Best Australian war series

Beneath the placid facade of Canberra, amidst rising tension between China and America, senior political journalist Harriet Dunkley uncovers a secret city of interlocked conspiracies, putting innocent lives in danger including her own.

The story of Dorrigo Evans, an army surgeon whose short but forbidden affair with his uncle's wife sustains and haunts him through his darkest days in a Thai-Burmese prisoner of war camp in WWII.

As dawn breaks on April 25, 1915, ANZAC troops go into battle on the beaches of the Gallipoli peninsula. Landing in the dark chaos, Tolly, Bevan and their mates struggle to establish a tenuous foothold on the treacherous slopes and deep ravines. They endure the next eight months on the peninsula learning lessons of survival. By the time of the final evacuation they have also learned the skills of combat and what it means to be a young man in war.

The unique, and rarely told true stories of Australian and New Zealand nurses serving at Gallipoli and the Western Front during the First World War.

Three journalists, Charles Bean, Ellis Ashmead Bartlett and Phillip Schuler, arrive at Gallipoli with the invading British and Allied troops in 1915. They will report the war but are prevented from getting out the true story of an unfolding disaster. From encampment in Cairo to Anzac Cove to the evacuation, this is the story of journalists who will not accept that truth be the first casualty. This is the story of the men who will not shut up. The actions of these men will help change the course of the campaign, ensure that a strategic disaster becomes a legend of human heroism, and leave an impregnable mark on each of their lives.

The decline of Hitler’s empire from the inside out by exploring the decline of the Nazis through the perspective of Hitler's bumbling generals and a paranoid Fuhrer.

It's a little-known part of World War II history: in the Allied secret services, one in ten spies was a woman. A look back at the journeys of these women of exemplary bravery, who, risking their lives, played a decisive role in supporting the Resistance.

Based on real-life experiences, Tenko remains one of the most fondly remembered and acclaimed BBC dramas of the early 1980s. It follows a group of women, formerly comfortably well-off ex-pats living in Singapore, as they are captured by the Japanese during World War II.

There are more than ten thousand monuments across the country that honour the war dead . But what of the bloody battles fought on our home soil, in our longest-running war that established the Australian nation?

Rise and Fall: The Turning Points of World War II is a 50 minute documentary-history-war in six episodes.

A comprehensive cast of the main players provides an enthralling account of one of the most turbulent periods of Australian political history. For the first time, Kevin Rudd gives his full account of the period and relives in vivid detail the events of losing the Prime Ministership. Julia Gillard is forthright with her recollections and analysis and doesn't spare her colleagues.

The Nazi era from 1993 to 1945 is illustrated through archived material, with insights and anecdotes provided by world-leading experts and commentators.

Power, terror, performance. These notions define our perception of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party at the height of the Third Reich. But behind these impressions Hitler was a rather ordinary man. This compelling new series tells the story of one of the most comprehensive, wide-reaching, and successful marketing campaigns in modern history. It describes in a whole new way the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Our Vietnam War tells the story of Australia's involvement in the words of the men who were sent to fight; the battles, the protests, returning and the long shadow the war cast on the people whose lives were turned upside down.

Six young Australians go to war, full of confidence and bravado. They land in Singapore in 1942, just in time for surrender. With 15,000 others, they are marched off to Changi prison camp. Together, the six boys survive three and a half years of incarceration. Almost sixty years later, the six prepare to get together for what may be their last hurrah.

A Total War is all encompassing, a war without boundary or limitation. It is a war of material and morale. A war that mobilizes, destroys and displaces civilian populations. The Second World War was a war in which massive armies advanced, confronting whole populations with impossible choices. The manufacture of weapons transformed industry and the workforce; area bombing campaigns reduced cities to rubble; sieges doomed populations to starvation; racial policies sponsored campaigns of genocide. Told through archive footage and expert interviews, we learn how WWII shattered the boundaries between home-front and battlefield.

An exploration of the tumultuous life of King Herod the Great, as well as the rise and fall of the kingdom of Judea under the Roman Empire, through the words of Titus Flavius Josephus, a Romanized Jewish historian.

The Goddard family is about to be torn apart by the arrival of Australian conscription during the Vietnam War.

This ground-breaking series examines the lives of the leading Nazis, in an effort to answer the question, why did it happen? It explores and tries to understand the incredible transformation of educated men into Nazi criminals, by charting the lives of six people who over the course of 20 years descend into moral oblivion.

Bastard Boys is an Australian television miniseries broadcast on the ABC in 2007. It tells the story of the 1998 Australian waterfront dispute. The script, published by Currency Press, won the 2007 Queensland Premier's Literary Award for Best Television Script.

Heroes II: the Return is a 1991 Australian mini-series about Operation Rimau during World War II. The true and tragic story of Operation Rimau, one of the most daring raids of WW2. In September 1944 Ivan Lyon and 22 Australian and British troops attempted to blow up Japanese ships in Singapore. Just 10 miles away from the target they are discovered and so begin a long and desperate bid to escape to Australia. The series shows how after the war it is revealled that 13 men were killed during the pursuit and that the remaining 10 were murdered by the Japanese in a war crime. Tragically this was covered up and their killers were never charged while the men themselves never received any honours for their heroism.

An original and dramatic series that views the most violent and significant episodes in modern history from a fresh perspective – not as two world wars, but as a continuous narrative of error, ambition, revolution and courage. An expert re-examination of history forms links and conclusions that tie the entire war period together and, with the benefit of hindsight, pieces together how the world went and stayed at war for so much of the 20th century.

Set against the brutal chaos of World War II, a love story begins that will take two lovers through a living nightmare of captivity, across three continents and two decades.

Anzacs was a 1985 5-part Australian miniseries set in World War I. The series follows the lives of a group of young Australian men who enlist in the 8th Battalion of the First Australian Imperial Force in 1914, fighting first at Gallipoli in 1915, and then on the Western Front for the remainder of the war.

A documentary series which covers the major wars and conflicts in which Australia has participated this century, and which explores how the Australian experience of war has contributed to the development of the Nation.

Insiders analyses and discusses Australian politics with the use of a panel of political journalists and columnists and interviews with prominent politicians and commentators. Broadcast on ABC1 on Sunday mornings at 9 am, the show also features many regular commentators from various Australian media outlets and think tanks. The program is presented by veteran political journalist Barrie Cassidy as part of the ABC's Sunday morning line-up, commencing with Insiders, followed by Inside Business and then Offsiders, a sports program also hosted by Cassidy.

Based on the life of Emma Eliza Coe, known as the "Queen of the South Seas", whose strength and cunning staved off the colonial struggle involving the United States, Great Britain, and Germany while she built her own empire. Emma’s father, the first consul in Samoa, taught his daughter at an early age the bitter truth about the fickleness of men.

In Their Footsteps is a ten-part documentary depicting Australian families and war. The first episode aired in Australia on 8 May 2011 on the Nine Network. In each episode an Australian will retrace the steps of a close ancestor’s wartime experience.

The Howard Years was a documentary series about the prime ministership of John Howard produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It was divided into four one-hour episodes - one episode for each term Howard served as Prime Minister of Australia - and originally broadcast on ABC1 from 17 November to 8 December 2008.

This sweeping World War II series examines the outcome of battles fought in every major theater. It shows that these battles were decided by strategy and by which armies could capitalize on the terrain or gain better access to supplies. Whether waged by the Allies or by Hitler and the Axis powers, victory or defeat could determine possession of territory, resources, or the will to go on fighting.

The True Believers is a 1988 Australian mini series which looks at the history of the Australian Labor Party from the end of World War Two up to the Australian Labor Party split of 1955. It was co-written by Bob Ellis who focused on three characters "Chifley, the unlettered man of great dignity; Menzies, who used to stand for something but eventually stood only for Menzies; and Evatt, the grand idealist... It's almost like Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1. It's a chunk of national history during Australia's great era of change after the war."

1915 is a 1982 Australian mini series about two friends who wind up serving in World War One.

Capturing the spirit of the age and the turmoil of the times, Sword of Honour tells the heartbreaking story of a nation at war, the soldiers who left their families to fight, the social upheaval and the emotionally perilous journey back home. At 21, Tony Lawrence (Logie winner Andrew Clarke, ANZACs) won the Military College's Sword of Honour. At 22 he was fighting in the Vietnam War with his best friend and Brother in Law, Frank Vittorio (Alan Fletcher, Neighbours), just as the conflict began to escalate. The horrors and carnage of the war leave an indellible impression on the two young men - ripping them apart from their families, girlfriends and country. Back home after the devastation of the battlefields, both men try to cope with life in their own way. Sword of Honour is a gripping 6 hour 4-part miniseries that will take you back to a time and conflict that created heroes and divided a nation.

The story of Australia and the First World War is revealed through the lives of six Australians. Brought to life through personal testimony, dramatic reconstruction, expert analysis, location filming and colourised archive.

In 1964 in Laos, young Tim Page discovers his vocation as a photo journalist and is given a job, a camera, and a trip to Vietnam. There, he learns the ropes, learns about the war first in Saigon, and then in country on patrol with troops. He and his colleagues, including the sons of Errol Flynn and John Steinbeck, capture the war in pictures, recover from their wounds, swap stories, battle censorship, and support each other between the explosions at the brothel run by Tranh Ki: Frankie's House.

The Alien Years is a three-part miniseries that first aired on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on 19 April 1988. It was directed by Donald Crombie and written by Peter Yeldham. It stars Victoria Longley, John Hargreaves and Academy Award-winner, Christoph Waltz. Yeldham later adapted his screenplay into a novel of the same name.

Jungle Warfare in the 20th century, from WW2, to Malaya and Indonesia, to Vietnam and Cuba.

Through graphics, archive, oral history and travels across the scenes of past battles, Neil Pigot and Dr Peter Pedersen explain where, why and how the ANZACs fought in France and Belgium almost 100 years ago.