Kirjahaku

The definitive account of the Australians on the Kokoda Trail - a story told through the eyes of the Australians who fought there, many of whom have now passed away.

Descent into Hell is a scrupulously researched and groundbreaking account of one of the most traumatic calamities in Australian history - the Malayan Campaign, the fall of Singapore and the subsequent horrors of the Thai-Burma Railway. Unpicking the myths and legends of the war, Peter Brune goes to the heart of the Australian experience. He describes the shambolic planning by the British in Singapore and the failures and incompetence of some of the Australian command. He debunks the claims about Australian deserters in Singapore, and we learn of the black market in Changi and the beatings, torture and murder on the Thai-Burma Railway.Here too are stories of the war's many heroes and villains: of officers who looked after their men and optimised their chances of survival, and others who looked after themselves at their men's expense; the heroes of battle who became ineffectual and lost in the camps and on the Railway, and the least liked and least respected battlefield officers who came to be great leaders. And then there are countless acts of kindness and decency performed by one POW for another in the most cruel of circumstances.Impressive, compelling and rich in human spirit, Descent into Hell is an unprecedented chronicle by one of Australia's finest military historians.

Ralph Honner: Kokoda Hero is the story of one of Australia's great World War II battalion commanders. Honner fought as a junior officer in the first and triumphant North African battles of Bardia, Tobruk and Derna. He then took part in the heartbreaking and disastrous campaigns in Greece and Crete where he was one of the last Australians to be evacuated by submarine-three months after Crete's fall. But it was during 1942, at Isurava on the Kokoda Trail and at the Japanese beachhead of Gona in Papua New Guinea, that Ralph Honner played a decisive role in the making of an Australian legend. Worshipped by his men, he was severely wounded in 1943 and, after a long convalescence, served Australia with distinction as a public servant, political figure and diplomat. Written by one of Australia's bestselling military history authors, who knew Ralph Honner and had access to his private letters and papers, Ralph Honner: Kokoda Hero contains gripping, action-packed descriptions of the fighting in North Africa, Greece, Crete and Papua New Guinea. The story of a remarkable man, it covers events from Honner's adolescence in the last vestiges of pioneering Australia through to his distinguished political and diplomatic career, spanning nearly a century of his nation's history.