War chronicles that speak volumes

My dad did not go to the war. It was because of flat feet or something. He was made to stay home and serve in an RNZAF store somewhere in the lower North Island, probably packing parachutes. I have a photograph of him in a uniform that looks borrowed. We stayed in a cottage outside Levin. That is all I can remember. Hardly the stuff of war stories.

A far better source to turn to is Martyn Thompson. His father did not go to the war either, but an uncle on his mother's side, Private Owen Gatman, served with the 22 Battalion of the Second New Zealand Espeditionary Force and died of wounds in Libya in November 1941. He lies in an unknown grave. As a child, Thompson was told "the Panzas got him" and he envisaged his uncle being run over by a very large and very nasty tank. All the while Thompson's mother had been hoarding her brother's letters from the desert, a collection that eventually provided the material for Thompson's first book, On Active Service, published in 1993.

Since then Thompson has made two sentimental journeys to Libya and, for Our War, painstakingly interviewed 80 old soldiers about their North African experiences. Befitting a former journalist, PR man, and marketing and communications expert, Thompson knows what makes good copy. Anyone who has listened to Jim Henderson's interviews on Radio Pacific on Anzac Days will know exactly what I mean; and yes, the venerable Henderson appears in Our War.

Thompson's veterans, 17 of whom have died since the project began, do not hold back. Did you know, for instance, that our blokes were master looters and pillagers? They would nick anything. "The Digs," writes Thompson, "felt they were getting their just rewards for a job well done."

Regular booty such as Lugers and Zeiss binoculars was sold to the Americans, a piano found in the desert was put on the back of a truck for the rest of the campaign and lifted down only for camp sing-alongs. Troop supplies unloaded at Tripoli docks did not escape shifty Kiwi hands either. "Tiny Freyberg and his 40,000 thieves," said one wit.

Then there were the members of the Maori Battalion who captured an Italian pay wagon. "The boys were giving out handfuls of these big bills all over the place," recounts Kingi Edwards. "They were using them for toilet paper. They didn't realise they were still valid currency and we could have used it when we went up to Italy later on."

Hugh Mackenzie said he found two pairs of brand-new German underpants "which I promptly changed for my oldest ones that were grubby and in need of a wash".

No less engrossing is Terry Kinloch's Echoes of Gallipoli, In The Words of New Zealand's Mounted Riflemen, although I confess the horses were of as much interest to me as their riders. Six thousand horses were sent to war by New Zealand in WW1. Most were donated by the public following an appeal to the war effort. Seventy-seven died on the seven-week voyage to Alexandria. The survivors then lined up for morning sick parades as influenza and ringworm swept through their ranks. Many had to be destroyed. "My word they are killing a terrible lot of horses here," said one rifleman. The lucky ones got to practice their swimming skills in the Nile.

Kinloch, who was a member of the last regular mounted rifles unit in the New Zealand Army and a competitive equestrian in his time, would no doubt concur with a source that said the horses "were more than mounts to shift us from spot to spot — they were cobbers".

Three hundred and seventy of the NZ Mounted Rifles Brigade horses were killed in action out of a casualty total of 1402. Because of strict quarantine regulations none could re-enter New Zealand. Most were sold to the British, the rest to the Egyptians. Only one horse that served in the Middle East made it back home, a mare named Bess. Unfortunately, Kinloch provides us with no further details. I would have liked to have known more about the durable Bess.

If any further evidence is needed of New Zealand's growing pre-occupation with the two World Wars, note that military historian Glyn Harper's Kippenberger, an Inspired New Zealand Commander, is a paperback edition. His far-reaching biography was first published and well-received in 1997.

So why give Kippenberger another crack? Why these books about war? One might just as well ask why Gallipoli has become a popular stopover for New Zealand camper-vans or why the streets of Wellington ground to a halt last year for the return of the Unknown Warrior.

Without getting too deep into this, and agonising over the reasons for our new-found sense of national identity, Martyn Thompson puts it so: "Those who returned from World War II did not want to talk about the war. They just wanted to get on and re-build their lives," he says.

The next generation, caught up in, among other things, the anti-Vietnam War protests, simply did not want to know. To them, ageing men, marching out of step at the crack of a chilly Anzac Day dawn, wearing ribbons, medals jangling, were faintly ridiculous. Now, says Thompson, those very same men's grandchildren are likely to ask, expectantly: "What did you do in the war, granddad?"

* Hedley Mortlock is an Auckland reviewer.

* Our War, Martyn Thompson, Penguin, $39.95
* Echoes of Gallipoli, Terry Kinloch, Exisle, $49.95
* Kippenberger, Glyn Harper, Harpercollins, $34.99