The longest days

This official history of the Western Front campaign is a book for all New Zealanders.

Ian McGibbon’s impressive 400-pluspage narrative of our Western Front campaign of 1916-18 is the latest in the official WW100 series marking the centenary of World War I.

He has produced one of the best official histories in many years, a superbly illustrated coffee-table account of a campaign that so often stands in the shadow of Gallipoli in popular memory, yet accounted for more than 16,500 dead and about 58,000 casualties – almost half our all-time war losses. About 845 were killed in one day alone at Passchendaele.

McGibbon’s book is not the first single-volume overview of the campaign in recent years, but it is the first Government-produced effort since a hasty two-volume “semi-official” account in the early 1920s, and fills a substantial gap in the official coverage.

He covers all the main military events on the ground: our divisional arrival around Armentières, the Somme, Messines, Passchendaele, the Somme again and the final push of 1918. As befits a publicly funded volume, part of the book is given to institutional-style history, broken down by functional theme: line of communication personnel, individuals, cyclists and employment troops, among others. There are chapters on our contribution to the air war over the trenches, training camps, the mechanics of command and supply, and our relationships with other combatants.

Bateman’s production, for the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, is truly superb, bringing the glass-plate photographs and colour artworks of the day to life in new ways – they’re so clear you can almost feel