I was really pleased to be able to pick this book up. It is one of the classic first person accounts of the early early war in New Guinea.
Osmar White was born in New Zealand in 1909, and worked in Sydney in the late 1920s before moving to South East Asia and China, where he wrote features and short stories for Australian and American papers. Around 1934 he returned to New Zealand, and then joined the Melbourne Sun News-Pictorial in 1937. He enlisted in the AIF in 1941, but was ‘manpowered’ out by Sir Keith Murdoch who said ‘Oh we don’t want you rushing around with a pack on your back, you’ll fight the war with your pen, dear boy’.
Arriving in Port Moresby in June 1942, White set off with Damien Parer on an epic journey up the Bulldog Track to report and photograph Kanga Force, 2/5th commandos fighting the Japanese around Salamaua and Wau, near Lae. This trek was the basis of White’s great book of the New Guinea war, Green Armour.
With Parer and Chester Wilmot, White reported on the Kokoda Track in August, and was badly wounded while on an American ship bombed by the Japanese in the Solomons later in that year.
While recovering in Melbourne, he wrote Green Armour.
“Journalist Osmar White’s gripping story of the Australian and American forces’ struggle against the Japanese invasion of New Guinea in 1942-43 is stark, vivid, chilling. White is true to his sources – four ‘dog-eared notebooks’ and his original newspaper dispatches – but it is his sharp recollection of the terrible battles and the courage and endurance of his friends, etched forever on his memory, that makes Green Armour truly unforgettable. White is a first-class writer, with an extraordinary story to tell.” from the publisher.
Excellent first person account by an Australian war Correspondent of the fighting on the Kokoda Trail and later, with the American Army, on New Georgia. He highlights the lack of preparedness of the Australian forces deployed to New Guinea to blunt the Japanese in the early days of 1942.