The best books about Australia in World War I covering the battlefields and/or the home front

The Broken Years is a wonderful book about what Australian soldiers thought and felt during the war.

It originated in Bill Gammage’s PhD thesis, which was the first systematic study of the soldiers’ letters and diaries collected by the Australian War Memorial. The result is an illuminating and moving masterpiece, which proved transformational.

When he began his thesis he was in unfamiliar territory, as the concentrated use of these sources was unprecedented — in fact, military history itself was not popular. But he persevered, gradually sensing he was on to something, and indeed he was.

The Broken Years became an enduring classic. It was personally very influential for me during the 1970s when I was a dissatisfied, recently graduated lawyer considering a change to something more aligned with my interest in history. I took the plunge, left the law, and I’ve been a historian and biographer ever since.

Geoffrey Serle was an outstanding Australian historian who wrote a number of fine books, and one of the best was his award-winning biography of the most renowned AIF commander, John Monash.

Various other authors have compiled books on Monash, but none are as good as Serle’s. This is a magisterial whole-of-life volume, with plenty on Monash’s life before WWI and during the 1920s. It was a marvellous precedent for me to keep prominently in mind after I embarked on my whole-of-life, warts-and-all biography of Monash’s contemporary, Pompey Elliott.

It’s not common for books about WWI to contain detailed analysis of both the battlefields and the home front (although this dual coverage is a feature of my lost generation multi-biographies).

To compile a comprehensive history of Australia during the war that combines what happened at home with what occurred at the various fronts is indeed a daunting task, yet Joan Beaumont accomplished it with conspicuous success in this acclaimed and award-winning book. 

Charles Bean’s epic volumes were pioneering, illuminating, thorough, deeply researched and far superior to equivalent official histories produced by other nations involved in the conflict.

Although Bean’s books were written long ago — between 1921 and 1942 — they are still the starting point for any credible project concerning itself with what the AIF did in battle. And he edited various volumes in the Official History series compiled by other writers as well, including a book about the home front during the war.

Bean was remarkable. His Official History, and the records and research materials underpinning it, have been crucial in so much of my work—not only my lost generation multi-biographies, and also my books on Pompey Elliott and Will Dyson, but many other research projects as well.

My choice here could have been Douglas Newton’s superb Hell-Bent about Australia’s entry into the conflict, or various other fine books by renowned historians, but I can’t go past this one by an expert on Australia in WWI.

Peter Pedersen’s PhD on Monash as a commander became a fine book; his authoritative survey of the AIF during the war entitled The Anzacs: Gallipoli to the Western Front is another work of high quality; and he has also produced several studies of notable AIF battles. But my recommendation is a different publication — his extraordinary Western Front guidebook. Stay with me while I explain why.

Anzacs on the Western Front is lavishly illustrated with maps and photographs, and informed by his comprehensive detailed familiarity with what Australians did. It’s crucial for anyone visiting France and Belgium with the aim of pursuing particular engagements great or small, both to plan your visit beforehand and to have with you while you’re there.

I found it indispensable when I was in France researching my book. To show what’s so remarkable about it, this is the kind of thing Pedersen writes again and again (I’ve concocted an example to illustrate his method):

Starting at Armentieres, head east along the Z452 as shown on the map on p. 175. After 11.4 kilometres you come to an intersection, with a church visible on your right. Turn left at this crossroads, and continue along this road for 900 metres until you encounter a turn-off to a dirt track on your half-right near a batch of trees alongside a farmhouse. About 270 metres along this narrow track a single tight parking spot has been created on the left side of the track. Stop there, taking care to get as much off the track as you can. Look to your left front, and you’ll see four trees on the horizon, as shown in the photo on p. 178. It was from the left of these four trees that two companies of the 38th Battalion emerged and advanced 350 metres directly towards you shortly after 5.30pm on 31 March 1918. Their intervention was crucial, because the British were being driven back in a south-westerly direction at the time, as shown in the map on p. 179, and the advent of the 38th companies changed the course of the fighting in this sector.

This is typical of what Pedersen does throughout the book. It’s brilliant, the result of exceptional knowledge, and invaluable if your grandfather, for example, was in one of those companies and you want to increase your understanding of what he did.