January 23, 1942, New Britain. It was 2:30 a.m., the darkest hour of the day and, for the defenders of this Southwest Pacific island, soon to be the war's darkest hour. Fifteen hundred men and six nurses, Lark Force, had been deployed to New Britain to fortify and defend Rabaul, capital of Australia's mandated territories. Once they'd completed their work on the strategic port and its two airfields, the group-mostly volunteers from Victoria-had settled into the routine of garrison duties, confident of being relieved within a year. But the Japanese had other ideas. Rabaul was the linchpin of their campaign to conquer the Southwest Pacific—and in the early hours of January 23 their invasion force swarmed ashore. What ensued is the story told in The Darkest Hour, a gut-wrenching account of courage and sacrifice, folly and disaster, as seen through the eyes of the few who survived. Bruce Gamble, the critically acclaimed author of Black Sheep One, follows key individuals—soldiers and junior officers, an American citizen and an Army nurse among them—through their experiences in Lark Force. Together their stories comprise a harrowing picture of the Australian forces overrun and driven into the jungle, prey to the unforgiving environment and a cruel enemy that massacred its prisoners—and tormented further by fate, when a Japanese ship transporting prisoners to Hainan Island was torpedoed by an American submarine. The dramatic stories of the Lark Force survivors, told here in full for the first time, are among the most inspiring of the Pacific War.
A native of central Pennsylvania, Bruce Gamble is an award-winning author and historian specializing in highly readable narratives about World War II in the Pacific.
During his career as a Naval Flight Officer in the closing years of the Cold War, Bruce logged nearly 1,000 hours as a navigator in EA-3B Skywarriors, including deployments aboard aircraft carriers in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. While serving as a flight instructor in 1988, he was diagnosed with a malignant spinal cord tumor. He underwent a complicated surgery and was medically retired from the Navy the following year.
Starting over as a wheelchair user, Bruce began volunteering at the National Naval Aviation Museum and eventually worked part-time as the staff historian for the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. Over the next several years he collected oral history interviews and wrote numerous articles for Foundation magazine. Bruce then made the leap to freelance writing and published his first book, The Black Sheep, in 1998.
With a total of four titles now in print, Bruce is gaining recognition as one of the top authors on the air war in the Pacific. His narrative style and use of human-interest vignettes have earned critical acclaim in publications such as Publishers Weekly and Booklist. In addition to writing, Bruce does a substantial amount of public speaking. He is also the featured historian in documentaries produced by the History Channel, Fox News Channel, PBS, and the Pritzker Military Library.
Bruce earned two literary awards in 2010: the Admiral Arthur W. Radford award for excellence in naval aviation history and literature, presented by the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation, and a Gold Medal in the history category from the Military Writers Society of America.
Bruce is a member of the Authors Guild and holds life memberships in the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation and Paralyzed Veterans of America. Cancer-free for more than twenty years, he lives near Panama City, Florida.
