The day a shadow fell

IT'S a wintry Auckland day, but the Mediterranean sun of nearly 70 years ago illuminates Jack Middleton's room at the Ranfurly Veterans Home.

The old soldier is at work on one of his tapestries, a hobby he began to while away the wet winter evenings when farming on the Hauraki Plains after his "overseas trip".

The tapestries are very good but, colourful as they are, his needlework can't compete with his war stories.

For the next hour the former carpenter, soldier and farmer is no longer 91 and plagued by angina and a gammy knee.

He's a 21-year-old back in a leaking eight-man army tent in Ngaruawahia in 1939; then on board the Orion a few months later as the converted passenger liner pulls away from the dock, taking the First Echelon to the Middle East.

That first day in Egypt monuments, mates and mischief. Good times.

Then Greece. Rumbling, oncoming tanks, hundreds of them. Crete, and parachutists, thousands of them. Bad times.

Back to Cairo. So many faces missing.

The colonel who saw him as officer material (no thanks).

Libya, and fixing bayonets for a night charge on Belhamid.

El Alamein, and shrapnel in the knee.

Coming home, and opening an unexpected letter from the War Department. It said he didn't have to go back to the war.

And the day he and his fellow carpenters on an Auckland state housing construction site put down their saws and hammers and went into town for a drink. World War II was over.

Jack's war started as it ended - on a building site.

He remembers the announcement on the radio but didn't stop hammering nails just because a world war had broken out. No one was hysterical about it, he said, and there was a job to be done for the Lands and Survey Department at Kerepehi, south of Ngatea on the Hauraki Plains.

A couple of days later Jack rode his pushbike 12 miles to Paeroa to sign on - the first in the town to do so when enlistment opened. There was another job to be done.

Besides, he adds: "I wasn't going to get a trip overseas otherwise."

Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage prophetically warned that it would be a long, bitter conflict. Even so, who would have predicted war between then-allies Germany and Russia, and World War I allies America and Japan?

The impact on New Zealand was enormous, perhaps more than Savage could have envisaged, had he lived to see it. In September 1939, the New Zealand Army numbered 2500. Three years later, one in eight Kiwis was in uniform, when the Home Guard is taken into account, and by then the war accounted for half the nation's economic activity. Twelve thousand New Zealanders died, one in 130.
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But Jack recalls that the mood on board the Orion was optimistic when she sailed on January 5, 1940. And why not? He had left school in the midst of the Great Depression, yet here they were, at the start of an experience they had never had before. Travelling in style, too; they had two-berth cabins, luxury compared to the army training camp at Ngaruawahia.There was even a full orchestra. And stewards.

"We still had to drill and march around the decks."

And when the First Echelon landed in Egypt, the overseas experience was everything it promised. On their first day at Maadi Camp their colonel marched them into Cairo for a look around, and they "saw everything there was to see", Jack says, with a twinkle in his eye. That's a reference to the Wagh el Birket, the infamous red-light district.

They visited the museums, the zoo, the brewery (where the Kiwis were not invited back). And the English tea gardens, until someone was rude to one of their hostesses, who turned out to be Lady Astor. The Kiwis were not invited back.

His mate, Bruce, would "drink like a fish, he wouldn't go to sleep until he'd kissed everyone good night".

The New Zealanders were seeing the world, but the bill was about to arrive. For all their training, Jack recalls, they had "no idea what was coming".

Of the 700 men in 18 Battalion who left Egypt for Athens at the start of March 1941, fewer than half assembled back at Maadi Camp after the disasters of Greece and Crete. "We had 420 reinforcements, that was how many we lost, killed or prisoner."

Their first night in Athens was spent in a cemetery after their arrival on the Ajax, and they were sent by train to Salonika.

"We had no equipment, just rifles, no tanks, or air support, they had everything."

He remembers the Germans pushing unwilling Italians in front, forcing them to fight.

"We were pushed back..." A slight pause. "Never mind."

Bitterly, the New Zealanders noted Winston Churchill's public claims that the Allies did have air support in Greece. "One bloke said, if the air force is in Greece then where the hell are we?"

At least Churchill showed up in Egypt later, Jack says. "He came tearing along in a jeep, he said 'hello, kiss my arse' and was gone again."

It's no surprise to hear that Jack was a PBP Poor Bloody Private from start to finish, even though battalion commander Colonel Jan Peart offered him officer training after Crete.

Jack was mentioned in dispatches after El Alamein, and nominated for a military medal, but in the end the only metalwork he collected was the shrapnel in his knee in the battle. The wound was "nothing" he says (Peart, the former headmaster of King's College, Auckland, died of wounds on September 4, 1942).

Jack wasn't to know it, but the Allied victories in North Africa meant his war was coming to an end.

"Strafed in the desert and bombed out in Crete

With sore dark eyes and hardened by the heat"

James K Baxter, "Returned Soldier"

In July 1943, after three years away, the first furlough draft of 2NZEF returned to New Zealand. To their disgust, they found they had been fighting a very different war from those at home who had found ways to gain exemption from active service.

"We all decided we wouldn't go back, there were so many jokers walking around in civvy clothes."

Public opinion swung behind the soldiers, and Jack says that those who did go back were mostly given tasks away from the front, such as driving. In his own case his mother was ill his father died in 1929 and Jack was given six months' compassionate leave, albeit without pay. Then in June 1944, to his complete surprise, the letter from the War Department arrived to say he was discharged.

The quiet life followed building, farming, working for Hellaby's in the bacon factory, and raising two children.

It's nearly spring now, meaning it's time to see the daffodils in bloom on his son's farm at Pukekawa. The Ranfurly has its own outings and activities they look after him well, Jack says, and he keeps himself busy with tapestries, surrounded by people who can identify with his war experiences.

But they've never been that far away. Years after the war, on an evening when he took his wife out for dinner at the Thames RSA, a familiar voice boomed across the room: "I kissed you good night over there and I'm going to kiss you good night again now!"

Keen Auckland sailor Con Thode went to work as usual on September 3, 1939, despite the morning news.

After all, he and his yachting friends had seen the war clouds gathering for months and had taken steps towards gaining the qualifications they would need to serve in the navy.

But although his first rank was "Acting probationary temporary sub-lieutenant", he never expected to see the war through a periscope.

The living room of the 98-year-old's home at Okura, north of Auckland, is testament to four years of service with distinction in submarines. In one corner is the ship's bell from the Scythian, which he commanded. On one wall is an artist's impression, published in the Illustrated London News, of a head-on collision between his first submarine, the Proteus, and an Italian destroyer off the Greek coast.

At 98, Con retains an alertness that belies his years, and, although some of the memories are a bit hazy now, he clearly remembers how he nearly didn't make it to sea at all.

In 1939 the New Zealand division of the Royal Navy wasn't recruiting, and would-be officers thinking of joining the Royal Navy in Singapore were advised that "private means" were a prerequisite.

Disgusted at the elitism, Con enlisted in the infantry, only to learn from a fellow crew member on the yacht Iorangi that an Auckland yachtmaster's ticket would open doors in London. Sailing community contacts helped him "un-enlist" and he left New Zealand for the first time, working his way to England on the Port Darwin, and arriving to a London of sandbags and gasmasks.

Training in Brighton and convoy escort duty on corvettes followed, where the only sign of the other side was a Focke-Wulf Condor circling out of range.

But Con's war changed course in 1941 when the Luftwaffe dropped a parachute mine on the Liverpool Adelphi Hotel, killing some of his fellow diners. "It just got to the stage when it all seemed so hopeless," he says.

It turned out to be a case of mood matching opportunity, because the next day, after he had picked his way through glass and rubble to report for duty, he learned that the Royal Navy was looking for submarine volunteers.

Over the next four years Con was twice mentioned in dispatches after patrols that sank troopships in the Aegean and protected the Allies' Arctic convoys.

And there was an enormous party for his crew and everyone else in Trincomalee harbour, Sri Lanka, on the day it was all over.

"There was supposedly a great shortage of booze, it was amazing how much appeared that night. Rockets and flares... it was a big night."

It was over, except it wasn't. Back in New Zealand, he married and returned to his old job of working for chemicals giant ICI, but could not fit back into civilian life. He cleared his head by going farming at Matakana, near where he now lives.

He has a fantastic view of the sea, and given those days and nights of dim lighting and stale air, he surely appreciates the sunshine and salt air more than most.

"Near miss", says the caption in neat capital letters. Understatement isn't the word, given that the image it accompanies is of a German bomb landing close to HMS Leander in the Mediterranean.

Leander veteran Des Price, 89, enlarges: "A near miss could be worse than a direct hit, a near miss alongside a ship could open her up."

This photo album is surreal, the result of some entrepreneurial spirit by a camera-toting crew member who would pin prints to a board and sell copies to willing buyers. Another picture shows a half dozen of the cruiser's crew grinning on a sunny day. It could be anyone's holiday snaps if not for the steel helmets and the neat handwriting noting that they have just helped fight off an air attack.

"That was taken on my 17th birthday," says Des's Leander shipmate Bill Morland, 85, pointing to a picture of himself and two other sailors. Shortly after the shutter clicked, the crew were at action stations to repel aircraft.

If you were an historian trying to capture the spirit of the New Zealand experience of World War II, you could give up on the words and just run these pictures a sepia world of Sydney swimsuit beauties and exotic ports of call Bombay, Colombo, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean. And the Solomons, when there was no "near miss". They were lucky to survive; 33 of their crewmates didn't.

Bill Morland clearly remembers September 3, 1939. He was on leave in his home town, Dunedin, and had already been in the navy since the age of 15-and-a-half "I used to see all the ships coming in with all the pomp and ceremony and thought it would be a good life."

No sooner had the radio announced the news when his brother appeared in the Octagon with a telegram ordering him to report back to HMS Philomel, the naval base in Auckland. The declaration of war came as a shock, he recalls. "When you're young you don't really think about world events."

Des, originally from Levin but now living in Auckland, heard the announcement on the Leander's tannoy, on the way back from the cruiser's first mission. New Zealand had not waited for the outbreak, given what happened at Fanning Island (now Kiribati) in World War I, when the German raider Nurnberg shelled the cable station and disrupted communications across the Pacific. The small garrison Leander was carrying 1 platoon A company, special Service Force became known as "The men who beat the gun", Des recalls.

The two veterans admit they had no idea what was in store; Des thought the war would last maybe a year while Bill hoped they would be "cruising the islands in winter and New Zealand and Australia in summer".

Des, whose father had been wounded and shell-shocked in World War I, expected at least to be safer at sea, although he had been keen on the navy since primary school.

"In the navy it's 99% boredom and 1%... well..." His meticulous "summary of places of call and events" records everything from "boredom" to "well..."

On February 21, 1941, the Leander sank Ramb I, an Italian armed raider. (Almost all the crew were rescued.) The previous day: Leander's ship's cat Minnie was unfortunately lost overboard. March 16, another disaster: the ship "ran out of rum".

He knows all this because, against regulations, he also kept a diary. There's a gap, but he's glad it was only the pages he lost.

They were both on board when the Japanese torpedo struck on the night of July 11, 1943, when Leander formed part of a Pacific task force.

Des, in particular, had a lucky escape. He was working in the boiler room as part of an electrical repair party when he was called away to the other end of the cruiser. "At midnight they wanted a job done in the after engine room and took me away. A chap from Devonport took my place. One hour later there wasn't anyone left."

They were lucky to get back, says Bill. The photos show a huge hole in Leander's port side, and the cruiser would have been an easy target as she limped to safety.

You'd think that by now Des might have been rethinking the relative safety of the navy but he only got in deeper, literally. A former motor mechanic before joining the navy, his fascination with submarines was prompted by a visit aboard a seized Italian sub in Aden in 1943. He was one of four friends who volunteered.

"We used to see them going out and coming back, somehow it just got us."

He served on the Otway, Tribune and Totem, and the eventual fate of the latter is a chilling reminder of the risks he faced. Sold to Israel after the war, the submarine disappeared en route and the wreckage was found only four years ago in the Mediterranean.

"These things happen," says Des.

At Submariners' corner in the Devonport RSA there is a list of Allied submarines lost in the war, and it's a long one.

Bill ended the war on HMS Norfolk (Leander was "paid off" in 1944), and saw the Norwegians' reaction when the cruiser brought King Haakon and his family to Oslo in June 1945 after five years in exile. It was a "quite interesting" occasion, notes Bill. He was in Malta when Japan surrendered "That was a bit of a relief. We were refitting on the way to the Pacific."

He remembers arriving back in Wellington on Christmas Day 1945 "That was great. We came back on a converted aircraft carrier, all the North Islanders got off at Wellington on Christmas Eve, we sailed for Lyttleton. We had leave 'til March."

Everyone else was being demobbed but Bill and Des, being regular navy, had to report back after their leave.

And for Bill, it started all over again in Korea. After that he joined the army and served 14 years as an instructor. But when offered a tour of duty in Vietnam, he declined: "I said I wouldn't trust my luck that far."

Des concurs: "I suppose we were lucky in many ways."

Near misses, and all that.

When Esther Cochran reads an Agatha Christie thriller, the page numbers take her on a voyage around the Pacific of 70 years ago.

It's one of the odd ways the memories of her war service return, says the former Waaf (Women's Auxiliary Air Force) weather specialist.

Page 115 is Auckland; page 172 is Hamilton. The numbers are weather codes memorised as part of her years of work for the air force weather department in Suva, when Fiji was the crossroads of the Allied war effort in the Pacific.

But the 94-year-old Aucklander wishes she could remember more and regrets not recording her experiences from 1939-45. Something as mundane as a cloud formation can set off a flashback she had to know her nimbostratus from her cumulus.

"I'm very angry at myself that I didn't write things down. When you're young and things happen, you don't really register that they'll be very important, you think it doesn't matter but it does."

The former shorthand typist does recall that when the conflict broke out the War Department visited the company she worked for.

"They wanted volunteers to join His Majesty's Armed Forces. I was no more an armed force than a pussycat but I put my hand up."

Esther considered herself patriotic and saw it as her duty, but learned very quickly that doing her part would involve personal sacrifice.

The occasion was an encounter with her former manager in Queen St.

"I had quite a thing about that boss. I had a bit of a crush on him. He pumped my hand and said I was looking as lovely as ever."

But there was a war on and the regulations demanded secrecy. She couldn't tell him where she was going or what she was doing.

She volunteered for overseas service and was posted to Suva, where she plotted maps for the air force forecasters around the clock.

Esther was one of 10,000 New Zealand servicemen and women in Fiji. The official history of New Zealand notes that they were overcrowded, under-resourced and endured boredom and tropical diseases while their contribution to the war effort went largely unnoticed.

Esther was lucky to have work she considered enjoyable, but she missed her Devonport home with its magnificent oaks and pohutukawa, blackberries in the back yard, cosy fireplaces and poetry library, including her own verses and short stories. She missed the concerts her family would attend at the Auckland Town Hall.

But she did make good friends in the Waafs and, after all these years, one of them still comes to her birthday parties at the Ascot retirement home in Devonport.

It's not far from the house Esther returned to after four years in Fiji, and where she lived from the age of three months to 88 years a home of happy family memories, except for the grief that World War I visited on her family.

Despite her sense of patriotism, Esther has never had any illusions about war.

"I feel very angry when I think about the war and any wars. They are diabolical, they just are. It ruined my sister's life."

Her sister Dorothy's husband was given six weeks' leave after their marriage. He knew he had a daughter, but never lived to see her. She was six weeks old when he was killed in the Battle of the Somme.

Her brother Hector was wounded but survived and won the Military Medal.

"Wars are just dreadful. That was my sister's life ruined. They were so in love. It's just unbelievably awful. There should always be another way of settling your arguments without having a war."

Tom Shaw never spoke much about the war.

His son John, a Devonport painter, says he and his siblings would ask about it but their mother would intervene "Don't upset your father".

The Wairarapa farmer took his memories and stories to the grave, but he did leave behind a suitcase full of clues.

Showing a sense of posterity and occasion and a disregard for army regulations Gunner Shaw used his Kodak Box Brownie to record scenes ranging from the Maori Battalion on parade to his artillery unit in action.

We can guess why he singled out certain graves in the El Alamein cemetery. But we won't know the circumstances and other consequences of the air raid that resulted in the Chevrolet 4x4 (used to tow the 6th Field Regiment's 25-pounder guns) catching fire, leaving the crew to frantically shovel sand on to the blaze.

In another picture of a Chevy, there's someone else's ammunition inside. It's a dud shell that landed right next to the steering wheel.

The memorabilia Tom Shaw was perhaps proudest of was his "one-way ticket" to Europe the berthing card issued on his departure from New Zealand. He kept it for the rest of his life in a precious leather wallet which also contains small head and shoulders photos with brief captions: "Gunner V.B. Silbery. Killed in action." "Gunner R. Townhill. Killed in action."

Intriguingly, one photograph (above) shows German paratroops landing only about 100m away. On the back, a single word: "Crete".

It could be an extraordinary snapshot taken in the heat of battle, but exactly when, where and by whom is unknown. The source best-placed to comment died in August 2006, aged 87.

Tom Shaw's family can only speculate that he might have been more forthcoming to someone outside the family. But today, Google says only: "Your search `6th field regiment' `Tom Shaw' did not match any documents".

By ARTHUR WHELAN - Sunday Star Times 30 -8 -9