Author talk with Jimmy Thomson - The First ANZACS - Batemans Bay Library

About

Official historian Charles Bean claimed the first Australian ashore at the Gallipoli landing on 25 April 1915 was an infantry officer. But Bean wasn't there, and a bunch of Australian and New Zealand army engineers were. Even today, the army is reluctant to accept that sappers were among the very first ANZACs ashore.

This is the untold story of World War I Australian and New Zealand sappers-combat engineers-with extracts from their diaries. They were always in the vanguard, clearing defences, and building bridges, roads and walkways, usually under fire, for the troops who followed. At Gallipoli, strafed by machine guns and targeted by snipers, they dug trenches and tunnels to advance on the Turkish defences. On the Western Front, they burrowed under the German lines to plant massive explosives. In Egypt they demolished a Turkish railway in a day.

Jimmy Thomson has co-written three books about Australian sappers (with Colonel Sandy MacGregor): Tunnel Rats, A Sappers' War and Tunnel Rats versus the Taliban. A journalist for more than forty-five years, he has written true crime, sports biographies and military history. He writes crime fiction under the pen name James Dunbar and lives in Kings Cross, Sydney, with his wife and their cats.

Come along to this fascinating and informative talk about the ‘extraordinary saga of the Australian army engineer of World War One, the story of those who make and break, everywhere.' Phillip Bradley, author of Inferno