When war heroes become social outcasts

It seems like yesterday that Australia had a unifying national hero when Ben Roberts-Smith received the Victoria Cross in 2011, the nation’s highest military honour. Papers cast glowing portrayals of the trooper who was renowned for charging a Taliban machine-gun position, with Australian press further firing up the popular imagination by declaring him “War hero Big Ben”. At the time, Big Ben’s heroics offered a welcome distraction from grubby cabinet infighting in Canberra, as the post-Howard race to the political bottom gathered pace.

Furthermore, Big Ben’s imposing stature, standing over two metres tall, quickly became central to his public image, as the returning national hero was rewarded with speaking engagements, board gigs, magazine covers and awards like Father of the Year. He was also granted a personal audience with the late Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace.

Yet in 2017, the public was shocked to learn that Big Ben was facing war crimes allegations. In 2023, matters worsened when he was found civilly liable for outrages against unarmed non-combatants, with a new nadir reached last week when he was arrested by police to face five counts of murder.

A war hero’s falling out of favour is nothing new in human history. The earliest example is the celebrated Athenian commander Alcibiades, who was implicated in a scandal involving the defiling of busts of the god Hermes in 415 BC. This led to the talented commander fleeing his native Athens, where he was condemned to death in absentia. A sudden fall from grace also befell Spain’s famous commander, the ‘Iron’ Duke of Alba, who was backstabbed by courtiers in Madrid like Ruy Gómez while he suppressed rebellion in the Netherlands. This led to his recall, with the duke further disgraced and placed under house arrest six years later, when his son married without royal permission.

Another hero turned pariah was Albrecht von Wallenstein in the 1630s, the celebrated and victorious “Generalissimo” of the Holy Roman Empire’s forces. Von Wallenstein’s subsequent huge popularity and wealth unsettled those in power, so that he was soon accused of treason, dismissed, and assassinated. The Marquis de Lafayette, a hero who helped secure American independence, later dipped his toe in reform by supporting a constitutional monarchy in France, only to flee his country when radical Jacobins took over the movement and declared him an enemy.

Napoleon Bonaparte was another illustrious warrior who fell from grace, along with his famous, loyal Marshal Michel Ney, following the dramatic events surrounding Boney’s exile, return and unlikely defeat at Waterloo. The vanquished Boney was exiled for a second time while Ney was executed.

More disgrace was achieved in the 20th century, when German army commander Erwin Rommel - renowned as the “Desert Fox” by admiring friends and foes for his impressive African victories - was permitted to take his own life, after being implicated in a Hitler assassination plot. General Douglas MacArthur, the Allied commander and US hero of the Southwest Pacific during WW2, was fired by President Truman in 1951 for insubordination during the Korean War, after he loudly pushed for bombing and blockading Communist China.

As for the current millennium: General David Petraeus, the celebrated architect of the Iraq surge strategy, resigned from the CIA in 2012 after a scandal involving an extramarital affair and mishandling of classified information.

History’s fallen heroes reveal Big Ben as something of a novelty, being the first national war hero to be prosecuted for allegedly crossing legal boundaries in a conflict zone. As his proceedings continue, arguments will rage over whether this demonstrates that Australia is more evolved than other nations, or a navel-gazing, self-conscious country that is overly obsessed with cutting down tall poppies without appreciation for the reality of war. Regardless, the saddest part of Big Ben’s fall is that unifying heroes in Western society have become all too rare - and rarer still are those who unexpectedly go on to divide opinion.

James Vella-Bardon's work can be found on Amazon.