Forty years ago, the proponents of the ‘new military history’ sought to extend our understanding of war and its impact by looking beyond the battlefield and by considering the social and cultural implications of armies and military activity. In the process, the best work added layer upon layer of complexity and nuance to the study of war in history, but over time it came to seem that this approach to military history was interested in anything and everything except war’s central concern: battle and purposeful, organised violence between groups and individuals. Peter Ewer has written a book that belongs to what some are now hailing as the ‘new new military history’, approaches that seek to integrate broader socio-cultural significance and individual experience with serious attention to the basic elements of war through the ages: battle and killing.

The Greek campaign of 1941 provides plenty of material for such an approach, while a fresh look at the campaign is overdue. There has been no major study of Australian involvement since the relevant volume of the official history, written by Gavin Long and published in 1953. The New Zealanders published two volumes: on Greece by W.G. McClymont, and on Crete by the incomparable Dan Davin, in 1959 and 1953, respectively. All three reflect the conventions of official history in the 1950s – strong on battlefield narrative and organisational detail, and with due account paid to the experiences of individual soldiers and officers – but are probably too long and insufficiently immediate in style and approach for many modern readers.