John Monash

Origins and early life

John Monash was born in Melbourne on 27 June 1865 to Louis Monash and Bertha Manasse, Jewish immigrants from Krotoschin in Prussian Poland, and his grandfather Baer-Loebel Monasch had been a noted Hebrew printer and publisher there.

Work and career

He was raised in the Jewish community of Melbourne, had his bar mitzvah at the East Melbourne synagogue, and remained a practising if unobtrusive Jew all his life, president of the Zionist Federation of Australia and New Zealand in his last years. He graduated from the University of Melbourne in engineering, arts and law, and as an engineer introduced reinforced concrete to Australia through the Monier patents, building bridges and buildings across Victoria.

A part-time militia officer since student days, he was fifty when the war came, commanded the 4th Infantry Brigade at Gallipoli, the 3rd Division in France in 1917 at Messines and Passchendaele, and in May 1918 was given command of the whole Australian Corps of five divisions, the first Australian to hold it. The battle of Hamel on 4 July 1918, planned to the minute with tanks, aircraft, artillery and infantry working as one, was over in ninety-three minutes and became the model for the allied offensives that followed.

Recognition

He led the Corps at Amiens on 8 August, at Mont Saint-Quentin and through the Hindenburg Line, and was knighted in the field by George V, the first commander so honoured in two hundred years. Field Marshal Montgomery later called him the best general on the Western Front. After the war he organized the repatriation of the Australian troops, chaired the State Electricity Commission of Victoria that brought the brown coal of the Latrobe valley into the grid, and was vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne.

He died on 8 October 1931. Some 300,000 people lined the streets for his funeral, and Monash University, the Monash Freeway and the hundred-dollar note carry his name.