Sir Hudson Fysh's Qantas at War is the story of this great Australian airline-and its pilots, its partners, and its rivals - during the dramatic and colourful years from 1934 to 1945: a period considerably enlivened by World War II. After Qantas and Imperial Airways had started Australia's first international service in 1934, the book's most romantic chapters deal with the flying-boat service to London in 1938. Sir Hudson Fysh writes with nostalgic affection of these spacious and leisurely aircraft, in which passengers could really see the world they were flying over or, when they needed relaxation, could play clock golf in mid air. But no sooner had the flying-boats got going than World War II broke out, and then wherever anything big happened in the Pacific - Singapore, Java, Darwin, Broome, New Guinea - Qantas was in the thick of it. The pilots' reports of the Darwin and Broome raids, which Sir Hudson quotes extensively, are most illuminating. The difficulties of Imperial Airways in London, the start of the TEAL trans-Tasman service and the service to Portuguese Timor, the re-establishment of the international service with Catalinas across the Indian Ocean, the hectic days of competition between the big airlines when the war ended and the modern era began @these are highly interesting reading, and they are history. Qantas at War is of course the successor to Sir Hudson Fysh's very successful Qantas Rising; but it is complete in itself as a record of those years from 1934 to 1945 when Qantas, one way or another, was "always at war".