More than twenty years after the guns fell silent on the Western Front in November 1918, war again broke out on a global scale. This war, the Second World War, proved to be the deadliest in human history. Close to 40,000 Australians lost their lives, and with the bombing of Darwin in February 1942, the Australian mainland came under attack for the first time.

On 1 September 1939, Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland set the Second World War into motion. Two days later, Australian Prime Minister Robert Gordon Menzies followed Britain’s lead and declared that Australia was at war with Germany.

Almost one million Australians served in the Second World War, joining the war effort primarily in the Mediterranean and the Middle East in 1940 and 1941, and increasingly in the Pacific after Japan entered the war in December 1941. Women served as well, with women’s branches of the Army, Navy and Air Force established in 1941.

By the time the war came to an end in September 1945, close to 40,000 Australians had lost their lives in the course of their service.

In honour of the courageous Australians who served in the Second World War, the Royal Australian Mint presents these coins. The coins features a wreath of red poppies – an enduring symbol of remembrance in Australia and other Commonwealth nations. Surrounded by sculpted leaves, the eight poppies in the wreath represent the eight decades that have passed since the most devastating war in human history.