Interview with Paul Ham

Interviewer: Did your interpretation of Kokoda or Vietnam change throughout the research process?

Paul Ham: Well certainly it did. It was constantly changing and I made a point of opening my mind to change, to changing my opinion, my judgement. You have to constantly test your prejudices. You have to, as I said before, you have to clear out the attic of your brain to start with as close as possible a clean slate and look at experiences – the experiences of the people involved in this historical event, through their eyes, using as far as possible the documents from the time; and therefore you are challenging your opinions.

My opinions, my notions, my ideas of what happened were changing all the time. I went into it thinking about Kokoda as this great heroic victory to the Aussies, and of course it was. But there were many other things I wasn't aware of, and certainly I qualified that impression by looking at other dimensions to that campaign in the Owen Stanley Mountains of New Guinea. Yes, we sent untrained militia over these mountains in jungles, to take on a crack unit of the Imperial Japanese Army, and not surprisingly an entire company of Australian soldiers deserted – just ran into the jungle, terrified. They were untrained, they had very poor leadership and most of them just could not hack it. The book recounts this: it hasn't been recounted properly in books before, and I think it's very important to qualify the impression one has of gung-ho Aussie diggers defeating the might of Japan.

This is, of course, ridiculous to just write a book about that. You have to look again both sides, so I looked at the Japanese side. And we have this image of the Japanese, this sort of ferocious – as it was seen at the time – terrible, racist impressions of the Japanese: slant eyed, yellow, terrifying, warriors, samurai warriors, who were going to tear down on Australia and take over the country. Reality is, of course, and now it's emerging through films like 'Letters to Iwo Jima', that the Japanese Army, like any other, is full of – of course, very cruel and officers who would stop at nothing – but also young men who hated war. In fact the book recounts the diary of one young soldier who was a pacifist, who confesses in his diary he's a pacifist. And to confess that in the Japanese Army at the time was a criminal offence but he does so in his diaries, in secret. So the whole perspective you get of two nations at war will always change, the more research you do, but you have to put a stop to it at some point.

The Vietnam War is a much more complicated war, I think. We still don't know what it was – we're still discussing what the Vietnam was. Was it a civil war? Was it a war of liberation? Was it a Marxist, a communist invasion of South Vietnam? So many – was it a proxy war, fought out by the superpowers on either side of a battlefield chosen by them, in this little country called Vietnam? It was all of these things. So to simply dismiss the Vietnam War as one of those things, fails to engage with what the war was in fact, what it actually was. And then we can start looking at recounting, writing the narrative of Vietnam, by taking on board all of those different impressions. So my attitude of individuals, as well, was changing all the time.

Commanders: they may have had legendary status at the start of my book; they certainly didn't at the end of it; in some cases, others were rescued from oblivion. Who has heard of General Vasey? Probably the greatest commander during the Kokoda campaign; he died tragically in 1945 in an air crash, but he was, in his day, a legendary figure. He was a very handsome man; he was put on the front of page of Woman's Weekly. He was an icon – hate that word – but he was a hero to his men and also a much-loved Australian man.