Aimed at presenting the efforts of the New Zealand Military Forces during the war to the general public, the series was published during the period 1919 to 1923 under the stewardship of Fred Waite.

However, Major General Alfred Robin, the commandant of the New Zealand Military Forces, held firm views of what should be communicated by an official history.

Journalistic and writing skills were second to the ability to understand and communicate military tactics and strategy, the lessons of which were to be imparted at the direction of the Imperial General Staff at the War Office.

Hence, rather than Ross, Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Stewart, an academic of the Canterbury University College who had commanded an infantry battalion in the New Zealand Division during the war, was favoured by Robin to write the official history.

[7] A draft manuscript detailing the NZEF operations in the Middle East had been prepared by Major A. H. Wilkie, who had served with the Wellington Mounted Rifles in the Sinai and Palestine Campaigns but the draft was deemed unacceptable and Lieutenant Colonel C. Powles revised it into a more accessible form.

[3] There were chapters on the seizure of Samoa, the work of the New Zealand Naval Forces' HMS Philomel and the brief Senussi Campaign.

[9] His work completed in seven months, Drew also proposed a volume of New Zealand's general war effort but this suggestion was not taken up by the Government.

[1] An error in the first volume of the series led to a long-running under-estimate of the number of New Zealanders who fought in the Gallipoli Campaign.

In 2013, David Green determined that Hamilton had calculated his figure from a mistaken interpretation of tables in The New Zealanders at Gallipoli.