by Michael King
The third service to recruit New Zealanders for combat was the Royal Navy (the Royal New Zealand Navy was not formed until 1941). From 1940, 7000 reservists (RNVR) went to Britain to serve subsequently on Arctic, Atlantic and Mediterranean convoy escorts, in the Fleet Air Arm, in submarines and in the Merchant Marine. New Zealanders largely manned the Royal Navy’s light cruisers Achilles and Leander. Achilles first went into action spectacularly at the Battle of the River Plate on 13 December 1939, which led to the scuttling of the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee off Montevideo, Uruguay. Leander was first assigned convoy duties in the Pacific and then sent to join the Red Sea force in 1940. Minesweeping activities off the New Zealand coast were stepped up after several local ships were sunk from 1940. In November of that year the German raider Komet intercepted and sank the passenger steamship Holmwood off the Chatham Islands. The 29 passengers and crew were eventually landed at Emirau Island in the Bismarck Archipelago.
New Zealand-manned cruisers came back to the Pacific for the war with Japan. Achilles was badly damaged by bombs in a raid that killed 13 of its crew, and Leander lost 28 men when torpedoed off Kolombangara Island in July 1943. Achilles returned to action for attacks on Japanese bases and patrols off the Japanese mainland shortly before and after the end of the war. Other members of what was by this time the Royal New Zealand Navy served in corvettes off the Solomons and manned minesweepers and Fairmile launches in other parts of the Pacific.
From November 1943 the New Zealand Division in the Mediterranean became part of the British 8th Army’s push to clear German forces out of Italy. The war was not yet over, but German defeats in North Africa and Russia were clear indications that the tide had turned and an Allied victory in Europe was ultimately assured. The very month that the New Zealanders began their northerly advance up the long leg of Italy from Bari to Trieste, Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt were meeting in Tehran to plan the shape of the post-war world.
There were still battles to be fought and lives to be lost, however. In November and December 1943, New Zealand forces bogged down at the Sangro River were trying unsuccessfully to break through the Germans’ Gustav Line. Early in February 1944, as part of the newly formed New Zealand Corps, they were thrown into costly action at Cassino, near the southern end of the Gustav Line. It took almost three months of fighting and a high rate of casualties to reduce the town to rubble by 18 May, when the Germans at last pulled out.
From that time, the war for New Zealand troops was a matter of pursuing German forces as they withdrew. Spirited fighting occurred north of Rome and just south of the River Arno. Then the front moved across the Apennines, from Rimini to Ravenna and on to Bologna. In the north-east, the New Zealanders had to adapt to a very different style of warfare to that which they had become accustomed to in North Africa: bridge building and river crossing, fighting through canals and ditches, house-to-house engagements. They were held back for some months south of Bologna, which other forces entered in April 1945. They moved across the River Po, and from there on to Padua and Venice, both of which turned out to be in the hands of Italian partisans. They then began a race for Trieste in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent Tito’s communist partisans from incorporating the province of Venezia Giulia into the new Yugoslavia.
In late April and early May 1945, while the New Zealanders were eyeballing Tito’s men, Prime Minister Peter Fraser was impressing delegates at the first meeting of the United Nations Organisation (UN) in San Francisco. Fraser had an ambitious, global vision for the post-war world and New Zealand’s place in it. He had already opened new diplomatic posts in Washington and Ottawa, and another would soon follow in Moscow. He had concluded an agreement with the Australian Government – the so-called Canberra Pact of January 1944 – in which both countries undertook to consult on international matters, particularly those affecting Pacific countries, to be involved in decisions regarding the disposal of ‘enemy’ territories, to advance a trusteeship system for colonial dependencies and to set up a ‘South Seas Regional Commission’ to promote further economic and social development in the Pacific (this last led to the foundation in 1947 of the South Pacific Commission).
Fraser and the Australian Prime Minister, John Curtin, had not established a rapport – Curtin considered the New Zealander too impractically idealist, and was still smarting from the fact that his neighbour had failed to bring home its division from the Middle East when Australia took that step. But Fraser formed an especially close and mutually respectful relationship with the Australian Minister of External Affairs, the robust and sometimes uncouth former High Court judge, Herbert Evatt. This relationship bore fruit at San Francisco, when both men pressed for mechanisms to protect small nations from aggression and opposed – unsuccessfully – granting veto powers to members of the Security Council. Fraser also chaired the committee which set up the Trusteeship Council and engineered the placement of Western Samoa within this system as a first step on the road to political independence.
On the international stage, at this and other UN meetings and conferences of Commonwealth prime ministers, Fraser cut a far more resolute and charismatic figure than he appeared at home, where he was often preoccupied by the trivia of political administration. Leaders of other countries, including Churchill, admired his sagacity and his firm stands on matters of principle. And the value he placed on the United Nations as an international arbiter and potential protector of small and weak countries set a precedent that New Zealand Labour governments in particular would follow and indeed emphasise in the later years of the twentieth century.
Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945, V-E Day, and New Zealanders in towns and cities awoke on the morning of 9 May to the sounds of whistles, hooters and car horns. Scenes that followed in the course of the day were unusual in a country that did not normally favour public displays of emotion. ‘[Trams] were packed with people and everybody travelled free,’ one Wellingtonian recalled. ‘People met at various points in the city and danced and sang and there was … general hilarity everywhere.’ The impulse was the same in rural areas. Congregations gathered at isolated churches to give thanks; even larger crowds gathered at country hotels.
For most New Zealanders, the war in Europe was the war. Germany had had to be defeated and Britain secured before civilisation – and New Zealand’s principal market for exports and major source of imports – could be considered safe. In all, 194,000 men and 10,000 women had served in the country’s armed forces, 140,000 of them abroad. And most had been involved in ‘Hitler’s war’. More than 11,500 had been killed, the highest casualty rate per head of population in the Commonwealth.
By the time of the German collapse, the Japanese too were in retreat, fighting their way back to their fortress of islands. When the end came there too, in atomic explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, it was sooner than expected – but expected none the less. V-J Day on 15 August inspired scenes of jubilation, but none so joyously uncontrolled as those which had marked V-E Day. A sense of climax, however, was followed by anti-climax. The only immediate change that the close of hostilities brought was the end of casualty lists. Many of the conditions of war persisted. Petrol, meat, butter, sugar and tea continued to be rationed. Men and women overseas could not be brought home at once; some had to wait until 1946 before they could be reunited with their families. When those reunions took place, they were often among tired men and women, spiritually and physically spent after six years of deprivation and sacrifice.
The sense of anti-climax included, for some, feelings of downright disappointment. Only in times of crisis are men and women inclined to extend themselves to exceptional limits; only when challenged in extraordinary ways does the human spirit soar. Troops in combat enjoyed physical fitness and a sense of comradeship for possibly the first and the only times in their lives. And they witnessed or shared in acts of heroism. It was strange, the writer John Mulgan noted, that war which accustomed men to death also brought with it ‘so full and ric
h a sense of life’. For thousands of men and some women, it had been the one great epic in their lives, the time when they felt most conscious of being alive and of having a worthy role to play. The return to the mundaneness and petty squabblings of civilian and domestic life was often accompanied by disenchantment.
This war would also be New Zealand’s last great common denominator, the last intense experience that tens of thousands of people would share, and one whose rationale was accepted by the country as a whole. For the time being, it strengthened the convictions that made New Zealand life and cultures coherent and harmonious. In the coming decades, however, the certainties would erode and the harmonies be interrupted by static. The settled society New Zealand had become in the century from the 1840s to the 1940s would now be subject to unsettlement.
[1] This move and the appointment of support staff to Washington in 1942 was the beginning of the country’s diplomatic service. Prior to the war, New Zealand had representation only in London and Canberra; by war’s end four new posts had been established along with a new Department of External Affairs headed by Alister McIntosh. Nothing could have signalled more strongly the Labour Government’s determination to act independently of Britain in foreign affairs.
Part IV: Unsettlement
Chapter 25
Cracks in the Plinth
The immediate effect of World War II and its aftermath was to turn New Zealanders in on themselves – as individuals and as families – and to confirm some of the most profoundly imprinted social patterns of the pre-war years. Joseph Adelson’s analysis of North America in the 1940s and 1950s rings true also for New Zealand.
We sought, all of us, men and women alike, to replenish ourselves in goods and spirit, to undo, by an exercise of collective will, the psychic disruptions of the immediate past. We would achieve the serenity that had eluded the lives of our parents; the men would be secure in stable careers, the women in comfortable homes, and together they would raise perfect children … [It was] the idyll of suburban domesticity, which would redress the grievances of the past and ensure a perfect future.
The sheer magnitude and force of these domestic ambitions produced national trends. One was the rapid development of city suburbs and suburban culture, concentrated on the nuclear family and on house and garden. The nation bred at an unprecedented velocity. From 16 births per 1000 population in 1935–36, the rate rose to over 26 per 1000 by the late 1940s and this was maintained until 1961 – the so-called ‘baby boom’ that would necessitate a massive expansion in the number of schools and teachers through the 1950s and 1960s. Another trend was the growth in philosophical and political conservatism, leading to disenchantment with the tired, elderly leadership of the Labour Government. This brought National to power in 1949 and kept the party in office for 29 of the next 35 years. At the same time there was an American-led build-up of the Cold War mentality and a minor outbreak in the 1950s of something resembling McCarthyism. There was also the growth of a more overt form of materialism than had been apparent previously, centring on a desire for better homes and more consumer goods: washing machines, refrigerators, family cars, fashionable clothing – the phenomena that came to be known collectively as ‘keeping up with the Joneses’.
Belief in the appropriateness of the values underlying such things was reinforced by a series of events which some saw as portents confirming New Zealand’s position in the world as unusually blessed. There was Edmund Hillary’s triumphant conquest of Mount Everest in 1953, for example, as a member of a British expedition, followed immediately by the coronation of a young monarch – the newspapers spoke of the promise for the whole Commonwealth of a ‘new Elizabethan age’ – and a visit from that Queen and her consort to New Zealand in 1953–54, the first time a reigning monarch had set foot on New Zealand soil. Other events cited for their oracular value included the appearance of Opo the dolphin in the Hokianga in 1956 and her playful interaction with humankind (some local Maori identified the dolphin as the spirit of Kupe, as presaged in the full name of the harbour, Te Hokianganui-a-Kupe, the great returning-place of Kupe); and the three to one defeat of the Springboks in the All Blacks’ test series at home the same year.[1]
In the 1940s, many features of pre-war life seemed to have survived reassuringly intact. Most New Zealanders still spoke of Britain as ‘Home’ and saw nothing wrong with superannuated British aristocrats or military men being sent here to represent the King of New Zealand in New Zealand. They certainly saw nothing odd in having the country’s head of state live 20,000 km away in London. On New Year’s Day 1946, the outgoing Governor-General, Sir Cyril Newall, a much-decorated former Marshal of the Royal Air Force, reminded young New Zealanders that they were ‘heirs to a partnership in an Empire whose contribution to the welfare of mankind was second to none’. Sir Cyril was replaced by Sir Bernard Freyberg, who did at least have a New Zealand connection though he was British-born, like all of his predecessors.[2] In that same year New Zealand still possessed a Department of ‘Native’ Affairs, whose function was to assist the country’s first indigenous people and, by organising the development, lease and sale of their land, contribute to what almost all New Zealanders believed were the ‘best race relations in the world’.
Yet cracks were already appearing in the foundation of national unity and coherence. The Fraser Government, narrowly re-elected in 1946, was already discussing with its civil servants ways in which the country’s defence arrangements could be transferred from the waning world power that was Britain to a United States that was by this time showing serious interest in its potential responsibilities as a nation with a Pacific seaboard. British politicians were by the late 1940s beginning to give serious thought to ways in which Continental-wide security could be guaranteed, to prevent yet another round of blood-drenched wars on European soil. This consideration would lead in the 1950s and 1960s to specific proposals for a European Economic Community that would have no reason to retain Britain’s historical and sentimental links to its Commonwealth primary producers. And Maori, who had lived predominantly in rural communities for the whole period of their interaction with Pakeha, had begun during the war to move into towns and cities, a trickle that would become a torrent in the 1950s and 1960s. This demographic change would alter the ethnic composition of New Zealand urban communities and eventually require a rewriting of the social contract between the two peoples.
Perhaps most dramatic of all, in the 1960s television and cheap jet travel would open New Zealand to the world and the world to New Zealand. All kinds of domestic cultural features – from cuisine to clothes to literature – would change as a result of new global influences and of New Zealanders being able to travel widely and return home. And the development of the contraceptive pill would revolutionise the nature of personal and sexual relations.
One of the small seeds that eventually helped to develop social and cultural change was a direct consequence of the war and the upheavals in Europe that preceded and accompanied it: the displacement and dispersal of talented people – ‘like a ripened crop from a vigorously shaken tree’. New Zealand was fortunate to benefit from this diaspora of talent, particularly in the case of Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Europe, who were admitted only in their hundreds but, as one of them said, ‘punched well above their weight’.
Perhaps the best known was the Viennese philosopher Karl Popper, who left Austria in 1937, one year ahead of the disastrous Anschluss with Germany, to take up a position as lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury University College. ‘[New Zealand] is not quite the moon, but after the moon it is the farthest place in the world’, he wrote, voicing the reason some refugees chose to travel so far – in the case of Jews, to the very edge of their diaspora. At Canterbury, according to the university’s official history, ‘Popper’s impact on academic life was greater than that of any person before or since.’ Between 1938 and 1943, Popper also wrote what may well be the most influential book ever to come out of New Zealand: The Open Society and Its Enem
ies, a classic definition, through a study of Plato, Hegel and Marx, of the values that underlie non-totalitarian societies. For all the praise heaped on him subsequently, Popper was given no strong encouragement to remain in New Zealand and in 1945 accepted a post at the London School of Economics.
Another intellectual leviathan who did stay, the German–Jewish scholar and poet Karl Wolfskehl, arrived in Auckland in 1938. A relative of Heinrich Heine and a cousin of Sigmund Freud’s wife Martha Bernays, Wolfskehl had abandoned Germany the day after the Reichstag fire in 1933 and lived in Italy for five years before burgeoning anti-Semitism there drove him on to New Zealand as the ‘refuge [most] remote from the sickness of Europe’. Described as ‘a walking encyclopaedia who could always supply a missing quotation or an apposite … myth’, he formed influential associations with such New Zealand writers as Frank Sargeson and A. R. D. Fairburn. According to Sargeson, Wolfskehl brought with him a whiff of the antiquity and high culture of Europe and ‘could immediately be recognised as a figure from the previous century: dark clothes, cravat or great bow, a crop of hair, artist’s wide-brimmed hat …’ He was progressively isolated by blindness and depression, however, and his late letters and poems are full of the gloom of exile. He died in Auckland in 1948 at the age of 79.