The inspiration behind the HBO series THE PACIFIC Here is one of the most riveting first-person accounts to ever come out of World War 2. Robert Leckie was 21 when he enlisted in the US Marine Corps in January 1942. In Helmet for My Pillow we follow his journey, from boot camp on Parris Island, South Carolina, all the way to the raging battles in the Pacific, where some of the war's fiercest fighting took place. Recounting his service with the 1st Marine Division and the brutal action on Guadalcanal, New Britain and Peleliu, Leckie spares no detail of the horrors and sacrifice of war, painting an unsentimental portrait of how real warriors are made, fight, and all too often die in the defence of their country. From the live-for-today rowdiness of Marines on leave to the terrors of jungle warfare against an enemy determined to fight to the last man, Leckie describes what it's really like when victory can only be measured inch by bloody inch. Unparalleled in its immediacy and accuracy, Helmet for My Pillow tells the gripping true story of an ordinary soldier fighting in extraordinary conditions. This is a book that brings you as close to the mud, the blood, and the experience of war as it is safe to come. 'Helmet for My Pillow is a grand and epic prose poem. Robert Leckie's theme is the purely human experience of war in the Pacific, written in the graceful imagery of a human being who - somehow - survived' Tom Hanks

On 8 May 1945, Victory in Europe Day-shortened to "V.E. Day"-brought with it the demise of Nazi Germany. But for the Allies, the war was only half-won. Exhausted but exuberant American soldiers, ready to return home, were sent to join the fighting in the Pacific, which by the spring and summer of 1945 had turned into a gruelling campaign of bloody attrition against an enemy determined to fight to the last man. Germany had surrendered unconditionally. The Japanese would clearly make the conditions of victory extraordinarily high. In the United States, Americans clamored for their troops to come home and for a return to a peacetime economy. Politics intruded upon military policy while a new and untested president struggled to strategize among a military command that was often mired in rivalry. The task of defeating the Japanese seemed nearly unsurmountable, even while plans to invade the home islands were being drawn. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall warned of the toll that "the agony of enduring battle" would likely take. General Douglas MacArthur clashed with Marshall and Admiral Nimitz over the most effective way to defeat the increasingly resilient Japanese combatants. In the midst of this division, the Army began a program of partial demobilization of troops in Europe, which depleted units at a time when they most needed experienced soldiers. In this context of military emergency, the fearsome projections of the human cost of invading the Japanese homeland, and weakening social and political will, victory was salvaged by means of a horrific new weapon. As one Army staff officer admitted, "The capitulation of Hirohito saved our necks." In Implacable Foes, award-winning historians Waldo Heinrichs (a veteran of both theatres of war in World War II) and Marc Gallicchio bring to life the final year of World War II in the Pacific right up to the dropping of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, evoking not only Japanese policies of desperate defense, but the sometimes rancorous debates on the home front. They deliver a gripping and provocative narrative that challenges the decision-making of U.S. leaders and delineates the consequences of prioritizing the European front. The result is a masterly work of military history that evaluates the nearly insurmountable trials associated with waging global war and the sacrifices necessary to succeed.

Nauru is often figured as an anomaly in the international order. This book offers a new account of Nauru's imperial history and examines its significance to the histories of international law. Drawing on theories of jurisdiction and bureaucracy, it reconstructs four shifts in Nauru's status - from German protectorate, to League of Nations C Mandate, to UN Trust Territory, to sovereign state - as a means of redescribing the transition from the nineteenth century imperial order to the twentieth century state system. The book argues that as international status shifts, imperial form accretes: as Nauru's status shifted, what occurred at the local level was a gradual process of bureaucratisation. Two conclusions emerge from this argument. The first is that imperial administration in Nauru produced the Republic's post-independence 'failures'. The second is that international recognition of sovereign status is best understood as marking a beginning, not an end, of the process of decolonisation.

Little has been written about when, how and why the British Government changed its mind about giving independance to the Pacific Islands. Using recently opened archives, Winding Up the British Empire in the Pacific Islands gives the first detailed account of this event. As Britain began to dissolve the Empire in Asia in the aftermath of the Second World War, it announced that there were some countries that were so small, remote, and lacking in resources that they could never become independent states. However, between 1970 and 1980 there was a rapid about-turn. Accelerated decolonization suddenly became the order of the day. Here was the death warrant of the Empire, and hastily-arranged independence ceremonies were performed for six new states - Tonga, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Kiribati, and Vanuatu. The rise of anti-imperialist pressures in the United Nations had a major role in this change in policy, as did the pioneering examples marked by the release of Western Samoa by New Zealand in 1962 and Nauru by Australia in 1968. The tenacity of Pacific Islanders in maintaining their cultures was in contrast to more strident Afro-Asia nationalisms. The closing of the Colonial Office, by merger with the Commonwealth Relations Office in 1966, followed by the joining of the Commonwealth and Foreign Offices in 1968, became a major turning point in Britain's relations with the Islands. In place of long-nurtured traditions of trusteeship for indigenous populations that had evolved in the Colonial Office, the new Foreign & Commonwealth Office concentrated on fostering British interests, which came to mean reducing distant commitments and focussing on the Atlantic world and Europe.

"Asia, the Pacific Islands and the coasts of the Americas have long been studied separately. This essential single-volume history of the Pacific traces the global interactions and remarkable peoples that have connected these regions with each other and with Europe and the Indian Ocean, for millennia. From ancient canoe navigators, monumental civilisations, pirates and seaborne empires, to the rise of nuclear testing and global warming, Matt Matsuda ranges across the frontiers of colonial history, anthropology and Pacific Rim economics and politics, piecing together a history of the region. The book identifies and draws together the defining threads and extraordinary personal narratives which have contributed to this history, showing how localised contacts and contests have often blossomed into global struggles over colonialism, tourism and the rise of Asian economies. Drawing on Asian, Oceanian, European, American, ancient and modern narratives, the author assembles a fascinating Pacific region from a truly global perspective"--

The definitive history of American war reporting in the Pacific theater of World War II, from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After almost two years slogging with infantrymen through North Africa, Italy, and France, Ernie Pyle immediately realized he was ill prepared for covering the Pacific War. As Pyle and other war correspondents discovered, the climate, the logistics, and the sheer scope of the Pacific theater had no parallel in the war America was fighting in Europe. From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The War Beat, Pacific provides the first comprehensive account of how a group of highly courageous correspondents covered America's war against Japan, what they witnessed, what they were allowed to publish, and how their reports shaped the home front's perception of some of the most pivotal battles in American military history. In a dramatic and fast-paced narrative based on a wealth of previously untapped primary sources, Casey takes us from MacArthur's doomed defense on the Philippines and the navy's overly strict censorship policy at the time of Midway, through the bloody battles on Guadalcanal, New Guinea, Tarawa, Saipan, Leyte and Luzon, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, detailing the cooperation, as well as conflict, between the media and the military, as they grappled with the enduring problem of limiting a free press during a period of extreme crisis. The War Beat, Pacific shows how foreign correspondents ran up against practical challenges and risked their lives to get stories in a theater that was far more challenging than the war against Nazi Germany, while the US government blocked news of the war against Japan and tried to focus the home front on Hitler and his atrocities.

Between 1803 and 1853, some 80,000 convicts were transported to Van Diemen's Land. Revising established models of the colonies, which tend to depict convict women as a peculiarly oppressed group, Gender, crime and empire argues that convict men and women in fact shared much in common. Placing men and women, ideas about masculinity, femininity, sexuality and the body, in comparative perspective, this book argues that historians must take fuller account of class to understand the relationships between gender and power. The book explores the ways in which ideas about fatherhood and household order initially informed the state's model of order, and the reasons why this foundered. It considers the shifting nature of state policies towards courtship, relationships and attempts at family formation which subsequently became matters of class conflict. It goes on to explore the ways in which ideas about gender and family informed liberal and humanitarian critiques of the colonies from the 1830s and 1840s and colonial demands for abolition and self-government. -- .

New York Times bestseller: The true story of the WWII naval battle portrayed in the Roland Emmerich film is "something special among war histories" (Chicago Sun-Times). Six months after Pearl Harbor, the seemingly invincible Imperial Japanese Navy prepared a decisive blow against the United States. After sweeping through Asia and the South Pacific, Japan's military targeted the tiny atoll of Midway, an ideal launching pad for the invasion of Hawaii and beyond. But the US Navy would be waiting for them. Thanks to cutting-edge code-breaking technology, tactical daring, and a significant stroke of luck, the Americans under Adm. Chester W. Nimitz dealt Japan's navy its first major defeat in the war. Three years of hard fighting remained, but it was at Midway that the tide turned. This "stirring, even suspenseful narrative" is the first book to tell the story of the epic battle from both the American and Japanese sides (Newsday). Miracle at Midway reveals how America won its first and greatest victory of the Pacific war-and how easily it could have been a loss.

We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future. On 26 May 2017, after a historic process of consultation, the Uluru Statement from the Heart was read out. This clear and urgent call for reform to the community from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples asked for the establishment of a First Nations Voice to Parliament protected in the constitution and a process of agreement-making and truth-telling. Voice. Treaty. Truth. What was the journey to this point? What do Australians need to know about the Uluru Statement from the Heart? And how can these reforms be achieved? Everything You Need to Know about the Uluru Statement from the Heart, written by Megan Davis and George Williams, two of Australia's best-known constitutional experts, is essential reading on how our Constitution was drafted, what the 1967 referendum achieved, and the lead-up and response to the Uluru Statement. Importantly, it explains how the Uluru Statement offers change that will benefit the whole nation.

Architecture in the South Pacific: The Ocean of Islands recounts the recent developments of the South Pacific and its fascinating architecture. This volume traces the European architectural overlay onto this scattered group of islands as well as the transition of these same islands towards a regional identity that has been fashioned by the remoteness of each location, the incomparable setting, and the distinctive ethnic mix of its inhabitants. A series of themed essays present the story of architectural development in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Wallis and Futuna, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Samoa and American Samoa, and French Polynesia. Recent architecture typifies the evolution of the islands as they have been subjected to the transformative waves of alien trade, religion, colonization, war and tourism, followed by post-colonialism and revived nationalism. As with the Pacific region itself, the most prominent characteristic of the architecture is its diversity. The blending of the universal and the local sets the stage for a fresh vision of the South Pacific across a wide range of building types, from spectacular mission churches to sensational resorts in paradise. This book, in full colour, will appeal to architects, armchair-tourists, students and all those for whom the South Pacific is the idyll of their dreams.

Winding Up the British Empire in the Pacific Islands is the first detailed account, based on recently-opened archives, of when, how, and why the British Government changed its mind about giving independence to the Pacific Islands. As Britain began to dissolve the Empire in Asia in the aftermath of the Second World War, it announced that there were some countries that were so small, remote, and lacking in resources that they could never become independent states. However, between 1970 and 1980 there was a rapid about-turn. Accelerated decolonization suddenly became the order of the day. Here was the death warrant of the Empire, and hastily-arranged independence ceremonies were performed for six new states - Tonga, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Kiribati, and Vanuatu. The rise of anti-imperialist pressures in the United Nations had a major role in this change in policy, as did the pioneering examples marked by the release of Western Samoa by New Zealand in 1962 and Nauru by Australia in 1968. The tenacity of Pacific Islanders in maintaining their cultures was in contrast to more strident Afro-Asia nationalisms. The closing of the Colonial Office, by merger with the Commonwealth Relations Office in 1966, followed by the joining of the Commonwealth and Foreign Offices in 1968, became a major turning point in Britain's relations with the Islands. In place of long-nurtured traditions of trusteeship for indigenous populations that had evolved in the Colonial Office, the new Foreign & Commonwealth Office concentrated on fostering British interests, which came to mean reducing distant commitments and focussing on the Atlantic world and Europe.

This revisionist history of convict transportation from Britain and Ireland will challenge much that you thought you knew about religion and penal colonies. Based on original archival sources, it examines arguments by elites in favour and against the practice of transportation and considers why they thought it could be reformed, and, later, why it should be abolished. In this, the first religious history of the anti-transportation campaign, Hilary M. Carey addresses all the colonies and denominations engaged in the debate. Without minimising the individual horror of transportation, she demonstrates the wide variety of reformist experiments conducted in the Australian penal colonies, as well as the hulks, Bermuda and Gibraltar. She showcases the idealists who fought for more humane conditions for prisoners, as well as the 'political parsons', who lobbied to bring transportation to an end. The complex arguments about convict transportation, which were engaged in by bishops, judges, priests, politicians and intellectuals, crossed continents and divided an empire.

The recent floods that ravaged Queensland saw three-quarters of the state declared a disaster zone.from the capital city on the Brisbane River to remote rural communities.and caused billions of dollars worth of damage, forcing thousands to abandon their homes. This latest assault by nature reminds us all that, despite its stark beauty, the Australian landscape has a deadly edge. It is a place of flood, fire, earthquake and ferocious storms. The Australian Book of Disasters features enthralling stories of catastrophe.and survival and courage in the face of enormous odds. With chapters covering the breadth of this harsh land, it includes detailed accounts of the events burnt into Australia's national memory, from the Dunbar shipwreck in 1857 to the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009, and finishing with an in-depth look at the Queensland floods of 2010-2011. From the same series as The Australian Book of True Crime and The Australian Book of Heroism.

Anzac and Empire is the remarkable story of George Foster Pearce - a carpenter who became one Australia's most influential politicians, and the man central to how Australia planned for, and fought in, World War I. The nation's longest-serving defence minister - holding the portfolio before, during and after the Great War - Pearce saw no contradiction in being both a fierce Australian nationalist, and also a loyal subject of the British Empire.Anzac and Empire is the first full-length biography of this extraordinary Australian. Written by one of Australia's leading military historians, this book shows that to understand Australia in the Great War, you must understand the man behind it.

In the build-up to World War II both the United States and Japan believed their battleships would play a central role in battle, but after the Pacific War began in December 1941, the role of the battleship proved to be much more limited than either side expected. There would be only two battleship vs battleship actions in the Pacific in World War II, both of which are assessed in this engaging study. At Guadalcanal in 1942, Kirishima faced two modern US battleships, USS Washington and USS South Dakota. In the Surigao Strait in 1944, two World War I-era Japanese battleships, Yamashiro and Fuso, faced six American battleships supported by four heavy cruisers in history's last-ever clash between battleships. Employing full-colour artwork, carefully selected archive photographs, and expert analysis, former US Navy Commander Mark E. Stille examines the two head-to-head clashes between the battleships deployed by the United States and Japan in the struggle for control of the Pacific during World War II.

Throughout the first year of the war in the Pacific during World War II the USAAF was relatively ineffective against ships. Indeed, warships in particular proved to be too elusive for conventional medium-level bombing. High-level attacks wasted bombs, and torpedo attacks required extensive training. But as 1942 closed, the Fifth Air Force developed new weapons and new tactics that were not just effective, they were deadly. A maintenance officer assigned to a B-25 unit found a way to fill the bombardier's position with four 0.50-cal machine guns and strap an additional four 0.50s to the sides of the bomber, firing forward. Additionally, skip-bombing was developed. This called for mast-top height approaches flying the length of the target ship. If the bombs missed the target, they exploded in the water close enough to crush the sides. The technique worked perfectly when paired with "strafe" B-25s. Over the first two months of 1943, squadrons perfected these tactics. Then, in early March, Japan tried to reinforce their garrison in Lae, New Guinea, with a 16-ship convoy - eight transports guarded by eight destroyers. The Fifth Air Force pounced on the convoy in the Bismarck Sea. By March 5 all eight transports and four destroyers had been sunk This volume examines the mechanics of skip-bombing combined with a strafing B-25, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the combatants (B-25 versus destroyer), and revealing the results of the attacks and the reasons why these USAAF tactics were so successful.

A British colony of fifty souls in the Pacific Ocean, Pitcairn Island was settled by the Bounty mutineers and nineteen Polynesians in 1790. In 2004 six Pitcairn men were convicted of numerous offenses against girls and young women, committed over a thirty year period, in what appears to have been a culture of sexual abuse on the island.
This case has raised many questions: what right did the British government have to initiate these prosecutions? Was it fair to prosecute the defendants, given that no laws had been published on the island? Indeed, what, if any, law was there on this island? This collection of essays explores the many important issues raised by the case and by the situation of a small, isolated community of this kind.
It starts by looking at the background to the prosecutions, considering the dilemma that faced the British government when the abuse was uncovered, and discussing the ways in which the judges dealt with the case, as well as exploring the history of the settlement and how colonial law affects it.
This background paves the way for an exploration of the philosophical, jurisprudential and ethical issues raised by the prosecutions: was it legitimate for the UK to intervene, given the absence of any common community between the UK and the Island? Was the positivist 'law on paper' approach adopted by the British government and the courts was appropriate, especially given the lack of promulgation of the laws under which the men were prosecuted? Would alternative responses such as payment of compensation to the female victims and provision of community support have been preferable? And should universal human rights claims justify the prosecutions, overriding any allegations of cultural relativism on the part of the UK?

The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English. In a provocative contribution to the series, Graham Huggan presents fresh readings of an outstanding, sometimes deeply unsettling national literature whose writers and readers just as unmistakably belong to the wider world. Australian literature is not the unique province of Australian readers and critics; nor is its exclusive task to provide an internal commentary on changing national concerns. Huggan's book adopts a transnational approach, motivated by postcolonial interests, in which contemporary ideas taken from postcolonial criticism and critical race theory are productively combined and imaginatively transformed. Rejecting the fashionable view that Australia is not, and never will be, postcolonial, Huggan argues on the contrary that Australian literature, like other settler literatures, requires close attention to postcolonial methods and concerns. A postcolonial approach to Australian literature, he suggests, is more than just a case for a more inclusive nationalism; it also involves a general acknowledgement of the nation's changed relationship to an increasingly globalized world. As such, the book helps to deprovincialize Australian literary studies. Australian Literature also contributes to debates about the continuing history of racism in Australia-a history in which the nation's literature has played a constitutive role, as both product and producer of racial tensions and anxieties, nowhere more visible than in the discourse it has produced about race, both within and beyond the national context.

On November 20, l943, in the first trial by fire of America's fledgling amphibious assault doctrine, five thousand men stormed the beaches of Tarawa, a seemingly invincible Japanese island fortress barely the size of the Pentagon parking lots (three-hundred acres!). Before the first day ended, one third of the Marines who had crossed Tarawa's deadly reef under murderous fire were killed, wounded, or missing. In three days of fighting, four Americans would win the Medal of Honor and six-thousand combatants would die. The bloody conquest of Tarawa by the newly created Central Pacific Force provided the first trial by fire of America's fledgling doctrine of forcible amphibious assault against a heavily fortified objective. Described by one veteran as"a time of utmost savagery," the incredibly violent battle raged for three days and left 6,000 men dead in an area no bigger than the Pentagon and its parking lots. Utmost Savagery is the definitive account of Tarawa and reflects years of research into primary sources, tidal records, new translations of Japanese documents, and interviews with survivors. A Marine combat veteran himself, Col. Alexander presents a masterful narrative of the tactics, innovations, leadership, and weapons employed by both antagonists. The book portrays the battle's full flavor: the decisions, miscalculations, extreme risks, lost opportunities, breakthroughs, blunders, and vital lessons learned. Alexander describes the landing plan and its assumptions, analyzes the freakish"tide that failed," and follows the amphibious ship-to-shore assault as it encounters the exposed reef and hellish Japanese fire. He renders a professional salute to Japanese Admiral Keiji Shibasaki and his well-trained Special Naval Landing Forces who defended Tarawa virtually to the last man. Above all he highlights the courage and adaptability of the Marine small-unit leaders who kept the assault moving throughout 76 hours of unmitigated horror.

Amanda Nettelbeck explores how policies designed to protect the civil rights of indigenous peoples across the British Empire were entwined with reforming them as governable colonial subjects. The nineteenth-century policy of 'Aboriginal protection' has usually been seen as a fleeting initiative of imperial humanitarianism, yet it sat within a larger set of legally empowered policies for regulating new or newly-mobile colonised peoples. Protection policies drew colonised peoples within the embrace of the law, managed colonial labour needs, and set conditions on mobility. Within this comparative frame, Nettelbeck traces how the imperative to protect indigenous rights represented more than an obligation to mitigate the impacts of colonialism and dispossession. It carried a far-reaching agenda of legal reform that arose from the need to manage colonised peoples in an Empire where the demands of humane governance jostled with colonial growth.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Australia explores Australia's history from ancient times through to Federation in 1901. It begins with an archaeological examination of the continent's Indigenous history, which dates back 50,000 years. This volume examines the first European encounters with Australia and its Indigenous people, and the subsequent colonisation of the land by the British in the late eighteenth century, providing insight into the realities of a convict society and how this shaped the nation's development. Part I traces the dynamic growth in Australia's economy, demography and industry throughout the nineteenth century, as it moved towards a system of liberal democracy and one of the most defining events in its history: the Federation of the colonies in 1901. Part II offers a deeper investigation of key topics, such as relations between Indigenous people and settlers, and Australia's colonial identity. It also covers the economy, science and technology, law and literature.