Written in an era when the battles of Kokoda were still fresh in people’s minds, Retreat from Kokoda is one of the early books about the campaign.

When Raymond Paull’s Retreat from Kokoda had been published in 1958, the Chief Justice of Victoria, Sir Edmund Herring, (who had been in the Kokoda campaign as a corps commander) organised a letter to The Age to discredit the book. As a result, as recently as the 1980s, apart from battalion histories there was only Retreat from Kokoda and Dudley McCarthy’s volume of the Official History available.

“Journalist Raymond Paull