KIA KAHA: New Zealand in the Second World War.

• Author: McINTYRE, W. DAVID
• Position: Review

KIA KAHA: New Zealand in the Second World War Editor: John Crawford Published by: Oxford University Press, Auckland, 2000, 330pp, $39.95.

This is a valuable, though very mixed, collection of essays. They are a selection of the papers presented at the Kia Kaha: Forever Strong Conference held in the National Library, Wellington, in May 1995, to mark the half-centennial of the end of the Second World War. This somewhat belated publication was one of the last productions from Auckland by the Oxford University Press before it decamped from New Zealand in 2000 in favour of Melbourne. Of the twenty essays, twelve are on strategic/military themes, and eight concern civil matters. The quality varies and space prevents mention of all of them in a review.

The essays fall into four categories: restatements of well-known themes; historical revisions; illustrative episodes, and original contributions. In the first category, Ian McGibbon surveys New Zealand's grand strategy and argues that support for the defeat-Germany-first policy was based on a sound appreciation of the national interest. American John B. Hattendorf shows how the US concept of a Pacific War, entrenched in the Orange and Rainbow war plans, were upset by the extent of Japan's advances, which prompted flexible and somewhat different strategies in the Central and South-west Pacific.

The revisionists include Australian Carl Bridge, who, in comparing Australian and New Zealand grand strategy 1941-43, counters the view that dramatises the differences between the Tasman Dominions. The difference, he says, was `one of style rather than substance'; interests and policies usually coincided and both countries operated within agreed Allied strategy. Glyn Harper, using War History Branch correspondence and subsequent interviews, compares Kippenberger's attitude to two famous 1942 battles -- disaster at Ruweisat Ridge on 15 July and success on Miteiriya Ridge on 23-24 October. On the former, Kippenberger admitted that he had not made his intentions sufficiently clear, that the battle was `a tragedy of misdirection and mismanagement', though they could not say that in the official war history. On the eve of the latter battle, he is remembered for his inspirational remarks about having the opportunity to take part in the `very beginning of the turning of the tide'. Roberto Rabel argues against Geoffrey Cox's view that the Trieste confrontation in mid-1945 was the opening bout of the Cold War. Rather...