In the last devastating months of the First World War, the British Fourth Army pursued the Germans to their final defensive position — the Hindenburg Line, a formidable series of defensive positions studded with concrete dugouts and thickly set barbed wire.

18 August 1966, five kilometres from the Australian Task Force base at Nui Dat, a group of Viet Cong soldiers walked into the right flank of Delta Company, 6 RAR. Under a blanket of mist & heavy monsoon rain, a Company of 108 men held its ground with courage against a three-sided attack from a force of 2,500 Viet Cong & North.....

‘If we do not win the battle of training, we shall win no other battle in the air.’ In 1943 the Royal Air Force recognised that training a vast amount of aircrew for a high attrition war was essential to an Allied victory, and that the key to winning the ‘battle of training’ was the Empire Air Training Scheme (EATS).

 

‘There’s the bend in the road at Long Tan,’ I said. ‘We’re behind enemy lines. Turn back east, quickly.’ I had been scared before but now I was terrified. In 1966, Bob Grandin was a Royal Australian Airforce helicopter pilot stationed in Vietnam. This book is written from the logbook he kept while working in Nui Dat and is a fascinating look at ......

Through the insights of those around Naka, together with new research including the personal accounts of Australian interrogators, the author shows how this handsome loner provided the impetus for the dramatic events in the early hours of August 5, 1944 where hundreds of Japanese soldiers stormed the Camp defences for honour, or death!

As a UN peacekeeper, I joined the East Timorese fight for life. By then, the earth had drunk the blood of one third of their population. But worse was still to come.