The AIF was, of course, famously “ill disciplined” - they viewed the army as a job, which meant they expected to agitate for pay and conditions, be informed, and challenge the “bosses”. This is interesting on its own and also useful as a reference book for people studying the era. Stanley trawled through the AIF court martial files and basically put together this book about the various miscreants of the AIF. 'Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny and Murder in the Australian Imperial Force' by Peter Stanley is a 2010 non-fiction book that does what it says on the tin. Stanley exposes, with a wealth of examples drawn from court-martial files and soldiers’ letters, how the war turned some men into criminals, but also how bad characters made the AIF the superb force it was This frank history - the first book on the AIF’s indiscipline - shows that it became one of the war’s most effective fighting forces in spite of its record for military misbehaviour.

These were men who went absent and deserted, caught or concealed VD, got drunk and fought their comrades, who stole, malingered, behaved insolently toward officers or committed more serious offences, including rape and murder.

Leading war historian Peter Stanley reveals the citizen soldiers the army regarded as its ‘bad characters’. Winner of the 2011 Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History.Īustralians have celebrated the Anzacs for nearly a century-but what do we really know of what war did to them? Charles Bean, historian of the citizen soldiers of the Australian Imperial Force, wrote that its history spanned ‘the good and the bad’-but so far Australians have only looked at the good.

Bad Characters by Peter Stanley