In the 1962 edition of Australia in the War of 1939-45, Dudley McCarthy describes his account as “the story of small groups of men, infinitesimally small against the mountains in which they fought, who killed one another in stealthy and isolated encounters beside the tracks which were life to all of them; of warfare in which men first conquered the country and then allied themselves with it and then killed or died in the midst of a great loneliness.”

The jungle warfare in New Guinea and throughout the Pacific tested troops and their support apparatus to the very limits of endurance. Often the test proved too difficult. Once hardened by experience, those fighting men who lived and died in the jungle, eventually became masters of their surroundings, with the strength and skill required to dominate and defeat their opponents. The jungle changed those who fought within its depths fundamentally.

Survival in the jungle requires stamina, prudence, and imagination to compensate for the discomfort, disorientation, and isolation the jungle imposes on all who venture within. The jungle is a primaeval world in which sound and light, heat and damp collide, corrode and corrupt, until all that is left is sensation, fear, uncertainty, and McCarthy’s ‘great loneliness’.

Against the Rising Sun is the first novel by Steven Sharman, born of a twin passion for history and fiction, dedicated to courage under fire.