Bøger af Paul Ham

'We need to send our survey party there!' (pointing to map) 'But Colonel, we cain't do it. that's the most insecure area in the whole country!' 'Insecure? Goddamn it! the greatest concentration of American troops in the country is there!' 'Yes Colonel, and have you considered why the greatest concentration of American troops is right there?' CAPtAIN BULLEN'S WAR combines the irreverent humour of M*A*S*H with the sharp satire of Catch 22 in portraying one man's extraordinary experiences of the war in Vietnam in 1968, the bloodiest year of the conflict. the difference is that neither Captain John Bullen nor his experiences are fictional. Nor was he a reluctant soldier. A graduate of the Royal Military College, Duntroon, and a career soldier in the Australian Army, Bullen commanded the vital map-producing section of the Australian task Force at Nui Dat. Alert to the possibility of humour in the bleakest circumstances, he decided to chronicle the events around him. What emerges is one of the most darkly funny and lacerating accounts of the Vietnam War ever written. Strewn with wonderful character sketches and hilarious anecdotes, CAPtAIN BULLEN'S WAR is more than just one man's insightful account of the absurdity of war. He perceives with unsparing clarity the nature and enormity of the conflict around him. A thoughtful, decent man, Bullen's is a voice of sanity in a world gone mad.

In a unique and balanced portrayal, renowned journalist Paul Ham recounts both the Australian and Japanese perspectives of the events on the hellish Papuan jungle trail where thousands fought and died during World War II. Based on extensive research in Australia and Japan, and including previously unpublished documents, Kokoda intimately relates the stories of ordinary soldiers in 'the world's worst killing field', and examines the role of commanders in sending ill-equipped, unqualified Australian troops into battles that resulted in near 100 per cent casualty rates. It was a war without mercy, fought back and forth along 90 miles (145 km) of river crossings, steep inclines and precipitous descents, with both sides wracked by hunger and disease, and terrified of falling into enemy hands. Defeat was unthinkable: the Australian soldier was fighting for his homeland against an unyielding aggressor; the Japanese ordered to fight to the death in a bid to conquer 'Greater East Asia'. Paul Ham captures the spirits of those soldiers and commanders who clashed in this war of exceptional savagery, and tells of the brave souls on both sides of the campaign whose courage and sacrifices must never be forgotten.

When Adolf Hitler went to war in 1914, he was just twenty-five years old. It was a time he would later call the "most stupendous experience of my life."That war ended with Hitler in a hospital bed, temporarily blinded by mustard gas. The world he eventually opened his newly healed eyes to was new and it was terrible: Germany had been defeated, the Kaiser had fled, and the army had been resolutely humbled.Hitler never accepted these facts. Out of his fury rose a white-hot hatred, an unquenchable thirst for revenge against the "criminals" who had signed the armistice, the socialists he accused of stabbing the army in the back, and, most violently, the Jews--a direct threat to the master race of his imagination--on whose shoulders he would pile all of Germany's woes.By peeling back the layers of Hitler's childhood, his war record, and his early political career, Paul Ham's Young Hitler: The Making of the Führer seeks the man behind the myth. More broadly, Paul Ham seeks to answer the question: Was Hitler's rise to power an extreme example of a recurring type of demagogue--a politician who will do and say anything to seize power; who thrives on chaos; and who personifies, in his words and in his actions, the darkest prejudices of humankind?

In this harrowing history of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Paul Ham argues against the use of nuclear weapons, drawing on extensive research and hundreds of interviews to prove that the bombings had little impact on the eventual outcome of the Pacific War. In this gripping narrative, Ham demonstrates convincingly that misunderstandings and nationalist fury on both sides led to the use of the bombs. Ham also gives powerful witness to its destruction through the eyes of eighty survivors, from twelve-year-olds forced to work in war factories to wives and children who faced the holocaust alone. Hiroshima Nagasaki presents the grisly unadorned truth about the bombings, blurred for so long by postwar propaganda, and transforms our understanding of one of the defining events of the twentieth century.