Description
In the Shadow of War. There were probably about 250 to 300 World War One veterans still alive then. The WW1OHA put out a press release asking men who wanted to be interviewed about their war experiences and its effect on their lives – the social as well as the martial – to get in contact. Many men were keen, and 85 interviews were completed. Some of the men had never spoken in any depth about the war to anyone; very few had spoken to their families in any depth.
The men who ‘speak’ in this collection are: ‘Stan’ (Sydney) Stanfield who joined up at 15 and had his 16th birthday after the Battle of the Somme; ‘Curly’ Blyth who later became a lieutenant colonel; Vic Nicholson and Russell Weir, who fought at Gallipoli; Colin Gordon of the New Zealand Medical Corps; Beet Algar who was in the Sinai-Palestine Campaign, including in the Camel Corps; Gordon Neill who became a prisoner of war; Bill Wiggins who guarded German prisoners from Samoa on Motuihe Island before going overseas; Norman Hutchinson who was hospitalised with shell shock; and Bert Stokes who became a well-known Passchendaele veteran because of his interviews with British historian Lyn Macdonald.
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