Why am I passionate about this?
I am a Research Professor in history at UNSW Canberra at the Australian Defence Force Academy. I now mostly write on the military history of British India history but for 27 years I worked at the Australian War Memorial, Australia’s national military museum, where I became Principal Historian. Much of my career was devoted to Australian military history and more than half of my 40 or so books are in that field. That puts me in a good position to comment upon what I think are the five best books in the field of Australian military history (my own excepted, of course).
Peter's book list on Australian military history
Why did Peter love this book?
The study of battles, and often individual actions by small groups of men, has been an important part of Australian military history, and the Australian military historical tradition has produced many fine practitioners of operational military history. One author who produced a fine example of the genre is Gerard Windsor, the author of fiction and memoir who, though without any previous experience of writing military history, produced All Day Long the Noise of Battle, a study of the attack made by one company of Australian infantry upon a Viet Cong bunker system in Phuoc Tuy province, South Vietnam, in 1968. Sparked by a chance encounter with a schoolmate, Windsor began investigating a hitherto unnamed battle, one of the most fierce the Australians fought in their ten-year war in Vietnam, and a superb example of how to write about men in battle.
1 author picked All Day Long the Noise of Battle as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
"In 1968 an Australian infantry company assaulted a Vietnamese bunker complex in a three-day battle. Yet it passed unacknowledged in Australia, and the men were insulted by command's failure to recognise their courage. Gerard Windsor's All Day Long the Noise of Battle looks at the men's strengths and weaknesses, their alliances and tensions, their morale, their reactions to combat, their stand-out characters and their leaders. And throughout, the book becomes an essay on the nature of men's memory of battle. Windsor brings a fiction writer's eye to this tragic episode. Full of memorable personalities Windsor's book is seminal and moving."