Anzac Guerrillas

A World War II Story of Resistance, Hope and Humanity in Occupied Europe

By Edmund Goldrick

Published by Hachette
RRP $34.99 in paperback | ISBN 9780733652356

This is author Edmund Goldrick’s first solo venture into publishing, having collaborated with Neil Churches on The Greatest Escape, a groundbreaking account of the escape of Allied servicemen POWs from German-occupied Slovenia in 1944.

Leaving behind the misery and uncertainty of Depression-era Melbourne, Ronald Jones enlisted in the AIF with grand hopes of seeing the world.

Goldrick reconstructs his extraordinary story.

This one-time Melbourne storeman risked everything to infiltrate the leadership of a genocidal insurgent group in Yugoslavia.

Similarly, Tasmanian bank clerk William Reid protected Serbian farmers at Mount Kapaonik.

These are the stories told in Anzac Guerrillas— incredible true stories of how a handful of escaped Australian soldiers became resistance fighters, double agents and spies during World War II, evading the Nazis and exposing a group of genocidal collaborators.

When the Germans took thousands of Allied prisoners during the catastrophic Greek campaign of 1941, a handful of Australian soldiers escaped from prison trains in occupied Yugoslavia. What awaited them was not passage home, but a brutal underground war where the fate of a nation was at stake.

Yugoslav resistance against the Nazis was divided — royalist Cetniks battled communist Partisans while the Germans retaliated with terror.

The escaped Anzacs faced grave threats from all sides, and even as they came face-to-face with two of World War II’s most divisive figures – Josip Broz Tito and Draza Mihailovic – their sense of what was right never wavered.

The war would continue to haunt them, and their stories would remain untold, even to those closest to them – until now.