Won by the Spade

Posted: Monday Mar 04, 2019

How the Royal New Zealand Engineers Built a Nation

This authoritative history of the Royal New Zealand Engineers offers a comprehensive account of the corps’ actions, events and personnel from the New Zealand Wars of the 19th century to the present. It examines military engineering in New Zealand, the corps’ role in overseas wars and home defences, and provides a contemporary record of New Zealand’s contribution to military engineering, including demining operations, peacekeeping and civil aid missions.

The book carries underlying themes of military innovation and engineering’s contribution to national development. In New Zealand’s context military engineering played a key role in building infrastructure in an otherwise undeveloped country. The warfare in the North Island saw military engineers do this utility work until the 1870s, when peace prevailed. Military roads and communication corridors aided military success and opened up the country. Similarly, the electric telegraph hemmed in rebellious tribes as effectively as weapons. Thereafter a tradition developed of citizen sappers taking their civil experience into the military and, after several overseas wars, bring the experience back to developmental roles in civic, transport, utility and industrial sectors. With about 40 per cent of early European settlers in technological occupations, theirs was going to be a society which took to military engineering well. And it did.

• An authoritative commissioned history of the Royal New Zealand Engineers.
• A major work unlikely to be repeated for a very long time.
• Comprehensive and meticulously researched, and well- illustrated with black and white and colour photographs.
• Provides a contemporary record of New Zealand’s contribution to military engineering, including demining operations, peacekeeping and civil aid missions.
• Will appeal to anyone interested in the corp’s history, colonial wars, engineers at war or New Zealand’s development.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Cooke specialises in New Zealand military history and industrial heritage, having written a dozen books to date. He has also written on such diverse topics as Shell Oil NZ Ltd, Wellington Returned and Services Association, water supply, rugby in war, and mine-proof vehicles. As a product of the British diaspora, he brings an internationalist perspective to works on New Zealand history, showing the country as part of a global whole.

Peter edits two New Zealand military history periodicals, lobbies for defence heritage sites under threat and runs field trips to local battle sites. Married with children, he lives in central Wellington and is actively involved with his community.

SPECIFICATIONS 240mm x 190mm, Hardcover, 688 pages

RRP $69.99

April 2019 | 9781775593645

CATEGORY Military History IMPRINT Exisle