Beyond The Battlefield: New Zealand and its Allies, 1939-45.

• Author: McIntyre, W. David
• Position: Book review

BEYOND THE BATTLEFIELD: New Zealand and its Allies, 1939-45.

Author: Gerald Hensley

Published by: Penguin/Viking, Auckland, 2009, 415pp, $65.

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This is a very readable addition to our literature on the Second World War marred only by some rather embryonic footnotes. No period of our history has been so exposed as the years 1939-45. The official history ran to 50 volumes with a mix of campaign, unit, support corps, and civilian histories, the Episodes & Studies series, and the documents volumes. A flow of memoirs, biographies, diaries, battle analyses, and photo books followed. The impending demise of veterans prompted the Ministry for Culture and Heritage to gather a recent series of oral testimonies. This ever rising tide produced its own problems in differentiating the wood from the trees. Remedied for the military aspects by Ian McGibbon's brilliant New Zealand and the Second World War (Hodder Moa Beckett, 2004), Hensley has now done the same for diplomacy.

Though not a work that tells us anything startlingly new about the war, the book's significance lies in the author, his selection of topics, and his judgments on men and issues. A generous anonymous donor offered to underwrite a substantial work on New Zealand foreign policy at the time of the war, which enabled the National Army Museum to sponsor this excellent volume. Their chosen author was uniquely qualified for the job.

A history graduate, who started out as an assistant lecturer in Canterbury University's History Department, Hensley tells us, in his delightful memoir Final Approaches, how he threw up a postgraduate scholarship to enter the practical world of the Department of External Affairs. There, from playing a role in New Zealand's pioneering Pacific decolonisation in Western Samoa, he went to London as personal assistant to the first Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, joined New Zealand missions in Washington and the United Nations, was high commissioner in Singapore, and eventually head of the Prime Minister's Department. Thus he is at home in the corridors of power in Wellington, London, and Washington and knows the inside of the diplomatic documentation which provides the sources.

In structure the book makes an interesting comparison with Andrew Roberts's brilliant Masters and Commanders (Penguin, 2008), which focuses on four men, Roosevelt and Churchill, Marshall and Brooke. Hensley focuses on four New Zealanders (two political, two public...