Gunner Inglorious. 2nd NZEF POW (1945 First Edition) By Jim Henderson

Gunner Inglorious by Jim Henderson.

Publisher: Harry H. Tombs, Wellington, 1945, First Edition.

Good hardback with jacket. Slight compression to spine ends, book seller's stamp to ffep, light tanning and foxing. Jacket is marked, rubbed and chipped with some small tears and loss to edge. Spine is dulled down. 214 pages.

"Anyone who has ever spent time in a big military surgical ward will know what Jim Henderson's book is about. Its a scream of protest from everyone who ever had to endure the pain of shrapnel wounds and the grinding torments of recovery. It deals in suffering and defiance in the face of desperate, acute misery and starvation. It's about the endurance of the "undistinguished, unremarkable plain people the strength of a nation". It's report on that agonising, personal face of war which is largely concealed from us behind curtains of rhetoric and bastions of abstract statistical and strategic generalities by politicians, the military and the historians. Henderson was badly injured in the debacle at Sidi Rezegh taken prisoner and held in a filthy Italian military hospital where he underwent amuptation for a gangrenous wounded leg and nearly succumbed with shock and pain. Even at this distance, it's impossible not to feel emotionally moved by his account of these misadventures. Yet he has also caught the wry simplicity with which such events were endured."

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