Honour

Lieutenant Commander Richard Adams, RAN

In 1922 a Royal Australian Navy lecture for junior officers and petty officers described honour as being ‘based on our own self-respect and esteem … [it] comes to us through our conscience’.^[2] Such a notion is fundamental to military service. To serve in the armed forces was, according to the 19th century strategist Carl von Clausewitz, ‘a special calling [which] if it is to be followed with success requires peculiar qualifications of understanding and soul’.^[3] Writing in 1832, Clausewitz described the concept of the ‘noble’ spirit of martial honour, an idea which still endures today. He understood that in the greatest warriors there existed a sense of something decent and aspirational; a staunchness of will and moral purpose formed from a fusion of individual character and professional insight. Framed by unique service traditions, and bound by shared understanding, such a sense of honour conveys what is worthy or creditable in our lives. So too, the early Australian Navy held that its members ‘are honour bound to do a certain thing’.

In a more recent publication, Navy Values: Serving Australia with Pride, today’s Royal Australian Navy (RAN) defines honour as a ‘fundamental value’ where we are required to give ‘our all to complete our mission professionally’.^[4] To maintain this type of behaviour requires a disciplined professional attitude, one which involves far more than just technical expertise. Above all, it entails a determination to live according to a very high set of values. Honour is thus a complex idea, which embraces notions of professional judgement and personal merit in addition to our collective sense of right and wrong.

Honour must rely on more than mere skill in the technical art of war because military force can, and has been, employed for criminal or dishonourable ends. Hence a sense of honour should build on the foundation of a service ideal, something fearless and confident. Yet, we must still be careful to understand the wider moral context. To focus narrowly on notions of duty and glory, is to describe that ‘suspect professional virtue’ which Clausewitz dismissed as little more than ‘a soul-stirring hurrah’.^[5] Honour, he argued, rises above the ‘outburst’ of effervescent courage, because fighting for its own sake, no matter how valiant, will entail nothing but shame, ‘a feeling of inward humiliation’.^[6] Clausewitz neither trivialised war nor underestimated physical courage, but he well understood the dangers of strength without honour.

The RAN’s understanding of honour is likewise quite different from the form of militarism which praises unrestrained fighting and heedless physical courage. Significantly, Navy Values: Serving Australia with Pride suggests an awareness of professional martial virtues which, being internal to the armed services, differs from the relatively undemanding requirements of civilian society. As Mark Osiel notes in his book Obeying Orders:

Australian naval tradition recognises a professional community, which is defined less by national borders and more by a fraternal ‘fellowship of the sea’ and shared sense of honour. During the first months of World War I the German raider SMS Emden created havoc on Allied shipping lanes; her crew under Captain Karl von Müller nevertheless earned a reputation for honourable conduct. Recalling his capture after the epic battle with HMAS Sydney (I) on 9 November 1914, Oberleutnant Franz Joseph, Prince of Hohenzollern, made the point:

Given the rare opportunity to associate closely for a few days after their battle, officers in Sydney and Emden came to the joint conclusion that ‘it was our job to knock one another out, but there was no malice in it’.^[8] Later, transferred as prisoners to HMS Hampshire, Franz Joseph added:

The contrast between the conduct of the combatants during our first at sea triumph and the situation we face today is stark. ‘Pitted against adversaries who fight without any rules or restraints [who] employ methods that are rightfully viewed as horrific and appalling by the rest of the civilised world’, we are shocked by a type of conflict we immediately reject as ruthless and uncivilised. Understandably there are those who wish to respond to terrorism in kind, yet it would be dishonourable, ‘a violation of our own values for us to engage in a war with no rules’, with a sense neither of honour nor shame.^[9]

The care lavished on SMS Emden’s wounded by HMAS Sydney’s (I) men received great praise from German survivors (RAN).

During the last year of World War II (WWII), concepts of honourable conduct were undoubtedly being stretched for RAN sailors, particularly as the increasingly desperate Japanese resorted to mass suicide tactics. At Lingayen Gulf kamikaze operations inflicted many casualties on HMA Ships Australia (II) and Arunta (I). The heavy cruiser HMAS Shropshire was also present, but despite similar attention managed to avoid being hit. Nevertheless, the provocation to hit back at a ruthless enemy remained extreme. On 6 January 1945 the third kamikaze of the afternoon disintegrated under the fire of one of Shropshire’s 8-barrelled pompoms. The pilot was blasted from the wreckage and at about 500 feet appeared briefly to hang beneath his parachute, ‘a Jap very much alive, arms and legs spread wide, for all the world like a four-pointed star’.^[10] There were some cries of ‘shoot the bastard’ to the pompom captain, but he ignored them and continued to hold fire until the decision was taken from his hands. A cult of death was indoctrinated into all Japanese warriors, and before reaching the sea the pilot slipped from his chute and disappeared below the surface.^[11]

Lieutenant Hugh Syme, GC, GM*, RANVR in London (AWM 141700).

War without honour is simply brutalism, but the Australian sense of honour is bequeathed by our heroes, not unthinking fanatics. A case in point is Lieutenant Hugh Randall Syme, Royal Australian Navy Volunteer Reserve (RANVR), one of the most highly decorated Australian naval officers of WWII. Syme won the George Cross and George Medal twice, not for brief moments of heartless killing, but for sustained gallantry in the delicate and unforgiving business of mine disposal. Recalling this officer, and other RAN members similarly awarded for intrepidness, George Hermon Gill records that in every instance ‘the citation tells of ‘’gallant and undaunted devotion to duty’’ … ‘’courage, initiative and devotion to duty’’ … ‘’skill and undaunted devotion to duty’’. There could be no higher commendation’.^[12]

Such recollection of the past is both meaningful and evocative, and underlines our inherited appreciation of the idea of honour. The sense is that we may learn ‘how to act among our contemporaries by studying the actions of those who have preceded us. [Our forebears] give stability and coherence to our moral lives – and to our military lives. Notions about right and wrong are remarkably persistent’.^[13] In other words, to recognise honour now, we need to be acquainted with the traditions of honour that have been passed down to us by the naval men and women of the past.

It is important to remember that honour is multi-dimensional. It is based not on a definitive quality, but upon a ‘constellation of independent and non-specific virtues, which have particular relevance in the context of military service. Moral virtue is intermingled with physical prowess, in a construct of martial honour which demands considerable sustained effort, and which encourages pride in practised talent and professional judgement.^[14] Honour, therefore, connects morally to unique situations in a way that explicit rules can never approach. Honour informs integrity, shaping conscience and influencing notions of pride, self-respect and shame. Thus, honour can often operate as a more authoritative concept than notions of legality, identifying ‘the proper course’ when rules, regulations or laws offer uncertain guidance. Clausewitz, for example, described ‘military virtue’ as transcending the ‘vanity of an army held together merely by the glue of service-regulations and a drill book’.

Such a sense of honour is not capable of precise definition, yet it is a powerful term which enables us to understand something of the moral meaning of naval life. Australia aspires to be a nation that stands proud and respected among the free people of the world, and with its global reach the RAN will remain one of the key tools in achieving this aim. We will continue to face many challenges, but these will not only include direct assaults on our sovereignty. Threats to our collective ideals and the principles which underpin our Australian way of life may be equally prevalent. Honour is therefore very much more than a redundant ideal, out of place amid the indiscriminate violence of the modern world. Our nation and our Service both expect us to maintain what has been achieved and by our deliberate efforts and career example give no cause for our friends and allies (and even our opponents) to have anything but the highest regard for RAN personnel.

References

1. ↑ Royal Australian Navy, Navy Values: Serving Australia with Pride, Canberra, September 2009.
2. ↑ Royal Australian Navy, Lectures Suitable for Junior Officers and Petty Officers, vol. 1, lecture 13, 1922, p. 4, held in Sea Power Centre - Australia archive.
3. ↑ C von Clausewitz, On War, Penguin, London, 1982 reprint, pp. 138, 146, & 155.
4. ↑ Royal Australian Navy, Navy Values.
5. ↑ MJ Osiel, Obeying Orders: Atrocity, Military Discipline and the Law of War, Transaction, New Brunswick, 1999, p. 14.
6. ↑ Clausewitz, On War, p. 149.
7. ↑ Osiel, Obeying Orders, p. 17.
8. ↑ AW Jose, The Royal Australian Navy, Australian War Memorial, Melbourne, 1928, p. 567.
9. ↑ S French, The Code of the Warrior, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 2003, pp. 233-4.
10. ↑ TM Jones and IL Idriess, The Silent Service: Action Stories of the Anzac Navy, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1945, p. 364.
11. ↑ S Nicholls, ‘HMAS Shropshire’, www.hmasshropshire.com/contents.htm (29 April 2010).
12. ↑ GH Gill, Royal Australian Navy 1942-1945, Australian War Memorial, Melbourne, 1985, p. 715.
13. ↑ M Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument, Basic Books, New York, 2000, p. 16 (syntax altered).
14. ↑ Osiel, Obeying Orders, pp. 18, 19 & 33.