Soon after the declaration of war on Japan, a secret military reconnaissance unit was established, based on the British Special Operations Executive (known as SOE) and called the Inter-allied Services Department. The unit was tasked with the role to "obtain and report information of the enemy...weaken the enemy by sabotage and destruction of morale and to lend aid and assistance to local efforts to the same end in enemy occupied territories."

In Larrikins in Khaki, Tim Bowden has collected compelling and vivid stories of individual soldiers whose memoirs were mostly self-published and who told of their experiences with scant regard for literary pretensions and military niceties. NCOs and officers who were hopeless at their jobs were made aware of it - they laughed their way through the worst of it by taking the mickey out of one another and their superiors. 

Australia's Greatest Escapes is a collection of stories about the most hazardous aspect of the prisoner of war experience - escape. Here is all the adventure, suspense, and courage of ordinary Australians who defied their captors; men who tunneled to freedom, crawled through stinking drains, or clawed a passage beneath barbed wire in a desperate attempt to flee captivity.   

It was the evening of 16 May 1943. Nineteen modified Lancaster bombers from 617 Squadron RAF, under the command of youthful Wing Commander Guy Gibson, roared into the night sky from their Lincolnshire base. They were on a top-secret Bomber Command mission, codenamed Operation Chastise, now regarded as one of the most dangerous and audacious bombing raids of World War II - an attack on the formidable, well-defended dams of Germany’s Ruhr Valley. Slung beneath the belly of each aircraft was one of the war’s greatest secrets - a bouncing bomb.

On 31st October 1917, as the day's light faded, the Australian Light Horse charged against their enemy. Eight hundred men and horses galloped four miles across open country, towards the artillery, rifles and machine guns of the Turks occupying the seemingly unassailable town of Beersheba. What happened in the next hour changed the course of history. This brave battle and the extraordinary adventures that led to it are brought vividly to life by Australia's greatest storyteller, Peter FitzSimons.

It was the afternoon of 18 August 1966, hot, humid with grey monsoonal skies. D Company, 6RAR were four kilometres east of their Nui Dat base, on patrol in a rubber plantation not far from the abandoned village of Long Tan. A day after their base had suffered a mortar strike, they were looking for Viet Cong soldiers. Then—just when they were least expecting—they found them. Under withering fire, some Diggers perished, some were grievously wounded, the rest fought on, as they remained under sustained attack. For hours these men fought for their lives against the enemy onslaught. 

Established after World War I by the Royal Australian Navy, the Coast Watchers were a loose organisation of several hundred European settlers, missionaries, patrol officers and planters living in British and Australian Pacific Island territories whose job it was to observe and report on the enemy. They were mostly all unpaid volunteers whose job it was simply to observe and report on foreign shipping and aeroplane movements. It was never envisaged that the Coast Watchers would do any fighting, nor operate inside enemy-occupied territory.

"We are the people our parents warned us about" is the motto of the Bandidos, one of the world's most feared outlaw motorcycle gangs. For ten years, Steve Utah was a Bandidos insider. He arranged the security of their clubhouses. He 'cooked' ecstasy and ice for them. He was at meetings where interstate and overseas drug and weapons smuggling was planned. He saw stolen military weapons being sold. He witnessed vicious beatings, helped dump corpses.It all became too much and, in an attempt to regain control of his life, Utah resorted to the unthinkable....

On 21 July 1942, a large Japanese reconnaissance mission landed along the north-eastern coastline of Papua. It would soon turn into an all-out attempt to capture Port Morseby. This is the powerful story of the three weeks of battle by a small Australian militia force, the 39th Battalion, supported by the 1st Papua Infantry Battalion and the Royal Papuan Constabulary, to keep the Japanese at bay. Outnumbered by at least three to one, they fought courageously to hold the Kokoda Plateau - the gateway to the Owen Stanleys. 

The Battle of Le Hamel on 4 July 1918 was an Allied triumph and strategically very important in the closing stages of WWI. A largely Australian force, commanded by the brilliant Sir John Monash, fought what has been described as the first modern battle - where infantry, tanks, artillery and planes operated together as a coordinated force. Monash planned every detail meticulously, with nothing left to chance. Peter FitzSimons brings this Allied triumph to life and tells this magnificent story as it should be told.

The war on the Eastern Front from 1941 to 1945 was the bloodiest combat theater in the bloodiest war in history. Oberleutnant Friedrich Wilhelm Sander experienced this bloodshed firsthand when serving with the 11th Panzer-Regiment. This regiment made up the core of the 6th Panzer-Division, one of Hitler's top armored formations, which was involved in most of the major campaigns on the Eastern Front; campaigns such as Operation Barbarossa and Operation Winter Storm.

In 'The Colditz Story', Pat Reid told the story of the escape academy that sprang up inside the most impregnable German POW camp of the Second World War, ending appropriately with his own incredible escape from Colditz. But Reid’s own break-out was by no means the last. In this enthralling sequel, he follows the fortunes of the escape academy right up until the arrival of the allied forces in April 1945. Here are the tales of fantastic bravery and stunning ingenuity every bit as mesmerising as the original.

In mid-2017, whispers from Australia's most secretive and elite military unit reached Walkley Award-winning journalist Nick McKenzie. McKenzie and veteran reporter Chris Masters began an investigation that would not only reveal shocking information about Australia's most famous and revered SAS soldier but plunge the two reporters into the defamation trial of the century.

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.

Dale Hanson takes us from a northern Minnesota boyhood to the incredible stresses of US special operations during the Vietnam War, the deadly world of MAC-V-SOG, the top-secret Special Forces project that conducted America’s secret war against the Communist forces on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Shrouded in mystery and equipped with exotic weaponry, SOG operators suffered casualty rates in excess of 100 percent for three successive years.