Review Of Glyn Harper's Book
Massacre at Passchendaele
Alan A Brash - 7/7/00

What does the word Passchendaele mean to you? If, according to Glyn Harper, the word just reminds you of one of the many places in Europe where World War I was fought, and nothing more, you are a typical New Zealander in that respect.

Glyn Harper has this year published a book called "Massacre at Passchendaele" (Whitcoulls NZ$39.95 230 pages). In the first 120 pages he sets out the ghastly facts which that word should call to New Zealand minds. It was the most disastrous defeat the New Zealand army has ever suffered. In one day there were over 3000 casualties of whom 1190 were deaths, over a thousand of whose bodies were never recovered.

Glyn Harper makes it quite clear that he believes the New Zealand army was one of the greatest fighting forces of that war. But on 12 October 1917 that fighting force was set a task by the Imperial High Command which was obviously a disastrous impossibility. It was inadequately prepared. The required advance bombardment was quite inadequate. The ground over which the advance was ordered was a total mass of over knee deep mud and shell holes full of water and rotting bodies. The barbed wire entanglements were so strong that they were never penetrated though hundreds died trying.

As well as all that, the Germans were fully aware of the pending attack and well prepared for the ensuing slaughter. It was a senseless waste of human life and a total failure. Glyn Harper describes it mainly in the words of survivors.

In the remaining seventy pages of his book the author lists the names of 1,179 New Zealanders which are recorded on the Memorial to the Missing in the Tyne Cot Cemetery, Zonnebeke, West Vlaanderen (one of the 174 British cemeteries in Ypres Salient). These were the names of the men who died that day and whose bodies were never found. It should never have happened. But it did happen, in one day, at Passchendaele.

The New Zealand government of the time and the New Zealand press played down the disaster. So our pious words on ANZAC day, "We shall remember them" are a mockery as far as the Passchendaele dead are concerned. The more completely we forget such blasphemous events in the past, the more quickly we will drift towards a nuclear holocaust.