Richard Begg & Dr Peter Liddle (eds.): For a shilling a day: Anzacs & Allies fighting in WW II

A new oral-history book covers the Second World War from the perspective of New Zealanders who fought
in and survived the conflict, writes MARGIE THOMSON.

It was about three days out [from Reykjavik, heading for Russia as part of an Allied plan to get the merchant marine to sail independently through German lines] that we were torpedoed - this was 2 November 1942.

"My station was the port-side Oerlikon, and when we were hit I finished up at the foot of the starboard lifeboat davit and I didn't know very much about how I got there or anything ... I got to my feet and tried to cut the lifeboat free, but the ship was going so fast that I was awash before I could do anything and the ship just went down - it completely disappeared within a very, very short space of time. It couldn't have been any more than three minutes, well two minutes, and there was nothing to be seen ... It was just so sudden and then, after it was all over, it was a most weird, weird feeling, because suddenly about me there was nothing there, and you were just on your own with people all around just sort of hollering out at each other and trying to make contact.

"It didn't seem very long after that that I spotted this shape and it was the submarine that had sunk us, coming towards us, and we were screaming out for help ... and they steamed up alongside us and I felt myself being dragged over the side on to the submarine, and after that I just didn't remember very much more."

The teller of this story, Ralph Urwin, who was only 17 at the time he was miraculously rescued from that freezing water, is one of 54 voices included in a new oral-history book, For Five Shillings a Day: Anzacs and Allies Fighting in the Second World War (HarperCollins, $34.95). It is a remarkable joint project by a New Zealand veteran, retired Nelson doctor and former Royal Navy lieutenant, Richard Campbell Begg, and British historian Dr Peter Liddle, director of the Second World War Experience Centre in the city of Leeds.

Fifty-one of the contributors are New Zealanders, some of the lucky ones such as Ralph Urwin, who made it back from the war to work as an engineer in Wellington and on the West Coast before retiring to Nelson and dying an old man in 1999.

Their stories have been collected by Begg since 1994, when he got roped in by Liddle and asked to interview an 81-year-old veteran living "down your way" at Waimate. It went so well that Begg was soon following up, by word of mouth, on further names, and by the time he had taped 50, he knew he was on to something of tremendous value, both to historians and the public. Thus was the idea for the book born, enthusiastically taken up by Liddle, and keenly embraced by the publisher at a London lunch.

In 1993 Begg had responded to a newspaper appeal by Liddle who was anxious to record the reminiscences of as many ex-servicemen from the British and Commonwealth forces as he could.

Begg, recently retired, had just spent a year writing his own memoir, and also possessed the letters he had written to his mother while he was at war.

He travelled to Leeds, donated his papers and was himself duly taped, forming a friendship with Liddle in the process.

To date, Begg has taped more than 70 ex-servicemen for the Leeds centre, and the timeliness of the project is underlined by the fact that by the time the book went to press five of the contributors had died.

Some of these men were in their 90s by the time they got the chance to have their stories preserved for posterity, and Begg notes that, for some, it was the first time they had spoken of their experiences.

Nevertheless, the stories came tumbling out in great detail, often very emotionally and always as freshly and spontaneously as if it was only yesterday that these then young and often dashing men had dug trenches for their guns, watched as battleships exploded into flame, withstood the terror of being under fire or, in one humorous episode recounted by William Seeney, broken ranks while marching through France in order to pick blackberries from the side of the road.

Some of these veterans may have swapped stories over a beer at the RSA, but mostly, once back from the war, other things took precedence: working, supporting families. Their silence was as much because no one asked them for their stories - or at any rate, no one who was prepared to sit there for several hours and really listen - as because of that famous reticence in the New Zealand male character.

The book's structure gives a shape to the war that many younger readers will not have seen before, and it is one of Begg's achievements that he has managed to construct an overall history of the war almost solely through the eyes of New Zealanders across all ranks and services.

Begg and Liddle have treated their subject as chronologically as possible, dividing the book into chapters covering the theatres of conflict, and providing brief background details of particular campaigns or operations.

Begg's is one of the voices within the book, and he tells in particular of his time in the East Indies, or cycling around Singapore after the Japanese surrender, and later watching Lord Louis Mountbatten at the Surrender Ceremony.

A career Navy man, Begg spent a year at Dartmouth Naval College before joining first the Home, then the East Indies Fleet. He resigned his commission after the war and turned instead to medicine, returning to his native New Zealand and eventually becoming Director of Health Promotion in the Department of Health. The war did not preoccupy his life until after he retired and decided to start writing his memoir.

Like most of those who have been involved in it, he describes war in general as "a dreadful business ... a horrible way of showing you've failed in trying to get people to understand each other."