Sir John Monash deserves promotion to field marshal

Sir John Monash. Picture: AAP

At 11am on the 11th day of the 11th month, Armistice Day, 1918, Sir John Monash had exactly the correct rank of lieutenant general or, as some say, a three-star general. On this, almost all agree.

He was successfully commanding the five Australian Imperial Force divisions as they put in 100 days of heavy fighting starting with the small but exemplar Battle of Hamel on July 4, 1918, eventually smashing through the Hindenburg line with difficulty and with Allied assistance to victory.

Lieutenant general was the correct rank for a corps commander of five divisions, even though he had at times thousands of other Allied soldiers under command.

Just over two months before this, as many are learning for the first time, Monash and notably Pompey Elliott, William Glasgow and their key units had helped turn back the lunge of the Germans under Operation Michael.

Villers-Bretonneux, 100 years ago overnight, was a key turning point in this repulse; had the Germans held on and captured the Amiens railway junction, just to the west, then most historians agree the Germans would have won the Great War throughout continental Europe.

So I salute the decision of then prime minister Tony Abbott to build the first key Australian Western Front centre near Villers on the Hamel side. It is located just beyond the huge Australian and Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery, complete with a brilliant design and under budget.

Most would also agree with the Department of Veterans’ Affairs-devised name for the centre, the Sir John Monash Centre, with no rank attaching, in my view, the correct nomenclature and name for this vital symbol of Australian history on French soil.

It is also an agreed historical fact that Monash did receive a double knighthood from King ­George V: one in the field on August 12, 1918, at AIF HQ Chateau Bertangles — a year after Canadian Arthur Currie was knighted in Albert, France — and one announced on January 1, 1919, in London. It happens that this was after the victory banquet at Buckingham Palace on December 27, 1918, attended by US president Woodrow Wilson and five prime ministers. Everyone who mattered and who was around was present.

Sitting near each other were Winston Churchill, artist John Singer Sargent and Monash. My book Maestro John Monash has the seating plan and shows right next to Monash on his right-hand side sat Rudyard Kipling, who Monash had met in Melbourne before the war. It was a night of nights that made Australia’s prime minister, William Morris Hughes, jealous of the standing of Monash.

The result is the fact that Monash was frozen at the rank of lieutenant general for 11 years after November 11, 1918. On November 11, 1929, a correction was made with Monash and Sir Harry Chauvel being promoted to the rank of general (or four-star) by then prime minister James Scullin.

There were no Australian awards for Monash, absolutely zero for our brilliant non-Duntroon citizen-soldier, who entered the army as a private and rose through the ranks as a res­ervist, generally agreed even by those in the Canberra triangle of being by far our greatest citizen-general.

In 2107, Monash will have equalled the years in death that George Washington had reached when the White House promoted Washington one step in rank to the equivalent of field marshal, namely the passage of 176 years.

Australia in so many things is quicker than the Yanks — quicker into World War I and World War II by years, for starters.

We do not have to wait that long to do the right thing by Sir John Monash of Jerilderie and Melbourne.

Tim Fischer is a former deputy prime minister of Australia.