The Bush Soldiers

Though I say that this is a strange story, I was fascinated by it. During WWII, Japanese forces invade Australia and occupy its cities on the east coast, putting residents into forced labor. Geoffrey Sawtell, a soldier in the Australian Defense Corps, is assigned to destroy anything that the Japanese might use to fortify their positions in Australia. With four other men, he travels through bleak and deserted towns spread far and wide across the bush, destroying water tanks, buildings, livestock, etc., so the Japanese cannot use them. After destroying a Japanese-held mine, the bush soldiers flee across the vast and deadly desert, fearful of Japanese retaliation. However, the Japanese don't seem to be much of a threat, but these gritty and hardened men are in a constant struggle with surviving in this harsh wilderness. Throughout the book there is a continual mood of impending doom and a grim atmosphere fostered by the description of the bleak and deadly desert and its abandoned, destroyed towns. I kept wondering why I had never heard of a Japanese invasion of Australia, but this is obviously a fiction based on altered history. Humorless and grim though the story is, I was hooked on plodding through this scorching desert with these men to find out what happened to them in the end...and the end was not a pretty picture. This book was very different, but I'll never forget the mood it created and the vision of the deadly Australian wasteland.