Getting the house in order : tactical intelligence in the south-west Pacific area

In 1942, Brigadier John Rogers, then the Australian Army’s foremost intelligence officer, noted that the Army’s intelligence system was not at the standard necessary to defeat the Japanese, a new and unfamiliar enemy, nor ready for the demands of operating in the harsh jungle environment of the SWPA. It was a serious issue. Yet, despite extensive research on military intelligence during the Second World War, little is known on the Australian Army’s collection, use or improvement in its dealings with tactical intelligence in the South-West Pacific Area. As a consequence a set of serious historical questions remain unanswered. How, for example, did the Australian Army responded to these challenge by analysing developments in terms of training, equipment and doctrine?In response to a clear historiographical shortfall, and in an effort to contribute to closing it – and thus fill in some significant ‘blind-spots’ of the Australian military historical record – this study takes an empirical and ‘case study’ methodology. To this end it uses the 18th Infantry Brigade as representative of brigade and battalion intelligence practice through three diverse operational deployments across the duration of the Pacific War, Milne Bay and Shaggy Ridge in New Guinea, and Balikpapan in Borneo in the War’s final year.In overall terms, this thesis demonstrates that improvement in the collection and use of tactical intelligence was uneven across the three major types of intelligence studied: geospatial, technical and human. The use of geospatial intelligence developed rapidly, in line with the Allies’ increasing technological supremacy. Technical and human Intelligence, however, did not see the same consistent improvement. In particular, the prevalence of ‘souveniring’ deprived the Australians of a potential information source, while the reluctance of many troops to capture Japanese prisoners was a complex problem that Army leaders were never able to entirely resolve, despite the introduct