This book is a companion to my earlier works At the Front Line and Fighting the Enemy. It concerns the way Australian soldiers, and particularly members of combat units, interacted with two categories of people. One category includes the local people they met in the Middle East and on the way there. The other comprises the allies alongside whom they fought in the Middle East. The evidence from which the book's conclusions are drawn comes mainly from the soldiers themselves, especially in their letters and diaries. In the discussion of allies, the emphasis here is not on relations between politicians and senior commanders, for these have been well covered in other works, particularly by Professor David Horner. Inevitably there is discussion of the broader picture of how, for example, Australians came to be fighting alongside New Zealanders and British troops in Greece, but the focus is how the two interacted in that country, especially at the ‘sharp end’.

Most of the conclusions of this book might not surprise many readers, but on the way to reaching them most will get to know much better how Australian soldiers thought and fought alongside their allies and how they interpreted the Arabs, Jews, Greeks and others with whom they came into contact. Australians generally used the word ‘natives’ for the locals, and I use it interchangeably here if the soldiers did. This does not imply that I judge the people concerned as worse, or better, than any other. Nor do I judge those Australians whose comments on other nationalities I have quoted here and which today appear racist. Nearly all of the writers are dead now, and would in many cases undoubtedly have later renounced or modified those views.