Series number

AWM153

Series title

Roll of Honour cards, Vietnam

Contents date range

c. 1971-1973

Extent

10 cm  

Access conditions

Subject to the Archives Act 1983

Agency controlling

Australian War Memorial

Custodial agency

Australian War Memorial

Function and provenance

The Roll of Honour, which is situated in the cloisters of the commemorative area of the Australian War Memorial, records on bronze panels the names of approximately 102,000 Australians who have died as a result of active service with Australian forces, or those whose deaths, during designated periods, have been attributed to their war service in the conflicts in which Australia has been involved.  The panels on the western side record the names of those who served in the Sudan, South Africa, China and the First World War while the panels on the eastern side record the names of those who served in the Second World War and all subsequent conflicts until the present day.   

The idea of a national war museum was first conceived by C. E. W. Bean, the official war correspondent (and later official historian) on the battlefields during the First World War.  He continued formulating ideas on his voyage home to Australia in May 1919 and presented them to the War Memorial Committee in July 1919 in a paper entitled ‘Outline of a scheme for the Australian War Museum’.  He suggested that the building ‘would be a main hall with two wings; the main hall containing the most precious relics; with the names and, possibly, the miniature oval photograph of every Australian who fell ranged (inlet into a continuous band of bronze) under the names of their towns and districts around the wall’.  The committee gave its general approval to Bean’s proposal.  While they decided not to place photographs around the walls they agreed that the names of the dead would be inscribed on the walls and that they would be arranged by towns and districts and not by units so as to identify ‘the men as citizens, friends and members of families, rather than as soldiers’.

In August 1919 the Memorial began the task of compiling names for the Roll of Honour by sending circulars (questionnaires) to the next-of-kin seeking biographical information about those who had lost their lives in the war.  The circulars, which were distributed by the Department of Defence, were also to be used by the official historian and by the Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC).  These circulars are now held in the Memorial’s Research Centre as Series AWM131.

While policy decisions relating to the Roll continued to be formulated in the 1920s no decisions relating to its physical design could be made until plans for a memorial building had been finalised.  In March 1922 Cabinet approved that the Australian War Museum would be the national memorial and it would be located in Canberra.  However, it was not officially announced until August 1923.  The Australian War Memorial Act which established the Memorial was subsequently passed in 1925.  A competition was launched for the design of the new building in August 1925.  One of its conditions was a requirement for the building to have a hall of memory containing the names of the fallen.

The result of the competition was disappointing as most of the 69 entries which were received had not met the criteria. All of them had exceeded the allocated budget of 250,000 pounds with the exception of design 41 submitted by John Crust.  While his design was within the budget he did not meet the requirement of inscribing names in a hall of memory. Instead, Crust had placed the names in cloisters in a garden court concept.  His design, and that of Emil Sodersteen, had caught the judges’ attention and they invited them to work together and come up with a new design.  The design which they presented in September 1927 resulted in the abandonment of Bean’s original concept for the Hall of Memory.  The names of those who died were now to be placed in the cloisters outside of the hall.

In February 1928 a subcommittee consisting of Sir Neville Howse, Colonel Donald Cameron, Henry Gullett and Charles Bean was formed to look at all aspects of the Roll including the various methods of inscribing the names on the wall, e.g. engraving in fine stone, etching into bronze or inscribing into bronze tablets.  In the following month the subcommittee presented its submission to the Memorial Board who accepted the proposal that the Roll of Honour would take the form of individual names (with no ranks or decorations shown) being inscribed on bronze tablets and they would be arranged by town and district.  The Board also met to consider eligibility criteria.  John Treloar, the Director, had presented a list of those he considered eligible for the Roll of Honour to the Board in 1927.  While it included most categories of Australians who had served during the First World War and those who had died due to war service in peacetime, Treloar had by this time realised that it would be difficult to compile a roll for some of these categories.

In considering eligibility criteria the subcommittee had closely considered the guidelines of the Australian Soldiers’ Repatriation Act which had been introduced in 1917.  The Act defined ‘members of the forces’ as persons ‘enlisted or appointed’ to the Commonwealth Naval or Military Forces ‘for or employed on active service outside Australia or employed on a ship of war’.  The Act also applied to any soldier of the Imperial Reserve Forces called up for active service during the war or any person serving in the Naval or Military Forces of any part of the King’s Dominions provided that they lived in Australia before service.  However, the Act excluded members of the Mercantile Marine (Merchant Navy), members of auxiliaries such as the Australian Red Cross or the Australian Comforts Fund, munitions workers, war correspondents and other civilians.

The guidelines that the subcommittee presented and which were adopted by the Board included members of the forces, those who served overseas with Commonwealth and Dominion forces and members of the Mercantile Marine.  While the document remains a little ambiguous in relation to the other categories mentioned above (and who were excluded from the Act) clause 3b stated that ‘the Australian War Memorial will consider individual cases, provided they were Australian and death was directly due to war service’.  This last clause thus allowed for most Australians to be included on the roll and file correspondence indicates that this was still intended. 

In the 1930s little progress was made on the Roll as work on the Memorial building had slowed down during the Depression and problems with its final design continued.  In August 1936 Cabinet decided to proceed with the completion of the building, in particular, the Hall of Memory and the cloisters.  This meant that work on the Roll of Honour now also became a priority.  The compilation of names for the Roll was based primarily on information contained in the cemetery and memorial registers issued by the IWGC and on the drafts of registers for Australian cemeteries compiled by the Department of Defence.  The names from these records were then checked against various supplementary records such as the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) and Royal Australian Navy (RAN) nominal rolls of deceased, the British publication Soldiers who died in the great war, Repatriation Commission monthly lists of deaths accepted as due to war service, Roll of Honour circulars, printed rolls issued by universities, public schools and other institutions and newspaper items.

The Memorial created a biographical card for each person who was eligible for the Roll of Honour.  This probably commenced late in 1937 after a large order of 88,000 index cards was received.  Two sets of the Imperial War Graves Commission registers which had been received from England in March 1937 were cut up and used as the basis for the compilation of the cards.  A report to the Board meeting in March 1939 reported that ‘extracting from the cemetery and memorial registers was proceeding smoothly and approximately 70,500 names had been carded’.  It also noted that checking was difficult for those who had died after the war but at this stage they were still intending to add this category of people to the Roll.

The outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 meant that the Board had to reconsider its eligibility criteria and include all those who would lose their lives during this conflict.  Work on the compilation of the Roll slowed down considerably during the war while decisions about its scope were being revised.  At a Board meeting in January 1944 there was a call for work to resume on the Roll, however, it did not fully recommence until July 1953 when the newly created position of Roll of Honour Clerk was filled.

A number of decisions taken by the Board between 1952 and 1956 resulted in changes to the original concept of the Roll of Honour.  In 1952 the Australian War Memorial Act was amended to allow for an increase in the scope of operations of the Memorial.  This amendment replaced the words:

• ‘a Commonwealth memorial of the Australians who died in war’ with ‘have died on or as a result of active service’.

While the effect of this amendment was to widen the scope of the Memorial to cover all wars past and future it also narrowed the category of persons eligible to be commemorated to members of the Australian defence forces whose deaths were due to war service.  This meant that it now precluded the listing on the Roll of Honour any members of the Mercantile Marine, auxiliaries, and civilians attached to the forces such as correspondents.  These names would now be listed in a supplementary roll. 

In October 1952 the Board also altered the eligibility criteria relating to those whose deaths occurred after the war but were attributed to war service.  By this time the Memorial had acknowledged that it had become too hard to compile information for this category of people.  The Board therefore decided that only the names of those who died on active service would be included on the Roll and the names of those who died in peacetime as a result of their war service would now be included in a supplementary roll.  However, the provision of accurate information continued to be a problem and the Board in April 1967 decided to abandon the supplementary roll altogether.  The biographical cards prepared for the supplementary roll up to this date are now held in the Memorial’s Research Centre as Series AWM261.

Another modification to the Roll occurred in November 1954.  A report prepared by the Roll of Honour Clerk two months earlier in September stated that the major hold up in compiling the Roll at this time was in determining the towns or districts of the deceased.  As a result, the plans committee consisting of Jim McGrath (the new Director), Charles Bean, William McLaren (Secretary of the Department of the Interior) and Gavin Long (Official Historian) decided that the names would now be arranged by units and not by towns and districts as originally determined.

The eligibility criteria determined in 1928 had also allowed for Australians who had died while serving in British and other Dominion forces to be included on the Roll.  However, as work progressed on this task in the 1950s it became increasingly difficult to obtain information about this group of people.  As a result a recommendation was made to the Board that the names to be included on the Roll were only of those serving with Australian forces.  The Board accepted this proposal in December 1956 and decided that the names of those serving in British and Dominion forces would also be placed on the supplementary roll.

By the end of 1956 a final set of eligibility criteria had been established.  The first panels for the First World War were ready to be cast and the compilation of the rolls for the other conflicts was proceeding rapidly.  The Board hoped the cost of the Roll would be borne by the Federal government as funds had not been made available in the Memorial estimates for 1956/57 or 1957/58 to cover the project.  In January 1958 the government approved the construction of the Roll at an estimated cost of 38,000 pounds.  The National Capital Development Commission contracted Meldrum and Partners of Melbourne as the design architects with the casting and construction of the panels undertaken by Arrow Engraving Pty Ltd, also from Melbourne.

Installation of the 188 panels for the First World War, consisting of 61,521 names, began in March 1961 and was completed by December 1961.  By the end of 1963 the panels for the Sudan, China, Boer War, Second World War, Korea and the Malayan Emergency were also in place.  Following the completion of the panels for the Second World War, the Memorial began to receive complaints from members of the public regarding the accuracy of the information contained in the army sections.  The omission of all native Papuans and New Guineans enlisted in the Australian forces (in the Pacific Islands Battalion, Pacific Islands Regiment and the Papua and New Guinea Infantry Battalions) had also been bought to the attention of the Memorial by the Director of the Department of District Administration in New Guinea, J. K. McCarthy during a private visit. 

The Memorial contacted the Department of Defence regarding the inaccuracies in the Roll.  It found that the lists provided by the Army to compile the Roll had originally been used to send out memorial scrolls to the next-of-kin of deceased servicemen and servicewomen at the end of the Second World War.  An official request was made to the Army asking them to recheck their sources of information.  While it was initially reluctant to do so, a thorough recheck of the rolls was undertaken between 1967-1969.  This process revealed that at least 1744 corrections had to be made which included 269 errors in name, 196 errors in the initials, 1,279 errors in the name of the unit and 158 names of native Papuans and New Guineans to be added.

The Department of the Navy also revised the information it had supplied to the Memorial and discovered a large number of inaccuracies.  As a result it decided to recast the whole Roll with the cost being borne by the Navy.  The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Roll was also revised and found to be correct.  The Memorial was now faced with the decision of whether it should recast all the panels.  It was estimated that the cost of recasting the panels would be $70,000-$100,000.  Due to the high cost, it decided that the corrected names would appear on supplementary panels adjacent to the original panels.

Work on the revision of the rolls for the 1939-45 panels was finally completed by March 1972 along with the sections covering Korea and the Malayan Emergency. New rolls were completed for the Malay Peninsula, 1964-66, and Sabah-Sarawak, 1962-66 (now referred to as Indonesian Confrontation) but file information is not available relating to their installation.  Following the completion of this task work commenced on the compilation of the Vietnam Roll.  Given the small number of names involved (around 500) it was suggested that the next-of-kin be circularised to ensure the accuracy of details.  The compilation of the Roll was completed in late 1973 and the panels were installed in the 1974/1975 financial year.  The 12 panels for the Second World War supplementary roll were finally installed in early June 1976 at a cost of $21,975.

In 1975 the Australian War Memorial Act was again amended following public pressure from the Merchant Seamen and Allied Service Associations in the 1960s for their inclusion on the Roll of Honour.  The narrowing of the Act in 1952 had excluded these groups and others from inclusion on the Roll.  In February 1968 the Board agreed that the scope of the Memorial should be extended to include these groups but the Act was not passed until 1975.

The 1975 Act defined the Memorial as ‘a national Memorial of Australians who have died:

• on or as a result of active service (or)
• as a result of any war or warlike operations in which Australians have been on active service’

This amendment now allowed the commemoration of Australians who had served in the Merchant Navy, with Allied forces, as artists, photographers and war correspondents and as members of philanthropic organisations attached to the forces, e.g., Australian Red Cross, Australian Comforts Funds and the Young Men’s Christian Association.  In 1979 the Board considered the question of an appropriate form of commemoration for the newly included categories.  It decided that due to the practical difficulties of obtaining definitive lists of names to include on the Roll of Honour that a general commemorative plaque would be erected and the known names would be inscribed in a commemorative book.  As additional names came to light they could be added to the book and their inclusion on the Roll would be discussed again at a future date. A plaque was installed in the cloisters in 1979.

It was not until 1981 that a Commemorative Book was installed in the alcove at the south eastern end of the cloisters and adjacent to the Roll of Honour.  However, it was removed from public display in 1985 due to water damage.  It was replaced by an automated Commemorative Scroll in 1991.  As the technology on which the scroll was based upon became outdated the present Memorial Council (previously Board) decided to replace the online system with a new book which was installed in 2001.  The original card index supporting the Commemorative Book is held as Series AWM272.

In 1995 the Memorial once again received representations from the Merchant Navy for its inclusion on the Roll of Honour.  The Memorial’s Council reviewed the eligibility criteria for the Roll and at a meeting in May 1996 decided that it should continue to be devoted exclusively to members of the Australian armed forces.  However, they decided that Australian merchant seamen who had died during service in wartime should be commemorated in a more appropriate manner at the Memorial.  As a result of this decision, a memorial commemorating merchant seamen was unveiled in the Western courtyard in October 1988.  It includes a Roll of Honour listing the names of those merchant seamen who died in the First World War and the Second World War.

Since the Vietnam War the Australian Defence Force has been engaged in a number of peacekeeping operations throughout the world and a number of deaths have occurred during these engagements.  The issue of their commemoration was referred to Council in the 1980s.  The Council minutes of May 1988 record that ‘there was a consensus that the present legislation and guidelines did not satisfactorily cover situations arising from the changing nature of the role of Australia’s defence forces in war like activities’.  A sub-committee was formed to look at the whole question and to seek advice from the Chiefs of Staff Committee of the Department of Defence.  The sub-committee expressed the view that the names of service personnel killed while on duty on peacekeeping operations should also be recorded on the Roll of Honour in the cloisters.

New eligibility criteria for the Roll of Honour were adopted by Council at a meeting in August 1997.  To be eligible for the Roll an individual must now:

• ‘be a member of the Australian Defence Force at the time of death; to have died on Warlike Service, or as a result of such Service and within the prescribed period; and
• have died during or as a result of service in a conflict classified by the Department of Defence as Warlike Service, and between the defined start and end dates of that Warlike Service’

Since the Vietnam War four conflicts have been categorised by Defence as Warlike.  These are Somalia, East Timor (up until 18 August 2003), Afghanistan and Iraq.  A panel listing the single death which occurred during the Somalia conflict was installed in 2001.  In September 2004 panels were installed for East Timor (two names) and Afghanistan (one name).  A panel for Thailand (1965-68) was also installed in early 2005. 

The Memorial still receives enquiries from members of the public relating to eligibility for the Roll of Honour and the Commemorative Book.  Each request is officially researched and a final decision on its eligibility for inclusion on the Roll is made by the Memorial’s Council.

This series became known as AWM153 in the mid 1980s when the Memorial adopted its new numbering system for Official Records.

Content

This series consists of index cards which record the names of members of the Royal Australian Navy, the Australian Army and the Royal Australian Air Force who died on active service or whose deaths were accepted for repatriation purposes as being the result of war service during the Vietnam War.  At the time of compilation of the cards the eligibility date for inclusion on the Roll of Honour for this conflict was 3 August 1962 – 31 December 1972.  These dates had been approved at a Memorial Board meeting held on 26 April 1973.  The end date for this conflict was revised by the Department of Defence in December 1997 and extended to 29 April 1975.

The cards (20 x 12.5 cm) provide the following details:

• War
• Service
• Surname
• Christian names
• Number
• Rank
• Unit
• Date of death
• Place (which also includes cause of death)
• Panel number on the Roll of Honour
• Authority (includes next of kin details from circular)

The cards were compiled from information supplied by the Central Army Records Office (CARO), the Department of the Navy and the Department of Air.  In a small number of cases the information was supplied by the Repatriation Department. 

Due to the small number of deaths involved for this conflict, in comparison to previous conflicts, the Memorial decided that the next of kin should be circularised before the Roll was completed to ensure that all details were accurate and correct.  The circulars, unlike previous ones, asked the next of kin to verify information already provided to the Memorial by the relevant service departments.  The circulars are currently housed in files maintained by the Memorial’s Document Control Centre (AWM315).

The index cards used in the compilation of this series were originally ordered to record names for the supplementary roll.

System of arrangement and control

The cards have been arranged alphabetically by surname according to service.

Using the series

The Roll of Honour cards (AWM141-AWM153) were automated in 1998 and can now be accessed through the Roll of Honour database on the Memorial’s website at:

www.awm.gov.au/database/roh.asp.

The information contained in the database has been transcribed directly from the original index cards for each conflict.  In a small number of cases additional information has been provided by the next of kin and added to the database.

Researchers should search on an individual’s surname and a service number to obtain the best results.  First names can be used but please note that in most cases only initials have been entered on the original cards in this series for members of the Australian Army.  Searches can also be done by unit or date of death. 

The Roll of Honour cards were microfilmed in 1988 and microfiche sets were available for sale to the general public.  Copies may be found in many state libraries, local libraries or genealogical and historical societies.

The original cards are not available for public access.  However, Research Centre staff can check the information contained in them on behalf of researchers.

Sources

AWM Administrative file, AWM153 Series Dossier

AWM Registry file, 746/1/2, Pts 1-3, Roll of Honour general policy

AWM Registry file, 746/2/1, Pts 1-3, Roll of Honour to be inscribed in AWM – general arrangements for compilation of roll

AWM Registry file, 746/003/001, Pts 1-3, Roll of Honour to be inscribed in AWM

AWM Registry file, 746/010/005, Pts 1-6, Correspondence with next of kin in respect of the Vietnam section of the Roll of Honour

AWM170: Australian War Memorial Council and related committee records, various files

McKernan, Michael 1991, Here is their spirit: a history of the Australian War Memorial 1917-1990, University of Queensland Press in association with the Australian War Memorial, St Lucia, Qld