The Battle of Long Tan

 

 

Peter Fitzsimons

Sydney, NSW: Hachette, 2022

Hardback   512pp   RRP $49.99

 

Reviewer: Mike O’Brien, December 2022

 

This hyperbole-laced account of the Battle of Long Tan seeks to convey the atmosphere of the battle and that of the events that led to it. It succeeds at the level of a lurid comic strip. It is, as are many of the author’s ‘military histories’, an assemblage of the work of others joined together with evocative and scatological phraseology. Fitzsimons, ‘Australia’s greatest storyteller’ is gifted with the ability to read the unrecorded emotions of those long dead - or is he?

   Inaccuracies abound. Perhaps the worst is the assertion that Colonel Ted Serong led Australia’s counterinsurgency campaign in Burma!

There is a very good account of the battle in the Official History. Read this one if you must!

 

                                   

 

 

The RUSI – Vic Library thanks the publisher for making this work available for review.