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'Too important to be lost to history': Secret war diaries reveal all

Kurt Bayer
By
South Island Head of News·NZ Herald·
8 mins to read

Alick Trafford wanted his secret wartime diaries, written in the trenches of the Western Front, burned. But more than a century later, his family decided his remarkable first-person account of the horrors of the industrial, mechanised slaughter of World War I, including the Somme, Messines, "Passchendaele, damned Passchendaele" and the liberation of Le Quesnoy were too important to be destroyed and lost to history. Kurt Bayer reports.

As a boy, Ian Trafford wondered why his Papa always cried on April

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