Supreme sacrifice

From the front line to the POW camps and the home front, NZ’s role in WWII is commemorated in a landmark book of war photography.

World War II was brutal, particularly for New Zealanders. Worldwide, perhaps 60 million people died, which averages out at about 27,000 deaths for each and every one of the 2179 days of war. Because of our then close ties to Britain, we were intimately involved from the get-go.

Despite the country having a population less than a third of its current five million, and not technically having a navy in 1939, the country was at war for all but three of those days. One in eight Kiwis served in the armed forces. Nearly 12,000 died and thousands more were wounded or taken prisoner, another of our greatest per-capita deeds.

Nearly 11,000 New Zealanders served in Britain’s Royal Air Force and 45,000 in the Royal New Zealand Air Force in this country and across the Pacific.

For THE FRONT LINE: Images of New Zealanders in the Second World War (MUP, $79.99), Glyn Harper, professor of war studies at Massey University in Palmerston

North, and his wife, Susan Lemish, went through 30,000 images to get to the more than

800 that appear. Most are from the collections of the three service museums, but many came from private collections after a public shout-out. As the title suggests, the photos are central to the book.

Each chapter is led in by a shortish essay contextualising the various theatres of war, from preparations to fighting in the Aegean, North Africa, the Pacific and Italy as well as the New Zealand prisoners of war and returning to images of the home front. Although there are photos of Adolf Hitler during a Nazi parade in Warsaw and one of actress Vivien Leigh, many are of soldiers at rest, at work and getting ready to do their impossible job. A surprising number are of Kiwi prisoners of war, given that cameras were strictly verboten. l

Clockwise from left, six members of No 75 Squadron RNZAF line up ready to board their aircraft at RAF Feltwell in Norfolk; three nursing sisters with brimmed hats – sisters Bolton and Crawford and matron Eva Mackay – with another uniformed woman on a camel ride in Egypt in 1940; a pilot’s view of a formation of No 75 Squadron RNZAF Lancaster heavy bombers; the light cruiser HMNZS Leander gets a paint job in Alexandria, Egypt.