Darwin was a battle Australia would rather forget. Yet the Japanese attack on 19 February 1942 was the first wartime assault on Australian soil. The Japanese struck with the same carrier-borne force that devastated Pearl Harbor only ten weeks earlier. There was a difference. More bombs fell on Darwin, more civilians were killed, and more ships were sunk.

The raid led to the worst death toll from any event in Australia. The attackers bombed and strafed three hospitals, flattened shops, offices and the police barracks, shattered the Post Office and communications centre, wrecked Government House, and left the harbour and airfields burning and ruined. The people of Darwin abandoned their town, leaving it to looters, a few anti-aircraft batteries and a handful of dogged defenders with single-shot .303 rifles.

Yet the story has remained in the shadows. Drawing on long-hidden documents and first-person accounts, Peter Grose tells what really happened and takes us into the lives of the people who were there. There was much to be proud of in Darwin that day: courage, mateship, determination and improvisation. But the dark side of the story involves looting, desertion and a calamitous failure of leadership. Australians ran away because they did not know what else to do.

Absorbing, spirited and fast-paced, An Awkward Truth is a compelling and revealing story of the day war really came to Australia, and the motley bunch of soldiers and civilians who were left to defend the nation.

David Mulligan. A novel based on Australian battles along the Kokoda trail in Papua New Guinea. 208 pages.

Douglas Lockwood. In the years that followed the bombing of Darwin in 1942,  the author traveled the world interviewing survivors and participants of the attack. 214 pp

19.95

C.E.W. Bean landed with the first convoy on 25th April 1915 and remained until the evacuation, despite being wounded. As the official correspondent his material was often censored. This new edition contains extracts from his own diaries. Hardcover 292 pp.

Peter firkins. The story of Dr James P Taylor surgeon to Australian POWs during their internment in Borneo. 150 pp.

Tony Palmer

On the Kokoda track, in the damp, disease filled jungle, Murray Barrett and the rest of the 39th battalion are the only thing standing between Australia and a Japanese invasion. Everyone thinks they will be slaughtered and Murray finds that he will have to fight alongside his worst enemy.

Australian field- support units in Vietnam.

24.95

Vivian Bullwinkel survived the Japanese attack on Singapore but was captured, tortured, starved and is the sole survivor of a Japanese massacre. See also White Coolies book and audio.