600 pages
THE BIG BOOK OF AUSTRALIA’S WAR STORIES
‘The bravest thing God ever made,’ said a British officer of the insubordinate Aussies at Gallipoli. And before the Normandy invasion, Field Marshall Montgomery’s chief of staff remarked, ‘I only wish we had the Australian 9th Division with us this morning’.
From Federation to the Vietnam War, from our first VC winner to our hundredth, Jim Haynes has rediscovered stories that are as harrowing as they are uplifting, as strange as they are brutal and as heart-breaking as they are humorous.
This comprehensive 600 page overview of Australia’s military adventures is a guide to understanding how our role in the twentieth century’s major conflicts unfolded as each war ebbed and flowed. There are the accounts of the extraordinary courage, resilience, stoic humour, personal heroism and sacrifice that created the mythology of the Aussie ‘digger’—the soldiers, sailors, nurses and flyers who earned the undying respect of their countrymen, their allies and often their enemies.