This important book, based on extensive interviews and unprecedented access to SBS archives, argues that SBS is one Australia’s most significant and innovative cultural institutions and that its charter to broadcast for multicultural Australia is as relevant today as it was when the organization started 30 years ago.

A gripping history of Britain's Special Boat Squadron in World War II, drawing on veteran interviews and including rare photographs from the SAS Regimental Association. The Special Boat Squadron was Britain's most exclusive Special Forces unit during World War II, and yet its exploits have been largely forgotten. This book tells its story. Highly trained, totally secretive and utterly ruthless, the SBS was established as an entity in its own right in early 1943. Unlike its sister unit, which numbered more than 1,000 men, the SBS never comprised more than 100. Led by men such as the famed Victoria Cross recipient Anders Lassen, the SBS went from island to island in the Mediterranean, landing in the dead of night in small fishing boats and launching savage hit and run raids on the Germans. Through unrivalled access to the archives of the SAS Regimental Association and interviews with the surviving members of the unit, Gavin Mortimer has pieced together the dramatic feats of this elite fighting force. In this new and updated paperback edition, featuring additional content including new text and photographs, the unit and its members are finally granted the recognition that they so richly deserve.

The men of the SBS are the maritime equivalent of their counterparts in the SAS; they are the elite of the British Special Forces and also the most secretive. Although SAS activity has been extensively documented, the SBS has remained in the state it prefers - a shadowy silhouette, with identities protected and missions kept from public view. Formed during the Second World War, when they took part in many daring raids (one of which was filmed as The Cockleshell Heroes), they were active in the jungle campaigns in the Far East, in the Falklands, the Gulf War and Bosnia. Since this seminal book was published in 1997, John Parker has been privy to much more inside information about the SBS's original operations and he brings the book right up to date with accounts of their exploits in East Timor, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Kosovo and most recently in Iraq.

In 1979, Nam Le's family left Vietnam for Australia, an experience that inspires the first and last stories in The Boat. In between, however, Le's imagination lays claim to the world. The Boat takes us from a tourist in Tehran to a teenage hit man in Colombia; from an ageing New York artist to a boy coming of age in a small Victorian fishing tow...

The Special Boat Service (SBS) was a small force during World War II, never more than about 300 men. But that did not stop it from inflicting great damage on the enemy. In the Mediterranean arena and in the Aegean, which the Germans controlled after the fall of Greece and Crete, this small commando force kept up a constant campaign of harassment, thus pinning down enemy forces and preventing their joining other fronts. John Lodwick took part in the SBS Mediterranean campaign and writes from personal experience with the panache and verve of the squadron itself.

Not by strength but by guile. Only since the Falklands campaign have the initials SBS become known to the public. Yet this clandestine formation of Britain's armed forces has been in existence since the Second World War. Barrie Pitt, who himself served with the SBS, describes how the it came into being in 1941. How they fought with distinction in the Aegean, where one of their exploits inspired The Guns of Navarone. How they earned rapport in the Adriatic, in Greece and in Italy. How the SBS was reorganised in 1946 as part of the Royal Marines and has since played a role in Korea, Borneo and the Falklands. Equally interesting is the author's report of the training and specialized skills required by the boat units, and the essential tasks facing them -- infiltration from the sea, reconnaissance, sabotage, survival, resistance to interrogation, escape from captivity -- and the expertise and determination to complete them. As Barrie Pitt's superb account of the formative years of this elite force shows, these qualities have been present from the very beginning. Barrie Pitt (1918-2006) was well known as a military historian and editor of Purnell's History of the Second World War and History of the First World War. His publications include 'Coronel and Falkland', 'Churchill and the Generals' and 'The Crucible of War', a trilogy covering the North African campaign of the Second World War. He was born in Galway and later lived near Ilminster in Somerset.