons I know there were great men
there, marvellous people, we honour them every year in Australia,
but you know someplace in the centre there has to be a great man'
and this was a great man, Leslie Morshead. He can never be done
sufficient honour in his memory for what he did at that time in
that place. It may interest some of you to know that in March,
April and into May of that year I was in London sitting in the
War Cabinet with the great Winston Churchill anca staying with him
each weekend down at Chequers. Hardly three days would ever go
by without him saying something about the defence of Tobruk, This
captured his imagination. You know, with that rich vocabulary
of his, he would look at me and say " This is not a matter merely
of defending something. This is a sally-fort from which to attack
the foe". I had the great honour once of sending Leslie Morshead
a message about this which I know he kept because he referred to
it years and years after the war.
And then, of course, don't let us forget that that
was an. episode of defence against siege, but it wasn't so long
thereafter when at Alamein, Morshead commanded the Ninth Division
and that was the crucial turning battle of the war, Let me
emphasise that fact. There were people, when I was in Egypt early
in 1941, who thought that if the enemy once got near the delta
there was no defence possible. Alamein was designed to jreven
them from getting into the delta and Alamein, this crucial battle,
meant that the Rommel forces rolled back, that the whole position
in North Africa became clear, that an attack on Italy became
feasible, that a strike into the heart of the enemy from the
Mediterranean became possible. I really believe that if you had
to determine what were the crucial battles of the war, Alamein
would be at least one of them and I would think possibly the
crucial battle. e. e / 3
Somubody '. ro'Ce a book Which read as a bcy
called " Seven Decisive BcaGles of History" or something of
the kindo I've forgottena This, I believe, was a decisive
battle in the war and therefore we must not think of these
matters without thinking back to the man who played so great
a part in them Leslie Morshead, I have told you a lot of
things, all of which you know better than I do. I thought
I would rather like to tell them in the presence of his widow
because it is important that she should know that she wears
a name that is not a great name just because somebody said it
is but a great name because he made it one, and I think it is
a marvellous thing that in this city his name should be
commemorated in this fashion. I hope that all over Australia
it will never be forgotten,
It is a very particular honesty for one who
was his admirer and, I am happy to say, his friend, to be able
to stand here and declare this building open,