Military Regulations

[Mike Cecil]

"Whole point of my argument is historic regulations and instructions are only pointers to history they are not written in stone proof"

Lang, to be fair, I didn't say they were 'stone proof' as you put it, but in the absence of anything to disprove that the instructions were generally applied, they and period images are pretty much all we are left with, and provide a damn fine start. I'm well aware of the dilution of HQ instructions as they trickle down to unit and sub-unit level, and the many reasons why, but I believe in this instance it is not relevant to my comments about 12 Aust Div.

The main point of my post was that the commonly held view that 12th Aust Div had a very limited 'life' of just weeks, is incorrect, and that the impression that it contained several main force units is also incorrect. The surviving records show clearly that it was never a division in the true meaning of that word, but simply a means of providing 'formation identity' to a group of field force units, an identity that persisted long after the cut-off date provided in Wiked-pedia.

Mike