The Anzacs

What better day to commence reading this book than Anzac Day, 25 April, and a public holiday in New Zealand and Australia. Adam-Smith's book is not well known - a paltry 77 ratings and 11 reviews here on GR currently. To my mind that makes is seriously under-rated.
This should be recommended reading for Australians - perhaps for New Zealanders, but it is (fairly) written from a very Australian perspective, and the Kiwis only get a mention in context and where they interrupt the narrative. It is an Australian book about Australian Anzacs.

Published in 1978, you can draw the conclusion that this was the authors last chance to interview those men who were at Gallipoli, and those other theatres of war, as they would then be in their late seventies, and early eighties (at youngest). Adam-Smith explains she read thousands of letters and diaries, interviewed many old soldiers and their wives and children to gain their perspectives. It covers the soldiers in the Australian army, navy and fledgling air force, and also those Australians in the RAF.

Divided into two main parts, then an appendix, it covers first Gallipoli, the ‘After Gallipoli' which is about the war in Europe - Belgium and France - primarily the Battle of the Somme, the attack at Fromelles, the Battle of Pozières, the Battle of Bullecourt and the Battle of Passchendaele (Ypres). Woven through these was the time in Egypt and Palestine, and around the Suez Canal.

I found the Gallipoli section read well, was fairly linear and focussed. By default the ‘After Gallipoli' section was a lot harder - there were repetitions and fragmentations, and it was generally a more complicated read - this of course is because on the Western Front there were multiple things happening concurrently so it is harder to keep in order.

The book is literally filled with quotations from these sources, and it can become an overwhelming read. We are introduced to hundreds of soldiers and nurses only for a great many to die shortly after their introduction. However in the case of one particular person - sister Alice Kitchen a nurse we get to know well, we follow her through the entire duration of the war.

As I reached the 300 page mark I began to feel it had missed a tighter edit, to slim it down a bit and deal with the duplications, but I later changed my mind, having wondered whose story didn't deserve to be there. Of course the answer is that none of the stories in this book deserved to be left out. They were all equally compelling stories of the sacrifices that young men and women made in serving Australia and the British Empire, especially considering that each and every Australian participant in World War I was a volunteer, as there was no conscription. (From New Zealand there were approximately 92,000 volunteers and 32,000 conscripted soldiers.)

This book preserves the stories of all those the author was able to include.
5 stars