John Thomson: Warrior Nation

Hazard Press

$49.95

Review: Jack Leigh*

The wars of the last century are supposed to have annealed our nationhood, anointed our heroes and established us in history as fighters of the first order.

Yet our blood sacrifice of 100,000 dead and wounded out of 235,000 men was made far from our own shores and for a global good. Slow to fly the imperial nest, we did not ratify our own sovereignty until 1947 and the search for a national identity is not over yet.

War set the cornerstones - of confidence in our territorial security and the men who will defend it. And what of those who survived the crucible of battle to become kindly grandfathers? Are they haunted by thoughts of shellfire and bayonet? They don't say. We seldom ask.

John Thomson's admirable book, while touching on the wider points, is mainly a record of field operations and a tribute to those who served. He takes a journalistic approach, pulling in essential details from reference material, then joining up the dots in what he calls "one person's one-volume report" on a century of New Zealand at war, neatly sealed by the millennium.

More than 360 pages of desperate events are not to be taken in one gulp, and the chessboard manoeuvres in battle after battle are relieved by tales of great heroism - the extraordinary deeds of ordinary fellows who see what is needed and do it, or die trying.

The book is a human story, though Thomson never lets emotional interest cloud the big picture - which ranges from the Boer War of 1899-1902 to East Timor, where he says our involvement reflects "the maturing of a warrior nation from ... servant to respected principal." The narrative closes with the death there in July this year of Private L. M. Manning.

The land campaigns of the two world wars occupy most of the book and there are separate chapters on the Air Force, the Navy, Asian conflicts and peacekeeping campaigns.

In all, it is a conventional history drawn from conventional sources. Formalities are observed and legends maintained. Words like Gallipoli, Passchendaele, Crete, El Alamein and Cassino come up like new, as do heroism and sacrifice.

The writing, which is clear and careful, cannot quite efface the monotony of war-torn landscapes, but it does give confidence that the events were as depicted. There is also a sense of war as a thoughtful activity, a sense of men at work, of the Army as a sentient organism with its tentacles retracting and probing.

Among many fascinating sidelights are how the secrecy of the Allies' Ultra code-busting device hindered its usefulness in Crete; how New Zealander Clive Collett made the Royal Flying Corps' first parachute jump in 1917; why a German captain in 1943 recommended the VC for pilot Lloyd Trigg who died sinking his U-boat; how Kiwi-born Patrick Shanahan, a crewman in the US Great White Fleet which visited Auckland in 1908, went on to become an American rear-admiral.

Worthy though it is, this book's very existence raises the question of why another should be written on a subject it says is already "richly reported." It lists its own sources by the score, and says there are 50 volumes of official history on the Second World War alone.

Clearly there is scope for single-volume treatment to plug what the publisher's blurb calls "a yawning gap" in popular histories. This book will aid access to the facts, and reduce the yawning.

* Jack Leigh is an Auckland journalist.