Secondhand Military History Bargain Book Box SP4072

Secondhand Military History Bargain Book Box SP4072

Eighteen ex-library books spanning the Western Front, Singapore, the Thai-Burma Railway, civilian internment, shell shock, and the home front — with a strong strand of critical and revisionist Australian military history alongside the primary accounts.

1. Diggers in France: Australian Soldiers on the Western Front — Richard Travers — A vivid account of the Australian experience on the Western Front, following the diggers from Gallipoli to the mud of Flanders and the Somme.
2. Descent into Hell: The Fall of Singapore, Pudu and Changi, the Thai-Burma Railway — Peter Brune — One of Australia's most powerful military historians on the catastrophic fall of Singapore and the suffering of Australian POWs that followed.
3. What's Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History — Marilyn Lake & Henry Reynolds — A sharp and important challenge to the centrality of military sacrifice in Australian national identity. Essential reading for anyone interested in how Australians understand their own history.
4. Watson's Pier — Joshua Funder — A fascinating account of the complex wartime relationship between Australia and America, told through a remarkable and little-known piece of history.
5. Breakdown: The Crisis of Shell Shock on the Somme, 1916 — Taylor Downing — A searing examination of the psychological destruction wrought by the Somme, and the medical and military establishment's slow reckoning with shell shock.
6. Carrier Attack: Darwin 1942 — Dr Tom Lewis & Peter Ingman — The complete guide to the Japanese carrier attack on Darwin — Australia's own Pearl Harbor — told in meticulous detail.
7. Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War — Joan Beaumont — A landmark work of Australian Great War history, examining not just the battles but the social and political fractures the war opened at home.
8. Australia's Forgotten Prisoners: Civilians Interned by the Japanese in World War Two — Christina Twomey — The neglected story of Australian and other Allied civilians interned by Japan, and their long struggle for recognition after the war.
9. The Battle Within: POWs in Postwar Australia — Christina Twomey — Twomey's companion study of what happened when the prisoners came home — the trauma, the silence and the long aftermath of captivity.
10. The Barbed-Wire University: The Real Lives of Prisoners of War in the Second World War — Midge Gillies — A richly researched account of how Allied POWs created cultural and intellectual lives inside the wire — theatre, universities, sport and escape committees.
11. Accommodating the King's Hard Bargain: Military Detention in the Australian Army 1914–1947 — Graham Wilson — A forensic study of discipline, punishment and military justice in the Australian Army across both world wars.
12. Bully Beef & Balderdash: Some Myths of the AIF Examined and Debunked — Graham Wilson — Wilson turns a sceptical eye on some of the most cherished legends of the Australian Imperial Force, with bracing results.
13. Digger Smith and Australia's Great War: Ordinary Name — Extraordinary Stories — Peter Stanley — Stanley recovers the stories of the many Australian servicemen named Smith, turning an ordinary name into a prism for understanding the war's human cost.
14. Gallipoli: The New Zealand Story — Christopher Pugsley — Essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand what happened at Gallipoli in 1915, told from the New Zealand perspective by one of its foremost military historians.
15. Aircraft-Carrying Ships of the Royal Navy — Maurice Cocker, foreword by Admiral Sir Jeremy Black — A comprehensive history of British aircraft carriers from the First World War to the modern era.
16. Both Sides of the Wire: The Memoir of an Australian Officer Captured During the Great War — William Cull, edited by Aaron Pegram — A rare and vivid first-hand account of captivity in Germany during World War One, from an Australian officer's perspective.
17. Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire — Calder Walton — A rigorously researched account of how British intelligence shaped and was shaped by decolonisation, drawing on newly declassified files.
18. Australia's Real Baptism of Fire — Greg Raffin — The story of an early and little-known Australian military action, recovered here in full for the first time.