Download or read book Anzac Fury written by Peter Thompson and published by Random House Australia. This book was released on 2010-05-01 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Tobruk to the Battle of Crete - the new bestseller from the author of Pacific Fury. Anzac Fury commemorates the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe when 8900 Anzac prisoners of war captured in Greece and Crete were released from captivity. In 2010 it will be exactly 70 years since the 2nd AIF arrived in the Middle East to begin their extraordinary adventures in battles against the German and Italian armies in North Africa, mainland Greece and Crete prior to the outbreak of the Pacific War. Written by a brilliant storyteller, Anzac Fury tells the riveting story of how the legendary Anzac Corps was reformed in the heat of battle during World War II to fight a powerful and merciless foe. Dramatically combining personal memories with combat action, Anzac Fury gives voice to the experiences of young Australians and New Zealanders who were sent on Churchill’s orders from the victorious battlefields of Libya on a disastrous mission to Greece and Crete. A companion volume to the acclaimed 2008 publication Pacific Fury, this book celebrates the Anzac spirit of sacrifice, mateship, courage and endurance that sustained the new Anzacs during the darkest days of the war.

Download or read book Anzac Fury written by Peter Alexander Thompson and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 685 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ANZAC FURY commemorates the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe when 8900 Anzac prisoners of war captured in Greece and Crete were released from captivity. In 2010 it will be exactly 70 years since the 2nd AIF arrived in the Middle East to begin their extraordinary adventures in battles against the German and Italian armies in North Africa, mainland Greece and Crete prior to the outbreak of the Pacific War. Written by a brilliant storyteller, ANZAC FURY tells the riveting story of how the legendary Anzac Corps was reformed in the heat of battle during World War II to fight a powerful and merciless foe. Dramatically combining personal memories with combat action, ANZAC FURY gives voice to the experiences of young Australians and New Zealanders who were sent on Churchills orders from the victorious battlefields of Libya on a disastrous mission to Greece and Crete. A companion volume to the acclaimed 2008 publication PACIFIC FURY, this book celebrates the Anzac spirit of sacrifice, mateship, courage and endurance that sustained the new Anzacs during the darkest days of the war.

Download or read book Swastika over the Acropolis written by Craig Stockings and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Swastika over the Acropolis is a new, multi-national account which provides a new and compelling interpretation of the Greek campaign of 1941, and its place in the history of World War II. It overturns many previously accepted English-language assumptions about the fighting in Greece in April 1941 – including, for example, the impact usually ascribed to the Luftwaffe, German armour and the conduct of the Greek Army Further, Swastika over the Acropolis demonstrates that this last complete strategic victory by Nazi Germany in World War II is set against a British-Dominion campaign mounted as a withdrawal, not an attempt to ‘save’ Greece from invasion and occupation. At the same time, on the German side, the campaign revealed serious and systemic weaknesses in the planning and the conduct of large-scale operations that would play a significant role in the regime’s later defeats.

Download or read book Escape Artist written by Peter Monteath and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2018-07-30 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The never-before-told story of World War II escape artist extraordinaire, Johnny Peck.In August 1941, an eighteen-year-old Australian soldier made his first prison break an audacious night-time escape from a German prisoner-of-war camp in Crete. Astoundingly, this was only the first of many escapes.An infantryman in the 2/7 Battalion, Johnny Peck was first thrown into battle against Italian forces in the Western Desert. Campaigns against Hitlers Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe in Greece and Crete followed. When Crete fell to the Germans at the end of May 1941, Peck was trapped on the island with hundreds of other men. On the run, they depended on their wits, the kindness of strangers, and sheer good luck.When Pecks luck ran out, he was taken captive by the Germans, then the Italians. Later, after his release from a Piedmontese jail following the Italian Armistice of 1943, and at immense risk to his own life, Peck devoted himself to helping POWs cross the Alps to safety. Captured once more, Peck was sentenced to death and detained in Milans notorious, Gestapo-run San Vittore prison until escaping again, this time into Switzerland.Historian Peter Monteath reveals the action-packed tale of one young Australian soldier and his remarkable war.

Download or read book Men of Valour written by Ron Palenski and published by Hodder Moa. This book was released on 2013-03-26 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In May of 1941 New Zealand?s citizen soldiers, not long removed from their day jobs, were thrust into a type of fighting the world had not seen before: a land force against an airborne invasion. It was man against machines. In many ways, Crete became in the Second World War what Gallipoli had been in the First: another Dunkirk ? a scrambling effort to survive after defeat. This book breathes new life into the baptism of fire for New Zealand?s men of valour. It puts a human face on a military disaster, a failure that paradoxically was as large for the victors, the Germans, as it was for the losers, the Allies, among whom New Zealanders dominated. Crete tempered the New Zealand Division, and it went on to become one of the most respected and admired fighting forces of the Second World War.

Download or read book Unending War written by Ian Howie-Willis and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-05-05 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Malaria is not only the greatest killer of humankind, the disease has been the relentless scourge of armies throughout history. Malaria thwarted the efforts of Alexander the Great to conquer India in the fourth century BC. Malaria frustrated the ambitions of Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan to rule all Europe in the fourth and thirteenth centuries AD; and malaria stymied Napoleon Bonaparte’s plan to conquer Syria at the end of the eighteenth century. Malaria has also been the Australian Army’s continuing implacable foe in almost all its overseas deployments formation of the Australian Army in 1901. On at least three occasions malaria has halted Australian Army operations, bringing it to a standstill and threatening its defeat. The first time was in Syria in 1918, when a malaria epidemic cut a swathe through the Australian-led Desert Mounted Corps. The second time was in Papua New Guinea in 1942–43, when the Army was fighting malaria as well as the Japanese. The third time was in Vietnam in 1968, when malaria caused more casualties than did enemy action. Indeed the Australian Army has been fighting ‘an unending war’ against malaria ever since the Boer War at the end of the nineteenth century. The struggle against the disease continues 115 years later because virtually all Army’s overseas deployments are to malarious regions. Fortunately for Australian troops serving in nations where malaria is endemic, the Australian Army Malaria Institute undertakes the scientific research necessary to protect our service personnel against the disease. Ian Howie-Willis, in this very readable book, tells the dramatic story of the Army’s long and continuing struggle against malaria. It breaks new ground by showing how just one disease, malaria, is as much the serving soldier’s foe as any enemy force.

Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Australia written by Norman Abjorensen and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Australia’s development, from the most unpromising of beginnings as a British prison in 1788 to the prosperous liberal democracy of the present is as remarkable as is its success as a country of large-scale immigration. Since 1942 it has been a loyal ally of the United States and has demonstrated this loyalty by contributing troops to the war in Vietnam and by being part of the “coalition of the willing” in the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and in operations in Afghanistan. In recent years, it has also been more willing to promote peace and democracy in its Pacific and Asian neighbors. This fourth edition of Historical Dictionary of Australia covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Australia.

Download or read book Greece 1941 written by Jeffrey Plowman and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This WWII history presents an in-depth study of the Battle of Greece and a provocative new analysis of Nazi military tactics. Every student of the Second World War is familiar with the infamous Nazi military tactics known as blitzkrieg—or “lightning war.” In the early days of the war, these rapid attacks brough about the demise first of Poland and then the Low Countries and France. But were these tactics really as devastating as they seemed? That is the major question Jeffrey Plowman asks in this absorbing new study of the campaign in Greece in 1941. Within three weeks, the Germans overran the country. However, a close analysis of the campaign reveals that they never gained ascendancy over the token British and Anzac force sent to bolster the Greek defenders. They came close to doing so, but the Anzac troops and their Greek allies put up a spirited defense that sometimes turned the Germans’ own methods against them. This perceptive new account should prompt a reassessment of the Greek campaign. It also offers a fascinating insight into the weaknesses of the Germans’ all-conquering method of warfare which became increasing apparent during the later stages of the war.

Download or read book In the Picture written by Donat Gallagher and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2014-11-15 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evelyn Waugh at war is an irresistibly fascinating subject, as are his war novels and diaries. Drawn to units offering the greatest danger, but often frustrated in his search for action, Waugh served in multiple regiments, saw battle on Crete and worked behind the lines in occupied Croatia. In the Picture traces Waugh’s experiences, both vivid and mundane, with a completeness never before attempted and shows how they come alive in Sword of Honour. It also illuminates the brief hints within the narrative of key events of the war, while highlighting its strategic direction. Waugh’s individualistic relationships with superiors, subordinates and public opinion led to blame and controversy. Working mainly from archival sources, In the Picture examines Waugh’s fitness to be an officer, his conduct on Crete, his being sacked from the Special Service Brigade, and his service in Croatia. New, very surprising discoveries dispel entrenched myths.

Download or read book Medical Emergency written by Ian Howie-Willis and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Major-General `Ginger' Burston led the Army Medical Service throughout the Pacific campaigns. This pivotal book explains how Burston and his medical team kept Allied troops healthy in primitive and hostile conditions and during the greatest medical emergency of World War II - the struggle against malaria. By keeping the soldiers healthy, and particularly by reducing malaria infection rates from 100 to less than one case per 1000 troops per week, the Army Medical Service assured an Allied victory over Japan. A Medical Emergency tells this remarkable story for the first time. In engrossing detail and using contemporary accounts, veteran historian Ian Howie-Willis brings to life the struggle of `Ginger' Burston and his Medical Service to fight a deadly opponent that decimated the ranks of friend and foe alike. Their victory was key to the ultimate Allied success.

Download or read book Politics of Forgetting written by Martyn Brown and published by Australian Scholarly Publishing. This book was released on 2019-04-24 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greece was a poor country in turmoil and pain during the 1940s. A military dictatorship was followed by invasion and terrifying occupation by Germany and its allies, starvation, civil war, political unrest and mutiny in its free military armed forces. New Zealand entered this arena and found a bond with a people that it still celebrates to this day. Absent from the New Zealand national storytelling is the complex, divisive and sometimes violent and surreal relationship between the two countries and the inescapable influence of Britain. The New Zealand-Greek story stretches from the mountains and open country of Greece and Crete to Middle East deserts, autumn-swept plains of Italy, and the blood-splattered streets of post-liberated Athens. New Zealand official state memory emphasizes some things and ignores the unpalatable. It also conceals its assertiveness with Britain over the latter’s Greek policies.

Download or read book Mussolini Mustard Gas and the Fascist Way of War written by Charles Stephenson and published by Pen and Sword Military. This book was released on 2024-03-30 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early October 1935 and without any declaration of war some two hundred thousand men, comprising soldiers and airmen of the Italian armed forces, Fascist ‘Blackshirt’ Militia, Eritrean ascari and Somali dubats, invaded the independent state of Ethiopia (Abyssinia). It was an operation entirely of choice, the chooser being Il Duce: Benito Mussolini. The resultant conflict is often described as a colonial war. while it was certainly launched with the intent of turning Ethiopia into an Italian possession, it was in fact a war of aggression against an independent, sovereign, state with membership of the League of Nations. A state that had, according to one of its nineteenth-century rulers, been ‘for fourteen centuries a Christian island in a sea of pagans’. The swiftness of the Italian victory resulted from their possession and ruthless use of technology; most particularly aircraft, mustard gas, and motorisation/mechanisation. Since they were fighting an enemy who possessed none of these things, then they were able to wage, indeed inaugurate, what the prominent military theorist JFC Fuller dubbed ‘totalitarian warfare’ or, as it became known a few years later, total war. This, he opined, was the Fascist, the scientific, way of making war. In his considered view, the Fascist Army that waged it was ‘a scientific military instrument.’ This book examines that campaign in military and political terms.

Download or read book Australian Women and War written by Melanie Oppenheimer and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sourced from Oppenheimer's own research and archival material from the Australian War Memorial, Australian Red Cross archives and State Libraries, Australian Women and War contains accounts of women such as Nursing Sister Nellie Gould in the Boer War and Angela Rhodes, the first Australian Military female air traffic controller to serve in Baghdad during the second Gulf War. The book also contains little known accounts of women such as Nurse Ethel Gillingham, one of the only Australian women to be a POW in WWI, and the group of Australian teachers sent to South Africa during the Boer War to work in the internment (concentration) camps.

Download or read book Battle on 42nd Street written by Peter Monteath and published by NewSouth. This book was released on 2019-11-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At what point does the will to survive on the battlefield give way to bloodlust? The battle for Crete was at once the most modern and the most ancient of wars. For a week Australian and New Zealand forces were relentlessly hammered from the skies by the Luftwaffe and pursued across Crete by some of the most accomplished and best equipped forces Hitler could muster. On the morning of 27 May 1941, however, all that was about to change. When a unit of German mountain troops approached the Allies’ defensive line — known as 42nd Street — men from the Australian 2/7th and 2/8th Battalions and New Zealanders from several battalions counter-attacked with fixed bayonets. By the end, German bodies were strewn across the battlefield. Acclaimed historian Peter Monteath draws on recollections and records of Australian, New Zealand, British and German soldiers and local Cretans to reveal the truth behind one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War. 'This is military history at its best: deeply researched, powerfully told and proving that the essence of war is men killing other men.' — Joan Beaumont

Download or read book Combat Motivation written by A. Kellett and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What men will fight for seems to be worth looking into," H. L. Mencken noted shortly after the close of the First World War. Prior to that war, although many military commanders and theorists had throughout history shown an aptitude for devising maxims concerning esprit de corps, fighting spirit, morale, and the like, military organizations had rarely sought either to understand or to promote combat motivation. For example, an officer who graduated from the Royal Military College (Sandhurst) at the end of the nineteenth century later commented that the art of leadership was utterly neglected (Charlton 1931, p. 48), while General Wavell recalled that during his course at the British Staff College at Camberley (1909-1 0) insufficient stress was laid "on the factor of morale, or how to induce it and maintain it'' (quoted in Connell1964, p. 63). The First World War forced commanders and staffs to take account of psychological factors and to anticipate wideJy varied responses to the combat environment because, unlike most previous wars, it was not fought by relatively small and homogeneous armies of regulars and trained reservists. The mobilization by the belligerents of about 65 million men (many of whom were enrolled under duress), the evidence of fairly widespread psychiatric breakdown, and the postwar disillusion (- xiii xiv PREFACE emplified in books like C. E. Montague's Disenchantment, published in 1922) all tended to dispel assumptions and to provoke questions about mo tivation and morale.

Download or read book Dark and Hurrying Days written by Robert Menzies and published by National Library Australia. This book was released on 1993 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dark and Hurrying Days is the text of a diary kept by Robert Menzies, then Prime Minister of Australia, of his experiences during a wartime trip to England in 1941. It was a grim time when British cities were enduring heavy bombing and German invasion seemed imminent. Menzies' Diary reveals the shifting feelings and fears which these experiences engendered in him, and is of prime importance in capturing the brooding spirit of this grim time.

Download or read book Strategy and Command written by Louis Morton and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2015-07-11 with total page 792 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the United States, full involvement in World War II began and ended in the Pacific Ocean. Although the accepted grand strategy of the war was the defeat of Germany first, the sweep of Japanese victory in the weeks and months after Pearl Harbor impelled the United States to move as rapidly as it could to stem the enemy tide of conquest in the Pacific. Shocked as they were by the initial attack, the American people were also united in their determination to defeat Japan, and the Pacific war became peculiarly their own affair. In this great theater it was the United States that ran the war, and had the determining voice in answering questions of strategy and command as they arose. The natural environment made the prosecution of war in the Pacific of necessity an interservice effort, and any real account of it must, as this work does, take into full account the views and actions of the Navy as well as those of the Army and its Air Forces. These are the factors-a predominantly American theater of war covering nearly one-third the globe, and a joint conduct of war by land, sea, and air on the largest scale in American history-that make this volume on the Pacific war of particular significance today. It is the capstone of the eleven volumes published or being published in the Army's World War II series that deal with military operations in the Pacific area, and it is one that should command wide attention from the thoughtful public as well as the military reader in these days of global tension.