Militaria

//Militaria
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  • Since the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, the British people have confronted no greater threat to their freedom than in 1940, when Hitler's armies swept through France in a  few scant weeks and stood poised twenty-one miles from Dover. Had the Luftwaffe then gained air supremacy over the English Channel, nothing could have prevented the first invasion of Britain in over 900 years.  This is the story of how Britain turned the prevailing tide, against all the odds - and won the day. Illustrated with photographs from private collections, drawings, diagrams and charts that clarifies the day by day events on both sides accompanied by text from witnesses and combatants that evoke those few desperate weeks of human endeavour and how the delicate balance was tipped - only just - in Britain's favour.
  • More and more Australians are reflecting on the soldiers who helped shape our nation. Many are choosing to make pilgrimages to the battlefields of our history, to bring to life names like the Somme, Passchendaele and Ypres. This is the essential companion for anyone visiting the Western Front, presenting well-illustrated walking tours across fourteen of the most important battlefields on easily accessible walking routes, it points out to readers the battlefield landmarks that still exist - the memorials to the men who fought there and the cemeteries where many of them still lie. There are moving quotes and black and white illustrations revealing the experiences of war from the common Aussie digger together with easy-to-follow- directions that allows anyone to visit the battlefields and walk in the footsteps of the first ANZACS.
  • The Solomon Island archipelago stretches in a roughly east-west direction from New Guinea to San Cristobal. For the Imperial Japanese forces in 1942, it was a natural highway into the South Pacific. When checked at Guadalcanal, these forces realized they had moved east too quickly, and that their defeat was caused in part by inadequate air bases between the front and their head-quarters at Rabaul, more than six hundred miles away. As the last Japanese battalions were wrecking themselves against the Marine defensive perimeter on Guadalcanal, the decision was made to build the Munda airfield on New Georgia, right in the middle of the Solomons chain. This is the dramatic, harrowing story of green American soldiers encountering for the first time impenetrable swamps, solid rain forests, invisible coconut-log pillboxes, tenacious snipers tied into trees, torren-tial tropical rains, counterattack by enemy aircraft and naval guns, and the logistical nightmare of living and moving in endless mud.
  • Published for the Australian Military Forces by the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, in 1944. Full of sketches, poems, colour plates and photographs, cartoons and jokes, as well as those fabulous yarns that Aussies can tell so well - and all by the service personnel who were engaged in the South West Pacific during World War II.  Contributors are identified only by their service numbers...so your grandfather or great grandfather may be among the authors.  Here we do not find battle statistics, plans or  generals - just the down to earth Australian Diggers.

  • You can read history - or you can learn history from the people who lived it.  This compilation of accounts of life during the First World War are from diaries and letters: from those at home, from the trenches, from men and women in the armed forces...there's even a section devoted to the modern machineries of war and what those on the front line thought of them. Here are the voices of that time and they are the ones who know what life was like then.
  • An Australian soldier's letters to his friends from World War II. When written, these letters did not mention place names other than those permitted by the censor.  In order to make a continuous and intelligible narrative, these place names (now permitted) have been inserted. A rare glimpse from the war front.

  • A book full of information, pictures and maps of land battles throughout history that proves it was not always about who had the biggest army. In this volume - Metaurus - after the toughest forced march in history, Nero slays Hasdrubal; Agincourt - massed archers and infantry slaughter the French cavalry; Bunker Hill - a thousand farmers ignite the flame of American independence; Austerlitz - Napoleon crushes an army bigger than his own; Balaclava - a battle of idiocy and sheer courage; Second Bull Run - a high spot for the South in the American Civil War; The Somme - slaughter on a scale never seen before or since; Cambrai - tanks explode into action for the first time; Gazala - Rommels' fast moving tactical brilliance; Stalingrad - Hitler's obstinacy leads the Wehrmacht to disaster; Cassino and Anzio - Allied forces combine to force a breakthrough; The Battle Of The Bulge - fast moving Panzers against Eisenhower, Montgomery and Patton; Operation Commando - a true 'United Nations; against the Chinese in Korea. Illustrated with archival photographs, artists' representations and maps.
  • A volume of military activity, weaponry and technology from 1987. Arenas of activity covered: The Middle East - Tripoli; Lebanon; the Gulf War; South Yemen and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Europe, North America and the Soviet Union: Terrorism and Power Politics; The Superpower Relationship; NATO and the Warsaw Pact; International Terror; Northern Ireland. Asia - Islam's Guerrillas; The Tamil Tigers; The Philippines; Vietnam and Cambodia' Sikh Separatists. Africa - South Africa; Mozambique; Angola; Chad; The Sudan; Ethiopia; The Boy Soldiers of Uganda. Latin America: Guerrillas and Contras; El Salvador; Nicaragua; Peru; Chile. Military Technology: The War Machine; Aerial Warfare; Space and Missiles; Land Warfare; Naval Warfare. A wealth of information for the war history buff with plenty of colour photographs.
  • It was at Dunkirk that Toosey's charisma and fortitude were first noted and in 1941 he was given command of an artillery regiment. Sent to fight in the Far East he and his men were embroiled in the battle for Singapore and were taken prisoner after the island's fall in 1942. The Japanese, scornful of the Allied forces for surrendering, determined to make use of the new workforce now at their disposal. Toosey was sent to Thailand to command the 'bridge camp' at Tamarkan  where he was ordered to supervise the construction of two railway bridges over the river Khwae Mae Khlong. Starvation rations and harsh working conditions mean that dysentery and cholera were rife and a quarter of the 60,000 prisoners working on the Burma Railway wold perish.  Toosey insisted on high standards of hygiene and discipline, giving back the men their self-respect and making himself a buffer for the cruel excesses if the guards.  The author is Toosey's grand-daughter. Illustrated with black and white photographs and sketches.