Titles to Note

Anzac’s Long Shadow

James Brown, Redback, 2014,

ISBN 978163956390, 192pp, $19.99

Defence analyst and former army officer James Brown believes that Australia is expending too much time, money and emotion on the Anzac legend, and that today’s soldiers are suffering for it. Vividly evoking the war in Afghanistan, Brown reveals the experience of the modern soldier. He looks closely at the companies and clubs that trade on the Anzac story. He shows that Australians spend a lot more time looking after dead warriors than those who are alive. We focus on a cult of remembrance, instead of understanding a new world of soldiering and strategy. And we make it impossible to criticise the Australian Defence Force, even when it makes the same mistakes over and over. None of this is good for our soldiers or our ability to deal with a changing world. With respect and passion, Brown shines a new light on Anzac’s long shadow and calls for change.

Justice in Arms: Military Lawyers in the Australian Army’s First Hundred Years

Bruce Oswald and Jim Waddell (eds), Big Sky Publishing, 2014, ISBN 9781922132505, 575pp, $49.99

Justice in Arms brings to life a fascinating and important element of Australia’s legal history — the role of Army legal officers in Australia and in expeditionary operations from the Boer War to 2000. This is a comprehensive and absorbing history which describes the dynamic interaction of institutional and political imperatives and the personalities who managed this interaction over the decades. It is populated by colourful characters and legal luminaries and demonstrates that military justice is rightly concerned with discipline and cohesiveness. Reflecting broader societal norms, it is also concerned with the rule of law and respect for the rights, liberties and fair treatment of those who serve in the armed forces.

Justice in Arms describes the extraordinary contribution of Army legal officers to both the profession of arms and the development of the law, charting the evolving personal and structural relationships between Army legal officers and command dictated by the changing legal needs of the Army and the broader Australian Defence Force. Today Army legal officers apply, adapt and shape the law to meet evolving needs in peacetime and during armed conflict and peace operations, ensuring the legitimacy of military action and the maintenance of domestic and international support for national objectives.

Redeployment

Phil Klay, Allen & Unwin, 2014,

ISBN 9780857864239, 291pp, $29.99

Redeployment takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned. Interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival, the characters in these stories struggle to make meaning out of chaos. Written with a hard-eyed realism and stunning emotional depth, Redeployment grapples with the human costs of war.

Big Guns, Brave Men: Mobile Artillery Observers and the Battle for Okinawa

Rodney Earl Walton, Naval Institute Press, 2013, ISBN 9781612511306, 264pp, US$36.95

Intended as a springboard for an amphibious invasion of Japan, the conquest of Okinawa was the largest, bloodiest battle of the Pacific War and the greatest air-sea battle in history. The scope and intensity of the desperate 82-day battle, however, were overshadowed by the euphoria of VE day, the sudden, terrifying end of the war with Japan following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and history’s focus on the dramatic fight for Iwo Jima. While other books about Okinawa have emphasised the role of infantrymen, armour and US Marines, this work takes a fresh perspective by focusing on the vital role of the US Army’s forward artillery observers. These men were the eyes and ears of the American artillery and among the least-recognised heroes of the war. Divided into teams consisting of four of five men led by an artillery lieutenant, these observers would spend three days on the front lines directing artillery against enemy positions, return to their artillery battery for three days, and then rotate up to the line of battle again. While trying to maximise the damage inflicted on the enemy, the men also had to deal with the ever-present possibility of firing on their own forces. The ability to shift artillery fire throughout the battlefield was a new development in World War II, and its evolution is fully examined in this book. Ultimately, author Rodney Walton demonstrates that US artillerymen matched Japanese gunners in intensity and surpassed them in effectiveness because their forward observers were able to provide a much shorter response time to requests for artillery support.

War Dog

Damien Lewis, Hatchette, 2013,

ISBN 9780751553475, 304pp, $29.99

After he was shot down in the skies over France during a daring mission over the trenches in the winter of 1939, airman Robert Bozdech stumbled across a tiny German shepherd puppy while engaged in his own nail-biting escape from no man’s land. He hid the dog, which he named Ant, inside his jacket, and from that moment an unbreakable bond was formed. In the years that followed, Robert and Ant would save each other’s lives many times over. They flew together with Bomber Command over targets in Germany and beyond, both wounded in the line of duty and, when Ant was eventually grounded by the RAF top brass, he waited patiently on the runway for his master and his fellow pilots to return from each and every sortie. Perhaps inevitably, Ant became the mascot for Robert’s squadron, the only such mascot to fly on combat missions, or to suffer so many brushes with death under enemy fire. While French by birth, but British by his master’s adopted nationality, by the end of the war Ant had become a very British hero — and it was only right that he should be awarded the Dicken Medal, the ‘Animal VC’.

Fred’s War: A Doctor in the Trenches

Andrew Davidson, Short Books, 2013, ISBN 9781780721811, 318pp, $39.99

Fred’s War tells the extraordinary story of the 1st Cameronians, who achieved fame not solely for their illustrious deeds on the battlefield, but also for selling the Great War’s earliest front-line photographs. As the title suggests, the book also describes the exploits of Fred Davidson, their 25-year-old medical officer, one of the first doctors to win the Military Cross. His pictures are seen here for the first time, alongside those taken by his friend Lieutenant Robert Money and fellow officers.

Using a unique approach blending 250 original photographs with contemporary narrative, the author, Fred’s grandson, pieces together the story behind the pictures that have passed through his family for three generations, describing the men who fought with Davidson, the conditions in which they served, the battles they fought and the horrors they witnessed. From the parade ground at Glasgow’s Maryhill to the brothels of Armentieres, the book offers an unusually intimate portrait of life within a band of brothers — the same men who later proudly dubbed themselves the ‘Old Contemptibles’.

Secret Warriors: Key Scientists, Code Breakers and Propagandists of the Great War

Taylor Downing, Little, Brown, 2014, ISBN 9781408704219, 448pp, $32.99

The First World War is often viewed as a war fought by armies of millions living and fighting in trenches, aided by brutal machinery that cost the lives of many. But behind all of this a scientific war was also being fought between engineers, chemists, physicists, doctors, mathematicians and intelligence gatherers. This hidden war was to make a positive and lasting contribution to how war was conducted on land, at sea and in the air, and most importantly life at home. Secret Warriors provides an invaluable and fresh history of the First World War, profiling a number of the key figures who made great leaps in science for the benefit of 20th Century Britain. Told in a lively, narrative style, Secret Warriors reveals the unknown side of the war.

Lone Survivor

Marcus Luttrell with Patrick Robinson, Sphere, 2014, ISBN 9780751555943, 400pp, $22.99

In June 2005 four US Navy SEALs left their base in Afghanistan for the Pakistani border. Their mission was to capture or kill a notorious al-Qaeda leader known to be ensconced in a Taliban stronghold surrounded by a small but heavily armed force. Less than twenty-four hours later, only one of those Navy SEALs was alive This is the story of team leader Marcus Luttrell, the sole survivor of Operation Redwing. Blasted unconscious by a rocket grenade, blown over a cliff, but still armed and still breathing, Luttrell endured four desperate days fighting the al- Qaeda assassins sent to kill him, before finding unlikely sanctuary with a Pashtun tribe who risked everything to protect him from the circling Taliban killers.

Stubborn Buggers

Tim Bowden, Allen & Unwin, 2014, ISBN 9781743314425, 272pp, $29.99

There was a place far worse than Changi - Singapore’s Outram Road Gaol. For the POWs who endured it, deprivation here was so extreme that there really was a fate worse than death. Stubborn Buggers is the little known story of twelve Australian POWs who fought and survived the action in Malaya before the fall of Singapore and endured captivity and slave labour, then the unimaginable hardships of Outram Road Gaol. It is a story of how they dealt with the brutality of the Japanese military police, the feared Kempeitai. And it is the story of how they found a way to go on living even when facing a future of no hope and slow death.

The Chiefs: A Study of Strategic Leadership

Nicholas Jans with Stephen Mugford, Jamie Cullens, and Judy Frazer-Jans, Centre for Defence Leadership and Ethics, Australian Defence College, 2013, ISBN 9780987495860, 127pp

The objective of The Chiefs is to describe the leadership processes and culture at the most senior levels of the Australian military profession. This five-year study focused on the experiences of current and recently serving 3-star and 4-star officers in the Australian Defence Force. The study breaks fresh ground, not just in Australia but internationally. The vast majority of senior military leadership studies focus on what is done in the operational context. In contrast, The Chiefs analyses the senior role in the ‘corridors of power’ of the Australian military organisation and the central elements of the Department of Defence. The Chiefs is dedicated to the current and future senior teams who shoulder a significant responsibility as the stewards of the Australian military profession.

Jungle Warriors

Adrian Threlfall, Allen & Unwin, 2014, ISBN 9781742372204, 320pp, $32.99

Adrian Threlfall’s Jungle Warriors is a unique examination of Australia’s involvement in jungle warfare. Many historians agree that the Australian Army’s World War II transition from the desert to the jungle was extremely challenging. There is also an acknowledgement that Australians are among the best jungle fighters in the world. But how did the Australian Army rise to the challenge? Many years ago, the eminent British military historian Michael Howard asked how an army adapts to the ‘utterly unpredictable, the utterly unknown’. In 1941 jungle warfare was the ‘utterly unknown’ to Australian troops. The scale of the transition and the level of accomplishment by the men of the Australian Army over the course of the Second World War is clearly articulated by Threlfall in his Jungle Warriors. Threlfall examines the men’s passage from the training camps in Australia to the battlefields of North Africa to Milne Bay, Kokoda and final victory over the Imperial Japanese Army in Borneo, Bougainville and New Guinea. Like any serious research in this field, Jungle Warriors also inevitably reveals the inadequate planning that resulted in the unnecessary deaths of so many Australian men.