Cold War: Australia in Korea, Malaya and Vietnam

The Cold War was a battle for hearts and minds, between free market capitalism and Communism, a confrontation between the two post-World War II superpowers: the USA and the Soviet Union.

This is the story of how Australia, in a frantic search for defence security, threw in its lot with the United States in Korea and Vietnam and with the British in Malaya. It tells of the paranoid, but totally unfounded, fear of Communist China sweeping south to conquer a defenceless Australia.

Successive Australian conservative governments sent?Australian soldiers, sailors and airmen to anti-Communist conflicts that mostly ended is stalemate or humiliating defeat.

Read how the Menzies government split the nation by establishing an unfair and unnecessary National Service scheme that took hundreds of young Australians to their deaths in the jungles of Vietnam, in an unsuccessful bid to gain favour with a powerful ally.

The Cold War was a time of great tension, suspicion and division. It was also a time when the world, and especially Australia, were forever changed, when trust gave way to cynicism.