Two new histories are high-calibre additions to the WWI book blitz.
The centennial of World War I has unleashed a sustained barrage of books about New Zealand’s involvement in the conflict. It’s enough to think that with only a year of observance to go, publishers should be running low on ammo.
Seems not. Both Good-Bye Maoriland, by music writer Chris Bourke, and Fearless, by Massey University historian Adam Claasen, arrive in this month that marks the 100th anniversary of Passchendaele.
And although their publication three-quarters of the way through the WWI centenary year may suggest they are afterthoughts, it’s soon apparent they have a shared excuse for any tardiness – namely, sheer depth of content and superb, illustration-heavy, detailed design.
Both look back at the Great War through highly selective lenses. Bourke goes in search of the era’s music and returns with an evocative panorama of New Zealand army life; Claasen’s heftier effort traces the service of many of the 850 or so New Zealanders who fought in the first air war and delivers a book that, while lamenting the low life expectancy of those who headed aloft, can’t help but be thrilling for the stories of daring it weaves into a grand history.
Good-bye Maoriland, in a way, is a prequel to Bourke’s Blue Smoke, which traced our popular music history before rock and roll. The new book’s format is similar – chapters neatly offset with breakout profiles of intriguing figures. It starts out all rampant brass bands and rousing tunes and finishes with the sombre bells of the carillon at Wellington’s National War Memorial, which first rang in 1932.
In between, its 300 pages resound with troop-ship singalongs, home-front fundraisers, battlefield haka from the Pioneer Battalion, black-humoured ditties from those in the trenches and the jolly japes of behind-the-lines concert parties.
Some Kiwi troupes performed as “Pierrots”, whose costumes made them look like the forebears of early Split Enz line-ups. And Bourke’s book, although scholarly and painstaking, nicely captures the stories of those who signed up, then wound up singing to the shellshocked while dressed as frilly-collared clowns or frocked up as girls, in shows that curiously brought brief sanity to the madness of the Western Front. Good-bye Maoriland puts you in the front rows.
Fearless, on the other hand, takes you to much scarier places – in the open cockpits of flimsy planes without parachutes; on the decks of aircraft carriers only equipped for take-off; on the streets of London as German bombing brought the war to the home front.
The 500 pages spotlight many of the New Zealanders who wheedled their way into the Royal Flying Corps or Royal Naval Air Service, some having got their start at the Walsh brothers’ flying school in Auckland.
Some, such as Keith Caldwell and Keith Park, became aces and squadron leaders. Some lasted less than a fortnight before being killed in action. And some survived to tell the tale – or left enough logbook evidence to give Claasen material to tell some ripping yarns.
Among the most Biggles- worthy are RNAS pilot Samuel Dawson’s part in the daring bombing of the Tondern airship hangars and Wellington solicitor turned RFC aviator Alfred de Bathe Brandon, who was the first fighter pilot credited with downing a Zeppelin – by dropping darts on it from above.
You may wonder if Fearless should have been entitled “Foolhardy”, instead. But it’s a wonderful book, one that risks inducing a Peter Jackson-sized enthusiasm for the biplane era.
The publishing splurge of the centennial should mean future WWI anniversaries won’t lack for reference material. These two volumes should be easy to spot on the shelves. They’ll be the least dusty.
GOOD-BYE MAORILAND: THE SONGS & SOUNDS OF NEW ZEALAND’S GREAT WAR, by Chris Bourke (Auckland University Press, $59.99)
FEARLESS: THE EXTRAORDINARY UNTOLD STORY OF NEW ZEALAND’S GREAT WAR AIRMEN, by Adam Claasen (Massey University Press, $59.99)