A compelling, riveting read, Commando to Colditz is an unusual perhaps unique war story. It is centred around a most unusual war hero: Michael 'Micky' Burn, soldier, poet and novelist, whose journey from fascist follower, to commander of Six Troop, to Commando, to prisoner (and communist lecturer) in the notorious prison of Colditz forms the focal point of this powerful narrative. In 1942 Micky led his commando troop of 28 men on one of the most daring raids of the Second World Wa...

It finally happened… and the aliens were out for conquest.Amid a worldwide invasion, a secluded part of the world holds its own against the unwelcome intruders.Flight Lieutenant Nathan Harvey, a helicopter pilot from the Royal New Zealand Air Force is recruited into the CAVDEV, an experimental powered armor unit.He quickly finds himself leading the fight on the front lines against an overwhelming alien force.Can Harvey and his clande...

What does Australia' s military history reveal about us? In Beyond the Broken Years – fifty years after Bill Gammage' s acclaimed The Broken Years was published – provocative military historian Peter Stanley argues why it' s vital for Australians to understand how our military past has been created, by whom, how and with what consequences. Stanley explores military history and the storytellers – from historians Charles Bean, Henry Reynolds, Joan Beaumont and David Horner to ' ' Storians' P...

Australian civilians worked for decades supporting the survivors and orphans of the Armenian Genocide massacres. April 24, 1915 marks the beginning of two great epics of the First World War. It was the day the allied invasion forces set out for Gallipoli; and it marked the beginning of what became the Genocide of the Ottoman Empire's Armenians. For the first time, this book tells the powerful, and until now neglected, story of how Australian humanitarians helped people they had barely hear...

Australia's official war correspondent during WWI, Charles Bean was also Australia's first official war historian and the driving force behind the creation of the Australian War Memorial. Famously criticized for his deliberate myth-making as editor of The Anzac Book, Bean was also a public servant, institutional leader, author, activist, thinker, doer, philosopher, and polemicist. In Charles Bean, Man, myth, legacy, Australia's top military historians – including Peter St...

In 1945, the small island of Tarakan off Borneo's coast became the unlikely stage for one of the Second World War's most gruelling campaigns. As part of General Douglas MacArthur's plan to liberate the Netherlands Indies, Australian soldiers launched Operation Oboe One, a mission to capture Tarakan’s airstrip. What was meant to last three weeks stretched into two months of bitter jungle warfare, claiming 240 Australian lives and 1,500 Japanese defenders. The airstrip’s strategic goal falte...

The island of New Aachen is a hotbed of turmoil, with more than just the enemy in the firing line.In May 1945, as Europe celebrates the end of WWII, the Pacific theatre remains a brutal battleground. On the remote Pacific Island of New Aachen, the site of a massacre of Australian troops three years prior, tensions run high.David Wachter, a veteran turned war historian clerk, joins a group of correspondents to cover the conflict and bring home the story of the...

Based on the most famous animal in Australian history Simpson's Donkey tells the story of his service during the Gallipoli campaign where for three weeks he was one of several donkeys that Simpson used to carry wounded men down to Anzac Cove. His life before and after Gallipoli is a mystery but Peter Stanley beautifully imagines the rest for the reader.Stanley tells the donkey's story--in the donkey's own voice--taking the reader on a journey from the Aegean island of Lemn...

Australians remember the dead of 25 April 1915 on Anzac Day every year. But does anyone know the name of a single soldier who died that day? What do we really know about the men supposedly most cherished in the national memory of war? Peter Stanley goes looking for the lost boys of Anzac: the men of the very first wave to land at dawn on 25 April 1915 and who died on that day. There were exactly 101 of them: the first to volunteer, the first to go into action, and the first of the 60,000 A...

Australians have celebrated the Anzacs for nearly a century--but what do we really know of what war did to them? Charles Bean, historian of the citizen soldiers of the Australian Imperial Force, wrote that its history spanned 'the good and the bad'--but so far Australians have only looked at the good.Leading war historian Peter Stanley reveals the citizen soldiers the army regarded as its 'bad characters'. These were men who went absent and deserted, caught or concealed VD, got dru...

The Black Saturday bushfires killed 173 people — wreaking a greater human toll than any other fire in Australia’s history. Ten of those victims died in Steels Creek, a small community on Melbourne’s outskirts. It was a beautiful place, which its residents had long treasured and loved. By the evening of 7 February 2009, it felt like a battlefield.Prize-winning historian Peter Stanley tells the dramatic stories of this small piece of country on that one terrifying evening — of epic f...

If not for the famous Indian mutiny-rebellion of 1857, the Santal "Hul" (rebellion) of 1855 would today be remembered as the most serious uprising that the East India Company ever faced. Instead, this rebellion-to which 10 per cent of the Bengal Army's infantry was committed and in which at least 10,000 Santals died-has been forgotten. While its memory lived among Santals, British officers published little about it, and most of the sepoys involved died in 1857. In the words of one British ...