The last thing the German mountain trooper saw clearly before he became a prisoner of the New Zealanders was a man holding a Bren gun like a club. Not aiming for it, not firing it, holding it the way a woodcutter holds an axe. The trooper was 19 years old. He had jumped into Cree from a Yunker’s transport 6 days earlier with the fifth Gabber Jagger Division, Germany’s elite mountain infantry.
He had crossed the Dolommites in winter exercises. He had been told repeatedly by officers who had read the intelligence reports that the Allied forces on this island were a beaten rabble, demoralized, out of food, out of ammunition, out of fight. The intelligence reports were correct. The conclusion drawn from them was wrong.
It was 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday, 27th of May, 1941. The road was a sunken dirt track between Suda Bay and Channia that the British garrison had nicknamed 42nd Street after the engineering company that had been billeted along it. The Germans had a different name for it now. They called it the place where the war stopped making sense.
Because at 11:00 a.m. on that Tuesday, the demoralized rebel stood up out of the olive grove and started to scream. The screaming was the first thing that broke the German line. The Vermach had heard battlefield shouting before. Russians shouted. The French had shouted at Sedan. The British shouted occasionally in a clipped officer’s messway that sounded more embarrassed than aggressive.
None of those sounds prepared a man for what came up out of the ticelarian road that morning. It was a haka. The trooper would not have known the word. He would not have known that what he was hearing was Tehokawitu Atu, the war party of the war god chanted by a battalion of men whose greatgrandfathers had eaten the bodies of their enemies inside living memory.
He would not have known that the Mouri soldier at the front of the line, a Bren gunner from B company named Sam O’Brien from Tuc was wielding his weapon as a Taiha, a long-handled club of polished wood. because in the moment of the charge, the gun’s bullets mattered less than the gun’s silhouette.
He would only have known that the sound was wrong, that the men coming up the road were not behaving the way exhausted, surrounded, half-st starved men were supposed to behave, that the bayonets were fixed, that they were getting closer. Captain Rangi Royale had blown the whistle twice. The first time, the official accounts record, “No bugger moved.
” The second time, Captain Royal himself stood up and Sam O’Brien stood up beside him and 20 other men stood up after that and then the entire 28th Battalion supported on either side by the Australian 27th and 28th and the New Zealand 19th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd came up out of the sunken road and went forward at a flat run.
The German 141st Mountain Regiment had a battalion deployed along that approach. Mortar teams forward, machine gun positions on the flanks, officers with field glasses watching what they had been told was a routine pursuit of a beaten enemy. The pursuit ended in the first 30 seconds. The mortar crews were overrun where they stood.
The machine gunners got off short bursts, then nothing. The riflemen who tried to hide in the olive groves were bayonetted in the olive groves. The retreating Germans who tried to surrender in some places were taken prisoner. In other places they were not. When the charge stopped and it stopped only because Brigadier Ditmer ordered George Bertrand to ride forward and physically retrieve men who were still chasing Germans through the scrub a kilometer and a half down the road.
The count was 280 dead Germans on the ground, 10 Australian dead, an unknown number of New Zealand wounded and three prisoners. Three out of an entire German battalion sent forward to clear the road. Three men taken alive. And the question that has hung over military historians for 85 years is the same question those three German prisoners must have asked themselves sitting in the dust beside the secular road watching Mouy soldiers go through the pockets of their dead comrades for ration tins.
What had just happened to them? Because the men who had killed their battalion did not look like soldiers. Their uniforms faded to colorlessness. Their bayonets were not the gleaming parade ground steel the German officer corpse fetishized. They were dulled, scratched, used.
Their faces were burned dark by the Egyptian son. Some of them, the ones who had charged at the front, had a tattoo work, a curved blue black line of moco running across their cheeks and jaws that the vermached intelligence summaries had not prepared anyone to see. And one of them had used a machine gun as a club.
This was not the war the German officer corps had trained for. This was the war the Maui had been training for since before there was a Germany. Pause. Silence on screen for half a beat, then continue. The three prisoners would be marched back to Suda Bay that afternoon. They would be processed by New Zealand military police.
They would be given water. They would be given in one verified account a cigarette. and they would carry into German captivity when the New Zealanders themselves were eventually overwhelmed and forced to evacuate the island. A story that would spread through the Vermacht’s prisoner of war network and out into the wider war.
The story was simple. There was a battalion in the British Eighth Army that did not fight like the British. They fought like something else, something older, something the German military doctrine of 1941 had no chapter for. The Vermock Intelligence Services would later capture documents in which their own soldiers had begun referring to these men by a specific name, Scalper, Scalp Hunters.
It was not to the Malry themselves an accurate description of what they were doing, but to the German prisoners sitting in the dust at 42nd Street that afternoon, looking at the Bren gun in O’Brien’s hands and trying to work out in his head what the rules of this war actually were. It was the closest word he had and the rest of the Africa Corps were about to learn it too.
The captured Vermach document was not classified. That was the strange thing about it. It was a routine intelligence circular distributed at company level of the kind a German officer would read at his command post over coffee. It described enemy units in the eighth army sector. Most of the descriptions were what you would expect.
Strength estimates, equipment, training assessments. There was one entry that was not what you would expect. Beside the designation 28th Mari Battalion, New Zealand’s second division. The document used a single phrase to describe the unit’s combat behavior. Scalp Jagger. The translators in Cairo had a small argument about the word.
It is not quite scalp hunters in modern English. It is older than that. It carries the specific connotation of frontier warfare of an enemy who collects trophies from the dead, who fights without the European conventions an officer corps could rely on. The German staff officer who drafted the entry was almost certainly drawing on books he had read as a boy on Carl May westerns about Apache warriors and Comanche raids on the Texas frontier.
He was wrong. The Mouy battalion did not take scalps. They had never taken scalps. But the word stuck because the men who had passed it up through the German chain of command had run into something on the other side of the wire that did not fit any of the categories they had been trained to use.
And Scalp Jagger was the closest reference point their culture had given them. Here is what the men on the other side of the wire had actually been doing. On the early morning of 23rd November 1941 at the Italian Army barracks at Upper Soom on the Libyan Egyptian border, the Mouri battalion went forward across flat rocky ground in a frontal attack and took the position before breakfast.
20 Maui died, 33 wounded. 250 German and Italian prisoners marched out under guard, mostly to the battalion’s retaliatory artillery fire from Hala Pass, which was now landing on their own former positions. 3 weeks later at Gazala in mid December 1941, the battalion took over a thousand prisoners in a single engagement.
The battalion’s padre, a man named Kahi Herawira, wrote about the aftermath in a letter to Sir Apiranata, the Mouri MP, whose lobbying had created the battalion in the first place. Padre Harawira’s letter is in the official December 1941 war diary. It survives. It is not a legend. It is a primary source.
The Padre wrote in tero maui translated the relevant passage reads ase boys treat their prisoners well. They give them cigarettes and food just as the word says if your enemy hunger feed them. If they thirst give them drink. This was the same battalion the Germans called scalper. The Italian prisoners taken at Gazala had been told by their own officers what to expect from the ANZAC forces.
They had been told that the New Zealanders included savages from a Pacific island who took heads. They had been told the Maui ate the dead. They had been told a great many things drawn from the same well of pulp colonial fantasy that produced scalpagger in the German document. What they got when they put their hands up at Gazala was a cigarette and a tin of bully beef and water from a canteen.
The shock of that for an Italian conscript who had spent the previous 12 hours certain that surrender meant death was a shock that prisoners returning from captivity at the end of the war would still be talking about 30 years later when an old Maui Padre walked into a German Africa corpse reunion in the city of mines and was embraced by men who had survived the city Mcgreb sweep where over a thousand more Italians had been taken and the Elmar raid in late August 1942 where the battalion went forward at 4 in the morning under the heaviest artillery barrage of the desert war so far and overran two Italian companies on the western end of Rubyat Ridge in roughly 35 minutes. The Italian survivors of that raid interviewed afterwards by an NZEF war correspondent used a phrase the correspondent thought worth filing. They said they had been glad to be taken. glad to be taken by the men whose own
padre had to remind them in a war diary entry of the line from the book of proverbs about feeding your enemy. But this only deepened the question for the vermached intelligence officers reading the captured ration cards and the prisoner interviews because it was the same battalion exactly the same men often on the same day who would go into a German position with the bayonet and not stop. Minkar Kaim.
The night of 27th to 28th June 1942. The second New Zealand division surrounded by the 21st Panzer Division. The fourth brigade was tasked with leading the breakout. Charles Uppam commanding a company of the 20th battalion, throwing hand grenades at a truckload of German infantry at point blank range and continuing the attack with shrapnel wounds in his own legs from his own grenades.
Mouy bayonets in front. Mouy war cries. Actual Mouri war cries in Tero in the desert dark being sung as the brigade went through the German logger on foot. The Germans had not been ready. They had been told again that the New Zealanders were a beaten division. They had pickets out and tanks in logger and field hospital tents up.
The fourth brigade went through all of it. Through all of it. In the closearter chaos, men in field gray who failed to stand up and surrender were bayonetted as the New Zealand infantry stepped over them. Wounded were among the dead. Medical personnel were among the dead. Brigadier George Clifton, captured later in the year, was personally interrogated by Field Marshall Raml about what had happened at Minar Caim. Raml was angry.
The German press was running articles describing the New Zealanders as gangsters. One Africa corpse officer, captured in turn and heranged by Clifton on the New Zealand side, used the phrase, “Bolshevik’s drunk on vodka.” Clifton’s reply, recorded in his own memoir, is the quiet center of this whole strange story.
He explained that the first wave had gone through in the dark, and some Germans on the ground lying still had thrown grenades and fired pistols at their backs. So the second and third waves coming behind were no longer prepared to give Germans on the ground the benefit of the doubt. If you wanted to be taken alive by a New Zealander, Clifton said you had to stand up. It was not chivalry.
It was not cruelty. It was an arithmetic the Vermacht had never had to solve before because the Germans had never met an enemy who fought like the Maui in the assault and then fed you like a brother once your hands were up. The German staff officer in his command post had reached for scalpagger because it was the word he had. He did not yet have the right one.
The right word was waiting for him and it would arrive in person almost 20 years after the war was over in the form of a former padre of the 28th Battalion walking into a candle lit reunion hall in mines to a standing ovation from 7,000 of the men he had once tried to kill.
There is a bronze statue in Amberly, North Canterbury. It stands outside the local council building. The man it represents was a Christurch sheep farmer named Charles Uppam, the only combat soldier in the history of the British Empire ever to win the Victoria Cross twice. The sculptor in 1997 had to make a hundred decisions about what to put on that statue.
He chose to put grenades in Uppam’s hand because grenades were Uppam’s preferred weapon. He had used them at Malay on Cree in May 1941, used them again at Minar Kim, used them at Ruisat Ridge until his arm was shattered by a bullet, and he had to direct his company one-handed. He chose to keep the water bottle on Uppam’s belt because that was the thing the people who had fought beside him asked the sculptor to keep because at Ruisat in the moment when Uppam could no longer walk when his arm was useless and shrapnel was in his legs and the German tanks of the 21st Panzer Division were closing in to overrun the last six men of his company. At that moment up took his own canteen off his belt and gave water from it to wounded German soldiers lying near him on the ridge. He was about to be captured by them. He gave them his water first. This is the part of the New Zealand soldier the Vermached intelligence officers could not file.
Scalp Jagger did not give a wounded man your water before you became his prisoner. This was something else. The second face of the New Zealand soldier, the one the Axis prisoners stumbled into the moment they had thrown their rifles down, appears in account after account, in war diary after war diary with such consistency that even the most skeptical historian eventually has to accept it as a pattern rather than an anecdote.
At Ruisat, an Italian unit had been overrun by Uppam’s company in the dark. As the men were being marched back through the New Zealand lines, Uppam’s command vehicle bogged down in soft sand. He did not have the strength left to push it. So he turned to the Italian prisoners, men he had been trying to kill 4 hours earlier and ordered them in the kind of bellowed parade ground English that needs no translation to put their shoulders to the back of the truck and shove.
They did calmly, without escort, without resentment. They pushed his truck out of the sand and then went back to walking back to their own captivity. That detail is not from a New Zealand source. It is in the German records. The Italian prisoners taken by the New Zealanders did something that the German prisoners taken by the New Zealanders did not do, at least not at first.
They sang. In the back of the trucks rolling east toward the prisoner of war cages at Mi, Italian conscripts who had been told for two years that capture meant death began hesitantly to sing the songs from their valleys at home. The Mouri soldiers riding in the cab of the truck. Boys whose own grandfathers had grown up in Pa villages with no electricity, no roads, no schooling beyond the local church heard those Italian songs through the canvas and began eventually to learn them. Buonote Miamoree, a waltz, a lullabi, a love song. By 1944, when the Mauri battalion was in the mountains north of Casino, fighting through the same Italian villages whose young men they had captured in the desert, the old people of the Keianti Hills would later remember the New Zealanders not for the bayonet, but for the music, for the
singing in two languages around the fires at night, for Wata that the Mauy taught the Italian children in exchange for Aryas, the Italian grandmothers taught back. One of the last surviving veterans of Bee Company, Robert Gillies, told an interviewer in 2018 that the country people were lovely and that he and his mates used to steal sheep and pigs from the local farmers and cook them in defiance of every army regulation in the British Eighth Army in a hangy, an earth oven dug into the Italian soil, lined with hot stones, layered with leaves and meat, sealed with dirt for 6 hours of slow steam cooking. That is the wildcard detail of this chapter and it is verified. A New Zealand light infantry battalion in occupied Italy on active service against Vermach units 20 km up the road was digging Polynesian earth ovens in Italian farmland and inviting the farmers to share the meal of their own
stolen livestock. The Italians by every account that survives ate. This is where the official Vermacht intelligence summaries broke down because the German intelligence sections in the field could not produce a single coherent psychological profile of the New Zealand infantrymen. He was the man who had bayoneted German wounded at Minar Kim because grenades had been thrown at his back.
He was the man who had given his last canteen of water to a wounded German lying next to him on Ruat Ridge. He was the man whose padre wrote letters home about feeding the captured. He was the man who picked up a bren gun like a club and led a battalion charge that killed 280 Germans on a sunken road in Cree.
He was the man who 20 km from a German tank line in occupied Italy in 1944 was teaching the local Italian children to sing in Maui. The contradiction was not in fact a contradiction. It was the logic of the warrior tradition. the 28th battalion came from. In that tradition, there is a concept called tanga, the right way. Tanga governs how you fight, but it also governs how you treat the captured, how you feed a guest, how you sing for a child.
The same code that puts the bayonet at the front of the charge takes the bayonet away the moment the enemy’s hands go up. The Italian conscript at Gazala in December 1941 did not know any of this. He had been told he would be killed. He was given a cigarette instead. The shock of that, the simple unliterary shock of being treated like a man by people he had been told were savages, was the part of the New Zealand encounter no German intelligence circular ever managed to summarize.
There is a quote that has been attributed with some doubt about exact wording but considerable consistency about substance to General Sigfrieded Vestfall Raml’s chief of staff later commander of the Africa Corps. He said it to the Mouri battalion’s chaplain Padre Wii Tetau Huata at the mines reunion in 1972.
Westfall told the Padre that Raml had once spoken about the men of the 28th Battalion as having two sides, warriors equal to any, but also Westfall said, and this is the line that lands, they feel the importance of spiritual things. The Vermacht had never had the words for the second half of that sentence.
By 1944, in the Keianti Hills, with the smell of slow-cooked Italian lamb rising from a Maui earth oven dug into Tuscan dirt, they were beginning to. By the 12th of May, 1943, the Tunisian campaign was over and General Lieutenant Hans Grapon, commander of the 90th Light Africa Division, last and toughest of the Africa Cors infantry formations, had a decision to make about who was going to receive his sword.
The choices were not unlimited. The British 26th Armored Brigade had a column on the Capbon Road. American formations were closing from the west under Bradley. The first free French were in the mountains. Any of them would have done. Any of them would have been protocol. But von Spanik did something that the standard surrender accounts gloss over and that the divisional histories preserve in a single careful sentence.
The 90th Light Division, the formation Irvvin Raml had used as the spearhead of the Africa Corpse’s infantry, the unit the Vermacht had counted on when it counted on anything, insisted on giving up to the New Zealanders, their doutty adversaries of two years standing. That phrase comes from the German source, not the New Zealand source, doubty adversaries of two years standing.
To understand the strangeness of that, you have to understand what the 90th light and the second New Zealand division had been doing to each other since the autumn of 1941. They had first faced each other at Sidi Rzig in November 1941 where the 90th Lights machine guns had shredded New Zealand infantry battalions in the open desert.
They had faced each other again at Minar Caim in June 1942 where the New Zealanders had come out the other side at Bayonet Point. They had faced each other at Elmareer at Munib at the second battle of Alamagne where the New Zealand fifth brigade had pushed corridors through the German minefields for the British armor to exploit.
They had faced each other at Tbaga gap in March 1943 where the fifth brigade with the Maui battalion forward had broken the right flank of the Marath line in Fryberg’s famous left hook. 2 years Sidi Redzg to Tunisia. Each time the 90th light had been there each time the New Zealanders had been across from them.
20 months of trying to kill each other. And at the end of it, the German general looked around at the Allied formations available to take his surrender and chose the one that had been hunting him the longest. That is not a sentimental gesture. It is something strange. It is recognition. The shock for the German prisoners of the 90th light walking past the New Zealand military police at the Capon collection point was that the men receiving them were not triumphant.
They were not vengeful. They were not making speeches. They were processing prisoners the way the Mouri battalion’s padre had described back in 1941. Water, cigarettes, food, a place to sit down. Brigadier Brian Horix, commanding the British Corps that had cooperated with Fryberg’s New Zealand Corps in the final phase, would deliver one of the war’s harsher rebukes to Vonsponic a few hours later, accusing the 90th Light of being responsible for the deaths of millions, refusing the general’s request to travel into captivity in his own staff car. Horox was British. He had been bombed in London. The New Zealanders did not make speeches. They had been at casino that February. They knew what it had cost. They had nothing they wanted to say to the men in the trucks. This professional courtesy, this deliberate quietness around the moment
of capture was a thing the German officer corps had not been trained to receive. They expected a ceremony. They expected reproach. They got a sergeant from Hawks Bay holding a clipboard asking for a name and rank. There is a moment that captures the stranges of all this from the inside. In September 1942, Brigadier George Clifton of the New Zealand Sixth Brigade had been captured at Elmagne by Italian troops of the Folore Parachute Division and brought directly to Field Marshall Raml’s headquarters for personal interrogation. The film of the meeting survives. It was taken from a German propaganda cameraman whose body was later recovered by Allied troops on Cree. In the film, Clifton stands with his hands behind his back and Raml stands close speaking in German. The phrase Raml used, which Clifton later recorded in his memoir, The Happy Hunted, was the
question every Vermached officer eventually asked the New Zealanders. It is not your war at all. Why are you here? Why have you come 10,000 miles from a country no German has ever seen to fight us in this desert? Tell me that. I genuinely want to know. Clifton’s reply does not survive in the German records.
Clifton characteristically jumped out of the truck 20 minutes later and tried to walk back to Elamagne on foot. He was recaptured. He escaped again. He escaped in total nine times across two and a half years of captivity in Italy and Germany. The last successful attempt being in March 1945 from O flag 12B in the dying weeks of the war.
But the question Raml had asked him was the question every German encountering New Zealanders asked. It is not your war. The answer the Germans were given in actions, if not in words, was that the New Zealanders had decided otherwise. The clearest demonstration of that came in a German prisoner of war camp somewhere near Dresdon in late 1944.
A recruiter for the Vafanesses’s British Free Corps, a propaganda formation Ysef Gerbles intended to parade in front of cameras as proof that the British Empire was crumbling from within. Found a working party of six Mari soldiers and offered them a deal. Sign with the SS. Fight the communists on the Eastern Front.
beer, women, freedom from the camp. The story as reconstructed by the British historian Adrien Wheel from German records has two layers. The first layer is that the Mouy men briefly considered it. Captivity wears a man down. The second layer is what saved them from doing it. A Scottish NCO already in the British Free Corps, a man named Hugh Wilson Cowi, complained to the German leadership that the Free Corps was for whites only and that admitting Mari recruits would be racially unacceptable.
The Germans, reading the racial doctrine of their own SS organization back to its source, agreed. The six Maui soldiers were returned to their working party within 48 hours. They were never issued uniforms. They never enrolled. The British Free Corps, deprived of its critical mass, never reached the front it had been promised to.
Gerbal’s propaganda film was never made. The Mauy soldiers had accidentally sabotaged the operation by being insufficiently white for an SS unit recruiting from the same prisoner pool. This is not a heroic story. The men involved were tired and cold and hungry and they had said yes for a few hours before the racial doctrine of the people offering them the deal kicked them back out again.
But the vermached intelligence officers who tracked the British free corps recruitment recorded something they did not have an analytical box for. The earlier Mori prisoners, six of them taken on a famous two-month tour of Germany in 1943 and offered the same SS commission with full ceremony, had refused to a man.
The historian Monty Sutar, who is related to one of those men, recorded the SS commander’s reaction. He had been very upset. He could not understand why a colonized people would be fighting alongside their colonizer. The colonized people the SS commander did not yet realize were the same people the 90th light division would insist on surrendering to 6 months later.
The German officer corps had one last lesson to learn about what they had been fighting in North Africa. It was waiting for them in a military camp in the Warapa. In September 1942, a Japanese naval officer stepped off a transport ship at Wellington Harbor and read a sign at a country railway station that he had never heard of in his life.
Featherston, his name was Michiharu Shina. He had been pulled from the water off Guadal Canal after the destroyer he served on, the Akatsuki, was sunk by American gunfire. By the rules of the culture he had been raised in, he was already dead. He had been taught from childhood that to be taken prisoner was the ultimate disgrace. To die is honor.
To live is to cease to exist. And he had spent the days between his rescue and his arrival in New Zealand expecting at any moment to be executed. He had heard rumors in the holding cages of what the New Zealanders did to captured enemies. He had heard about the Mouri. He had heard the stories the German prisoners told filtered through three languages and a year of repetition about Scalpier.
He stepped off the train at Featherston station and began to walk under guard toward what he assumed would be either his place of execution or his place of slow death. He found instead a country town. The shock that ran through the Japanese prisoners on their first days at Featherston camp is recorded in Shina’s memoir published first in 1979 as the path from Guadal Canal revised and republished in New Zealand in 2001 as Beyond Death and Dishonor and in the testimony of every other Featherston survivor whose account has reached print. They had expected torture. They were given medicine. They had expected starvation. They were given New Zealand army rations, which were better than what the Japanese garrison on Guadal Canal had been eating. They had expected execution. They were given small army huts, eight men to a hut, boots, blue-eyed uniforms, a patch of garden outside each hut to grow flowers in.
Ma Jong sets carved out of scrap wood, a tennis court the prisoners eventually built for themselves. movies once a Fortnite in the recreation hall. The Japanese civilian laborers who had been drafted into the Imperial workforce on Guadal Canal, the first group through the camp gates formed within weeks a working trade with the New Zealand guards.
They carved small wooden animals and walking sticks and intricate models. The guards traded cigarettes for them. Some of those carvings still sit in the National Army Museum in Wuru. The military prisoners, especially the naval officers like Shina, did not understand what was happening. The behavior of their capttors did not match anything they had been told to expect.
Shina wrote later in lines the New Zealand academic researcher Maro Tsujimoto preserved through interviews with Adachi’s family that the Japanese prisoners wondered why New Zealanders had given such kind treatment to Japanese as their enemy, though they expected to be executed by New Zealand captives.
They having thought that they did nothing but die began to awaken the instinct for survival gradually began to awaken the instinct for survival. That is the line. That is the inversion. The men who had crossed the equator believing they were dead found themselves 3 months later planting carrot seedlings.
What happened on February 25th, 1943 has been picked over for 80 years and will be picked over for 80 more. A group of about 240 prisoners from the second intake, military men, naval officers, men who had not made the same peace with captivity that the civilian laborers had made, refused to work.
The Geneva Convention required prisoners to work. The Japanese government had signed but never ratified the convention and had never communicated its terms to its own military. The camp commandant did not have a translator. The senior Japanese officer at the scene, Lieutenant Toshio Adachi, sat down with his men in the compound.
The duty officer fired a warning shot. Then he fired a second shot which struck Adachi in the shoulder. The prisoners rose. The guards opened fire. The shooting lasted between 15 and 30 seconds. 48 Japanese prisoners died. One New Zealand guard, Private Walter Pelvin, was killed by ricocheting friendly fire from a machine gun on the latrine roof.
That part of the story is the part that gets retold. The part that does not get retold is what happened the next morning. The Japanese wounded 74 men with gunshot wounds were taken from the camp to Anzac Hall in Grey Town, the next town up the road, which had been converted overnight into a special hospital ward for them.
The doors were sealed. The windows were blacked out by order of the prime minister who was trying to keep the incident out of the papers to prevent reprisals against New Zealand soldiers held in Japanese camps in the Pacific. But the seal did not hold against the women of Grey Town. They came anyway. The women of Greytown, wives and mothers of New Zealand servicemen, some of them with sons and husbands serving in North Africa are already dead in the Pacific, came to Anzac Hall with flowers from their gardens and decorated the sick rooms of the men who had been their enemy a day earlier. They sat with Japanese prisoners who could not speak English. They held hands with men who had no language to thank them in. Adachi recovering from the bullet in his shoulder would later tell his daughter Fuki Adachi who related it in turn to the New Zealand researcher Maricot Sujimoto in 2010 that he had thought he
was going to die and that the kindness of the women of Grey Town was the moment that broke something open in him. It was the same shock the Italian prisoners had described at Gazala in December 1941. It was the same shock the German prisoners had described as they were processed at Kapon in May 1943.
It was the same shock, the simple unliterary shock of being treated like a man that the Vermached intelligence officer in the desert had reached for Scalpagger to describe and never quite managed to. Adachi went home to Japan in February 1946 on an American tank landing ship that stopped at Guadal Canal.
so he and the other survivors could hold a memorial service for their dead. He came back. He came back to Featherston four times before he died, burning incense at the campsite, lobbying for a peace garden against initial resistance from the local return services association, becoming, in the words of the New Zealand National Army Museum, one of the leading advocates for commemoration, reconciliation, and understanding between the New Zealand and Japanese people.
Today, there is a grid of 48 cherry trees at the campsite. They were donated eventually by a Japanese forestry philanthropist named Toshio Nakamoto. They bloom every September. Each tree is one of the men who died on February 25th, 1943. There is a stone plaque at the foot of the memorial. The inscription on it is a haiku written in Japan in the 17th century by Matsu Basho 300 years before the Featherston camp existed.
Behold the summer grass, all that remains of the dreams of warriors. That is what shocked the Axis prisoners most when they first encountered the Kiwis. Not the bayonet. The bayonet was something every army on every front had learned to expect from somebody. What shocked them was the second face. The Vermach trooper at 42nd Street watching a man use a Bren gun as a club never met the Mauy soldier who would teach his children to sing in Reo a year later in a Tuscan farmhouse.
The Italian conscript at Cid Megreb, glad to be taken, had been told he would be killed and was given a cigarette instead. The German general at Capbon insisted on giving up to the men who had been hunting him for 2 years because there was in the end no one else worth surrendering to.
The Japanese naval officer at Featherston, expecting execution, awoke the instinct for survival in himself when a guard he had been raised to despise, gave him a tin of stew and a place to plant a garden. The lethality and the kindness were the same code. The Vermach never had the right word for it.
The Italian conscript never had the words for it. The Japanese naval officer eventually wrote a book trying to find the words for it and titled the English edition Beyond Death and Dishonor. The word the Mouri themselves had for it. The word the 28th Battalion brought with them across half the world and which governed how they fought and how they fed the captured and how they sang at night with Italian farmers was tikonga.
the right way.
