Australia World War

From the author of the million-copy global best seller Lilac Girls, comes a captivating new historical novel, set during the American Civil War. It's a sweeping story of women caught in a country on the brink of collapse, in a society grappling with nationalism and unthinkable racial cruelty.

A little known story of two Australian battalions abandoned in Java during World War II and the heroes who kept them alive in the worst of Japan's prisoner of war camps. They were thrown into a hopeless fight against an overwhelming enemy. Later, hundreds died as prisoners of war on the Thai-Burma Railway and in the freezing coal mines of Taiwan and Japan. Through it all, wrote Weary Dunlop, they showed 'fortitude beyond anything I could have believed possible'.

In the harsh Libyan desert in the middle of the second world war, Private Jim Moody, a signaller with the First Australian Machine Gun Battalion, found a starving puppy on a sand dune. Moody called the dog Horrie. Much more than a mascot, Horrie's exceptional hearing picked up the whine of enemy aircraft two minutes before his human counterparts and repeatedly saved the lives of the thousand-strong contingent.

This is the wartime diary of J.D. McLauchlan, covering July 1943 to September 1944. In 1943, the Australian government sent a team to England to send back everything needed to build the Avro Lancaster in Australia. The mission was cloaked in secrecy, most of which still appears to be in place even now. While Australia never did build a Lancaster, the Lancaster’s replacement, the Avro Lincoln, was built after the war. Jim McLauchlan was sent to coordinate the flow of information back to Australia, and lived for a while in Manchester, traveling around England, Scotland, and Wales. This ...

In 1942, in Nazi-occupied Poland, a Jewish child was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto in a backpack. That child was Karen Kirsten's mother, but she knew nothing about this extraordinary event until one day a letter arrived from a stranger. After eventually discovering the grandparents she loved dearly were in fact not her biological grandparents, Karen travelled the globe to uncover her family's past and to find the answers to some baffling questions. Irena's Gift weaves together a mystery, history and memoir to tell the story of a family torn apart by war.

1917: America's declaration of war against Germany gives Grace Winter, a keen-eyed New York Times investigative reporter, a much sought after opportunity to make her mark on the Western Front, albeit in ways she had never expected. But by 1918 the gruesome reality of trench warfare has set in, and an invisible new enemy - The Spanish Flu - is killing allied soldiers in their droves.

In the spring of 1942, young Elzbieta Rabinek is aware of the swiftly growing discord just beyond the courtyard of her comfortable Warsaw home. But she has no idea what goes on behind the walls of the Jewish Ghetto nearby until she makes a discovery that propels her into a dangerous world of deception and heroism. Elzbieta comes face to face with the plight of the Gorka family who must give up their newborn daughter - or watch her starve. For Roman Gorka, this final injustice stirs in him a rebellion not even his newfound love for Elzbieta can suppress.

Simultaneous release of the thrilling new volume of true stories from airmen of the Second World War, from the author of Flak (also available in audio by Bolinda). Michael Veitch's life-long obsession with the aircraft of the Second World War led him to conclude that every single person who flew, or flew in them, has at least one extraordinary story to tell. With most of these veterans in their 80's, he knew that it was a matter of urgency to find them now, before their personal stories disappear forever.

In March 1942, twenty-five-year-old kindergarten teacher Magda Hellinger and nearly a thousand other young Slovakian women were deported to Poland on the second transportation of Jewish people sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The women were told they'd be working at a shoe factory. At Auschwitz the SS soon discovered that by putting Jewish prisoners in charge of the day-to-day running of the accommodation blocks, camp administration and workforces, they could both reduce the number of guards required and deflect the distrust of the prisoner population away from themselves.

The story of eight courageous women who had the courage and strength for which the Anzacs are renowned and the compassion and tenderness that only a woman can bring. One brave nursing sister, Hilda Samsing, became a whistle blower. Nursing aboard the hospital ship Gascon, outraged by the bungled evacuation of wounded Anzacs which was censored out of the press, she let her diary be shown in high places, which raised questions in the House of Commons.

The Second Battle of Krithia has existed largely in the shadows of the bigger Gallipoli story. It is, however, one of the most poignant and tragic tales of World War I. The fascinating story has been brought to light at last by bestselling military historian Mat McLachlan, author of The Cowra Breakout.

Twenty-five years after the end of the war, ageing British SOE operative Noah Ainsworth is reflecting on the secret agent who saved his life when a mission went wrong during his perilous, exhilarating years in occupied France. He never knew her real name, nor whether she survived the war. His daughter Charlotte begins a search for answers. What follows is the story of Fleur and Chloe, two otherwise ordinary women who in 1943 are called up by the SOE for deployment in France.

This is the story of how a teenage Australian soldier, George Aspinall, took his remarkable photographs as a prisoner of war of the Japanese, providing a detailed record of those desperate years from 1942-45, when British, Australian, Dutch and American troops were being driven beyond endurance as slave labour for the Imperial Japanese Army.

Australia's Greatest Escapes is a collection of stories about the most hazardous aspect of the prisoner of war experience - escape. Here is all the adventure, suspense, and courage of ordinary Australians who defied their captors; men who tunneled to freedom, crawled through stinking drains, or clawed a passage beneath barbed wire in a desperate attempt to flee captivity.

Tasmania, 1929: 10-year-old-twins Tom and Harry Abbott are orphaned by a tragedy that shocks Hobart society. They find sanctuary with their reclusive grandmother, growing up in the remote and rugged Binburra ranges - a place where kind-hearted Tom discovers a love of the wild, Harry nurses a growing resentment towards his brother, and where the mountains hold secrets that will transform both their lives. The chaos of World War II divides the brothers, and their passions for two very different women fuel a deadly rivalry.

It's March 1942. Singapore has fallen. Darwin has been bombed. Australia is on the brink of being invaded by the Imperial Japanese Forces. And Val Callahan, publican of The Brown's Bar in Townsville, could not be happier as she contemplates the fortune she's making from lonely, thirsty soldiers.

For months during 1943 there was no night in Hellfire Pass. By the light of flares, carbide lamps and bamboo fires, men near-naked and skeletal cut a passage through stone to make way for a railway. Among these men were some of the 22,000 Australian soldiers taken prisoner by the Japanese during World War II. In camps across Asia and the Pacific, they struggled, died, and survived with a little help from their mates.

March 1942: The world is at war. Too old to fight and with jobs scarce at home, Tom Phelps found work as a carpenter in the goldfields of the New Guinea Highlands. No one expected the Japanese to attack in the Pacific. But they did. Tom and his mates weren't going to hang around and wait to be killed. With escape routes bombed by the Japanese, their only option was to try to reach safety by foot, through some of the most rugged terrain on Earth - the Bulldog Track. Back home in Sydney, Rose Phelps, their son, George, and three daughters, Joy, Shirley and Ann, waited for news of Tom's fate.

On 11 August 1914, just days after war had been declared, Australian Captain J.T. Richardson boarded a German merchant vessel fleeing Melbourne's Port Phillip and audaciously seized a top-secret naval codebook. The fledgling Australian Navy had an opportunity to immediately change the course of the war. But what exactly had they found? Enter the Australian code breakers ...

Given their stellar legacy, it is little surprise that ANZAC soldiers were used by the British Empire for the several decades, most notably in World War II, ensuring that even after the British Empire declined, the Australian and New Zealand troops’ contributions to the Commonwealth remain a source of pride.