/ AS NEW /

The Backroom Boys is the remarkable, but little known, story of how a varied group of talented intellectuals, drafted into the Australian Army in the dark days of 1942, provided high-level policy advice to Australia's most senior soldier, General Blamey, and through him to the government for the remainder of the war and beyond.

This band of academics, lawyers and New Guinea patrol officers formed a unique military unit, the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, under the command of an eccentric and masterful string-puller, Colonel Alf Conlon.

What exactly did the Directorate do? The more suspicious saw it as “an intelligence group, an undercover operation which is shrouded in mystery”. This was most certainly not the case.

Staff training and development was a major innovation brought about during World War II. Conlon thought it had a major part to play in preparing for the post-war world, in territories occupied by Australian troops, but above all in Papua New Guinea.

The Directorate has been depicted as a haven for under-employed poets or meddlesome soldier-politicians. Based on wide-ranging research, this book reveals a fuller and more fascinating picture.

The fierce conflicts in the wartime bureaucracy between public servants and soldiers, in which the Directorate provided critical support to Blamey, went to the heart of military command, accountability and the profession of arms.

The Backroom Boys by Graeme Sligo is an as-new 2013 first edition published by Big Sky as part of the Australian Army History Collection.

It is a heavy, quality 380-page 16x23.5cm hard cover with matt dust jacket subtitled: Alfred Conlon and the Army's Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, 1942-46.

It is packed with interesting photographs and the odd map.

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