Australia War

On a cold night in Australia, two construction workers driving along a deserted mountain road are gunned down inside their vehicle. The killings are fast. Efficient. An assassination carried out with expert precision. The only witness to the crime is a man resting by the side of the road. Recently retired, he'd flown halfway across the world to escape his demons. Ex-US black ops operative Jason King.

On September 15, 1944, the United States invaded the tiny Pacific island of Peleliu, located at the Southern end of the Palau Islands. Boasting a large airfield from which the Americans could mount bomber campaigns, Peleliu was a strategically essential part of Gen. MacArthur's long-awaited liberation of the Philippines. With the famed 1st Marine Division making the amphibious assault, Pacific High Command was confident that victory would be theirs in just a few days. They were drastically wrong.

Unlike most other World War II accounts, this work covers the South Pacific operations in detail. The audiobook includes many now-forgotten operations that deserve to be well remembered. Significantly, the official Australian history of World War II correctly observed that Australia's part in the Pacific war is barely mentioned in American histories. This volume finally brings the major Australian contribution to the fore.

Drawing on hundreds of accounts by soldiers, politicians, aid workers, entertainers and the Vietnamese people, Paul Ham reconstructs for the first time the full history of our longest military campaign. From the commitment to engage, through the fight over conscription and the rise of the anti - war movement, to the tactics and horror of the battlefi eld, Ham exhumes the truth about this politicians' war - which sealed the fate of 50,000 Australian servicemen and women.

There are few moments in American history in which the course of events tipped so suddenly and so dramatically as at the Battle of Midway. At dawn of June 4, 1942, a rampaging Japanese navy ruled the Pacific. By sunset, their vaunted carrier force (the Kido Butai) had been sunk and their grip on the Pacific had been loosened forever. In this absolutely riveting account of a key moment in the history of World War II, one of America's leading naval historians, Craig L. Symonds, paints an unforgettable portrait of ingenuity, courage, and sacrifice.

In this gripping essay, Hugh White explores Australia’s fateful choice to back America to the hilt and oppose China. What led both sides of politics to align with America so absolutely? Is this a case of sleepwalking to war? What tests might a new government face? White assesses America’s credibility and commitment, by examining AUKUS, the Quad, Trump and Biden. He discusses what the Ukraine conflict tells us about the future. And he argues that the US can neither contain China nor win a war over Taiwan. So where does this leave our future security and prosperity in Asia?

In 1918, after four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia to take a job as the lighthouse keeper on remote Janus Rock. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes only four times a year and shore leaves are granted every other year at best, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Three years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel is tending the grave of her newly lost infant when she hears a baby’s cries on the wind. A boat has washed up on shore carrying a dead man and a living baby.

Established after World War I by the Royal Australian Navy, the Coast Watchers were a loose organisation of several hundred European settlers, missionaries, patrol officers and planters living in British and Australian Pacific Island territories whose job it was to observe and report on the enemy. They were mostly all unpaid volunteers whose job it was simply to observe and report on foreign shipping and aeroplane movements. It was never envisaged that the Coast Watchers would do any fighting, nor operate inside enemy-occupied territory.

The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later was heralded in the streets of New York - the revolutionary hero, back from the dead, at the dawn of the great Irish immigration to America.

The Korean War was a 20th Century conflict that has never ended. South Korea, a powerhouse economy and dynamic democracy sits uneasily alongside North Korea, the world’s most secretive, belligerent, unpredictable and repressive totalitarian state. Today, tensions simmer and occasionally flare into outright violence on a peninsula dense with arms, munitions and nuclear warheads. Cameron Forbes, acclaimed author of Hellfire, tells the story of the war and Australia’s involvement in it in a riveting narrative.

From the authors of the New York Times best-selling The Heart of Everything That Is and Halsey's Typhoon comes the dramatic untold story of a daredevil bomber pilot and his misfit crew who fly their lone B-17 into the teeth of the Japanese Empire in 1943, engage in the longest dogfight in history, and change the momentum of the war in the Pacific - but not without making the ultimate sacrifice.

As a National Public Radio reporter covering the last stand of the Taliban in Afghanistan's southern borderland, Sarah Chayes became deeply immersed in the attempt to rebuild a broken nation. With her NPR assignment finished in early 2002, she left reporting to help turn around the country's fortunes, accepting a job running a nonprofit founded by President Hamid Karzai's brother. With remarkable access to leading players in the postwar government, Chayes witnessed a tragic, perverse turn of events.

The incredible account of Sister Betty Jeffrey OAM and the Australian war nurses who survived the bombing of evacuation ship SS Vyner Brooke in February 1942, and subsequently spent three years in Japanese prison camps in Sumatra. During those perilous years surviving in squalid conditions, Sister Jeffrey kept a secret diary of day-to-day events which, after the war, was turned into a hugely successful book and radio serial: White Coolies. Sisters in Captivity builds on those diaries.

One American soldier called it "a green hell on Earth". Monsoon-soaked wilderness, debilitating heat, impassable mountains, torrential rivers, and disease-infested swamps - New Guinea was a battleground far more deadly than the most fanatical of enemy troops. Japanese forces numbering some 600,000 men began landing in January 1942, determined to seize the island as a cornerstone of the empire's strategy to knock Australia out of the war.

On May 13, 1945, 24 American servicemen and WACs boarded a transport plane for a sightseeing trip over “Shangri-La,” a beautiful and mysterious valley deep within the jungle-covered mountains of Dutch New Guinea. Unlike the peaceful Tibetan monks of James Hilton’s best-selling novel Lost Horizon, this Shangri-La was home to spear-carrying tribesmen, warriors rumored to be cannibals. But the pleasure tour became an unforgettable battle for survival when the plane crashed. Miraculously, three passengers pulled through.

1939: On the eve of war, young English heiress Grace Grey travels from London to the wilderness of Tasmania. Coaxed out of her shell by the attentions of her Irish neighbour, Daniel - Grace finally learns to live. 1975: Artist Willow Hawkins, and her new husband, Ben, can't believe their luck when an anonymous benefactor leaves them a house on the remote Tasmanian coast. 2004: Libby Andrews has always been sheltered from the truth behind her father Ben's death.

England, 1941. The world is at war. London is under siege as the German blitz pounds the city without warning, without mercy. Rose Hamilton did her part as a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force until she was unfairly discharged following a tragic loss. Working as a secretary on a Devon farmland, Rose is out of harm’s way, but she needs to contribute to something greater than herself to truly recover.

It was the afternoon of 18 August 1966, hot, humid with grey monsoonal skies. D Company, 6RAR were four kilometres east of their Nui Dat base, on patrol in a rubber plantation not far from the abandoned village of Long Tan. A day after their base had suffered a mortar strike, they were looking for Viet Cong soldiers. Then—just when they were least expecting—they found them. Under withering fire, some Diggers perished, some were grievously wounded, the rest fought on, as they remained under sustained attack. For hours these men fought for their lives against the enemy onslaught.

A fascinating look at a neglected Allied front in the Southern hemisphere, Instructions for American Servicemen in Australia, 1942 follows its successful predecessors as a captivating historical document of a pivotal era in history.

The town of Wirrawee is emerging from war, slowly, like a flower after a cold snap. Businesses are starting to reopen, the school has re-commenced classes, and local farmers are gradually repossessing their land. But it's not the same Australia as before the war. A new nation exists just a few miles away, a new border that separates Australia from its invaders. Or does it?