Ian McGibbon, New Zealand and the Second World War: The People, the Battles and the Legacy, Hodder Moa Beckett, Auckland, 2004. 248pp. $39.95. ISBN 1-86958-954-8.
Reviewed by Deborah Montgomerie.
Ian McGibbon’s New Zealand and the Second World War: the People, the Battles and the Legacy will serve its readers well. Presenting the history of New Zealand at war as at once global and national, social and political, general and intensely personal, it manages to juggle the contending stories of Maori and Pakeha, male and female, soldier and civilian, leaders and led, Pacific theatre and European without losing either narrative thread or tangling the reader in a skein of side issues. McGibbon’s reputation as New Zealand ’s leading military historian is undisputable; this book provides further evidence of his ability to synthesize, summarise and expound upon New Zealanders’ experiences of war in ways that are both readable and analytically satisfying. Aimed at a general audience, and cognisant of veterans’ (and their descendants) sense of ownership of particular parts of these war stories, it will also be invaluable in high school classrooms and undergraduate university courses.
Where there are omissions or silences they reflect the weakness of the scholarship on this period. Historians of mid-twentieth century New Zealand have paid too little to Maori women for instance, and to Maori civilians generally, and New Zealand and the Second World War reflects that gap. Nor is class a major theme, though the potential for industrial unrest to undermine the wartime economy is noted. Women are gendered individuals at war, but seldom do men’s gender identities matter to studies of New Zealanders at war. We are still grappling to come to terms with the significance of the war in the long sweep of New Zealand history and McGibbon’s final chapter on the war’s legacy is stronger on international affairs than on cultural and social history.
While the book strenuously avoids the kind of historiographical discussion that would alienate non-academic readers, McGibbon finds room for an occasional corrective to other writers. John McLeod is judged to have exaggerated the extent to which the behaviour of New Zealand soldiers was mythologized and sanitized, and James Belich’s notion of New Zealand ’s wartime policy-making as dominated by a quasi-neurotic need to prove itself a dutiful daughter of empire found similarly unconvincing. I was chastened to find my monograph on the war had been of less use than Eve Ebbett’s twenty-year-old popular history, When the Boys Were Away.
No book is letter perfect. The odd mistake such as the misspelling of Eve Ebbett and Ross Galbreath’s surnames jars because of the otherwise high standards of the text . The timelines provided for each chapter are a useful tool to help those unfamiliar with the period, and the maps were clearly drawn and nicely presented. Unlike some of the official histories, which contain numerous tactical diagrams, the emphasis is on mapping the terrain of war generally, not plotting individual military engagements. This reflects a realistic assessment of the cartographical literacy and interests of most of its intended readers.
Unlike some other recent histories aimed at a general market, though sparingly referenced, this book does support the text with notes and a short bibliography. On a number of occasions the notes not only provide the reader a sense of where McGibbon’s argument is located in the wider historiography but also with guidelines for additional reading.
The book is also generously illustrated, though the photo lay-out does not always do the images justice. This is a relatively large format book, not quite coffee-table sized but with pages wide enough to allow the text to be laid out in two columns. On some pages where the text is being supplemented with a single image, the caption has been placed in a sidebar and the photo is not centred on the same line as the text. This gives an ungainly, lopsided look and has the practical disadvantage of meaning that the edge of the photograph (or in some cases its location and reference number), is shoved too far into the binding of the book to be easily viewable. On page 86 for instance one can only see most of the men’s expressions by flattening out the spine of the book and peering into its innards. In other cases pictures are shrunk down and aligned with a single column of text, producing a more balanced page lay-out, but sacrificing too much detail in the case of group shots or panoramas. The expressions of the men in picture of the Elmwood home guard on p.101 become almost indecipherable, the isolation of a convoy of New Zealand trucks in the North African desert on p.115 is harder to sense, as is the scale of Maadi camp imaged on p.62. The captions also suffer from formatting decisions. The combination of a small font and a light grey, rather than black, ink means that they are not easy to read. This choice of font and grey ink may have seemed sensible combined with the decision to place most of captions in sidebars, but for readers with less than perfect eyesight it makes the captions more difficult to read while leaving some images marooned in white space on one side and shunted into the margin on the other.
As McGibbon’s preface notes, this is a brief account of New Zealand ’s war effort, but brevity has been sorely lacking in this area of New Zealand history. It does not render the earlier 48-volume official history of New Zealand ’s involvement in the Second World War redundant, nor did McGibbon intend it to. It does however provide an integrating narrative and an intelligent and informed assessment of the war’s impact that was from the older official histories. Those without the specialist interests that would justify reading lengthy histories of individual battalions or particular campaigns, or a two-volume history of the home front, will now have a reliable, and readable, book to which to turn. To call New Zealand and the Second World War a ‘one-stop shop’ overview of the war would be too glib. A more fitting analogy might be found in sport; like a good high-dive New Zealand and the Second World War presents an outward appearance of effortlessness, economy and flow while depending on the balance, control and expertise acquired only through years of rigorous application.
