Fighting for our freedom

Book cover of The Last of the Human Freedoms. Photo / Supplied

Anyone looking at New Zealand's military participation in the 20th century would see us as a bellicose little nation. For decades, we eagerly went where Britain (and later the US) went. In between making war, we've written about it, often very well. I'll mention Guthrie Wilson's Brave Company; Michael King's majestic New Zealanders at War; recent histories by Glyn Harper and Chris Pugsley; Jim Henderson's inimitable memoirs; John A. Lee; Dan Davin; Archibald Baxter's astonishing memoirs of a conscientious objector, We Will Not Cease. Apologies to numerous others.

Among many, many other things, war is a time when politicians rise like swamp bubbles (to rephrase A.R.D. Fairburn); when freedoms are eroded in the name of freedom.

And it's a time when language is often debased. Not in these five books of New Zealanders and wars, however: each possesses an honesty of narrative which eschews jingoism and propaganda.

Victoria University lecturer Keren Chiaroni's Human Freedoms began after hearing of the family in a little village east of Paris who rescued a young Christchurch pilot, John Sanderson, shot down after a botched raid in 1944. Yvette and Emil Patris sheltered the injured pilot until a local doctor betrayed him to the Gestapo. The repercussions for the Patris family were appalling.

This story leads to the narratives of other New Zealand air crew saved by French people: the "amusing, even charming" account of Raymond Glensor, with his Boy's Own Paper descriptions; the pilot covered with wheat sheaves to hide him from searching Germans; Resistance fighter Madeleine Riffaud, who killed her first enemy at the age of 15.

Chiaroni's dissertations on semantics, memory and moral integrity don't always sit lightly, but their relevance to ethical choices then and now is undeniable. Her writing is lucid and often dramatic; her respect for ordinary people moved to commit extraordinary acts strengthens the story.

Also from HarperCollins comes Day After Day, the rather predictably titled companion to Max Lambert's Night After Night, his history of New Zealanders on World War II bombing missions. This time he looks at the young (teenage, sometimes) Kiwis who flew fighter planes in the Battle of Britain, and who then struck deeper into Europe as the Allies advanced.

The first Kiwi pilot to die in the war; Cobber Kain and his unnecessary death; V1 and V2 attacks; the downed airman jumped by an over-zealous English farmhand: Lambert writes with clarity and authority about them all. He's committed to his topic; readers also need to be on occasions, as detail follows detail.

Day After Day draws judiciously on diaries and combat reports to provide a good balance of individual encounters and grand strategies. It doesn't deny the dubious contemporary equation of killing people with a jolly sporting occasion. Comprehensive, careful, and deepened by the pathos of so much human potential destroyed.

Women have - of course - been part of the heroics and hard work of aviation almost since its inception. Pam Collings has expanded and updated Shirley Laine's 1989 history of New Zealand women flyers, from an 1892 hot air balloonist at Invercargill to the engineers, pilots, air traffic controllers, wing-walkers and free-fall parachutists of the 21st century.

It's a list of names at times, but a meticulous list. Yes, Jean Batten is here, with an absorbing chapter to herself. So are Muriel Dutton, our first topdressing pilot; Briar Smith, who had to sit on three cushions to reach the controls; Air New Zealand's first women pilots and their wardrobes; women of the RNZAF.

This is a labour of devotion and application, with a great selection of archival and evocative photos. It may sit on the margins of a war books review, but it emphatically deserves its seat.

Wellington's Ngaio Press has built an impressive list of titles focusing on New Zealand history, and the story of World War II volunteer Bruce Robertson, infantryman and POW, makes an admirable addition.

Private - later Lieutenant Robertson - fought in the ferocious battles of the Western Desert, was captured at El Alamein, and spent 33 months in captivity, until liberated by advancing Americans. ("Negro Battalion took Mossburg. Disarmed SS and beat them up. Road littered with SS dead.")

Much of Duration is based on his diary entries. They're vivid, laconic descriptions of cold, madrigal groups, constant hunger, ingenious escapes, accountancy studies, camp concerts, the benison of mail and Red Cross parcels, the dangers from Allied bombing. Edited by Robertson's daughter Rosanne, they form a comprehensive, compelling account of personal endurance.

Next month is the 70th Anniversary of the Battle for Crete. David Filer marks it with his handsomely presented narrative of the disastrous campaign in Greece, the withdrawal by Allied forces to the island, the astonishing invasion by German paratroopers, and the even more astonishing withdrawal across Crete's mountainous spine and evacuation by the Royal Navy.

Thousands didn't escape, and Filer's inevitably controversial interpretation of events is that blunders by local commanders, including New Zealand's almost legendary Major General Freyberg, were a significant factor in the defeat.

It's a view based on careful analysis, from pre-war politics to post-battle recriminations. It blends overview with graphic incident, and German with Allied viewpoints. It never forgets the parts played by individuals.

That's a motif common to all five books. Thomas Hardy noted provocatively that "War makes rattling good reading". Whatever your feelings on the subject matter, you have to commend these differing but diligent treatments of it.

David Hill is a Taranaki writer.