New Military History

The epic World War II story of Australia's 75 Squadron - and the 44 days when these brave and barely-trained pilots fought alone against the Japanese. In March and April 1942, RAAF 75 Squadron bravely defended Port Moresby for 44 days when Australia truly stood alone against the Japanese. This group of raw young recruits scrambled ceaselessly in their Kittyhawk fighters to an extraordinary and heroic battle, the story of which has been left largely untold.

The Battle of Le Hamel on 4 July 1918 was an Allied triumph and strategically very important in the closing stages of WWI. A largely Australian force, commanded by the brilliant Sir John Monash, fought what has been described as the first modern battle - where infantry, tanks, artillery and planes operated together as a coordinated force. Monash planned every detail meticulously, with nothing left to chance. Peter FitzSimons brings this Allied triumph to life and tells this magnificent story as it should be told.

The first 100 days of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency are justly famous, viewed as a period of political action without equal in American history. Yet as historian David B. Woolner reveals, the end of FDR's presidency might very well surpass it in drama and consequence. Drawing on new evidence, Woolner shows how FDR used every ounce of his diminishing energy to pursue the things that mattered most to him: the establishment of the United Nations, the reinvigoration of the New Deal, the possibility of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and more.

Andrew and Jihi Bustamante were a “tandem couple”: married spies who’d dedicated their lives to the CIA. They met as trainees at Langley, and got married while hunting terrorists across the globe. Then, suddenly, they were assigned to a mission so sensitive and explosive that the CIA still has never acknowledged it.

A triumph of narrative, empathy and research, as gripping in its handling of individual witnesses to the war - those doomed to struggle with bombing, rationing, exhausting work and above all the absence of millions of family members - as of the gigantic military, social, technological and economic forces that swept the conflict along. It is the definitive account of a drama which reshaped our country.

There can be few more exciting or frightening moments in European history than the spring of 1848. Almost as if by magic, in city after city, from Palermo to Paris to Venice, huge crowds gathered, sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent, and the political order that had held sway since the defeat of Napoleon simply collapsed. Christopher Clark's spectacular new book recreates with verve, wit and insight this extraordinary period.

In November 1943, while on war patrol in the Makassar Strait, the USS Billfish submarine was spotted by the Japanese, who launched a vicious depth-charge attack. Explosions wracked the sub for 15 straight hours. With his senior officers incapacitated, diving officer Charlie Rush boldly assumed command and led key members of the crew in a heroic effort to keep their ship intact as they tried to escape.

In Petrograd, a fire is lit. The Tsar is packed off to Siberia. A rancorous Russian exile returns to proclaim a workers' revolution. In America, black soldiers who have served their country in Europe demand their rights at home. An Austrian war veteran trained by the German army to give rousing speeches against the Bolshevik peril begins to rail against the Jews. A solar eclipse turns a former patent clerk into a celebrity. An American reporter living the high life in Paris searches out a new literary style.

It's Smergey's lucky day. He gets to fight a dinosaur with a paperclip. Yeah, that's how much fun it's been with the First Team. What's left of them. Smergey doesn't know where anyone else is, or even if they are alive. He only knows that he and President Harkness have been separated from First Team. The President is severely wounded and Smergey is wishing he had practiced his boy scout skills better now. And you won't believe what happens for Smergey's second lucky day. The President wakes up just long enough from his fever coma to tell Smergey an atom bomb is about to blow up if the ...

The harrowing, dramatic and profoundly moving story of the Australian and New Zealand nurses who served in the Great War. Now a major six-part television series. By the end of the Great War, 45 Australian and New Zealand nurses had died on overseas service and over 200 had been decorated. These were the women who left for war looking for adventure and romance but were soon confronted with challenges for which their civilian lives could never have prepared them.

In this international history of Reconstruction, Don Doyle chronicles the world events inspired by the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1870, France withdrew from Mexico, Russia sold Alaska to the US, and Britain proclaimed the new state of Canada. British workers demanded more voting rights, Spain toppled Queen Isabella II and ended slavery in its Caribbean colonies, Cubans rose against Spanish rule, France overthrew Napoleon III, and the kingdom of Pope Pius IX fell before the Italian Risorgimento.

On the afternoon of January 16, 1942, three men boarded a TBD Devastator aircraft - a low-wing, single-engine torpedo-bomber - for an antisubmarine patrol flight. Although it was to be a relatively short flight, they became lost...

A collection of 10 new essays from some of our finest Civil War historians working today, Gateway to the Confederacy offers a reexamination of the campaigns fought to gain possession of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Each essay addresses how Americans have misconstrued the legacy of these struggles and why scholars feel it necessary to reconsider one of the most critical turning points of the American Civil War.

Established after World War I by the Royal Australian Navy, the Coast Watchers were a loose organisation of several hundred European settlers, missionaries, patrol officers and planters living in British and Australian Pacific Island territories whose job it was to observe and report on the enemy. They were mostly all unpaid volunteers whose job it was simply to observe and report on foreign shipping and aeroplane movements. It was never envisaged that the Coast Watchers would do any fighting, nor operate inside enemy-occupied territory.

In the city of Lahun, Hui lives an enchanted life. The favoured son of a doting father, and ruler-in-waiting of the great city, his fate is set. But behind the beautiful façades a sinister evil is plotting. Craving power and embittered by jealousy, Hui's stepmother, the great sorceress Isetnofret, and Hui's own brother Qen, orchestrate the downfall of Hui's father, condemning Hui and seizing power in the city.

The Battle of New Orleans sets its scenes with an almost unbelievably colorful cast of characters - a happenstance coalition of militia-men, regulars, untrained frontiersmen, free blacks, Indians, townspeople, and of course, Jackson himself. His glorious, improbable victory will catapult a once-poor, uneducated orphan boy into the White House and forge the beginning of a true nation.

September 1942 marked the high point of Axis conquest in World War II. In the Pacific, Japan's soldiers had seemed unstoppable. However, the tide was about to turn. On Sunday, 6 September 1942, Japanese land forces suffered their first conclusive defeat at the hands of the Allies. At Milne Bay in Papua New Guinea, a predominantly Australian force - including 75 Squadron (fresh from their action in 44 Days) - fought for two weeks to successfully defend a vital airstrip against a determined Japanese invasion.

Perhaps no conflict in American history is more important yet more overlooked and misunderstood than the War of 1812. At the climax of the war, inspired by the defeat of Napoleon in early 1814 and the perceived illegality of the Louisiana Purchase, the British devised a plan to launch a three-pronged attack against the Northern, Eastern, and Southern US borders.

On the 14th of August 1941, a Polish monk named Maximilian Maria Kolbe was murdered in Auschwitz. Kolbe's life had been remarkable. Fiercely intelligent and driven, he founded a movement of Catholicism and spent several years in Nagasaki, ministering to the 'hidden Christians' who had emerged after centuries of oppression. A Polish nationalist as well as a monk, he gave sanctuary to fleeing refugees and his death was no less remarkable: he volunteered to die, saving the life of a fellow prisoner. It was an act that profoundly transformed the lives of two Japanese men.

The prison at Abu Ghraib was still a relatively unknown part of America's War on Terror when - with no special training and their gear lost somewhere between the United States and Baghdad - the 152nd Field Artillery Battalion of the Maine National Guard was sent there to serve as guards in February 2004. Just before their arrival, the now infamous photos of the abuses suffered by the prisoners hit the world stage. Abu Ghraib became the focal point not only for global condemnation, but for the insurgents' outrage.