Military campaigns and war memoirs an important part of publishing

Another ANZAC Day, another seven book titles on the New Zealand market commemorating our involvement in wars recent and past.

Earlier this week there was a reminder of how passionately we feel about our involvement in both World Wars. WB ‘Sandy’ Thomas (pictured right), a spritely 91 year old Kiwi veteran of the Battle of Crete – now living in Australia – was initially refused a government grant to attend the 70th anniversary commemoration.

IMAGE: Kent Blechynden/DominionPost

Thomas, who was awarded an MC for his bravery during the battle, has been invited to speak at the event in Crete next month.

He had previously used his once-only Veteran’s allowance travel grant.

Within 24 hours, Defence Minister Wayne Mapp changed the rules, saying "Those who served in this historic battle stood ready to give up their lives to preserve our freedom. These grants are one of the ways we can further acknowledge what they went through on our behalf."

Is the name Sandy Thomas familiar to you? He wrote the classic Dare to be Free* recognised as one of the great escape narratives of the Second World War.

Tim Skinner’s Wellington bookshop, Capital Books, is one which stocks military history in depth.

The area has been a major interest for Tim (pictured below) throughout his bookselling career.

Military history is not immune from a variety of fashion, he observes.

“I had about half a shelf of World War One books until recently, but there’s been a growth of interest and now the stock covers four shelves.”

Tim believes it is really important to invest in oral histories of World War Two veterans. “The people involved won’t be around for much longer.”

Introducing the magnificent seven...
the New Zealand ANZAC titles for 2011

1. Letters from Gallipoli: New Zealand Soldiers Write Home edited by Glyn Harper (AUP $45.00). Tim Skinner observes that the letters home from adventurous young soldiers begin chirpily with “Gosh how lucky we are,” but soon change to a more sombre “God, this is awful.”

Even then, soldiers spared their loved ones the full horrors they were experiencing.

2. Day after Day: New Zealanders in Fighter Command by Max Lambert (HarperCollins $45.00). Before the memories are lost, recorded here are the stories of the young Kiwi pilots who flew in the Battle of France and the Battle of Britain. It recounts the life and death experiences of New Zealanders who flew single-engine day fighters in World War II; many not told before.
Lambert has also written Night After Night - New Zealanders in Bomber Command.

3. Kiwi Battlefields by Ron Palenski (Hachette NZ $44.99). Since the Boer War, and probably before, New Zealanders have gone overseas to fight in foreign wars. Kiwi Battlefields brings a unique perspective to the wars of the world and New Zealand’s part in them. Palenski provides an understanding of why more people than ever flock to Anzac Day services.

Win this book in this week's competition.

4. What Have They Done to the Rain? A Kiwi Soldier’s Memoir of Vietnam by Pat Duggan (Kukupa Press distributor: Southern Publishers Group, $32.00). It was members of the Regular Force, professionals like Duggan, who went to fight in Vietnam. Like their predecessors in World Wars One and Two, these men did their government’s bidding and risked all in the service of their country, but when they returned, the government didn’t want to know. Duggan’s war was typical of many who served, and he describes it unflinchingly and without embellishment or embarrassment.

Win this book in this week's competition.

5. Nice Day for a War: Adventures of a Kiwi Solider in World War I by Matt Elliott and Chris Slane (HarperCollins $29.99). A fictional story, but based on the diary of Matt Elliott’s grandfather and postcards he had sent home to the family. This Kiwi lad heads away, full of excitement, to war with his mates from rural New Zealand. There he encounters the horror that was the Western front. The book aims to capture what the new experiences of war were like for the young soldiers.  Nice Day for a War is a significant book for children and adults alike. “Conceptually… a gamble, but it works – brilliantly” says Matthew Wright in NZ Listener.

Win this book in this week's competition

6. The Last of the Human Freedoms by Keren Chiaroni (HarperCollins $39.99). When Kiwi airman John Sanderson was shot down over France in 1944, the Patris family chose to shelter him. A local doctor called in to treat his wounds made a different choice, betraying them all to the Gestapo. While Yvette Patris was eventually released, her husband died en route to Dachau. Sanderson survived the war and began a correspondence with Yvette Patris. Based on letters, journals, military records and personal accounts, this inspiring book examines what it means to be human when everything we value is taken away. Keren Chiaroni lectures in French at Victoria University.

Win this book in this week's competition

7. Lest We Forget  by Feana Tu’akoi, illustrated by Elspeth Alix Batt (Scholastic $31.00). The Kiwi titles cover personal experiences and memoir, military history and two picture books. Lest We Forget is aimed at children and Nice Day for a War is aimed at both adults and younger readers, and is based on a grandson’s retelling of his grandfather’s World War One stories gleaned from his diary.

Seems we’re avid readers of military history and memoirs – seven titles for just one small nation of four million.

Plus overseas military titles, which are arriving on our market at this time: Anzac Fury by Peter Thompson commemorating the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe when 8,900 ANZAC prisoners of war captured in Greece and Crete were released from captivity.

Bomber Flight Berlin by Mike Rossiter describing the 30 bombing raids over Germany by Geoffrey King and his crew at a time when the bomber crew survival rate was just 17 percent.

The War that Never Was by Duff Hart Davis about the covert action of mercenaries training rebel Yemeni soldiers in Egypt.

As this last title exemplifies, while the World Wars’ individual action campaigns and battles have mostly been exhaustively covered, there is a whole world of action out there, from books about the ancient Greek battle of Marathon, England’s Civil War (Oliver Cromwell vs Cavaliers), the American Civil War, to recent civil war in Rwanda.

“Even more recently there’s been a raft of British books on Afghanistan,” says Capital Books’ Tim Skinner.

And if you are wondering: where are the women in all this? The Read suggests last year’s Dressed to Kill by the pseudonymous Charlotte Madison, the first female Apache helicopter pilot in the Army Air Corps.

At twenty-seven, she had done two tours in Afghanistan, and this is a down-to-earth account of adrenalin-raising action in the air, and the grim realities of life on a base in Afghanistan.

Tim reckons he can date the rise of military history and memoirs reaching a general rather than a specialist audience back to one seminal book, Andy McNab’s Bravo Two Zero, an account of British SAS military action behind the lines in Iraq.

He also believes that New Zealand’s great interest in things military is a result of the proportionally large number of soldiers we sent to both World Wars and many of the conflicts since.

Tim tells The Read “Do you know there are still places in France, like Le Quesnoy, that raise a New Zealand flag every day because Kiwi soldiers liberated them from the German Army in World War One?”

*When the Germans invaded Crete in 1941, Sandy Thomas was shipped to the Greek mainland as one of their prisoners. Despite being severely wounded in the leg he attempted several escapes, including being carried out of his POW camp in a coffin.

"He finally succeeded in a spectacular escape, and made his way across Greece to Mount Athos, a rocky peninsula populated solely by monks. Here he evaded capture for over a year, before finally stealing a boat and navigating his way through winter seas to freedom in Turkey. (Dare to be Free is out of print but second hand copies are still available.)

By Jillian Ewart, writer for The Read.