ANZAC ADDRESS

‘Always a Day of Memories’

ANZAC Day, always a day of memories, and I’ve had a few in my time. The first I remember was when I was around eight years old, it was during World War II, and we’d go down to the RSA club house and get handfuls of red paper poppies and hand them out to the locals on parade. It was always a joyous time for a kid.

And we had something special to celebrate, which is why I remember that year. A local man, Jack Hinton, born in Riverton where I was born, had been awarded the Victoria Cross for exceptional bravery in hand-to-hand combat against the Germans at Kalamata, Greece, in 1941. The announcement of his award came while he was still being held in a Nazi prisoner of war camp. I was very proud that my family knew his family.

My dad had a medical disability which ruled out military service, but he served enthusiastically in the home guard at Bluff where we had moved to from Riverton. Sometimes I would join him in the evenings as he scouted Bluff Hill searching for Japanese infiltrators. If I was very good he would let me carry his wooden rifle – the real ones had all been sent to the front.

I was one of three sons, descendants of the whaling ship officer/farmer Willie Leader who had helped settle Riverton in the 1830s and married a Māori woman. Our Māori blood had thinned over the years but my mother Jane and grandmother Kitty Cross were leaders in the community. I remember they loved poi dancing, and regularly went mutton birding on Potama Island.

Of course, we descendants of Ngāi Tahu were particularly interested in the exploits of the Māori Battalion that was fighting overseas, first in North Africa and then in Italy. I soon learned the words of their fight song, ‘Māori Battalion March to Victory’, and sang it as I marched the streets of Bluff to school. Of course, I still remember those words today.

It was only after World War II, when I was in high school and could learn about such things, that I understood the remarkable contribution to the war effort by the 28th Māori Battalion of the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force. The unit was organised on tribal lines with soldiers whose spirit and courage exemplified all that all Māori knew of their own warrior ancestry. So eager were the Māori people to prove their loyalty that they had to petition the New Zealand Government in 1939 to form the unit.

The great battles the Māori Battalion fought are legendary now, from helping kick the German General Erwin Rommel out of North Africa, to giving their all in the stalemate battle of Monte Casino in Italy. Of the 3,500 Māori in the battalion, 655 died in action and 1,949 were wounded or captured – enormous casualties for any unit. And a full-blooded Māori would win the Victoria Cross, at the Tebaga Gap in Tunisia, in March, 1943.

Second Lieutenant Moana-nui-a-Kiwa Ngarimu, an infantryman, charged the attacking superior German forces, firing his machine gun from the hip more dramatically than any war movie actor might try to copy – and giving his life in the effort. But his example turned the tide of battle. It inspired men in his company to follow up the attack. The Germans were routed.

Historians quote Rommel as later writing: ‘The Māori Battalion is the greatest fighting force I have ever seen’. After the loyal service of the Māori Battalion in World War II it was difficult for any other New Zealander to have reason to hold any Māori back. They shared the dangers and the glories with the other New Zealanders who equally laid down their lives so that the rest of us could live in freedom.

From 1940 to 1945, 6,068 Kiwis in total would die and 15,108 wounded in a necessary war to save the future not only of this country but the whole western world. The deep pride of the Bluff Māori in their fighting men was matched by their own commitment and diligence to the war effort.

I sometimes hung around the waterfront, watching the Māori longshoremen work night and day to load up the endless convoys of the American big sea transports, the Liberty Ships, with meat, butter and wool for the war fronts. I’d also bum a few Camel and Lucky Strike cigarettes and Juicy Fruit chewing gum from the friendly American seamen, but I’d only take the chewing gum home.

I was 10 years old when World War II ended. I remember celebrating V-J Day in 1945 with a few young pals by stealing a case of soft drinks from a large stack delivered to the entrance to the grocery shop owned by the only Chinese merchant in Bluff, Willie Wong. We handed out the bottles to our friends. I never told my parents about it. Willie Wong may not even have missed the case. But the theft haunts me to this day, that I would cheapen a great day of national celebration with a stupid stunt like that.

The deeper meaning of ANZAC Day came home to me a few years later when I was sent to Waitaki Boy’s High boarding school in Oamaru, as had my two brothers. My parents loved their community but decided that they would give us an opportunity they never had, to find a pathway to the wider world beyond Bluff. That pathway would be through higher education.

At Waitaki in 1948, I was assigned to Don House and a 60-student dormitory called Sari Bair. The neighbouring one was called Lone Pine, and a third nearby was named Chunuk Bair. I would later learn that these names commemorated a series of battles in Turkey in 1915 that were the origins of ANZAC Day itself. Battles by New Zealanders and Australians there were bloody and brutal and sometimes lost and sometimes won and always indecisive.

It took me some time, after the clarity of our victory in World War II, to understand that by celebrating a failed cause at Gallipoli we elevated the struggle of our brave soldiers to a level far above mere victory or defeat; we glorify struggle itself as a vehicle of national purpose. I later learned that historians marked the actions in Gallipoli as the birth of national consciousness in New Zealand and Australia.

While all our battle dead through the years and many wars are commemorated on ANZAC Day, it is the fateful struggle at Gallipoli that conjures up the images that are most meaningful to us. The red paper poppies I handed out in my youth became the symbol of remembrance because these were the first plants to bloom from the shell-churned bloody mud of the French and Belgium World War I battlefields.

It was to circumvent those battlefields that the British First Sea Lord, Winston Churchill, approved the April 15, 1915, attacks on the Dardanelles by the New Zealand-Australian Army Corps. The idea was to clear the peninsula of Turkish guns so that the sea lanes to our then ally Russia could be opened. But the peninsula itself became a mirror of the European war and its unbearable stalemate. Finally on August 8, 1915, the allied forces attacked the Chunuk Bair heights that were seen as the strategic key to the control of the peninsula.

It was the beginning of days of tragedy. As the battle spread to neighbouring Sari Bair and Lone Pine, the casualties rose. The attacking force of 4,549 men was reduced by nearly half to 2,678, by energised Turkish units fighting for their own glory. On December 19, the invasion force pulled out of Gallipoli and into our history – to be remembered, with love of their sacrifice and with horror at their ordeal.

At Waitaki Boy’s High, sleeping in the shadow of the epic battles of World War I and well aware of the monumental bravery of the Māori Battalion in the Second World War, I was forced to face up to my own potential military service. We were often reminded of our duty by the then rector of Waitaki, Brig. General Jim Burrows, the handsome, grey-haired hero of campaigning in Italy in World War II. His son, Buzz Burrows, was the student and sports leader at Waitaki and later became a prominent military man himself.

And then the Government introduced compulsory military training in 1949 and I was among the first to be called up, at just 18 years of age. To be honest, I worshipped the exploits of the Māori Battalion but had never in my wildest dreams considered I might be asked to do the same work, and very much doubted that I had the right stuff.

At desolate Waiouru Camp where we had our basic training, my concerns about a military career were sharpened by the toughness of the training regime, and the obvious excitement of the career officers over the possibility of a war in the Korean peninsula. That was understandable. War, after all, is a professional military man’s business.

But as Korea did indeed erupt into war when the communist north invaded the south on June 25, 1950, and New Zealand agreed to a United Nations request to send soldiers there, my fears were suddenly realised. At a refresher training course at Waiouru, the officer in charge of our mortar company told us with great excitement that we were on the list for Korea, and that he would command us in the battlefield and make men of us all.

Maybe he would have. Bu the Government sent an artillery unit instead of us, with a thousand men and officers who served in Korea bravely for two and a half years, losing 33 dead and 79 wounded in action. Even at that early age I felt that the Korean peninsula would have been better served by a more realistic political accommodation by the superpowers that were behind the war, anyway.

The Korean War turned out to be a bloody stalemate. I felt vindicated. By then I had become a newspaper reporter. I took off for Australia like so many young Kiwi reporters before me, looking for journalistic glory – and a safe life – on London’s Fleet Street.

I didn’t know then that fate would turn me back upon myself. That rather than escaping from war I was heading straight into it. That the histories I’d read and the war veterans’ tales I heard would become reality in my own life, that I would crawl through blood-stained battlefield mud, and bandage wounded men.

I would have a brave soldier die in my arms, and hear the cry of fearful civilians cradling their own dead, and see cities destroyed before my eyes by the devastating munitions of war. I did not become a soldier, no. I became a war reporter. I did not shoot with a rifle, I shot with a camera. I was never a hero, always an observer.

And I remembered the real heroes of my youth, the men of Gallipoli, and the Māori Battalion, and Victoria Cross winners Jack Hinton and Second Lieutenant Moana-nui-a-Kiwa Ngarimu. I never tried to emulate them. No way. They were the examples of real heroes in my mind as I sought to understand wars, and how and why men fight them.

I first celebrated ANZAC Day overseas in Bangkok, Thailand, in 1957. The New Zealand Ambassador Charles Craw invited me to the dawn ceremony in the backyard of his modest embassy. A special guest that year was the prominent Māori legislator and social activist Eruera Tirera Tirikatene, by then white-haired and patrician looking.

Tirikatene was the Southern Māori MP and an old friend of my father. I had met him years earlier when he visited my home in Bluff. By now, I was working for the American-owned newspaper Bangkok World and was enjoying the exotic world of Thailand so much that I had given up my Fleet Street dreams.

I also felt I was slipping out of the peaceful orbit of my homeland and into a new world of foreign intrigue, big power politics and the cold war. My being from New Zealand helped. “You guys have helped us in every war we’ve had this century,” the American Ambassador U Alexis Johnson told me one evening during a cocktail party at his home. Kiwis would remain true. Another war was on the way: Vietnam. New Zealand would be there with its troops, as usual.

I began working part-time for the Associated Press. The American wire service hired me as a staffer in 1960 after I pulled a stunt right out of my Bluff playbook: when a neutralist coup d’etat overthrew the US-backed military government in Laos in August 1960, I was the only reporter in the capital, Vientiane.

I swam the half kilometre-wide Mekong River border with Thailand, every day for a week, to file my AP stories, because all communications with the outside world from Laos had been closed down. I was happy to be working for the Associated Press for several reasons. It was a regular paying job, the wire service was the most influential in the world, and I could learn from it.

What’s more, my old newspaper, the Southland Times in Invercargill, was an AP subscriber and it could run my news stories, and so allow me to be connected to my professional beginnings. But the AP also covered wars. In 1961 it was my turn to report on the rapidly developing Vietnam conflict, and I flew into Saigon on what I believed to be a temporary assignment. Instead, I stayed a dozen years that changed my life forever.

Vietnam brought me face to face with my fears and fantasies about injury and violent death that underline all those images we have about battlefield action. But there was something more I faced in Vietnam that would influence my whole future career.

For my generation of journalists, the noble certainties that had persuaded our fathers that all wars we fight in are good wars, these certainties began disappearing. Many at home and abroad would protest against the Vietnam War. On the battlefields themselves, some soldiers, and some officials of high standing, questioned the tactics and strategy of the war.

And that placed the war reporters in the middle of the controversy because it was we who conveyed these doubts and criticisms to the general public. We faced moral ambiguities along with the real dangers we encountered while covering battle actions with the troops. On the one hand we admired and supported the soldiers, who allowed us to join them on their operations in the jungles and mountains of Vietnam.

On the other hand, we believed it necessary to report on the growing doubts about the conduct of the Vietnam War and its value to the seven countries pursuing it – the United States, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines and South Vietnam itself.

I remember an ANZAC Day service on April 25, 1967, in Saigon, hosted by Ambassador Paul Edmonds at his residence, attended by a delegation of parliamentarians and publishers from New Zealand. The ambassador was a well-informed official who had shared some of his doubts with me about the ever-more brutal war.

But the delegation from home was gung ho about New Zealand’s role, and took noisy issue with me over critical media coverage, on the grounds that in times of war the press should always support the Government. The discussion got heated. The ambassador eventually separated us.

Before Vietnam there was generally heavy censorship by western countries of media reports from war zones. But the Vietnam War was the first of the modern conflicts fought for reasons less of pressing national security needs, than for convenient political objectives. It was labeled a ‘limited war’.

The George W Bush administration’s war in Iraq is the latest such conflict, what is known as a ‘pre-emptive war’. Iraq, of course, is one war in which New Zealand declined to participate in because it questioned its premise.

I covered the Iraq War for four years to better understand what was going on. As democracy spreads throughout the world a more knowledgeable public wants a greater say in matters of war and peace.

More and more today the world’s media, through the internet, and through satellite television and radio broadcasts, speaks for an international audience with much wider interests than the narrow national focus of years past. For that reason CNN flipped the diplomatic world on its head in 1991 by accepting Saddam Hussein’s invitation to remain in Bagdad during the first Gulf War to cover the Iraqi side, the enemy side. I interviewed Saddam in Bagdad 10 days into the war.

Five years later I spent a day during military operations with the Bosnian Serb military commander, General Radko Miladic, who was accused of committing brutal war crimes, and who today is one of the most wanted men in the world. And a year later in March, 1997, I interviewed – for CNN – another ‘most wanted’, Osama Bin Laden, in his mountain stronghold in Afghanistan.

Not for a moment am I suggesting that by interviewing any of these brutal dictators does it give them a free pass into the discourse of the world community. What it does do is force them to face up to the world’s questions about their conduct, and provide a glimpse into their future intentions.

I have few illusions left. Interviews and diplomacy can only go so far. More often than not, unfortunately, somewhere in the world people are plunged into violent conflict.

So on ANZAC Day, April 25, 2008, we again honour the deep commitment – and the great sacrifice – of New Zealand’s fighting men throughout the decades, and who are now on duty in Afghanistan, East Timor, the Solomons and Lebanon.

We may argue the politics of the wars our country enters into. But we should have no doubts about the willingness of our young men and women who have answered the call over the years, to serve with bravery and commitment in those wars.

And I have been privileged in my life to serve, in my own way, the cause of freedom that these brave men and women fight for.

Thank you.

Peter Arnett (Ngāi Tahu)