Iven Mackay

Iven Giffard Mackay was one of the most unusual generals of the Second World War. A physicist by training and a schoolmaster and university lecturer by profession, he spent most of his life as a volunteer soldier of the Australian militia rather than as a regular officer. On the front of the First World War he rose from battalion adjutant to brigade commander, and in January 1941 he led the 6th Australian Division to the Australian Army’s first victories of the new war: the capture of Bardia and Tobruk. His soldiers called him “Mr Chips”, after the hero of a popular novel about an old, pedantic schoolmaster. His careful, methodical way of fighting a battle, learned in 1918, won the British quick and cheap victories in Libya. In Greece, and later in New Guinea, however, it turned out that the new war demanded something more.

The minister’s son from Grafton

He was born on 7 April 1882 in Grafton, New South Wales, the eldest of the three children of Isaac Mackay, a Presbyterian minister from Scotland, and his Canadian-born wife Emily Frances, née King. He was educated at Grafton Public School and at Newington College in Sydney, where he rose to the rank of sergeant in the school cadet corps. In 1904 he graduated as a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Sydney. He was an all-round sportsman: he represented the university at rugby and rowing, and also played cricket.

From 1905 he taught at Sydney Church of England Grammar School, and in 1910 he returned to the university as an assistant in the physics department. At the same time he became involved in military training: in 1911 he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the cadet corps, and in 1913 he transferred to the militia and became adjutant of the 26th Infantry Battalion. In June 1914 he was promoted to captain.

Gallipoli

After the outbreak of the First World War, on 27 August 1914, he became adjutant of the 4th Battalion, 1st Brigade, Australian Imperial Force. On 4 September he married Marjorie Eveline Meredith. A riding accident, in which he broke ribs and punctured a lung, meant that he did not sail with the first contingent. He left for Egypt in December 1914 with reinforcements and joined his battalion on the Gallipoli peninsula on 8 May 1915, two weeks after the first landing of the Australians and New Zealanders in the Gallipoli campaign.

In July 1915 he was made major and company commander. In August his battalion took part in the attack on the Turkish trenches at Lone Pine. Firing from the hip, Mackay forced his way into a Turkish trench, seized a trench junction and barricaded it with sandbags. Although bombarded with grenades and slightly wounded, he refused to be relieved, and the next day he covered the building of new barricades. His wounds, however, proved serious, and he was evacuated to Malta and then to England. He was mentioned in dispatches, and according to his comrades he was even recommended for the Victoria Cross, which he did not receive.

The Western Front

He rejoined his battalion in Egypt in February 1916 and in March sailed with it to France. As a lieutenant colonel commanding the 4th Battalion he led it in July 1916 in the fighting for Pozières and in August at Mouquet Farm, as part of the Battle of the Somme. For this he received the Distinguished Service Order (DSO). In May 1917, in the Second Battle of Bullecourt, he was temporarily in command of the 1st Brigade, and when the Germans broke through the front of the neighbouring brigade he led a counter-attack that restored the position. This earned him a bar to his DSO.

In March 1918 he took command of the 1st Machine Gun Battalion and led it in the defensive fighting at Hazebrouck in April. In June, as a temporary brigadier general, he took command of the 1st Infantry Brigade and led it in the Battle of Amiens and in the attacks of the Hundred Days Offensive up to the Hindenburg Line. He ended the war as one of the most respected brigade commanders in the Australian Corps, with the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG), the French Croix de Guerre and five mentions in dispatches. The experience of 1918, when the Australians broke German positions with carefully prepared attacks by infantry, tanks and artillery, shaped him as a commander for the rest of his life.

Lecturer, headmaster, militia general

After the armistice he studied physics at Cambridge, in the laboratory of Ernest Rutherford. In 1920 he returned to Sydney and to lecturing in physics; from 1922 he was also adviser to students, and from 1925 secretary of the faculty as well. In 1933 he became headmaster of Cranbrook School in Sydney. He left it in February 1940 after a dispute with the school council, which blamed him for its financial difficulties after the Great Depression.

Throughout this time he remained in the militia, Australia’s volunteer citizen army. He commanded in turn the 9th, 8th and 5th Infantry Brigades, in March 1937 took over the 2nd Division and in July 1937 was promoted to major general, one of the few militia officers to reach that rank in this period.

The 6th Division

When Australia entered the war in September 1939, the government of Robert Menzies decided to raise a volunteer Second Australian Imperial Force for service overseas. In April 1940 Mackay, then 58, took command of its first major formation, the 6th Division, succeeding General Thomas Blamey, who had taken over a corps. In mid-April he sailed from Melbourne for the Middle East. The division trained in Palestine and Egypt. The soldiers soon nicknamed him “Mr Chips”, after the hero of James Hilton’s novel and its 1939 film adaptation, because of his past as a schoolmaster, his cool composure, his reserve and his strictness. Some regular officers complained that this “bloody schoolmaster” wanted to dot every i, and was too gentle in removing incompetent militia officers. His chief of staff, Colonel Frank Berryman, nevertheless wrote later that few equalled him in moral and physical courage and none surpassed him.

In December 1940, after General Richard O’Connor’s victory at Sidi Barrani in Operation Compass, General Archibald Wavell sent the 4th Indian Division to the Sudan, and Mackay’s division took its place at the front. On 21 December Mackay took command in the Sollum area and began preparing an assault on the Italian fortress of Bardia. O’Connor expected an easy victory; Mackay assumed that the Italians would put up a stiff defence. Together with Berryman he planned the attack as a break-in to a fortified line in the manner of 1918: on a narrow front, with a mass of artillery, sappers blowing gaps in the wire and Matilda tanks advancing with the infantry. He put off the assault by a day so as to have enough ammunition.

The Battle of Bardia, fought on 3–5 January 1941, was the first of the war in which a large Australian formation was commanded by an Australian general according to a plan drawn up by an Australian staff. The division took between 36,000 and more than 40,000 Italians prisoner, at a cost of 130 killed and 326 wounded. Before the next battle Mackay told his brigadiers: “I not only want Tobruk quickly, I want it cheaply.” On 21–22 January Tobruk fell to an assault carried out on the same pattern, and at the end of the month the Australians took Derna, entering Benghazi on 6 February. O’Connor praised Mackay’s “exceptionally strong and firm character”. For the Libyan campaign he was knighted, being appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Greece

At the beginning of 1941 the British government decided to send troops to Greece, which was threatened by a German invasion. The 6th Division went there too. When the Germans opened their Balkan campaign on 6 April 1941, Mackay commanded an improvised force of Australian, British, New Zealand and Greek troops, known as Mackay Force, which was to block the Klidi Pass near Vevi in Macedonia. On 12 and 13 April the force was pushed back by the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler brigade and armoured units. Mackay was the only Australian general to fight against the Waffen-SS. During the retreat southwards he impressed his men with his calm: according to one of his officers, during an air raid lasting several hours he sat out in the open, and on seeing him men came out of cover and went back to work. The division was evacuated at the end of April, partly to Crete, where in May, in the Battle of Crete, his son-in-law was among those taken prisoner. Mackay received the Greek War Cross, First Class, and rebuilt his battered division in Palestine and Syria.

The defence of Australia

In August 1941 Mackay handed over command of the division and returned home. On 1 September, promoted to lieutenant general, he became General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Home Forces – the troops that were to defend Australia against the expected Japanese attack. His authority was limited: it did not extend to New Guinea or the Northern Territory, and overall responsibility for defence remained with the Chief of the General Staff. Some regular officers treated the former militia officer with disdain. After the outbreak of the Pacific War his son, a lieutenant, was taken prisoner by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore in February 1942.

In February 1942 Mackay submitted to the government an appreciation of the situation in which he proposed that, given the scarcity of forces, the defence should be concentrated on the country’s vital area between Brisbane and Melbourne. This proposal later gave rise to the famous controversy over the so-called Brisbane Line, an alleged plan to abandon northern Australia to the Japanese. It was exploited politically by General Douglas MacArthur and by the Labor politician Eddie Ward against the Menzies and Fadden governments. Mackay himself maintained that he had never heard the term “Brisbane Line” until it appeared in the newspapers. In April 1942, during Blamey’s reorganisation of the army, he took command of the Second Army.

New Guinea

From January to May 1943, standing in for General Edmund Herring, he commanded New Guinea Force during the fighting at Wau. In August 1943 he took it over again when the Australians opened their offensive on the Huon Peninsula, and he directed the fighting for Finschhafen and Sattelberg. This led to sharp disputes with MacArthur’s staff over bringing up reinforcements by sea. Younger commanders felt that Mackay should have insisted firmly on what he needed and appealed to Blamey for help sooner, and Herring remarked that the general was ageing and slowing down. Blamey himself concluded that Mackay no longer had the energy such a campaign required. In November 1943 he handed over command to General Leslie Morshead, and in January 1944 he gave up the Second Army as well.

High Commissioner in India

Prime Minister John Curtin appointed him Australia’s first High Commissioner to British India. Mackay arrived in Delhi in 1944 and until the end of the war dealt mainly with military matters. It was there, too, that he was reunited with his son, freed from Japanese captivity. On 27 February 1946 he retired from the army, and the post became a civilian one. He came to know the leaders of the independence movement, among them Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, supported Indian independence in the hope that India would remain in the Commonwealth, and promoted trade with Australia and student exchanges. He completed his mission in May 1948, after India had gained independence.

Last years and legacy

After his return he declined to stand for the Senate for the Liberal Party. From 1950 to 1952 he chaired the recruiting committee in New South Wales, was active in ex-servicemen’s organisations, and the University of Sydney awarded him an honorary doctorate of laws. In 1951 he was a pall-bearer at Blamey’s funeral. In 1952 he represented Australia at the unveiling in Athens of a memorial to the Commonwealth soldiers who fell in Greece in 1941, and in 1961 he returned there for the dedication of the war cemetery at Phaleron. He died on 30 September 1966 at his home in East Lindfield, Sydney. He was survived by his wife, his son and two daughters.

Mackay belonged to the generation of Australian militia officers who had grown up in the trenches of the First World War and in 1939–1940 built a new volunteer army from scratch. Bardia and Tobruk showed the strength of his method: a careful plan, close co-operation between infantry, tanks and artillery, and concern for his soldiers’ lives. These victories mattered far beyond Libya. The destruction of the Italian Tenth Army prompted Hitler to send Erwin Rommel to Africa, and in the United States, where aid to Britain was being debated, it showed that the British Empire could win. In Greece and New Guinea Mackay met an enemy and conditions for which the experience of 1918 was no longer enough, and his career in the field ended in disappointment. Yet Australians remembered him as the commander of their first victories, a man of whom General Herring wrote that he was modest, reserved and scholarly, and fearless in battle.