KEY POINTS:
The Australian nationalist has one important advantage over his Kiwi counterpart. Never in history has the New Zealand Army fought a major engagement outside this country without being accompanied by allied troops. A hard-won, unassisted victory eludes those whose greatest wish is to proclaim the fighting prowess of the average Kiwi bloke, and if we are lucky, it will continue to elude them.
The Kokoda campaign in Papua New Guinea, where outnumbered Australians held off Japanese marines and army troops trying to force a passage across central New Guinea to Port Moresby, won those bragging rights at an extremely high price. In what is apparently considered the definitive account of this battle, Peter Fitzsimons is admirably frank in his intent, which is to celebrate the excellent character of the ordinary men who found themselves charged with slowing down the Japanese advance along an inaccessable muddy foot track through fearsome mountainous terrain.
There is no pretence at being balanced here or telling the Japanese side of the story. It's unclear whether Fitzsimons thinks the Japanese perspective has been told better elsewhere, whether he thinks it's up to Japanese people to talk about the Japanese experience, or he just doesn't think it's important. For the most part, the Japanese soldiers are invisible in this narrative, presented only as a faceless natural force which exists largely to provide the Australian men a chance to demonstrate their fortitude when dealing with leeches, infected cuts and the other hazards of the jungle terrain.
In one memorable passage, the Australian mortaring of a Japanese funeral party is celebrated with a "got the bastards". Not that such an offensive is indefensible within the context of a war, but if an Australian funeral service had suffered the same sort of attack, there's no doubt that Fitzsimons would have related it with the same condemnatory ardour he uses when talking about Japanese executions of Australian prisoners.
Also conspicuous in their absence are the New Guinea natives. Fitzsimons has plenty to say about the fortitude and bravery of the "fuzzy wuzzy angels", the Papuans who did assist Australians as stretcher bearers and packhorses, but these represented only the locals who were forced, often at gunpoint, into the Australian army. The Japanese did this too, but the idea that the Australian army was just another rapacious imperial force seems unattractive to Fitzsimons. He mentions briefly that the vast majority of Papuans fled the battle zone and did their best to avoid getting conscripted. Not the actions of people who felt they had a lot to lose from Japanese rule.
Fitzsimons focuses largely on the individual soldiers, to his credit, and writes in language that sounds like it comes from the diggers himself, with plenty of slang. But if the words are authentic, the ideas they express are not.
There isn't a single character who comes off as anything other than a shallow blokeish-patriot straight out of a 1950s up-and-at-'em-lads war movie. This book aspires to tell a grand story about great men doing great things, but ends up just adding a splash of fresh paint to the official story as laid out in 1945.
Kokoda
By Peter Fitzsimons (Hachette Livre $60)
- Stevan Eldred-Grigg is a Wellington historian and writer.
