‘Peter Stanley has brilliantly brought to life what seems like a small wartime incident, demonstrating its effects on the participants at the time and for decades later. This is woven insightfully into the bigger story of the Anzac narrative and its legacy for Australia.’— Daniel Reynaud, author, The Man the Anzacs Revered and Faith of the AnzacsThey survived Gallipoli, Pozières, Bullecourt and Passchendaele. Then, as they slept in a quiet village on the Somme, two German sh...

A compelling, riveting read, Commando to Colditz is an unusual perhaps unique war story. It is centred around a most unusual war hero: Michael 'Micky' Burn, soldier, poet and novelist, whose journey from fascist follower, to commander of Six Troop, to Commando, to prisoner (and communist lecturer) in the notorious prison of Colditz forms the focal point of this powerful narrative. In 1942 Micky led his commando troop of 28 men on one of the most daring raids of the Second World Wa...

In 1945, 240 Australians died taking the small Borneo island of Tarakan from the Japanese. The tragedy of Tarakan was that by the time they succeeded, they need not have begun.Peter Stanley explores that battle, what it was like and what it means to us over fifty years on. He traces the operation from its origins in MacArthur's GHQ, down to the rifle sections patrolling in Tarakan's rugged jungle.Tarakan: An Australian Tragedy suggests new ways of looking at Austra...

Smiths were among the first men to land at Gallipoli. Smiths fought and died at Pozieres, Bullecourt and Passchendaele. Smiths were wounded - and treated by doctors and nurses named Smith. At home, Smiths penned patriotic doggerel and spoke vociferously against conscription. There was Grace Cossington Smith and her iconic painting The Sock Knitter, and Victor Smith, who designed a guided missile in his dad's workshop in suburban Brisbane. Australia's Smiths included the AIF's seni...

It finally happened… and the aliens were out for conquest.Amid a worldwide invasion, a secluded part of the world holds its own against the unwelcome intruders.Flight Lieutenant Nathan Harvey, a helicopter pilot from the Royal New Zealand Air Force is recruited into the CAVDEV, an experimental powered armor unit.He quickly finds himself leading the fight on the front lines against an overwhelming alien force.Can Harvey and his clande...

Australians are becoming increasingly fascinated by their military history, and every year greater numbers visit the scenes of the battles commemorated each Anzac Day - Villers-Bretonneux, Long Tan, Kokoda, Gallipoli itself. But what can you learn from visiting a battlefield? And how do you make sure you get the most out of the experience?Peter Stanley, one of Australia's most experienced military historians, a veteran of battlefield research in Borneo and Egypt, Turkey and France,...

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 1945, the small island of Tarakan off Borneo's coast became the unlikely stage for one of the Second World War's most gruelling campaigns. As part of General Douglas MacArthur's plan to liberate the Netherlands Indies, Australian soldiers launched Operation Oboe One, a mission to capture Tarakan’s airstrip. What was meant to last three weeks stretched into two months of bitter jungle warfare, claiming 240 Australian lives and 1,500 Japanese defenders. The airstrip’s strategic goal falte...

Australia's official war correspondent during WWI, Charles Bean was also Australia's first official war historian and the driving force behind the creation of the Australian War Memorial. Famously criticised for his deliberate myth-making as editor of The Anzac Book, Bean was also a public servant, institutional leader, author, activist, thinker, doer, philosopher, and polemicist.In Charles Bean, Man, myth, legacy, Australia's top military historians – including P...

What does Australia’s military history reveal about us?In Beyond The Broken Years – fifty years after The Broken Years, Bill Gammage’s classic on World War One soldiers, was published – provocative military historian Peter Stanley argues why it’s vital for Australians to understand how our military past has been created. By whom, how and with what consequences.Stanley explores military history and the storytellers – from historians Charles...

The island of New Aachen is a hotbed of turmoil, with more than just the enemy in the firing line.In May 1945, as Europe celebrates the end of WWII, the Pacific theatre remains a brutal battleground. On the remote Pacific Island of New Aachen, the site of a massacre of Australian troops three years prior, tensions run high.David Wachter, a veteran turned war historian clerk, joins a group of correspondents to cover the conflict and bring home the story of the...

Based on the most famous animal in Australian history Simpson's Donkey tells the story of his service during the Gallipoli campaign where for three weeks he was one of several donkeys that Simpson used to carry wounded men down to Anzac Cove. His life before and after Gallipoli is a mystery but Peter Stanley beautifully imagines the rest for the reader.Stanley tells the donkey's story--in the donkey's own voice--taking the reader on a journey from the Aegean island of Lemn...