The Second World War was a dominant experience in Australian history. For the first time the country faced the threat of invasion. The economy and society were mobilised to an unprecedented degree, with 550 000 men and women, or one in twelve of a population of over 7 million, serving in the armed forces overseas. Social patterns and family life were disrupted. Politically, the war gave a new legitimacy to the Australian Labor Party which had been confined to the wilderness of the Opposition at the Federal level for most of the inter-war years. The powers of the Federal government increased and a new momentum for social reform was generated at the popular and governmental level. In the international sphere, the war fundamentally shook Australian confidence in the power on which it had relied for generations, Great Britain. It generated a sense of independence in Australian foreign policy and initiated a new, if halting and problematic, realignment towards the United States. In this accessible book Joan Beaumont, Kate Darian-Smith, David Lee, David Lowe, Marnie Haig-Muir, Roy Hay and David Walker consider the range of Australia's experience of this conflict. In a single volume they draw together the many aspects of the war and distil the current state of historical scholarship. Australia's War 1939-45 will be invaluable to tertiary students and of enormous interest to the reader concerned with the social, political and military history of Australia. A companion volume on the First World War is also available.

It is 1941. Australia is at war and there are fears of an attack on the homeland. Captain Bobbie Puflett, a doctor serving with the 10th Australian General Hospital of the 8th Division in Malaya, writes to his parents Bob and Ethel and sister Del. When the Allies surrender to the Japanese in February 1942, Bobbie is one of 15,000 men of the 8th Division who disappear. It is eighteen months before his family knows that he is a prisoner of war, but they continue to write. This is one family’s story told through letters. We learn of everyday life in wartime Sydney and service in the allied forces before the fall of Singapore. Most of all the letters bring to life the pain of separation.

Sexually transmitted diseases, for centuries lumped together as ‘Venereal Disease’, or ‘VD’ for short, have always marched in lock-step with soldiers from all armies wherever they have served. During the twentieth century at least 125,000 Australian soldiers contracted VD while serving in overseas deployments — the equivalent of six World War I infantry divisions. Until the advent of penicillin in the mid-1940s, the two most common and most devastating sexually transmitted diseases were gonorrhoea and syphilis. During the overseas deployments of the Australian Army during the twentieth century, these two debilitating, disfiguring, embarrassing and potentially lethal diseases put tens of thousands of soldiers out of action for weeks at a time. Gonorrhoea and syphilis weakened the Australian Army, seriously reducing its operational capability. These two diseases also incurred huge financial costs for Australian citizens, whose taxes went into recruiting and training whole cohorts of new troops to replace those hospitalised by VD and effectively lost to the Army for months on end. In addition, sexually transmitted diseases imposed enormous strain on the Army’s usually over-stretched health services. Essentially preventable and self-inflicted, they diverted resources that could otherwise have been devoted to treating and rehabilitating soldiers wounded in action. There were social costs as well because the soldiers who contracted VD were the menfolk of Australian women. The soldiers were largely inexperienced young men who were far from home and faced an uncertain future. The women they left behind would have been appalled to know that the soldiers they had lovingly farewelled would spend months in hospital being treated for diseases that were so taboo they could not be discussed around the family dinner table. In this honest, courageous book, Ian Howie-Willis tells the perplexing story of how two microscopic sexually transmitted organisms, Neisseria gonorrhoeae and Treponema pallidum, the bacteria causing gonorrhoea and syphilis, wreaked enormous havoc among Australian troops in all their wars, from South Africa in 1898–1902 to Vietnam in 1962–1973 and beyond.

It also changed the way the British Army fought, using concentrated artillery on a scale not seen since 1918 to break through Axis defences built in depth."--BOOK JACKET.

Dave, Ray, Morris and Alex Rohrlach were Australian Lutherans of German descent who served in the Australian Army and Navy in the Pacific during World War Two. In a fascinating biography of the brothers, Chris Pratt chronicles the events of their lives before, during, and in the aftermath of war. Dave, a Lutheran missionary in New Guinea, captained his mission schooner to rescue defeated Australian soldiers from New Britain in the opening months of the war. Ray served in a motorised infantry unit before enduring a year in an isolated malarial outpost in Dutch New Guinea. Morris struggled through two amphibious landings in Japanese occupied Borneo. Alex survived kamikaze attacks and a battle with a Japanese fleet in the Philippines to witness from an Australian heavy cruiser the signing of the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay. Included are historical maps and photographs provided by the family.

This is the story of a soldier without a gun. It is personal, yet universal. It is the story of what is left behind when the battles have been fought and the war has moved on. To the Australian Army, Private Lawrence Nicholas Kennedy was NX21854, a soldier who served for 1907 days with the 2/4th Australian Army Field Ambulance in Australia, the Middle East, the Kokoda Track and New Guinea during World War II. With older brother, Bill by his side, the Kennedy boys experienced the adventure and the joy, the loss and the despair of war – like too many others before and since. To those who knew Nick Kennedy after the war, he was a dedicated and professional psychiatric nurse. To the author, he was her gentle Uncle Nick, remembered as a kind, funny and generous man who seemed older than his years. The small diary he kept during World War II helped her understand why that was so. Kennedy’s words and photographs tell the harrowing and compelling story of one young man who went to war – not to kill the enemy, but to save his fellow soldiers – only to return home forever changed by the challenges, hardships and tragedy he experienced. All the Broken Soldiers provides a rare insight into an aspect of war fought by soldiers equipped with little more than a basic medical kit and a Red Cross armband … those who cared for the broken soldiers that war leaves behind.