A self-indulgent anecdote about Glyn Harper to start. A few years back, he and I found ourselves among the audience at a lunchtime performance by university drama students. Before the metaphorical curtain rose, we were all urged to stand and behave as if seized by the passions that the cast were about to portray. “Shed your inhibitions!” a voice cried.

While others leaped and contorted, the military historian and I sat with arms folded. “I rather like my inhibitions,” I muttered to him. “So do I,” he muttered back. “Spent a lot of time working on them.”

Some of those inhibitions are commendably present in this big, impressive new book The Front Line from Harper and his personal/professional partner Susan Lemish. There's nothing flamboyant about it: no hyperbole, no excess dramatizing; it's thoughtful, respectful, attentive.

It presents New Zealanders during World War II, as shown through hundreds of photographs, plus the odd document and cartoon. They're accompanied by a lucid text that narrates, summarises, evaluates. The book covers all 2179 days of conflict (there's a statistic for you), plus more in post-surrender Japan.

After outlining the first months – “the end of the old, pleasant days,” said Howard Kippenberger – it examines the war's various theatres. There's the disaster and salvage job in Greece and Crete; air and naval engagements across Europe and the Pacific; North Africa (where my uncles fought; I imagine many readers will have similar associations); Italy; the Home Front; Prisoners Of War.

But it's the images that dominate. They're all in shades [sic] of black-and-white, a stark palette eminently suitable to their subjects. They're meticulously credited and captioned. They include a number from cameras belonging to captured or dead enemy, plus propaganda images of Nazi forces advancing into Poland – mostly on horseback, which is one the numerous surprises you'll encounter.

Any selection will be inadequate but I'll mention the old lemon-squeezer hats that disappear as conflict spreads. Civilians in suits with watch-chains. Nurses, infantrymen, pilots and prisoners and politicians. Canteen workers; women on the East Coast and in Egypt; parents and children; flies and pyramids; “confetti in Cairo.” Xmas Cards – I still have one from my Uncle John – and a Tiger Moth upside-down at New Plymouth Airport after an unscheduled manoeuvre. German mountain troops face the photographer, as confident and vulnerable as their opponents.

Thousands of young, young faces under Brylcreemed hair. The luminous Vivien Leigh, gangling Eleanor Roosevelt, a drab Canadian Government minister, Churchill looking squat, Peter Fraser looking political, Bernard Freyberg looking unflappable as he shaves on the battlefield, VC winners Keith Elliott and Te Moananui-a-Kiwa Ngarimu. Crowds on wharfs, lining streets, watching cricket and playing rugby in the desert, on stretchers, in POW camps.

Harper and Lemish have managed some telling juxtapositions. Wrens stepping crisp and brisk down Auckland's Queen Street are followed by a shot of tired troops trudging through desert sand. A cheery J-Force soldier sits on a destroyed enemy aircraft, just above a hungry Japanese woman and her children scavenging on a beach.

Sometimes it's the captions which capture the contrasts. A smiling young Able Seaman poses in a coat of eager Trafalgar Square pigeons; a year later, he was dead.

Some manage an incongruous humour, as a military brass band appears to charge an invisible enemy. A number have the irreverence which NZers like to think distinguishes them, and which helps people survive in extremis. So troops stand in greatcoats and pyjamas at flooded Waiouru Camp; a Kiwi gunner lights Anthony Eden's cigarette with the same insouciance he'd light his cobber's; a sign advertising the “NZ Tourist Bureau” appears in Stalag 383 POW Camp.

What are the great war photos? Alexander Gardner's rag bundles of Confederate dead after the 1862 Battle of Antietam. Capra's Republican infantryman flung backwards by a bullet's impact in the Spanish Civil War. Nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Thuc fleeing, naked, napalm-seared and screaming, from her Vietnamese village. You'll have your own list. Often, they focus on an individual; evoke the life beyond combat or collateral damage.

From this book, I'll pick enemy parachutes flecking the sky above Crete, while a burning transport plane plummets down. (I remember another of my uncles telling me with head bent how he and other NZ troops shot the paratroopers as they drifted to Earth. “Poor bastards. We could hear them screaming.”)

There's the letter from “The British Free Corps,” an SS unit of Allied prisoners recruited to fight for the Nazis (one NZer served in it); a cartoon of a Lancaster squadron in flight, crammed with busy, bright little humans; devastated Monte Cassino, resembling Hiroshima in its obliteration. Most of all, perhaps, there's the frightened German POW captured at Sidi Rezegh. He's 15 years old. Once again, you'll make your own list.

“My subject is War, and the Pity of War,” Wilfred Owen wrote in 1918, a few months before he was killed during the last week of WWI. “The Poetry is in the Pity.” Pity, pathos, pomp and many other emotions are evoked in this collection, too. An authoritative and frequently affecting book. I can say so without – ta-da – any inhibitions.

Reviewed by David Hill