The PR Blog

I would venture to say that the two most famous and well known phrases of our military history are “Gallipoli” and “The Rats of Tobruk”. One was a magnificent defeat. The other was a magnificent triumph.

Field Marshall Sir William Slim, 13^th Governor General of Australia and at the time, General commanding the 14^th Army said after the triumph over the Japanese at Milne Bay that “…..Some of us may forget that, of all the Allies, it was the Australians who first broke the invincibility of the Japanese army and it was the Australians who first broke the invincibility of the German army.”

In speaking of the defeat of the German Army he was speaking about Tobruk. 14,000 Australian soldiers embarked on an eight month siege defending the harbour town of Tobruk, beginning on April 10-11 1941.

 “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

So said Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States of America. He was a spokesman for democracy, an American Founding Father and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. 

But who was he, as a man? He was a man of the times he lived in, as are we all. 

In the closing stages of WW2 the Australian Army was given a role that offended the higher echelons of the defense forces.

While MacArthur and Nimitz were doing their island hopping towards the Japan, the Australian forces were given the task of mopping up areas already by-passed. This angered the likes of Blamey who saw it as a deliberate snub to Australia by not including them in the inevitable defeat of Japan.

I reject that notion completely.

My father's small failed mission and its members will never be mentioned anywhere.

Just blips in history.

Z Special Unit His small group 'Platypus VII' of four " Commandos"  sent off in a botched raid at almost the end of the War, to help with an invasion that was mostly for vanity whether for Australia's or for General MacArthur's benefit I'm not sure.

The Japanese in Borneo in July 45 should have been a 'mopping up' operation rather than an invasion from what I've read. The US had broken their fighting forces in the Pacific and sent most back to Japan, where the possibility of a long, difficult fight still looked very likely, before the Atomic bomb was dropped.

Most people today know that the cuckoo is a rather sneaky bird. It lays its eggs in the nests of other birds leaving those unwitting innocents to rear the imposter as one of their own. The cuckoo thrives and eventually throws the other baby birds out to die.

Many of the older generation know the saying whereby someone is a cuckold , referring to a man who unwittingly rears a child, thinking that the little one is his own.

Well, I think we have been cuckolded and, if things don’t change, we will continue to be thrown out of our homes and left to perish.

In the United Kingdom, four students have recently been suspended from their school after slightly damaging a Quran, despite there being “no malicious intent by those involved” according to the BBC report. British police have recorded the event as a “non-crime hate incident,”

A boy had taken the Quran to school last week and given it to another pupil who read out passages on the tennis court. The book was then taken inside and fell on the floor before being put in a pupil’s bag. The book was the student’s own property. Yet this was deemed as a suspension-worthy offense by the school.

To escalate the situation more, a local government official, Usman Ali, claimed the book had been “desecrated” and it “needs to be dealt with urgently by all the authorities, namely the police, the school and the local authority”