Résultats de "Michael Veitch" dans Toutes les catégories

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.

The epic World War II story of Australia's 75 Squadron - and the 44 days when these brave and barely-trained pilots fought alone against the Japanese. In March and April 1942, RAAF 75 Squadron bravely defended Port Moresby for 44 days when Australia truly stood alone against the Japanese. This group of raw young recruits scrambled ceaselessly in their Kittyhawk fighters to an extraordinary and heroic battle, the story of which has been left largely untold.

It is somewhere close to midnight on the clock when the men who fought the Second World War will still be with us. I have met just a few of them, sometimes goading them to reveal their experiences, at other times being simply a conduit to the river of their memories, sensing, on occasion, a kind of urgency to get it out there, just so these adventures and tragedies will not be lost to future enquiring minds. Michael Veitch has always been a keen historian and aeroplane fanatic.

The Battle for Milne Bay - Japan's first defeat on land in the Second World War - was a defining moment in the evolution of the indomitable Australian fighting spirit. For the men of the AIF, the militia and the RAAF, it was the turning point in the Pacific, and their finest - though now largely...

Borneo: The Last Campaign tells the story of Operation OBOE, the massive, three-pronged assault on the vast Japanese-held island of Borneo in 1945. It was one of the largest amphibious invasions of the entire war, and a virtually all-Australian operation. Over the final twelve weeks of World War Two, the 1st Australian Army Corps chased down and fought the remnants of the Japanese army over burning oil fields, up languid tropical rivers, along leech-ridden jungle tracks and across endless hills, valleys and ridges.