The discovered diary of Yoko, a 13-year-old Japanese girl who lived near Hiroshima during the warAges: 8-12the diary of Yoko, a 13-year-old Japanese girl who lived near Hiroshima during the war1945 was a hard time to be a child in Japan. Many had seen their cities destroyed by US bombers. Food, fuel and materials were in short supply. Yet spirits remained high. In April 1945, Yoko Moriwaki started high school in Hiroshima, excited to be a prestigious 'Kenjo' girl, a...

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...

The assassination of Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, by a Bosnian-Serb terrorist in Sarajevo on 28th June 1914, precipitated the July crisis that brought war to Europe.Yet none of the great powers, in the days following the murder, believed it would lead to war. Extraordinarily, the Austro-Hungarian regime's first reaction to the outrage was relief: the incumbent emperor Franz Joseph loathed the archduke, his nephew, and opposed the accession. In fact...

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...

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...

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...

A history and analysis of the WWII nuclear bombings of Japan from "a master of engrossing and exciting narrative" ( Los Angeles Review of Books).In this harrowing history of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Paul Ham argues against the use of nuclear weapons, drawing on extensive research and hundreds of interviews to prove that the bombings had little impact on the eventual outcome of the Pacific War.More than 100,000 people were killed instant...

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...

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...

Herman Selderhuis as editor of this volume has brought together a team of experts, resulting in a unique approach since each chapter is co-written by a catholic and a protestant author, who have all integrated the latest research results. Each section begins with a brief historiographical overview. The same time, ecclesiastical events are always set within a greater framework of political, social, and cultural developments for which reason each author has taken the liberty to describe its ...

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...