Thomas Blamey

Sir Thomas Albert Blamey (1939)

Sir Thomas Albert Blamey GBE , KCB , CMG , DSO , ED , (born January 24, 1884 , Wagga Wagga , New South Wales ; † May 27, 1951 , Heidelberg , Victoria ) was an Australian officer of the First and Second World Wars and the previous one only Australian to achieve the rank of field marshal .

During the First World War , Blamey served as a career officer at Gallipoli and on the Western Front . At the height of his career, he was Commander-in-Chief, Australian Military Forces during World War II , while also leading the Allied ground forces in the Southwest Pacific under General Douglas MacArthur . On September 2, 1945, Blamey was on board the USS Missouri with MacArthur and signed the Japanese declaration of surrender to Australia. He then flew to Morotai and personally accepted the surrender of the remaining Japanese in the Southwest Pacific.

Early career

The seventh of ten children of Richard Henwood Blamey and his wife Margaret Louisa Murray, Blamey was born in Lake Albert near Wagga Wagga , New South Wales , where he also spent his childhood years. After a few failures in farming, his father bought a small farm and worked as a cattle dealer and a shepherd. Blamey learned necessary skills for the bush, combined with those for his father's business, and thus became a gifted rider. He was an avid and gifted member of the Army Cadets at his school. He also passed the test to become a police officer.

In 1899, Blamey began working as a trainee teacher in the Wagga Wagga area before moving to Western Australia in 1903 to continue his teaching profession. During this time he was always involved as a teacher with the school cadets.

He was also a very devout Methodist from childhood . In early 1906 he was encouraged by church leaders in Western Australia to begin training as a preacher, but he declined.

He saw a new opportunity when personnel for the training of cadets in the Australian military was sought. He passed the entrance examination as third best in Australia, but could not find a job because there were no vacancies in Western Australia. After he persuaded the military authorities in writing, he was given a position of lieutenant in Victoria; he entered service in November 1906 with responsibility for cadet training in Victoria.

On September 8, 1909, at the age of 25, he married 34-year-old Minnie Caroline Millard in Toorak . On June 29, 1910, their first son, Charles Middleton Blamey, called "Dolf", was born. He was killed in a plane crash on December 7, 1932, at the age of 22, while serving in the Royal Australian Air Force . The second child, Thomas Raymond Blamey, was born in 1914 († 1998).

In 1910 he was promoted to captain. In 1911, after several candidates had failed, he was the first Australian officer to pass the entrance test for the British Staff College , which trained soldiers for higher military ranks. He began training in Quetta , India in 1912, where he was accompanied by his wife and first child. He completed his training the following year without any problems.

Blamey was sent to Great Britain in May 1914 for further training. During the trip there he visited Turkey (with the Dardanelles ), Germany and Belgium . He joined the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards for a short time and subsequently began service with the 43rd Wessex Division , which was opening its annual camp at the time. On July 1, 1914, he was appointed major.

First World War

Blamey, 1919

During World War I , Blamey served in the First Australian Imperial Force (AIF) . In mid-1914, Blamey was a member of the Wessex Division. In November he traveled to Egypt with Henry George Chauvel to join the Australian contingent, where he eventually became intelligence officer of the 1st Australian Division at the Battle of Gallipoli . While landing at Anzac Cove , he was sent to assess the need for reinforcement from Colonel McCay's force. He confirmed the need, which is why the reinforcement troops were sent.

On the night of May 13, 1915, Blamey, in his capacity as intelligence officer, led a patrol made up of himself, Sergeant JH Wills, and AA Orchard behind the Turkish lines to locate positions in the olive groves that made the coast unsafe close. An enemy force of eight Turks approached near Pine Ridge, one of whom was about to stab Orchard, causing Blamey to shoot him with his revolver. In the battle that followed, six of the Turks were killed. Blamey withdrew with his patrol to the Australian lines without having found the positions. Subsequent investigations in secure terrain revealed that the positions were much further south than had been assumed.

Blamey has always been interested in technical innovations. He was instrumental in the recording of telescopic rifles at Gallipoli, an instrument he saw during an inspection of the front lines. He managed for the inventor, Lance Corporal William Beech, to be assigned to divisional leadership to develop the idea. Within a few days the model was perfected and telescopic rifles were being used inside the Australian trenches.

In July 1915, Blamey was promoted to General Staff Officer Second Degree (GSO2) and in September of that year he became a temporary lieutenant colonel and joined the newly formed Australian 2nd Division in Egypt as Adjutant General and Quartermaster General (AA & QMG) - the highest administrative officer - at. The commander, Major General James Gordon Legge , preferred an Australian officer because he felt that a British officer was not so attached to the troops. However, after the Australian troops were transferred to France in 1916 , a dispute between the GSO1 and his British officer ensured that Blamey returned from the 2nd Division to the 1st Division as GSO1, in which position he was involved in the Battle of Pozières and Trusted because of the attack that led to the capture of the city.

In 1917, he received the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) at the New Year's Awards. on June 1, 1918 he became chief of the Australian Corps under Sir John Monash . In the successes of Monash in the last months of the war he played a prominent role; he was impressed by the capabilities of the new tank models and urged them to be used in the Battle of Hamel , where they contributed to its success in July 1918. General Monash valued him as one of the key factors in the success of the Australian Corps in the Battle of Amiens (1918) in August and at the Hindenburg Line in September. On January 1, 1918, he was appointed Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George . Blamey continued to be an advocate of technical innovation.

Between the wars

In 1919 Blamey returned to Australia, where he was appointed deputy chief of the general staff in 1920. One of his accomplishments is the establishment of the Royal Australian Air Force in May 1920. From 1922 to 1925 he served as the representative of Australia in the London War Office . After returning to Australia, he joined the police force as Chief Commissioner of Police for the state of Victoria . He held this post until 1936.

In 1938 Blamey supplemented his income with radio broadcasts on international politics. He was appalled by the Nazis' persecution of the Jews . He later became responsible for recruiting new soldiers. As such, he laid the foundation for the expansion of the army in the event of a war with Germany or Japan , which he saw as inevitable.

1935 Blamey was beaten to Knight Bachelor . His wife died that same year. On December 5, 1939, he married the 35-year-old fashion designer Olga Ora Farnsworth.

Second World War

Sir Thomas Blamey

After Australia entered the war and the decision to set up a second Australian Imperial Force , Blamey was appointed commander of the newly formed 6th Division, which formed the nucleus of the AIF, on October 13, 1939 while being promoted to Lieutenant General . In the interwar period, Australia converted its army to a pure militia system , whose units were not allowed to be sent overseas. In his role as head of the AIF, Blamey was directly responsible to Prime Minister and Defense Minister Robert Menzies , to whom he owed his appointment mainly. He was to retain command of the AIF, which later grew to 300,000 men, throughout the war.

From January 1940 the first parts of the 6th Division were shipped to Palestine to prepare for their deployment in France alongside the British Expeditionary Force . After it had been decided to set up a corps command and a second division for the AIF, Blamey gave up command of the 6th division in April and was appointed commanding general of the 1st Corps, whose headquarters he opened in Palestine in June. Here he was subordinated to the British Commander in Chief Middle East, General Archibald Wavell . Due to the rapid defeat of the French and British in France by the German campaign in the west and Italy's entry into the war, Blamey's troops were kept as a reserve in the Middle East and used against the Italians in Libya from December 1940.

In March 1941, Blamey was sent to Greece with two divisions of his corps as part of the "Luster Force" commanded by Henry Maitland Wilson , when the German invasion was imminent. For his work in the Greek campaign , in which his careful leadership was praised, he received the Greek War Cross 1st Class. At the end of April he was appointed deputy Wavell as Lord Mayor Middle East (from July by Claude Auchinleck ) and promoted to general in September .

In early 1942, due to the Japanese threat, he was ordered back to Australia to take command of the front. He was appointed here by the American Commander-in-Chief in the Southwest Pacific, Douglas MacArthur, as his Commander-in-Chief of the Land Forces, but without gaining any major influence on the conduct of operations. In September 1942 he was sent by MacArthur to Port Moresby in Papua to personally lead the land operations in the New Guinea campaign . In addition, from 1943 he took care of the operations against New Britain and the northern Solomon Islands and in 1945 of the liberation of Borneo ( Operation Oboe ).

On September 2, 1945, he signed the Japanese deed of surrender for Australia on board the USS Missouri .

post war period

After he had offered to resign shortly after the end of the war, he was released from his offices at the end of 1945. Since he had never got on well with the Labor government under John Curtin and had also drawn considerable criticism in the army, he was discharged from the army in early 1946 without further recognition of his achievements. He then settled in Melbourne and dedicated himself to business, writing and veteran affairs.

After Menzies' re-election in 1950, he was promoted to field marshal as the first and so far only Australian . A short time later he fell seriously ill and died in May 1951 in a Melbourne hospital from a cerebral haemorrhage . His state funeral was attended by an estimated 300,000 people.

Honors

Blameys statue in Melbourne

The Canberra square , home to the headquarters of the Australian Defense Force and the Department of Defense, was named after Blamey. There is a statue of Blameys in the King's Domain in Melbourne. Barracks, a recruit training center and various streets have also been named after Blamey.

The baton Blameys and his records are in the Australian War Memorial stored.

Web links

Commons : Thomas Blamey  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Thomas Blamey's biography in the Australian Dictionary of Biography

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Daily Advertiser  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (as of September 9, 2008)  

predecessor	Office	successor
Item newly created	Commander in Chief of the Australian Military Forces 1942–1945	Vernon Sturdee