Page 56 - Australian Defence Magazine April 2023

56 BOOKS OF INTEREST
APRIL 2023 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
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SAVING PORT MORESBY
FIGHTING AT THE END OF THE KOKODA TRACK
BY DAVID W CAMERON Published by Big Sky Publishing RRP $32.99 in paperback
ISBN 9781922765611
This is the second of David Cameron’s three books commemorating the 80th anniversary of the battles in New Guinea. It’s 1942 and Japanese Major General Horii Tomitarô, having taken the Kokoda Plateau in late July, was tasked with entering the
COLDITZ
PRISONERS OF THE CASTLE BY BEN MACINTYRE Published by Viking/Penguin RRP $35.00 in paperback ISBN 9780241408537
Author Ben Macintyre answers the obvious question why another book on Colditz? In his preface, he insists that the myth of Colditz as the stiff upper lipped white male Allied officer dedicated to escaping the forbidding Gothic castle located on a hilltop in the heart of Nazi Germany, is only half the story. What Macintyre
Owen Stanley Range to capture Port Morseby. After fighting a delaying action at Templeton’s Crossing, the Australians took up a position along Mission Ridge. Horii and his battalions attacked and after two days of bloody fighting, the Australians were forced to withdraw.
After several further delaying actions, Brigadier Arnold
Potts and his men took up a position on Ioribaiwa Ridge,
just 50 kilometres north of Port Moresby, his brigade reduced to fewer than 300 men. Here they were reinforced with the men of the 25th Brigade. After a week of fighting the Japanese cut through the centre right flank
of the Australian 25th Brigade, forcing the Australians to fall back to Imita Ridge, the last defensible ridge in the Owen Stanleys. This book brims with the detail many readers will find engaging and interesting.
reveals is not only a tale of the indomitable human spirit but also one of class conflict, homosexuality, espionage, insanity and farce. Through
an astonishing range of material, Macintyre reveals a remarkable cast of characters, wider than previously seen and hitherto hidden from history, taking in prisoners and captors who were living cheek-by-jowl in a deadly game of cat and mouse. From the elitist members of the Colditz Bullingdon Club to America’s oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent, the soldier-prisoners of Colditz were courageous and resilient as well as vulnerable and fearful - and astonishingly imaginative in their desperate escape attempts. Thoroughly researched and well- illustrated with photographs including a detailed layout of the prison, this could well be the definitive book on Colditz.
JAPAN AT WAR IN THE PACIFIC
THE RISE AND FALL OF AN EMPIRE, 1869–1945
BY JONATHAN CLEMENTS Published by Tuttle Publishing; Dist. by New South Books
RRP $39.99 in hardback
ISBN 9784805316474
The transformation of Japan into a militarist power had begun decades before World War II with the toppling of the old samurai regime, and the rush of the formerly isolated nation onto the world stage.
BORN OF FIRE AND ASH
AUSTRALIAN OPERATIONS IN RESPONSE TO THE EAST TIMOR CRISIS 1999–2000
VOL 1. OFFICIAL HISTORY
BY CRAIG STOCKINGS Published by Australian War Memorial/UNSW Press
RRP $99.00 in hardback ISBN 9781742236230
Unsurprisingly, there was a political battle to get government approval for this project, first proposed by the eminent Official Historian Emeritus Professor David Horner, and then taken up by his successor Craig Stockings.
Fast forward to World War
II when Japan’s battle for supremacy in the Pacific brought the nation to great heights but led ultimately to its utter devastation at the end of the war, with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even today, the rise of Japanese militarism remains a political minefield, the author citing then US
Vice President Joe Biden’s rebuke of candidate Donald Trump in 2016 for suggesting that Japan consider acquiring nuclear strike capabilities. ‘Does he not understand that we wrote Japan’s constitution to say they could not be a nuclear power?’, igniting a predictable furore in Japan. Clements delves deep to explain the forces that led to the development of such a society in Japan and its awful consequences.
Finally, a well-funded team
was assembled to undertake
the project of recording the
facts surrounding Australia’s engagement in East Timor in 1999–2000. It was this nation’s largest mission conducted under United Nations auspices, the single largest deployment of
ADF personnel since the Second World War and an instrumental part of Timor-Leste gaining its independence. It was also one
not nestled within a lead nation’s logistics and administrative support. It was the first time Australia had led such a large multi- national force. Generally viewed as a successful intervention,
the ADF’s involvement in East Timor did however expose the ADF’s weaknesses and lack
of preparedness. At a hefty
976 pages, Born of Fire and
Ash tells the complex story of a military intervention in a country ill-prepared for independence with considerable skill and intellectual honesty, with a second volume to come.