Militaria

//Militaria
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  • Bill was massive. He had power, intelligence and unmatched courage. In performance and character, he stood above all the other 200,000 Australian horses sent to the Middle East in the Great War. But as war horses go, he had one serious problem. No one could ride him but one man, Major Michael Shanahan. Some even thought Bill took a sneering pleasure in watching would-be riders hit the dust. This is a remarkable tale of a bond between a determined trooper and his stoic but cantankerous mount. They fought together. They depended on each other for survival. And when the chips were down, Bill's heroic efforts and exceptional instincts in battle saved the lives of Shanahan and four of his men. By September 1918, 'Bill the Bastard' was known by the entire Light Horse regiment, who used his name not as an insult, but as a term of endearment. Bill had become a legend, a symbol of the courage and unbreakable will of the Anzac mounted force. There was no other horse like Bill the Bastard.
  • Blitzkrieg: Traces the origins of the war starting with the Armistice at Compiègne in 1919, covering the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, the first terrible months of the Blitzkrieg, the imperialistic aggression  of Japan in the Far East, the period of Allied appeasement, the evacuation of Dunkirk and the fall of France. Siege: Begins with the dogged and courageous stand of the British against the onslaught of the Nazi war machine, the war in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean, the invasion of the Balkans and Greece, the harsh and brutal war in the North African desert, the suicidal German attack on Russia, the cruelty of the winter war and the attack on Pearl Harbour. Counterattack: The initial period of the Axis reversals and the first steps on the Allied road to victory; the three great turning points of the war ( Stalingrad, Midway and El Alamein) Rome has fallen; the Nazis are reeling under the Russian counter-offensive and the first of the costly, bloody Pacific campaigns. Victory: The last stages of the war in both the European and Pacific theatres; the Allied landing on the beaches of Normandy, the battle of France, the Red Army offensive, the Yalta conference  and the capitulation of the Third Reich, concluding with the bitter Pacific Island campaigns, MacArthur's retrurn to the Philippines, the dropping of the atomic bomb and Japan's surrender. Each volume contains rare photographs; over four volumes, 500 photographs and 100,000 words.
  • An on-the-spot record of what the women of England were doing in World War II :  The land army, civil defence, munitions, communications,    the home war effort and the domestic and economic consequences of women doing jobs that had been in the traditional male domain.   Full of handsome colour plates by P.C. Hennel showing this band of determined women: servicing guns on a torpedo boat, dispatch riding, changing sparking plugs on a training aircraft, handling the barrage balloon, fitting the cowling to the motor of a Halifax bomber  and extinguishing an explosive incendiary bomb. A real piece of history.
  • Australian actor and comedian Slim DeGrey (1918 - 2007), known for his roles in They're A Weird Mob, You Can't See Around Corners and many other Australian film and T.V. productions was a member of the A.I.F. Prisoners' Concert Party in the infamous Changi Gaol. There was a funny side; not often and not always, but hilarious and absurd incidents did occur and together with the infamous style of Australian dry humour, helped sustain morale and relieve the drab lives of the P.O.Ws. Littered with fabulous Australianisms and droll sketches, Slim DeGrey definitely found Changi's funny side.
  • Published by the Dachau Museum, this book serves as a reminder of the victims of the Holocaust. It contains reproductions of official documents, anti-Semitic propoganda, photos of the camps, the prisoners and their few possessions that we callously stolen from them; letters of condolence from Camp Commandants to grieving widows, records of military personnel and so much more.
  • This is the story of an ordinary soldier, his experiences and those of his mates during the Malayan campaign and subsequent life as a P.O.W. in Changi, Singapore and Japan. At the time of publication (1991) it was the first and only book to tell the story of G Force and their experiences in Changi, Osaka, Takefu and Akenobi. It was typed on the reverse side of Naval Message S1320B forms on an hour-to-hour basis from January 1, 1942 - February 16, 1942. A carbon copy, typed on the same paper, was buried in a cylinder with a detailed account of the murders of Cpl. Breavington, Pte Gale and two British soldiers which brought to an end the Selerang Barrack's Changi Incident - where all P.O.Ws were herded into a square until they signed a 'Non-Escape Form'. The cylinder and its contents were retrieved after the war. The fate of the original is unknown. The story of G Force, from Changi to Japan, back to Manila and repatriation via H.M.S. Formidable - a British aircraft carrier - is supported by diaries kept by two members of G Force. Cry Crucify has been written to maintain fact from fiction and to give a balanced account of the war in Malaya and Japan, interspersed with accounts of the lighter side of P.O.W. life, together with the compassion, faith, hope and comradeship in the life of the prisoners.
  • Written in 1933, this book caused furor in many quarters. It's a far cry from Nichols' usual light-hearted badinage, being a bitter denunciation of the world's attitude toward peace and war and a thorough research into the activities of offensive preparations going on in the armament factories in England and on the Continent. It also covers the ineffectual preparations being made for defensive measures. Faced with the fact that war was brewing, the League of Nations was rendered virtually impotent through the media of the day and public opinion and that the civilian population is certain to be the victim in the next European War, his findings are far from negligible. The last half of the book is a succession of challenging dialogues, in which socialism, capitalism, militarism and pacifism are all given ardent advocates.  Time and events  demonstrated that Nichols predicted how World War II would proceed with uncanny 99% accuracy.
  • An oral history of D-Day where the stories of that long and violent day on the Calvados Coast of Normandy are told in the words of the men who were Americans, British, Canadians, French and German. Follow these men ashore, up the beach, and into the battle for Normandy. The men who landed on UTAH and OMAHA beach, cracked the Atlantic Wall at Arromanches, parachuted into Carantan or Ste Mere Eglise, or stormed Pegasus Bridge and the Merville battery, tell the reader what it was like to be there, in the midst of the most important single battle of World War II. The view from landing ship, tank turret, parachute harness or infantry fox hole has never been better told than in the pages of this absorbing book. Illustrated with archival photographs.
  • Warren Tute (1914-1989) a naval officer who took part in the Normandy landings, collaborated with historians John Costello & Terry Hughes to produce this volume book for the 30th anniversary of the D-Day landings.  The book opens with a facsimile of a letter from Eisenhower to the troops and there is a foreword by Lord Mountbatten. There are the newspaper headlines of the day, cartoons, maps and fabulous colour and black and white photos - a comprehensive, pictorial study of the preparation for and the events of the epic force that was the  D-Day landings of 1944.