Japan 1945. In one of the defining moments of the twentieth century, more than 100,000 people were killed instantly by two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by US Air Force B29s. Hundreds of thousands more succumbed to their horrific injuries, or slowly perished of radiation-related sickness.Hiroshima Nagasaki tells the story of the tragedy through the eyes of the survivors, from the twelve-year-olds forced to work in war factories to the wives and chi...

'A concise study of one of the most fascinating and evil men in history... Essential for anyone interested in military history' - SoldierMillions of words have been spent and misspent on Adolf Hitler. But there remains one aspect as yet insufficiently explored: the impact of the First World War on the man who would go on to indelibly shape the Second.Hitler fought at First Ypres and he saw something on the battlefields that eluded his fellow soldie...

For the first time this is the full story of Australia's involvement in our longest military campaign'Surely God weeps,' an Australian soldier wrote in despair of the conflict in Vietnam. But no God intervened to shorten the years of carnage and devastation in this most controversial of wars. the ten-year struggle in the rice paddies and jungles of South Vietnam unleashed the most devastating firepower on the Vietnamese nation, visiting terrible harm on both civilians and soldiers.Y...

After the fall of Singapore in 1942, the conquering Japanese Army transferred some 2500 British and Australian prisoners to a jungle camp at Sandakan, on the east coast of North Borneo. There they were beaten, broken, worked to death, thrown into bamboo cages on the slightest pretext and subjected to tortures so ingenious and hideous that the victims were driven to the brink of madness.But it was only to be the beginning of the nightmare. In late 1944 when Allied aircraft began bom...

The untold story of the Sandakan death marches of World War II.After the fall of Singapore, in February 1942, the Japanese conquerors rounded up tens of thousands of British and Australian soldiers and shipped them to prison camps scattered throughout Hirohito’s newly won Empire.The fall of Britain’s ‘impregnable fortress’ was the greatest humiliation in British military history, for which Churchill never forgave the Japanese.But nothing would surpa...

Passchendaele epitomises everything that was most terrible about the Western Front. The photographs never sleep of this four-month battle, fought from July to November 1917, the worst year of the war: blackened tree stumps rising out of a field of mud, corpses of men and horses drowned in shell holes, terrified soldiers huddled in trenches awaiting the whistle.The intervening century, the most violent in human history, has not disarmed these pictures of their power to shock. At the...

The inspiration for a major two-part ABC documentary, KOKODA is set to win over a whole new audience'Never in my life ... had I seen soldiers who looked so shocked and so tired and so utterly weary as those men' Brigadier John Rogers, Australia's Director of Military Intelligence, 1942Now a major two-part ABC documentary series produced with Screen Australia's Making History, Paul Ham's KOKODA is the bestselling history of the crucial battles in Papua New Guinea that saved Australia...

IN FEBRUARY 1534 a radical religious sect whose disciples were being persecuted throughout Europe seized the city of Münster, in the German-speaking land of Westphalia.They were convinced that they were God’s Elect, specially chosen by the Almighty to be the first to ascend to Paradise on Judgement Day, as told in the Book of Revelation.And it would all happen here, in ‘New Jerusalem’ (as they renamed the city), during Easter 1535, when God and Christ would descend and ushe...

For the first time ever, the compelling story of the infamous Kokoda Track campaign has been told from both sides of the conflict.In a unique and balanced portrayal, renowned journalist Paul Ham recounts both the Australian and Japanese perspectives of the events on the hellish Papuan jungle trail where thousands fought and died during World War II. Based on extensive research in Australia and Japan, and including previously unpublished documents, Kokoda intimately relates the stori...

'Outstanding . . . thought-provoking, readable and informative' SoldierOne hundred years on...On 18 July 1917, a heavy artillery barrage was unleashed by the Allied forces against an entrenched German army outside the town of Ypres. it was to be the opening salvo of one of the most ferociously fought and debilitating encounters of the First World War.Few battles would encapsulate the utter futility of the war better that wh...

In the early stages of World War 1 some 800,000 German troops defied Belgian neutrality and marched across the border.In August 1914 the bulk of the German army - some 800,000 troops - defied Belgian neutrality and smashed across the border. Their orders were to invade France, destroying any Belgian resistance in their path. The German commanders were to achieve this within 6 weeks. What followed was the rape and massacre of hundreds of Belgian civilians. Scores of...

Few years can justly be said to have transformed the earth: 1914 did. In July that year, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Britain and France were poised to plunge the world into a war that would kill or wound 37 million people, tear down the fabric of society, uproot ancient political systems and set the course for the bloodiest century in human history. In the longer run, the events of 1914 set the world on the path toward the Russian Revolution, the Treaty of Versailles, the rise of Naz...