The Pursuit of Justice is the first book to examine three separate instances of soldiers risking their lives during wartime to protest injustices being perpetrated by military authorities: within the United States Army during the American Civil War, the Australian Imperial Force during World War I, and the British Army during World War II. Nathan Wise explores the three events in detail and reveals how-despite the vast differences in military forces, wars, regions of the world, an...

Alike in many aspects of their histories, Australia and the United States diverge in striking ways when it comes to their working classes, labor relations, and politics.Greg Patmore and Shelton Stromquist curate innovative essays that use transnational and comparative analysis to explore the two nations’ differences. The contributors examine five major areas: World War I’s impact on labor and socialist movements; the history of coerced labor; patterns of ethnic and class identifica...

Anzac Labour explores the horror, frustration and exhaustion surrounding working life in the Australian Imperial Force during the First World War. Based on letters and diaries of Australian soldiers, it traces the history of work and workplace cultures through Australia, the shores of Gallipoli, the fields of France and Belgium, and the Near East.

A first-hand account of World War I by a nineteen-year-old Englishman who led a platoon into the carnage of the Battle of the Somme.While researching his excellent earlier book: Veterans of World War I, author Richard Van Emden encountered a fascinating personality of that long-ago conflict. After witnessing German naval attacks on British civilians, Norman Collins enlisted in the Seaforth Highlanders of the 51st Highland Division, even though he was under ...

Australians have celebrated the Anzacs for nearly a century--but what do we really know of what war did to them? Charles Bean, historian of the citizen soldiers of the Australian Imperial Force, wrote that its history spanned 'the good and the bad'--but so far Australians have only looked at the good.Leading war historian Peter Stanley reveals the citizen soldiers the army regarded as its 'bad characters'. These were men who went absent and deserted, caught or concealed VD, got dru...

In 1916, one million men fought in the first battle of the Somme. Victory hinged on their ability to capture a small village called Pozières. After five attempts to seize it, the British called in the Anzacs to complete this seemingly impossible task.At midnight on 23 July 1916, thousands of Australians stormed Pozières. Forty-five days later they were relieved, having suffered 23,000 casualties to gain a few miles of barren landscape. Despite the toll, the operation was heralded a...

On August 7th 1915, men of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade staged one of the most tragic, brave and futile charges of the First World War. Seeking to break out of the Anzac position at Gallipoli they attempted to storm an extraordinarily strong Turkish position, defended by artillery, machineguns and thousands of men, using nothing but fixed bayonets and raw courage. The first wave of Light Horsemen were killed within seconds of leaving their trench, yet over the course of the next few minutes...

The Australian experience of war in all its complexity - from the homefront as well as the battlefront - as the men and women who experienced it chose to understand and remember it.Winner of the 2014 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Australian History.The Great War is, for many Australians, the event that defined our nation. The larrikin diggers, trench warfare, and the landing at Gallipoli have become the stuff of the Anzac 'legend'. But it was also a w...

One of the greatest tragedies in Australian military history occurred at Gallipoli on 7 August 1915, when hundreds of Australian light horsemen were repeatedly ordered to charge the massed rifles and machine-guns of the Turkish enemy. It was a hopeless endeavour, and the resulting bloodbath has horrified every generation since and been the subject of considerable scrutiny by historians. The charge at The Nek, so vividly realised in Peter Weirs famous film Gallipoli, came to epitomise both ...

From the redcoat who served Charles II to the modern, camouflage-clad guard at Camp Bastion, from battlefield to barrack-room, this is a magisterial social history of the British soldier.Since 1660 the army has evolved and adapted, but the social organisation of the men has changed less, with the major combat arms retaining many of the characteristics familiar to those who fought at Blenheim, Waterloo and the Somme. The Duke of Marlborough, who built up the British army to become a...

Most Australian have heard of Lone Pine. Too few know why.Over four days in August 1915, Australians and Turks were thrown into some of the fiercest fighting of the war, on a small plateau in Gallipoli known as Lone Pine. Thousands of lives were lost. Seven of Australia's nine Gallipoli VCs were earned during brutal hand-to-hand combat in dark tunnels and in trenches just metres apart, bombarded by terrifying volleys of grenades.The Battle for Lone Pine is the firs...

In September 1915, Keith Murdoch, then a young war journalist, wrote an 8000-word letter to the Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher. 'The Gallipoli Letter', as it came to be known, changed the course of the Gallipoli campaign.The letter, protesting against the conduct of the campaign and describing conditions at the front, is both intimate and conversational: 'I shall talk to you as if you were by my side.' It is also at times angry, passionate, vivid and very moving: 'Then in the early ...