Australian Battalion Commanders in the Second World War

This is an outstanding analysis of infantry battalion command in the Australian Army that strips away popular stereotypes and considers the reality. Pratten shows that soldiers had most faith in commanding officers in whose professional competence they could trust and rely, regardless of whether they conformed to populist ideas of what a commanding officer should be. The book concludes that commanding officers as individuals and the Army as an organisation had to adapt to the changing demands of the war, and that the wartime profile of battalion commanders changed not only by the war’s end, but by its middle years as well.