Description

Title: 1000 Men at War: The Story of the 2/16th Battalion, A.I.F.

Author: Uren, Malcolm

Condition: Very Good Plus – Missing the dust jacket. Book dealers stamp on the inside front cover.

Edition: 1st Edition

Publication Date: 1959

ISBN: N/A

Cover: Hard Cover without Dust Jacket – 259 pages

Comments: The history of the 2/16th Battalion. 

The 2/16th Battalion of the second AIF saw service in several theatres of war, and thus its story becomes in miniature very nearly an account of the Australian army in action during the Second World War.  In the Syrian Campaign the names of Litani, Sidon and Damour carry their own significance.  Then came the return home before the tremendous task awaiting the men in New Guinea.  The desperate fighting along the Kokoda Trail…turning the tide…Gona Beach, and Markham and Ramy Valleys, and the audacious heroism of the Battle of Shaggy Ridge, and then finally Balikpapan, and with it the beginning of the end.  The 16th Battalion, originally recruited in Western Australia, suffered heavy casualties, and eventually, through reinforcements, represented a wide cross-section of the typical Australian citizen-soldier. 

To tell his story the author has searched the memories of many of the survivors of the Battalion and incorporated certain official sources of information.  But the emphasis is always on the individual rather than on grand strategy.  The exploits of small units fighting a personal kind of war; the recorded comments of the soldier in the field, these form the heart of the book.  This book will be welcomed wherever Australian fighting men remember the epic years of 1939-45, and will be read, too, by a younger generation, for whom it will bring to life and immediacy a period that may already be regarded as history.

Includes Nominal Roll