Great escapes, New Zealand style

Prisoners at a POW camp during World War II.

It's World War II. Under the cover of darkness a captured soldier, destined for a prisoner of war camp, leaps from a speeding train and spends weeks on the run evading recapture by the Nazis.

Sound like a movie? The escape was just one of a number of real-life stories in a new book, Escape, which documents New Zealand soldiers' bids for freedom after they were captured during the war.

"The audacity of some of the adventures was typically Kiwi," editor Matthew Wright said.

"I did get the feeling that one of the reasons that many New Zealanders got away with what they did was that the Germans would never have considered that they might try it.

"But New Zealanders try anything - if one thing doesn't work, you try something else."

The stories were collected from various publications that were either rare or out of print and put together so they could reach a wider audience, Mr Wright said.

He selected stories that covered different escape methods throughout the chronology of the war.

"I wanted to cover the range of different experiences, so you had people that were separated from their units but evaded capture, and that's one aspect of the experience.

"Other people were captured and escaped en route to prisoner of war camps, and other people were incarcerated in prisoner of war camps, but managed to find ways of escaping."

But Mr Wright said the key aspect was that the soldiers were ordinary New Zealanders who made up a "citizens' army".

"We had to conscript an enormous number of people, and so the escape experience was very much one of ordinary New Zealanders and, if you like, the ordinariness of their life at home contrasted with this extraordinary experience of confronting an enemy on their own ground and surviving against all kinds of quite terrible odds.

"So I was looking for stories which conveyed the way this happened."

Mr Wright said the stories were kept as the soldiers had written them to maintain their words, thoughts and feelings.

"Here we had people who were not trained writers but who could convey the essential human reality of what they were doing quite effectively."

After the war, soldiers who came home to their families were often so traumatised they could not speak of their experiences, Mr Wright said.

"And one of the stories in this book in fact is by someone who only just recently started writing down what had gone on."

Mr Wright said the key aspect to the stories was their understatedness.

"It's a very New Zealand thing. We go out, we conquer all sorts of things and don't really boast about it - it's just something we did."

Mr Wright said it was important for the younger generation to read the stories.

"It's part of our wider history. It's easy for us to compartmentalise topics and say 'Well it's just military history', but really the 20th Century was the most violent century the world has ever seen and New Zealand in many ways was shaped by what happened then - shaped by the wars in a social sense."

Mr Wright noted that wars now are not as personalised as World War I and World War II, with far fewer POWs and very little face-to-face combat.

"People don't even need to see the enemy, they just see something on a screen and push a button. People, even in World War II, frequently had to confront those they were fighting - personally and physically," Mr Wright said.

"In many ways the period we are looking at in this book reflects an age that has gone, but one that really made us what we are."

* Escape, published by Random House, is released on August 4.

- NZPA