I began reading the book with this statement firmly in mind, expecting a new paradigm, where military history and that of mourning and grief were interwoven. I was disappointed. To start with, there is no lack of maps, statistics, deployments of armies, motives of commanders, and score sheets of the commanders’ performance. Indeed, on a rough calculation I estimate that almost half the book is concerned with these matters. This is not a criticism. It is difficult to see how a book about a military campaign could be written intelligibly if these aspects were omitted, but it does dent Mckernan’s claim that this is a new form of military narrative.

A more serious matter is that when McKernan deals with these issues, he does not deal with them well. The reason for this is surely related to his opening statement. He is not very interested in those aspects of military history, but feels he cannot ignore them. So we have just two not very informative maps. More importantly, we have statements about the strategic and tactical aspects of the campaign that are just plain wrong. Thus we have Admiral Fisher wanting to use the Royal Navy in extraneous campaigns, when he wanted to do no such thing. We have the crucial meeting of the War Council, where Fisher expressed dissent about the naval attack, misdated by ten days. We have the tired old debate about whether the Turkish forts were running out of ammunition on 18 March 1915when (a) it didn’t matter much because the British had no method of dealing with the minefields and (b) the Mitchell Report of 1919 and modern scholarship in the form of Edward Erikson have demonstrated that they were not short of shells. We have General Hunter-Weston in command of the French forces at Helles, when he was not. We have D-Day shoehorned into the narrative (twice) and described as a close-run thing, when it was not. We have the Anzacs almost succeeding on 25 April1915 when the number of Turkish troops rushed to the battlefield ensured that there could not possibly have been a success that day. We have Kemal (later Atatürk) saving the Ottoman Empire from collapse (twice), when he manifestly did no such thing. Indeed, he led the state (Turkey) that emerged from the collapse of that empire. The soldiers on Y beach had no orders to link up with those on Ari Burnu. They were ordered to remain in situ until the force to the south at Helles joined them. The Suvla Bay operation is completely misconstrued. It was not designed as a feint attack to draw attention away from Anzac, or indeed to assist the Anzacs, but to establish a base for all forces on the northern peninsula. (By the way, it succeeded in doing this and must be ranked as the only landing at Gallipoli that accomplished what it set out to do.) The Australians could not see the British drinking tea at Suvla Bay because (a) the troops on the beach were Irish, (b) they were not drinking tea, (c) it was too far from Anzac to Suvla to see anything with this precision. The Murdoch letter did not decide the fate of Hamilton. That decision had already been made by the time Murdoch arrived in London. In any case, the British Dardanelles Committee never discussed his letter. I could continue, but my point is made.

There is also a scorecard of generals in this book. Hunter-Weston is at the bottom, Stopford not far ahead of him, Monash comes out badly, Birdwood slightly better, and so on.

What of the promise to integrate social history with the military narrative? There is a problem with the narrative style that McKernan employs. We have ‘Jacky’ Fisher, ‘Birdie’ Birdwood, ‘Freddy’ Stopford, ‘Hunter-Bunter’ and ‘Charlie’ Bean. A cast of characters with these names seems more appropriate for a raid on the tuck shop than for conducting military operations that result in death and maiming. The public school atmosphere continues with occasional comments, such as Hamilton’s note to Birdwood on the night of 25 April: ‘Thanks, old chap, and good night.’ To Hamilton’s attitude to his commanders, McKernan adds: ‘Best … that the chap should be left to his own devices ... Shows breeding that, and manners.’ When McKernan arrives at the genuinely tragic stories about young lives cut short, he has by these means compromised the high purpose of the book. Schoolboy humour detracts from the seriousness of the matters being discussed. This is a pity, because the best sections of the book revolve around the devastating effect of death on loved ones in Australia.

Perhaps others will winnow the grain from the chaff more effectively than I was able to do, but in a book without footnotes or even a short essay indicating where the material used came from, they will have their work cut out.

The introduction to the second book under review here, Pozières: The Anzac Story, sent shivers down my spine. It is written, we are told, by a management consultant to many of Australia’s most recognised retail companies. My first thought was to dash off a book myself on the pricing policy of Woolies and Coles, but I held my nerve and read on. In some ways, I was pleasantly surprised by this book. The author has consulted personal diaries and letters of troops involved in this unfortunate campaign, as well as the official war diaries and other military material held by the Australian War Memorial. Nicknames are not absent from his account – so we have ‘Hooky’ Walker and ‘Birdie’ making unwelcome reappearances, but at least there are not many of these, and mercifully there is no ‘Charlie’ Bean.

What we have is an easy-to-follow narrative about what the author describes as ‘the long-neglected Pozières battle’. Needless to say, it is not long neglected or neglected at all. Perhaps we should declare a moratorium on ‘neglected battles’, ‘forgotten wars’, and ‘untold stories’. Perhaps, on the other hand, publishers will continue to press such phrases on authors because they think such titles sell. Anyway, Scott Bennett tells his story with gusto and adds some personal anecdotes that have not seen the light of day before.

Given all this work, however, the book has two overwhelming flaws. It relies far too much on Bean’s personal diaries. To many, these accounts seem to be regarded as the holy grail of Australian military history. They in fact derive from a person with very strong and often biased views, who was often not in a position to pronounce on matters of strategy or tactics, and who often resorted to ill-informed gossip. The second flaw is more serious. This book does not address some of the great unanswered questions about the Pozières campaign, especially that aspect of it (the advance on Mouquet Farm) that was so appallingly costly in lives. Why was that advance attempted? What was its purpose? Why was the advance taking troops further away from the main British effort to the south? Why did no great tactical benefit flow when it was captured? What, in short, was the reason behind the loss of no fewer than 15,000 Australian lives?

One of the reasons, I suspect, that this and other important issues are not addressed in this book is that the author ignores the key file on this battle in the Australian War Memorial. (AWM 26 it is called.) This file came into existence because the saintly Bean broke every archival rule and excerpted the most important documents from the War Diaries (AWM 4). The excerpted files are enormous; perhaps the author blanched at the prospect of dealing with them. On the other hand, he may not have been aware of their existence. As a result, the book tells us very little more than we already know.

I am not one of those who think that the writing of history should be confined to academe. One has only to read some of the work that emerges from the academy to realise that there is room for other voices. But in a large book the least that might be expected is that the author knows the sources, or consults those that do. Then we might actually read books that add something new. Readers should expect nothing less.