IMPERIAL THEME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 380, 4 October 1946, Page 23

IMPERIAL THEME

NEW ZEALAND AT WAR. By Kenneth R. Hancock. A. H. & A. W. Reed.

HIS covers in one volume the entire history of New Zealand’s effort in the war. The author has succeeded in summarising in a little over three hundred pages a vast amount of material. The three Services are treated separately, RNZAF achievements being related with some attention to individual prowess which, in the nature of things, was not possible in the accounts of the work of the Navy and the Army. There is also a section on the Home Front, and here Mr. Hancock has found space to deal with such topics as the reluctance of some members of the furlough drafts to return overseas while Grade one men remained in civil life in New Zealand, or the treatment of conscientious objectors. A useful feature is that each section has its separate index. Although Mr. Hancock has not altogether sunk to the earth under the prodigious weight of so many unwieldy facts, this compilation is not uniformly easy to read, and here the soggy typography does little to help him. But in a work of this character the essential achievement is in the ground covered. Mr. Hancock does not himself embark on any critical assessment of operations; he does, however, quote Churchill or Montgomery or Admiral Vian. New Zealand at War gives some idea of the war as it affected New Zealand and of: the men who served and how they bore themselves. . Weoerre->

David

Hall