Books like Monash — picked by fans

I read this book cover to cover. It was incredible, full of well-researched detail and analysis. Les really got into the nuts and bolts of the Western Front and why things happened the way they did. It must have been exhausting to research, but well worth it. I found it invaluable in researching my own story. This book chronicles the reality of war in the trenches and goes much deeper than anything I’ve read before. Truly brilliant.

As a researcher and Historian, L.A. Carlyon was a genius. Gallipoli was a WW1 campaign that failed for the Allies; the brainchild of Winston Churchill and a complete disaster. And yet, it was the first big battle fought by Australians under a National identity and has been written into folklore. Many saw this as the blooding of our nation. What I really loved about this book is that it went into the deep truth about Gallipoli, things I never imagined could have happened, and a land offensive that was never supposed to happen. What we were taught at school was a long way from the truth and it really opened my mind.

Joe Maxwell was an Australian Soldier in WW1 who wrote this story of his time in the 18th Battalion (same battalion as my Grandfather, Stan Dunkley). Chances are they knew each other. Joe wrote the story from his own perspective and told of his mates and the fun they had behind the lines. Interestingly, when it came to the actual fighting, he tended to write little; perhaps because it was too horrible to write about but his bravery is well documented. He was the only soldier of the 18th BN to win the Victoria Cross after single-handedly taking a German machine gun nest. He also had the rare distinction of fighting the entire war without gaining so much as a scratch. I highly recommend this for its personal account of one man’s experience.

This is a first-person account of life in the trenches in France and Belgium in WW1. It’s actually a difficult read in places because his writing style is quite unusual and by no means eloquent, but once you get used to it, it’s truly intriguing. He wrote the book with a pencil on exercise books after the war, probably to try and exorcise his demons. It wasn’t until his family found it and took it to a publisher that his story came to light, a very frank and occasionally morbid description of war at its very worst but an essential read.

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… show more.

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.

Friedr and Wim is a novel that I can highly recommend and one of those gems you find outside of the mainstream.

The story moves from the trenches of World War One to a Germany in the 1920s that is in turmoil: politically, economically, and socially. The author gives the reader a different perspective to the one we might be used to in relation to the time period, by following the lives of two young German men as they move through arguably the most traumatic period in world history.

The author creates a story that is historically accurate, but rich in emotion and drama, while at the same time raising many questions for the reader.

The most influential spy novelist of them all, John Buchan, had the Germans planning to disable the British army with anthrax germs. While an admittedly small part of all the various plots in the complex novel, Buchan’s Richard Hannay touched all the bases in the five books in which he starred. For another example, in 1924 The Three Hostages, international demigods stirred up trouble with brainwashing and hypnotism. This device was a popular weapon employed by the likes of Fu Manchu.

World War I caused 20 million deaths and left 21 million wounded.

Soldiers who survived the gas attacks and trench warfare often returned to societies eager to forget the atrocities of the conflict and move on. Remarque’s insightfully written novel details the struggles of three German soldiers who return home only to discover that they may have no place in a nation that has learned almost nothing from what they regard as a senseless and immoral war.

In May of 1933, this novel and the rest of Remarque's writing were declared “unpatriotic” by the Nazi dictatorship and all his novels were banned.

Published almost sixty years ago, this compelling study of four senior commanders who served (mostly) on the Western Front remains as fresh as when it was first written. Barnett’s prose is exquisite, bringing us directly into the world of Helmuth von Moltke, John Jellicoe, Philippé Pétain, and Erich Ludendorff, telling us how they coped (or not) with the enormous stresses and strains they encountered as ‘supreme commanders’. It is a stunning portrait of men (and their command systems) at war.