Australia 1943: The Liberation of New Guinea   Written by: Peter Dean (ed),  Penguin Australia, 2013, ISBN 9781107037991, 337pp,   Reviewed by: Matt Miller Australia 1943: The Liberation of New Guin ea is an excellent snapshot of both familiar and unexplored aspects of the war in New Guinea. New Guinea was a complicated battlefield with a vast geography and unfamiliar names which will challenge the uninitiated. The book endeavours to explore the battle for New Guinea from the strategic heights of political …

Fromelles the Final Chapters: How the Buried Diggers were Identified and Their Lives Reclaimed   Written by: Tim Lycett and Sandra Playle, Penguin Australia, 2013, ISBN 9780670075362, 288pp   Reviewed by: Brian Manns I began reading this book with great interest, keen to know how Tim Lycett and Sandra Playle planned to tell the story of ‘how the buried diggers’ recovered from several mass graves near Fromelles in France were identified. The process of exhumation and identification was so complex that I …

All the King’s Men: The British Redcoat in the Era of Sword and Musket   Written by: Saul David, Penguin, 2013, ISBN 9780141027937, 592pp   Reviewed by: Major Tim Inglis The centenary of the Gallipoli campaign is not the only military anniversary in 2015. It will also be the bicentenary of the battle of Waterloo, which ended the revolutionary era and drew the Napoleonic Wars to a close. It is therefore hardly surprising that military historians are busy revisiting the events that led up to the battle. One …

Don’t Mention the War: The Australian Defence Force, the Media and the Afghan Conflict   Written by: Kevin Foster, Monash University Publishing, 2013, ISBN 9781922235183, 168pp   Reviewed by: Tom Hill Kevin Foster’s Don’t Mention the War seeks to explain the lack of objective and erudite reporting on the Afghanistan conflict by the Australian media, arguing that the coverage was characterised by an absence of insight and investigation. Instead, the media were forced to perpetuate the ADF’s strategic and …

Afghan Sun: Defence, Diplomacy, Development and the Taliban   Stuart Yeaman, Boolarong Press, 2013, ISBN 9781922109910, 360pp   Reviewed by: Colonel David Connery Most books reviewed in this journal are written by detached observers and academics. Afghan Sun is different. It is the work of former Australian Army officer Colonel Stuart Yeaman, AM, and is a personal account of the unit he commanded in Afghanistan. This book will primarily interest readers with a connection to the unit or those with a deep …

Canister! On! FIRE! Australian Tank Operations in Vietnam   Written by: Bruce Cameron, Big Sky Publishing, 2012, ISBN 9781921941993, 968pp (two volumes)   Reviewed by: Lieutenant Colonel Scott Winter In November 2012, the 1st Armoured Regiment hosted the official launch of Canister! On! Fire! Australian Tank Operations in Vietnam . A contingent of the regiment’s veterans, led by author Bruce Cameron, MC, joined the men and women of the regiment for the occasion. After a stirring presentation by former …

Climax at Gallipoli: The Failure of the August Offensive   Written by: Rhys Crawley, University of Oklahoma Press, 2014 ISBN 9780806152066, 384pp,   Reviewed by: Brigadier Chris Roberts (Ret’d), AM, CSM Mounted to break the deadlock resulting from the failed April landings, the August Offensive at Gallipoli was the largest operation undertaken on the peninsula. In the eyes of many contemporaries, and several subsequent historians, it came close to success; an offensive that failed by a whisker to bring the …

The Backroom Boys: Alfred Conlon and Army’s Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs   Written by: Graeme Sligo, Big Sky Publishing, 2013, ISBN 9781921941122, 416pp,   Reviewed by: John Donovan Although Colonel Graeme Sligo has written an interesting story about the Australian Army’s Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, the real story that needs to be told is that of the directorate’s enigmatic director Alfred Conlon, at least beyond the glimpses into his personality that appear in the book. The …

Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars   Written by: Daniel P. Bolger, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014, ISBN 9780544370487, 544pp,   Reviewed by: Brigadier Simon Stuart Recently retired US Lieutenant General Dan Bolger’s provocatively titled book Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars ultimately fails to prove its thesis. But, it does not matter. Counterintuitively, the value of Bolger’s book does not rely upon congruence between its title …

Rebalancing U.S. Forces: Basing and Forward Presence in the Asia–Pacific   Written by: Carnes Lord and Andrew S. Erickson (eds),  Naval Institute Press, 2014  ISBN 9781612514642, 226pp, Reviewed by: Andrew Carr There’s an old joke military officials like to tell: amateurs do strategy; professionals do logistics. For most of us self-proclaimed ‘amateurs’, how the United States positions itself in the Asia–Pacific is one of the key strategic questions of our time. As Carnes Lord and Andrew S. Erickson’s new …