In WWII, there were 1,993 enemy attacks around Australia. 

Scores of submarine and ship actions, and many hundreds of individual enemy air actions, from Darwin to Hobart, from Townsville to Melbourne, saw thousands of lives lost. Yet Aussies know little of it. 

This new work, from one of Australia’s foremost military historians, for the first time brings together all of the actions in World War II around the country’s coastline. The battle began with German surface raiders laying mines and attacking ships. It continued with submarine actions, and intensified with air attacks, at their height covering thousands of kilometres of coast. 

The book rewrites history, and brings the reader into a long struggle between German and Japanese forces and those of the USA, Britain’s and Australia’s, that saw scores of ships sunk and thousands of lives lost. 

Many of the stories are tragic: from fierce actions such as the loss of the cruiser Sydney with 645 lives which went down fighting against the raider Kormoran, to death on a quiet beach in South Australia where a mine blew up and killed two men, to the lonely end of a priest captured by an enemy floatplane and flown away to be executed. 

Some are tales of mistakes and misadventure, such as the bad decisions by senior defence commanders in the Sydney midget submarine raids which were remedied in part by the bravery – still unrewarded – of the small ship commanders which fought the submarines to their end. 

Others are newly revealed – the resolute attacks by two RAAF bombers against a Japanese fleet submarine which lies somewhere unlocated off New South Wales. 

This new work unveils it all.