Father’s war diaries spark prisoner of war book

Steve Liddle, from Napier, with his book, The War Inside. Photo / Paul Taylor

Steve Liddle was having a tidy-up when he came across his father’s war diaries.

Some of it is written in tiny writing on the inside of cigarette packets. His father passed away when Liddle, a Napier independent researcher and teacher, was just 9 years old.

That discovery led to a 20-year journey culminating in a book, The War Inside.

The War Inside is a series of interviews with New Zealand prisoners of war, with an emphasis on their lives afterwards.

The first thing Liddle did with the diaries was to type them up and send them to his family.

“Then I decided I would take some time off work and write a book,” Liddle said.

“I went to Italy to do some research. That was 20 years ago.”

He decided to put an advert in The Listener magazine asking for people to talk about their POW experiences.

“I got a few responses. At that stage, I was teaching in Auckland and the RSA secretary gave me the name of a person to talk to.

“From there it just grew and grew with people telling me their experience and suggesting I talk to this or that person.”

The interviews took place between 2004 and 2007. Included in those interviews are two Hawke’s Bay men who survived “death marches”, soldiers surrounded after winning battles, escaped prisoners who lived on the hospitality of Greeks under threat of execution, an Amsterdam family jailed for a gun-running brother, and twins who survived concentration camps.

It also includes later interviews with a fellow sea swimmer imprisoned for three years near Tokyo, plus an Italian POW met by chance in a Roman street. The book’s interviews reveal the triumphs – and limits – of the human spirit.

Liddle says these POWs were survivors, “but not necessarily all models of re-integration and resilience”.

Opting for the “richer detail of the interview” rather than today’s more popular narrative format, the author prefers to call himself “editor and contexter” of these oral histories.

Liddle says he has blown the budget to get his book published. “I chose to have it printed locally at Bremner Print rather than sending it overseas. It was then sewn in Auckland. That means it cost me a lot more. However, I have chosen to retail the books for $40. I’m really proud of it.”

The War Inside is available at Wardini Books in Havelock North and Beattie & Forbes Booksellers in Napier.