Behind the Wire

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 795, 15 October 1954, Page 12

Behind the Wire

PRISONERS OF WAR, by W. Wynne Mason, Official History of New Zealand in the Second orld 1939-45; Department of Internal Affairs, Wellington, 25/-.

(Reviewed by

James

Bertram

writes Sir Howard Kippenberger in his foreword to this exhaustive and, at first sight, rather daunting volume. No one who perseveres to the end is likely to challenge his adjective: it has been a mark of our age (in which the concentration camp preceded the prisoner of war, and has outlasted him) that there is usually more honour inside than outside barbed wire. Who will want to read this book? Ex-P.O.W.’s and their relatives no doubt: ten years is just about the. right time to make this psychologically possible, and to develop the sort of academic curiosity that appreciates checking up on details, and getting the whole picture straight. But I hope the book will be widely read both by serving soldiers who did not share the central experience it describes, and by that general public whose ideas about prison camps still fluctuate uneasily between the thrills of escape and the horrors of Belsen. For this book-unlike the personal narratives that are often so much more lively, but never tell the whole truth-is sober, balanced, impersonal, and crammed with facts. And that, one feels, is just how the whole thing needed to be treated at this stage. Mr. Wynne Mason could easily have written a more dramatic and colourful history: the material was there; again and again it reaches at heroic or tragic intensity through the compressed, police-court anonymity of his low-toned prose. But we have had enough rhetoric, and we have probably had enough heroes-a good many of them may be spotted for the briefest of instants in these pages, breaking cover between a quiet sentence and a footi 4 ; N honourable chapter in New Zealand’s history,"

‘note. What does emerge is a clear outline of that still insufficiently known figure, the average New Zealand prisoner of war. By suppressing all individual spotlights, by the painful accumulation of detail and by the deliberate muffling of crescendos, the author is able to keep attention firmly where he wants it: on the basic elements of P.O.W. experience, and their inevitable human consequences. And the reader who feels, after a few laconic accounts of evaders in Crete or Northern Italy, of epidemics in transit camps and the torpedoing of enemy transports, that Mr. Mason cannot write with warmth and feeling about anything, should turn in advance to his final chapter, which contains the fullest and fairest summing-up of the position of the ex-P.O.W. in post-war society that I have met in print. This is the right place for emotion and the appeal to our sympathies, for this is a difficult social adjustment that is still working itself out. The main history is concerned with the establishment of facts; and these, however they may work upon our imagination, call in the first place for clear-headed understanding. There were over 9000 New Zealand prisoners of war-more than one in every two hundred of our population; and the majority were in captivity for more than three years. This history makes clear both why the numbers were so large in the first place, and why most had to wait till the end of the war for

their freedom. For most prisoners, the first months of captivity and the last were the worst: in between were the years when they came to terms with their fate and with one another-and with their captors. The moral ascendancy that most British prisoners seem to have asserted over their guards is certainly striking: it may have been due to British phlegm, or to mere thickheadedness, or to a deep national tradition of thriving on adversity, but it contrasts with the violent fluctuations of more intelligent people like the French, and more vulnerable idealists like the Americans. One of the chief interests of this book, of course, is to compare general conditions in German, Italian and Japanese camps. For our men the German’ had in general respect, and the Italians friendliness: only the Japanese showed contempt, and this was a contempt for their status as prisoners. The Germans were correct but tough: realistically, they were prepared to allow in Red Cross food parcels that enabled prisoners to keep fit enough for heavy work. The Italians seem to have been more genuinely humane, but a good deal less efficient: the Japanese were both inhumane and inefficient-for prestige reasons they allowed in a mere trickle of outside supplies, yet drove workingparties hard on quite inadequate rations. In New Zealand, if I-follow Mr. Mason’s account and argument, humane treatment was carried to the point where it recoiled on itself, and the shooting had to start: a simpler explanation of the lamentable Featherston incident of Feb-. ruary, 1943, seems to be the still unexplained lack of translators and interpreters. One part of this history that will be fresh and illuminating to most ex-pris-oners, is the full account of negotiations between various Governments, and the International Red Cross, on their behalf. It is a story which should arouse belated gratitude for many barely-glimpsed and much-abused Red Cross officials. Less | grateful feelings will be stirred by the obstinacy (on both sides) about reprisals in the "shackling" of prisoners in Europe: or the rigidity of War Office instructions to camp-Jeaders in Italy at the time of the armistice, which were so largely responsible for conveniently handing yer so many thousands of Allied prisoners to the German Army. The most piquant New Zealand document quoted is the report of the. Allied Repatriation Unit in Italy in March, 1945: "Any ex-prisoner arriving in our hands should be treated as a normal soldier who has returned to duty after having had a slack time." No brief notice can do justice to the broad sweep of this book, which follows | (continued on next page)

BOOKS (continued from previous page) the major phases of all campaigns in which New Zealanders were involved; and fully documents such little-known chapters as the last months in Germany, when the European fortress was crumbling and long columns of prisoners were driven westwards into the snow, away from the Russian guns. Illustrations, maps and production generally are quite first-rate. The War History Branch deserves congratulation on the completion of what cannot have been its easiest volume to compile: my private thanks go to Mr. Wynne Mason for leaving our withers unwrung by fine writing, and for the patient search of records that made possible what is certainly, in his own modest claim, ®an "accurate, objective and impartial account of captivity as it affected New Zealanders in the Second World War."