Australia, Britain, Indonesia, Malaya, The pacific, indo-China, Korea, China and Japan.
This is the story of some of the most tumultuous years and events of our century, bringing history to life by relating times with kings, generals, foot-soldiers and villagers.
Rejected for military service overseas, Lachie McDonald accepted a publicity position at the Royal Australian Air Force headquarters in Melbourne. This led him to more wars and rebellions than experienced by most soldiers. From 1942 he worked for three years on the subeditors table at the London office of Australian Associated Press, and did the rounds of the airfields from which RAAF and RNZAF aircrews were mounting almost nightly bomber attacks on targets in Hitler's Europe.
In 1944 he reported on the war in the Pacific, seeing American and Australian troops in action during some of the war's last battles, where he joined a fire-bombing raid over Tokyo. Post-war, he has served as a correspondent on the Allied occupation of Japan, the civil war in China, the Korean War and the troubled end of colonialism in Malaya, the Dutch East-Indies and French Indo-China.
Against this broad sweep of history, McDonald provides anecdotes, both amusing and poignant, concerning the personalities at the centre of events and the extraordinary people who reported on them. This is a record of journalism during an era when the newspaper was still king, before television and satellites would forever change the nature of both newsgathering and presentation.
