"D-Day New Guinea" - Coming in April
 

D-Day New Guinea: The extraordinary story of the battle for Lae and the greatest combined airborne and amphibious operation of the Pacific War
(Allen & Unwin April 2019)
by Phillip Bradley
336 pages w/ photos & maps - paperback

"The most complete telling of one of the most significant campaigns of the Pacific War and Australia's role in it."

'Java is heaven, Burma is hell, but you never come back alive from New Guinea' - Japanese military saying

"The capture of Lae was the most complex operation for the Australian army in the Second World War. In many ways it was also a rehearsal for the D-Day invasion of France with an amphibious landing combined with the first successful large-scale Allied airborne operation of the war. But this is not just a book about a successful military campaign that changed the course of the war in New Guinea. It also brings together the extraordinary stories of the Australian, American and Japanese participants in the battle, and of the fight against the cloying jungle, the raging rivers and soaring mountain ranges that made New Guinea such a daunting battlefield."

Phillip Bradley brings a compelling clarity, humanity and new insight into a little known but crucial Australian battle of the Pacific War.

Author bio:
PHILLIP BRADLEY, author of the ground-breaking Hell's Battlefield, is a leading Australian military historian. He lived in Lae for two years and has spent many years since researching the battle for Lae."

https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse...-9781760632588

Re: "D-Day New Guinea" - Coming in April
 

Definitely on my list to buy. :)

Re: "D-Day New Guinea" - Coming in April
 

While the subject of the book seems very interesting, the title end " the greatest combined airborne and amphibious operation of the Pacific War" seems rather unjustified IMHO. The landings in Leyte, Lingayen Gulf and Okinawa were bigger.

"The capture of Lae was the most complex operation for the Australian army in the Second World War. In many ways it was also a rehearsal for the D-Day invasion of France with an amphibious landing combined with the first successful large-scale Allied airborne operation of the war."
The landings in North Africa and Sicily were done before the one in Lae and include an airborne operation... OK, the latter were not successful, but the paradrop near Lae was on an undefended target, and certainly could not be compared to any paradrop done in Europe during the war.

Conditions of war in the Pacific and in Europe were so different that I doubt anybody uses an experience in the Pacific to prepare D-Day in Normandy, especially when 4 major landings (TOCH, Sicily, Salerno, Anzio) were done in MTO before D-Day in far closer conditions. Landings in MTO and ETO were bigger than most of the ones in the Pacific, and were only made some hundred or tens of km from friendly ports (except TOCH), while those in the Pacific were launched from bases thousands of km away (and from bases like Los Negros, Milne Bay, Ulithi, Majuro, Guadalcanal, ... that were built from scratch during wartime).

Re: "D-Day New Guinea" - Coming in April
 

Publishers are known to utilize some exaggeration on the cover in order to prompt a potential customer to stop, pick up and thumb through a book while visiting in the store (brick & mortar or virtual) with the hope that they will buy the publication.


I think the elements of the cover to focus on are "combined airborne & amphibious", "Pacific War" and the fact that the Australian armed forces had a major role in the invasion. Having read all the previous books of the author (who I have worked with on several occasions) I am certain that there will be a high degree of academic rigor to this work.


Edward