‘Why are there so many long, bad war books written by journalists just at the minute?’ The question was raised first in Eureka Street by Peter Stanley in March 2005. Big, journalistic treatments of Gallipoli, numerously of Kokoda, and here of the POW experience in the Pacific theatre, from mainstream commercial publishers, have graced the bestseller lists and the front-window display cases over the last two or three years. Big books, big marketing budgets, big sales. Academic sour grapes aside, it’s probably not as simple as that, and never is.
Big books on popular themes by well-known journalists are nothing new, and neither is the ‘journalist as [good] historian’. C.E.W. Bean and Gavin Long had significant careers as journalists before they became official historians of Australia’s war effort between 1914–18 and 1939–45. More recently, Max Hastings in Britain and Tom Ricks and Rick Atkinson in the United States have shown that the marriage of accomplished journalism, careful research and sound historical sense produces good, serious books able to reach a wide, interested readership. That isn’t really the issue at the heart of my friend’s question, either.
Commercial publishers recognise two things: that there is a large audience out there keen to read (and pay money for) books that retell the Homeric aspects of our military history; and that academic historians are probably the last people willing, or able, to write them. This second proposition isn’t strictly true, of course. There are historians out there with a gift for clear, concise prose who can make the transition from seminar room to living room in the way they deal with issues and ideas, just as there are plenty of journalists with a cloth ear for language and a tabloid sense of history. But the way in which many historians have written more and more about less and less, and in a less and less interesting manner, here as elsewhere, has left the return of the big, popular synoptic history to the journalists, the popularisers, and the occasional academic ‘stars’ like Simon Schama or Niall Ferguson.
Does this matter? Probably not, so long as we understand what we are dealing with when we consider books like Cameron Forbes’s Hellfire. He tells us that his purpose is ‘to tell through individuals the story of the prisoners’ war, Australia’s relationship with Japan and its strategic shift’. He has read the secondary literature carefully, done some useful