Category: Military History

85th Anniversary of the Battle of Pinios Gorge – A Tough Fight

85th Anniversary of the Battle of Pinios Gorge – A Tough Fight

by | Apr 16, 2026 | | 0

Reading time: 16 minutes
85 years ago today hundreds of young Australians and New Zealanders were digging into the dry soil of central Greece, preparing to meet the advancing juggernaut of the German army. They fought hard, buying the time the rest of the Allied force needed to withdraw in good order further south.
The battle of Pinios Gorge, also known as the battle for the Tempi valley, was a pivotal rearguard action fought by Anzac troops – mostly made up of Australians – from the 17th to the 18th of April, 1941. Though successful in its main goal, delaying the German advance toward the central Greek town of Larisa, it was also a case study of the things that can go wrong in the fog of war.

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Apongo was a rebel leader in Jamaica – a diary entry sheds light on his west African origins

Apongo was a rebel leader in Jamaica – a diary entry sheds light on his west African origins

by | Apr 1, 2026 | , , | 0

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
For over three centuries, between 1526 and 1866, at least 10.5 million Africans were forcibly trafficked to the Americas in the transatlantic slave trade. Over half of them (with known places of departure) left from a 3,000km stretch of the west African coast between what are today Senegal and Gabon. Scholars trying to uncover the lives of these diasporic Africans are forced to work with historical records produced by their European and American enslavers. These writers mostly ignored Africans’ individual identities. They gave them western names and wrote about them as products belonging to a set of supposedly distinct “ethnic” brands.

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Survival in Singapore: The Triumph and Tragedy of Australia’s Greatest Commando Operation – Book Review

Survival in Singapore: The Triumph and Tragedy of Australia’s Greatest Commando Operation – Book Review

by | Mar 9, 2026 | , | 0

Reading time: 8 minutes
Tom Trumble’s Survival in Singapore offers an unsettling glimpse into one of the darkest chapters of Singapore’s wartime experience – the cruelty unleashed in the wake of Operation Jaywick. Jaywick is somewhat well remembered in Australia, as a daring raid by Australian and British commandos who sailed a disguised vessel, HMAS Krait, through enemy-held waters, hid in the Riau archipelago, and used folboat canoes to attach limpet mines to Japanese shipping in Singapore Harbour. Ships were sunk and damaged; the mission was regarded as ‘tactically brilliant’. Trumble’s book does not deny that brilliance. Instead, it shifts the spotlight to what is far less known and far more confronting; the hideous aftermath inflicted on civilians and internees by the Japanese security apparatus, who were determined to prove the raid must have been enabled by saboteurs from within.

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Report on the British Indian Army, 1943

Report on the British Indian Army, 1943

by | Feb 25, 2026 | , | 0

Reading time: 3 minutes
Over two million British Indian Army troops fought in the Second World War. This 1943 War Office document reported on the army’s battle readiness and made recommendations for its development. As India was part of the British Empire when the Second World War broke out, the British Indian Army was called upon to serve in the Allied effort. A volunteer army, rather than a conscripted one, it entered the war as a force of around 240,000.

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The Uncountable Crimes of Imperial Japan

The Uncountable Crimes of Imperial Japan

by | Feb 16, 2026 | , | 0

Reading time: 8 minutes
In the west, and especially Europe, the most horrific regime of WWII is often portrayed as the Nazi regime, with Imperial Japan’s role in the wider world war being somewhat neglected – most well known for being the victim of the world’s first nuclear weapons.
What is often not as well-known is just how brutal and cruel the Imperial Japanese Government was.

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First-ever biomechanics study of Indigenous weapons shows what made them so deadly

First-ever biomechanics study of Indigenous weapons shows what made them so deadly

by | Jan 30, 2026 | | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
Archaeological evidence for interpersonal violence (injuries of skeletal remains) is rare in Australia, but when found, usually consists of depressions to the skull and “parrying fractures”. These are breaks to the arm bones above the wrist, resulting from the raising of the arm in defence against a weapon. This can be either from a direct blow or a glancing blow off a shield – like the one used in this experiment.

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