SIR: It was good to read Peter Ryan (March 2008), in response to Max Hastings’ Nemesis. Like Ryan I found the chapter on the Australians incomprehensible. Hastings was able to deal fairly with the Japanese! There was for someone with my background an added irony, that while proclaiming 1944-45 as the “most inglorious of Australia’s history as a fighting nation”, Hastings could not even put Rabaul in his Brief Chronology at the end of Nemesis. The first mention of the Japanese invasion of New Guinea is February 3, 1942, under the heading “Japanese bombers attack Port Moresby, New Guinea” (sic:…