The Boy Colonel: Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Marks, the Youngest Battalion Commander in the AIF

by Will Davies

Known as The Boy Colonel, Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Marks, was the youngest battalion commander in the AIF and highly regarded not only as a future military commander, but as a business and community leader. It was a blustery day on the 25th January 1920 at Palm Beach to the north of Sydney and the surf was wild. Two attempts had already been m...

540 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2013

Reviews

[Jason Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

If this was a fantasy novel written by George R R Martin you would be complaining about your favourite characters disappearing from wounds, being captured, blown up shot by the enemy or shot by their mates as they come in from patrolling no mans land.

Yet that was the reality that the author weaves into this book. A young man from Sydney joins the army and enters the 13th battalion from NSW. He ends up at Gallipoli landing on the first day and surviving to the evacuation being wounded along the way.

He continues into the Battlefields of France where in days - half of all of his team and friends are wounded or dead. Drownings, gassings, and heads being blown off occur often as well as bullets, bombs and shrapnel - so much carnage and waste.

By the end at 22 he is leading 1000 men the youngest leader of that rank in the Australian army or AIF.

Good Anzac Day read.

[Bill Porter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will Davies takes you all the way to the front line, into the trenches and onward to the mayhem that was Gallipoli and later France and the western front. "The Boy Colonel" is as much about the 13th battalion as it is about Douglas Marks; perhaps the one was the making of the other. Read it and weep.