Showing results by publisher "Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd" in Military

The story begins in 1629, when the pride of the Dutch East India Company, the Batavia, is on its maiden voyage en route from Amsterdam to the Dutch East Indies, laden down with the greatest treasure to leave Holland. The magnificent ship is already boiling over with a mutinous plot that is just about to break into the open when, just off the coast of Western Australia, it strikes an unseen reef in the middle of the night. While Commandeur Francisco Pelsaert decides to take the longboat across 2,000 miles of open sea for help, his second-in-command Jeronimus Cornelisz takes over....

Lynsey Addario is just finding her way as a photographer when September 11th changes the world. One of the few photojournalists with experience in Afghanistan, when she is asked to return and cover the American invasion, she makes a decision - not to stay home, not to lead a quiet or predictable life, but to set out across the world, face the chaos of crisis, and make a name for herself.

For Australians, Kokoda is the iconic battle of World War II, yet few people know just what happened and just what our troops achieved. Now, best-selling author Peter FitzSimons tells the Kokoda story in a gripping, moving story for all Australians.

Former soldier Rob Langdon was working as a security contractor in Afghanistan when he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death in a case that would have been ruled a clear miscarriage of justice in the British legal system. His sentence was commuted to 20 years in jail, and he served his time in Kabul's most notorious prison, Pul-e-Charkhi, described as the world's worst place to be a Westerner.

From the hills of South Lebanon to the monsoon jungles of Southern Asia, Ray Goggins has operated in a life-and-death world. In the suffocating humidity of Liberia, the mountains of Afghanistan and the snow-covered Balkans, Goggins has seen the best and worst qualities in himself and others. From conflict zones to terrorist attacks and hostage rescues, Ray has learned the greatest life lessons: how to control fear, how to react calmly and positively and how to create a strong baseline from which to take action.

From Paul Ham, winner of the NSW Premier's Prize for Australian History, comes the story of ordinary men in the grip of a political and military power struggle that determined their fate and has foreshadowed the destiny of the world for a century. Passchendaele epitomises everything that was most terrible about the Western Front. The photographs never sleep of this four-month battle, fought from July to November 1917, the worst year of the war.

In the early days of April 1941, the 14,000 Australian forces garrisoned in the Libyan town of Tobruk were told to expect reinforcements and supplies within eight weeks. Eight months later these heroic, gallant, determined "Rats of Tobruk" were rescued by the British Navy having held the fort against the might of Rommel's never-before-defeated Afrika Corps.

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more than 100,000 instantly, mostly women, children, and the elderly. Many hundreds of thousands more succumbed to their horrific injuries later, or slowly perished of radiation-related sickness. Yet the bombs were "our least abhorrent choice", American leaders claimed at the time - and still today most people believe they ended the Pacific War and saved millions of American and Japanese lives. Ham challenges this view, arguing that the bombings, when Japan was on its knees, were the culmination of a strategic Allied air war on enemy civilians that began in Germany.

A gripping tale of betrayal and counterbetrayal that tells the story of the most enigmatic member of the Cambridge spy ring - Donald Maclean. Donald Maclean was a star diplomat, an establishment insider and a keeper of some of the West's greatest secrets. He was also a Russian spy, driven by passionately held beliefs, whose betrayal and defection to Moscow reverberated for decades.

On March 7, 2004, former SAS soldier and mercenary Simon Mann prepared to take off from Harare International Airport. His destination was Equatorial Guinea; his intention was to remove one of the most brutal dictators in Africa in a privately organized coup d’état. The plot had the tacit approval of Western intelligence agencies, and Mann had already planned, overseen, and won two wars in Angola and Sierra Leone. So why did it go so wrong?

Ireland’s Secret War reveals strategic Nazi intentions for Ireland and the real role of leading government figures of the time, placing Dan Bryan and G2—the military intelligence branch of the Irish Defence Forces—at the centre of the country’s battle against Nazi Germany. With the help of over 35 hours of previously unpublished audio recordings that were held in storage in Northern California for over 50 years, Marc Mc Menamin reveals the extraordinary unheard history of WWII in Ireland, told from the point of view of the main protagonists.

Former US Navy Top Gun Kevin Sullivan, captain of the ill-fated Perth-bound QF72, breaks his silence to give a gripping account of how a rogue computer went 'psycho', causing the Airbus A330 he was piloting to pitch down, nose first, towards the Indian Ocean—twice. Unlike other well-publicised near air disasters, the plane carrying 315 passengers and crew was out of control, a g-force of –8 propelling anyone and anything untethered through the cabin roof. It took the extraordinary skill and presence of mind of the veteran Top Gun to wrestle back control of the plane.

At the age of nine, Tomi Reichental, along with his mother, brother, grandmother, aunt and cousin, were incarcerated in the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Their crime: being Jews in Slovakia under Tiso’s regime which collaborated in the deportation of over 80 per cent of its Jewish population. He recalls the daily brutality, starvation and dehumanisation of the inmates.

Simultaneous release of the thrilling new volume of true stories from airmen of the Second World War, from the author of Flak (also available in audio by Bolinda). Michael Veitch's life-long obsession with the aircraft of the Second World War led him to conclude that every single person who flew, or flew in them, has at least one extraordinary story to tell. With most of these veterans in their 80's, he knew that it was a matter of urgency to find them now, before their personal stories disappear forever.

In 1943, Edda Mussolini, daughter of the fascist dictator, gave her father and Hitler an extraordinary ultimatum – release her husband, Italy’s former foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, from prison, or risk her leaking her husband’s incendiary diaries to the press. Instead, Hitler and Mussolini vowed to do everything in their power to destroy the diaries – even if it meant killing Edda. They ordered Hilde Beetz, a German spy, to seduce Ciano in prison in order to learn the diaries’ location.

Drawing on hundreds of accounts by soldiers, politicians, aid workers, entertainers and the Vietnamese people, Paul Ham reconstructs for the first time the full history of our longest military campaign. From the commitment to engage, through the fight over conscription and the rise of the anti - war movement, to the tactics and horror of the battlefi eld, Ham exhumes the truth about this politicians' war - which sealed the fate of 50,000 Australian servicemen and women.

For the soldiers and officers of Australia's Special Air Service (SAS) Regimentâ¿¿ this is not just their professional mottoâ¿¿ but a creed that shapes their lives. The SAS is among the world's most respected special forces unitsâ¿¿ a crack team of men from the Australian Defence Force who can be relied upon to handle the most difficultâ¿¿ strategically sensitive and dangerous of military tasks.

A riveting account of the hidden war in the mountains and cities of the world's most dangerous conflict and the comradeship between man and dog that has saved numerous lives. In Afghanistan, sometimes all that stands between coalition troops and death or serious injury is a dog. Highly trained dogs and their handlers search for improvised explosive devices or hidden weapons out on patrol with combat troops. It's a perilous job, often putting them right in the firing line and making them high-priority targets for the Taliban insurgents they're fighting. 

Australian General Sir John Monash changed the way wars were fought and won. When the British and German High Commands of the First World War failed to gain ascendancy after four years of unprecedented human slaughter, Monash used innovative techniques and modern technology to plan and win a succession of major battles that led to the end of the Great War.But Australia's greatest military commander fought as many battles with those on his side as he did with his enemies.

Nancy Wake, nicknamed 'the white mouse' for her ability to evade capture, tells her own story. As the Gestapo's most wanted person, and one of the most highly decorated servicewomen of the war, it's a story worth telling. After living and working in Paris in the 1930's, Nancy married a wealthy Frenchman and settled in Marseilles. Her idyllic new life was ended by World War II and the invasion of France. Her life shattered, Nancy joined the French Resistance and, later, began work with an escape-route network for Allied soldiers.