The Broken Years

The Broken Years is a wonderful book about what Australian soldiers thought and felt during the war.

It originated in Bill Gammage’s PhD thesis, which was the first systematic study of the soldiers’ letters and diaries collected by the Australian War Memorial. The result is an illuminating and moving masterpiece, which proved transformational.

When he began his thesis he was in unfamiliar territory, as the concentrated use of these sources was unprecedented — in fact, military history itself was not popular. But he persevered, gradually sensing he was on to something, and indeed he was.

The Broken Years became an… show more.

Bill Gammage was a doctoral candidate at the Australian National University in the early 1970s, when military history was so unfashionable he had to find a PhD supervisor among academics with whom he played football. He was the first to realise the value of the Australian War Memorial’s collection of soldiers’ letters and diaries, collected from the 1920s but which, astonishingly, no one had used. Bill used them to write a thesis published in 1974 as The Broken Years, which revealed that to Australians in the Great War it meant ‘nationhood, brotherhood, and sacrifice’. The Broken Years has appeared… show more.