Stealth Raiders

In 1918 a few daring low-ranking Australian infantrymen, alone among all the armies on the Western Front, initiated stealth raids without orders. These stealth raiders killed Germans, captured prisoners and advanced the line, sometimes by thousands of yards. They were held in high regard by other men of the lower ranks and were feared by the Germans facing them.

Who were these stealth raiders and why did they do it? What made Australian soldiers take on this independent and personal type of warfare? Using their firsthand accounts, as well as official archives and private records, Lucas Jordan pieces their stories together.

A gripping account of the crucial summer on the Western Front, Stealth Raiders- A Few Daring Men in 1918 considers the stealth raiders' war experience and training, the unprecedented conditions at the front and the morale of the German Army in 1918. Lucas Jordan argues that bush skills, and the bush ethos central to Australian civil society - with its emphasis on resourcefulness and initiative - made stealth raids a distinctively Australian phenomenon.

About the Author

Lucas Jordan grew up in Burekup in Western Australia and studied his Bachelor of Arts at the University of Western Australia, majoring in history and political science.

Lucas completed a Bachelor of Education at the University of Queensland followed by a Masters in Aboriginal Studies at the University of Notre Dame. This led to more than a decade of teaching and research in the Kimberley, Cape York and central Australia, and ingrained in him a deep respect for the Australian bush and its people. Lucas worked for Amnesty International as a researcher and fieldworker and co-wrote Amnesty’s global report '"The land holds us": Aboriginal peoples' right to their traditional homelands in the Northern Territory', which was based on three years of collaboration and camping with the Alyawarr and Anmatyerr people of the Northern Territory.

Lucas has taught history to undergraduate students at Deakin and Monash universities. He is currently a history teacher at Western English Language School, a secondary school for new arrivals and refugees in Melbourne. Stealth Raiders is his first book and is adapted from his PhD thesis, supervised by award-winning historians Professor Bill Gammage (ANU) and Dr Peter Stanley (UNSW).

Lucas lives in Lara, Victoria, with his wife and two sons and enjoys surfing, fossicking around the coast and the bush with his sons, and reading, writing and teaching Australian history.