Guy Somerset reviews The Dark Dad: War and trauma — a daughter's tale for Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books:
‘It used to be sometimes said of someone that they had had ‘a good war’. This meant that when their mettle was tested in World War II they had acquitted themselves with resourcefulness and valour. I say ‘they’, but it was, of course, always ‘he’. I say ‘valour’, but, well . . . you know. These were things a certain kind of man measured and valued. Sometimes someone had had ‘a bad war’, because when their mettle was tested they had gone to pieces or made a catastrophically poor decision. These evaluations could shape a man’s reputation long after the war ended. They could make or ruin him.
We now understand enough about war and its traumas to know that even a ‘good war’ could turn out to have been a bad war after all, leading to a bad peace. No peace at all. It could all catch up with you in the end. When you went to war, sooner or later your family might have to go with you. Not for nothing was Marriage Guidance established in 1949 in the wake of World War II. Or, some would argue, not for nothing was the violent protagonist of the 1947 Dorothy B Hughes novel In a Lonely Place – and its 1950 Humphrey Bogart-starring film noir adaptation by director Nicholas Ray – a war veteran. The post-war world could be a truly lonely place for some men.
As Mary Kisler records in her memoir The Dark Dad: War and trauma – a daughter’s tale, a former prisoner of war was regarded by some as having had no war at all. Those thinking this included some POWs themselves, their sense of failure and shame unabated by the likes of Major General Sir Howard Kippenberger encouraging them to ‘have pride in what they had endured and overcome’, and boosted by such incidents as a POW writing to thank the woman who had donated a balaclava, scarf and pair of gloves he received, only for her to write back that she had meant them ‘for a live fighting hero, not for a coward who gave himself up’.
Some New Zealand POWs were not welcome at their local Returned Servicemen’s Association branch because they were regarded as cowards, so joined the Ex-POWs Association the Army set up to counter such attitudes. Kisler’s father, Jack Arnott, was a gunner in the 7th Anti-Tank Regiment, 33rd Battery, 6th Brigade, New Zealand Artillery, part of Lieutenant-General Bernard Freyberg’s Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force. Arnott trained at Maadi Camp near Cairo in Egypt, before he was dispatched to fight in Greece and then, in late November 1941, wounded by shrapnel and caputured by Germans at the Battle of Sidi Rezegh in Libya. The Germans handed Arnott over to the Italians and he spent the rest of the war in a succession of POW camps, of varying degrees of awfulness, run by one or other of them. Kisler remembers being told as a child, by a boy whose father was a fellow soldier, ‘that my father was a coward and for years I quietly worried that it might have been true’.
Not, however, after he told her more of his wartime experiences, and after her extensive research into what he and other POWs endured in the camps where they were held. This was the main source of the darkness that infected Arnott in the years to come.’
Read the rest of the review here.
