Description
Title: Never Late – The 2/9th Australian Infantry Battalion 1939 – 1945
Author: Dickens, Gordon
Condition: Near Mint
Edition: 1st Edition
Publication Date: 2005
ISBN: 1876439475
Cover: Hard Cover with Dust Jacket – 445 pages
Comments: The detailed account of the 2/9th Battalion during World War 2.
This book tells the story of one of the finest battalions of the Second AIF. Formed in November 1939 the 2/9th was the first battalion raised in Queensland and it fought in Giarabub and Tobruk in North Africa, Milne Bay, Cape Endaiadere and Sanananda in Papua, on Shaggy Ridge in New Guinea and at Balikpapan in Borneo.
Over six years of war and seven campaigns the Battalion suffered 975 battle casualties but never lost a man as a prisoner of war and carried every on of its casualties from the field. Those who did not return home lie remembered in carefully tendered graves around the world.
As the successor to the 9th Battalion of the First AIF, the 2/9th wore a rectangular colour patch of Black over Blue with the border of grey that signified the Second AIF. In the years since the end of the war the fact that they wore the Black over Blue has been a great source of pride to the men of the 2/9th Battalion.
Gordon Dickens was born in 1947, the son of QX19546 Private Archie Eric (Mick) Dickens who served with the 2/9th Battalion from January 1942 to November 1944. Educated at James Cook University of North Queensland and the United States Naval Post-Graduate School at Monterey in California, he served in the Australian Regular Army for nineteen years. After leaving the Army in 1988 he worked in the Australian Public Service for five years before taking up a teaching post at the Canberra Institute of Technology. Gordon is now retired and lives in Canberra. Never Late is his first book.
Includes Nominal Roll and List of casualties
