Dark Journey: Three Key New Zealand Battles of the Western Front (review)

For a number of decades now there has been an ongoing and at times lively debate at both the academic and populist level with regard to the performance of the dominion armies within the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front in the First World War. There is little doubt that the soldiers of these European settler societies of the British Empire – Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Newfoundland – were profoundly affected by their experiences on the Western Front, as were, in turn the emerging national identities of the countries they returned to. Unfortunately it is this intimate connection with the theme of national identity that has often resulted in comparative assessments of the operational effectiveness of dominion troops vis à vis their British counterparts being reduced to a prima facie case of family one-upmanship by populist authors in both the "Old Dominions" and the United Kingdom.

Thankfully, Associate Professor Glyn Harper, head of the Centre for Defence Studies at Massey University and a former Lieutenant-Colonel in the New Zealand Army, rises above such simplistic distortions despite the fact that Dark Journey is squarely aimed at reminding his fellow New Zealanders of the experiences and, perhaps more pointedly, the achievements of their forebears on the Western Front. Despite being a nation of just under one million people in 1914 New Zealand sent a total of 100,000 men overseas to serve in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) of whom 59,000 became casualties. The NZEF contributed brigade level forces to the ill-fated Gallipoli Campaign in 1915 (hence the "NZ" in "ANZAC" – not that you would know it to read the work of some Australian authors on the subject), but the largest single formation fielded by the NZEF was in fact the New Zealand Division which served on the Western Front between 1916-18. Harper concentrates on the New Zealand Division's actions in three key battles: Passchendaele in October 1917, the defence of Amiens (Second Battle of the Somme) and the Battle of Bapaume in March and August 1918 respectively.

In doing so he succeeds in producing a nicely balanced narrative that utilizes first-hand accounts adroitly whilst also maintaining a coherent operational overview of the division, brigade and battalion level actions unfolding around them. Harper does not subject the actual battles themselves to significant re-examination but then this is not the focus of his work – the focus is on the performance of the New Zealand Division within those battles. The result provides the reader with some interesting insights into how this Division recovered from a brutal mauling at Passchendaele – its only major operational failure of the war – to go on and play its part so effectively in the key defensive and offensive battles waged by the BEF in 1918. Arguably this experience encapsulates that of the BEF as a whole and to that end a more explicit analysis as to what was unique and what was universal about the factors contributing to the New Zealanders' recovery might have been desirable. Nonetheless Harper's work provides a good introduction to one of the less well-known dominion contingents of the First World War.