Book review: The Gunners

The official history of the New Zealand Divisional Artillery in World War II ended with the observation that peacetime seems quieter to gunners than it does to other people.

It is small wonder, given the roar of their own guns in wartime and the scream of incoming shells in counter-battery duels.

But peacetime is also quieter for gunners because they are near-perfect examples of the observation by the 19th century German philosopher Georg Hegel that nations and governments have never learned anything from history.

The story of New Zealand artillery is one of repeated peacetime neglect and wartime reliance. The Gunners serves an importance purpose by coherently linking these cycles of boom and bust, that began in the colonial era and which persist into the 21st century.

Artillery in New Zealand pre-dates the Royal Regiment of New Zealand Artillery (which had its centennial in 2002) by some 260 years. It began six days after the first European sighting of the country, when Abel Tasman's crew fired on Maori waka in Golden Bay.

The Gunners shows a clear pattern of post-conflict retrenchment, with cut-backs in personnel and an attitude to spending on rapidly evolving equipment that, in the words of the authors, "would constrain New Zealand's use of artillery throughout the 20th century". They might have added "and into the 21st".

The book's recording of the New Zealand artillery's exploits on the battlefield is interspersed with details of the slumps in personnel, equipment and training that hampered its units' abilities to bring themselves to battle readiness.

The real sting is in the tail. The final chapter chronicles the period since the Vietnam War, which has seen 30 years of "deprioritising" of the artillery's role.

It has lost its medium artillery capability when there is an international consensus about the value of longer range guns.

In fact, the Defence Council in 1985 had approved the $18.9 million purchase of 155mm guns but the Labour Cabinet deemed the gun "too offensive". The Defence Force's current 105mm light guns are due to reach the end of their operational life in four years (but are likely to stay in service well past that time).

Reading between the lines, one senses that governments whose priorities are firmly in the peacekeeping role have difficulty in understanding that armies continue to have a need for artillery to provide indirect fire support for infantry. In the past decade, the Balkans and Afghanistan have proven that need.

But The Gunners is, a history of units at war and canvasses every conflict in which New Zealand artillery have played a role. It must be said that it often does so in the somewhat clinical way favoured by many military historians, citing unit involvements rather than vividly conveying the blood and sweat of battle. The reader is left to imagine the toil involved in the gunners of 5 Field, firing more than 3000 25-pounder shells in a day during the fighting retreat through the Olympus Pass in Greece in 1941 or 25 Battery firing 1600 high explosive and 10,056 smoke shells (150 tons of ordnance) in one day at Monte Cassino in 1944.