War Histories

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 375, 30 August 1946, Page 5

War Histories

T was courageous of General Kippenberger to begin his broadcast on the war histories by asking why there should be histories at all. We all want histories now; but the Editor-in-Chiefs task is to arrange for the publication of books that we shall perhaps read in ten years, and that arouses the sceptics and cynics. Australia, they remind us, received the last. volume of oné war four years after another had.started-a delay of 25 years. The 70 volumes of the official British history of 1914-18 took 28 years to write and are not all available yet. Our own histories of the same war help to make bar-gain-bundles at book sales; and so on. Well, everybody knows that these things are true, and that more things of the same,kind could be added. But if it would be foolish to try to brush them away it would be ten times more foolish to. accept them as the full story. What really counts in the end is that the truth should be told. If it can be told promptly, that means a short instead of a long wait in the dark; but it is the darkness that matters most and not the delay. Nor does it matter as much as we sometimes imagine that the whole truth should not reach everybody. The whole truth never does reach everybody on any subject at any time; but even the limited truth of a six-years’ war is for those only who equip themselves to grasp it. For the rest of us it is sufficient to know that the little journeys we do make are made in the right direction — that we get nothing wrong éven if we don’t get everything right. There will be gaps in the record however long we wait, since the men responsible for some parts of the story died and their secrets with them. Over them the darkness will remain. But within the limits of the possible what can be told will be, and our best guarantee of that is the scholarly care with which the facts are being assembled. by.. the archivist-in-chief before they come under the review of the editor-in-chief.