Hugh Sullivan’s escape: a soldier’s tale from Greece

Soldiers of Auckland’s 21st Battalion on Greece in April 1941. Ref. DA-12227-F Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington

In a recent blog I wrote about the problems faced by the New Zealand Broadcasting Unit in getting their reports cleared by military censors. But in March 1941, the problem was getting close enough to the action to report on it at all, as I have discovered by listening to recordings they made about the campaign in Greece and Crete.

The New Zealand forces were ordered to Greece to support the British and Australians in defending the country against the Germans. Noel Palmer, officer-in-charge of the NZBU, petitioned for the broadcasters to be allowed to go to Greece with the troops, but military authorities turned them down.

Palmer’s frustration at being left behind at Cairo’s Maadi Camp is revealed in his letters to colleagues at the National Broadcasting Service back in Wellington: “We are not in Greece and not sure what we will do for news. We are sitting on our tails at Base. We confidently anticipate ‘OBE’s’ at the end of the war: “Only Been in Egypt,” he wrote.1. Palmer eventually went as far as getting the request to go to Greece in front of 2NZEF commander General Bernard Freyberg, but the answer was still “No”.

The Greek campaign soon unravelled into disaster and a hurried retreat. Had the NZBU gone with the Division, any recording equipment they took with them would have had to be abandoned as the Allies’ withdrew from Greece and then Crete, a few weeks later, leaving almost all their equipment, vehicles and heavy weapons behind them. This would likely have spelled the end of the Broadcasting Unit’s work.

Instead by April 1941, with thousands of New Zealanders now across the Mediterranean fighting their first campaign of the war, the broadcasters back at Maadi were forced to cool their heels and make recordings such as this one I wrote about earlier. Some 80-plus years later, the radio broadcast fragment “Jazz at Shepheard’s Hotel” makes for atmospheric listening, but it’s not exactly gripping war reporting, a distinction keenly felt by the New Zealand broadcasters.

However, National Broadcasting Service Director James Shelley reassured the anxious Noel Palmer in a letter in early May, that war correspondence work was not regarded by the NBS as the unit’s primary role. “Your job is not in the firing line, but to keep us supplied with the kind of matter that is coming forward. [i.e. interviews and soldiers’ greetings] Cabled reports [from Greece] have been very scant so we don’t expect you to get running commentaries of the fighting when even the war correspondents are unable to do so. Personal accounts like that of the Commander of the Long Range Desert Group is the type of material that is very acceptable” he wrote.2

Stories from Greece and Crete

In May when the first New Zealanders evacuated from Greece began arriving back in Egypt, the NZBU quickly got them in front of a microphone to record first-hand stories of their experiences. Noel Palmer and commentator Doug Laurenson reported summaries of the Greek campaign and withdrawal, based on these accounts. You can listen to some of these recordings now online on Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision’s website. New Zealand officers, such as Divisional Signals commander Lt-Col Stanley Allen recorded accounts of their units’ action in Greece and individual men also recorded their experiences.

New Zealand soldiers of 21st (Auckland) Battalion with a donkey in Greece., 1941. DA-11862 Alexander Turnbull Library

“The most exciting experience of my life” – Hugh Sullivan’s escape

One of the most entertaining I have listened to is by Sergeant Hugh Sullivan from Horotiu in Waikato [military service number 21261.] He recorded a colourful description of how he and five of his comrades from No. 11 Platoon of the 21st (Auckland) Battalion, decided to head off on their own, after the order to withdraw was given on 18 April at Tempi, in northern Greece. He called the challenging journey to safety “the most exciting experience of my life.” (You can listen to his full recording on the audio player below.)

U-series. Sgt Sullivan’s escape from Greece. Parts 1-4. ID 12618-12621, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

The 21st Battalion had been fighting a rearguard action at Platamon and Tempi, holding off the invading German forces to allow thousands of Allied troops a chance to escape towards southern Greece and eventual evacuation to Crete, via the Royal Navy.

Sullivan says he and his friends, Private Tom Mutu of North Auckland [military service number 21455], Private “Happy” Appleton [21413] of Taumarunui, Private Bill Becker [22486] of Point Chevalier, Private Les Ormsby [21457] of Otorohanga and Private George Wright [22515] of Ramarama, had been together ever since they joined up and entered Papakura Camp together in January 1940. Instead of withdrawing with the rest of the 21st, they headed into the hilly countryside and eventually made their way to the eastern coast and the village of Karitsa. They met up with a Greek man who had lived in New Zealand for 25 years, owning a fish shop in Hobson St, Auckland. He advised them to head south, but one night, they decided to steal a small fishing boat and began rowing their way down the coast.

They had no oars so ripped up some floor boards and paddled with these. They hid onshore from German air patrols by day and rowed by night. Hunger was a constant problem, but they found Greek peasant farmers who would share bread or cook a few eggs for them, and they even managed to kill a sheep and cook it.

The journey taken by Sgt Hugh Sullivan and his 21st Battalion platoon mates, from Tempi, Greece to Port Said, Egypt 18 April-20 May 1941

After several nights rowing, they could see the island of Skiathos and when they reached it, were warmly welcomed by the locals who all brought what little food they had to feed the New Zealanders. Over the next few days they island-hopped their way through the Sporades islands, eventually meeting up with a group of evacuating Australians on the island of Skopelos. They had comandeered a larger fishing vessel and two Greek sailors. With them, the Auckland platoon-mates made their way across the Aegean Sea to the island of Chios, near the Turkish coast. The British Consul in Turkey was contacted and sent a boat which they used to sail along the Turkish coast (again dodging German aircraft), until they reached the British-held island of Cyprus. Ultimately, they reached Port Said in Egypt and rejoined the New Zealand Division, some 32 days after being given the order to withdraw from Greece.

Welcome back to Egypt

After arriving in Egypt from Greece and Crete, all New Zealanders were welcomed and given “comforts” funded by public donations to the Patriotic Board back home. The Broadcasting Unit covered the arrival at Alexandria of a Royal Navy destroyer full of New Zealanders evacuated from Crete, on 30 May 1941. (You can hear the recording on the audio player below.)

Commentator Doug Laurenson was joined on the wharf by a BBC counterpart Edward Ward, as they describe the hundreds of weary men disembarking with little but the clothes on their back and a few items ‘souvenired’ from German troops. In the recording you can hear the men saying “Thank you” to the YMCA workers who are distributing the comfort packs containing cigarettes, sweets, sandwiches and oranges, funded by New Zealanders who would eventually hear this recording once the disc made its way back to Wellington.

U-series. Arrival of New Zealand troops in a Middle Eastern Port. Parts 1-4. ID 12493 Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Laurenson notes the men all have to register first so records can be updated and families advised of the men who are missing. Nearly 1,000 New Zealanders were killed as a result of fighting on Greece and Crete and a further 4,000 were captured and became prisoners of war. BBC correspondent Edward Ward was soon to become a POW himself, captured at Tobruk in North Africa in November 1941.

BBC war correspondent Edward Ward, who also recorded with the New Zealand Broadcasting Unit. Photograph via BBC

Through May and June 1941 the New Zealand Broadcasting Unit was kept busy recording the many stories the evacuees had to tell: of their battles and escapes, of the support they received from the Greek and Cretan people (often at great personal cost), and of significant moments such as the role a New Zealand infantry platoon played helping the King George of Greece and members of his Cabinet escape over the mountains of Crete to safety. Platoon leader Lt Winton Ryan of Auckland [military service number 2608] was interviewed about this journey on this recording. His tale was one of the few bright spots in the disastrous campaign, and New Zealand’s military public relations office also arranged for him to be filmed telling his story, which can be viewed in the newsreel below (courtesy of Archives New Zealand.) I’m still trying to decide if the narrator in the newsreel is possibly Doug Laurenson of the Broadcasting Unit.

Towards the end of the newsreel we see and hear Prime Minister Peter Fraser who flew to Egypt in late May to personally welcome the evacuated New Zealanders. The fact that he flew to Egypt was worthy of comment in 1941. Commentator Doug Laurenson noted Mr Fraser is a direct link with home for the New Zealand troops, and describes his ‘speedy’ journey to Egypt, ‘as fast as airmail’ via Australia, Surabaya, Singapore, Bangkok, Calcutta, Karachi and Iraq.

Peter Fraser was recorded by the Broadcasting Unit in a suprisingly informal recording, as the microphone follows the PM moving among over 1,000 men at a garden reception held at the Gezira Sporting Club in Cairo.

Prime Minister Peter Fraser (in the white hat) with evacuated New Zealand personnel at the Gezira Sporting Club, Cairo, May 1941, DA-01103-F Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington

Fraser shakes the hand of each man and in a soft Scots accent, asks him where he is from. Almost without fail, he makes some comment referring to someone he knows from their hometown: locations as far-flung as Oamaru, Devonport, Taumarunui, Hamilton, Lower Hutt, Foxton and Methven, nowhere it seems was too remote to be beyond the reach of the Prime Minister. A man from Stewart Island is surprised when Fraser asserts that not only has he visited the island, “one of the most important places in New Zealand”, he also knows Tom Bragg. (Thomas Kaiporohu Bragg, 1876-1949, served five terms as chairman of the Stewart Island County Council and was a foundation member of the Ngāi Tahu Māori Trust Board.)3 The man he greets next turns out to be Tom Bragg’s nephew.

Prime Minister Peter Fraser greeting men evacuated from Greece and Crete, at Gezira Sporting Club, Cairo, May 1941. DA-01105-F, Alexander Turnbull Library.

Fraser has a reputation as being somewhat aloof and austere, but in the excerpt of the recording below, he comes across as very human, reassuring men who had just experienced combat for the first time, that he will tell their mothers he has met them, and even sending a greeting himself via the broadcasting unit, to the mother of one man, who he knows. Fragments from the past like this can sometimes reveal unexpected insights, part of the joy of listening to archival recordings.

U-series. Rt. Hon. Peter Fraser PM in Egypt. Parts 3 – 4. ID 12424-12425 Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

References

1.Palmer to Smith, 14 April 1941, R22011494, Archives New Zealand, Wellington

2. Shelley to Palmer, 8 May 1941, R22011494 Archives New Zealand, Wellington

3. https://kareao.nz/MEDIA/Public/Text/2022-0933-NTB054.pdf

Uncovering J Force speakers’ names

Three members of No. 14 Squadron RNZAF at the Itsukushima Shrine on Miyajima Island, near Hiroshima, Japan, April 1946. Image from the Robert Redvers Pearson personal collection, courtesy The Air Force Museum of New Zealand.

Names of speakers heard in J Force recordingsDownload

One aspect of my research into the work of New Zealand’s broadcasting units, is to verify the names of the voices heard in the surviving recordings.

Documents listing the names of the speakers were sent back to New Zealand with the discs, but they have long since disappeared, with only the discs surviving in the sound archives of Radio New Zealand, which are cared for by Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision.

So today, the only way of knowing who is speaking, is by listening to the recording and when a speaker is introduced by a broadcaster, making an educated “best guess” at how that person’s name is spelled. I have then been searching in Auckland War Memorial Museum’s wonderful Online Cenotaph database for speakers’ names and matching up the enlistment records with dates of recordings and other details, such as the New Zealand hometown the speaker sends greetings to.

Auckland War Memorial Museum’s Online Cenotaph website

In early 2026 I finished listening to the recordings made of New Zealanders serving in Japan as part of J Force (1946-1948) and verified nearly 500 speakers’ names. you can click on the link at the top of this page to download an alphabetical list of them, with their military service numbers and a link to their page in Online Cenotaph. (Where possible, iwi affiliations have also been added for speakers who were identified as iwi Māori, but this is not be complete.)

If you find someone on this list you want to hear, you can then search for their name on Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision’s online catalogue, and find their recording. (Most of the J Force recordings have been made available to listen to online, but if not, click the purple “Ask about this item” button to send a message to Ngā Taonga to ask if you can hear it.)

Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision’s collection search page

If you find any errors or want to know more about the list of J Force speakers, please feel free to get in touch. And if you find an ancestor or loved one – please take a moment to go to their Online Cenotaph page and consider uploading a memory or even leaving an email contact address.

When I have identified speakers via Online Cenotaph I have sometimes been able to let their whānau know I have found a recording of their family member – but I can only do this if they’ve left an email address. There are many ways to contribute to Online Cenotaph, so get involved!

“Five Māori…set out to do the impossible” – reporting the story of Takrouna

On April 23, a new film Sergeant Haane opens in cinemas, telling the story of a small group of Māori Battalion men fighting in North Africa. In this blog, I take a look at how the NZ Broadcasting Unit reported the extraordinary story.

In April 1943 in the midst of World War II, the New Zealand Division was in North Africa, fighting its way across German and Italian-occupied Tunisia. Radio correspondent Arch Curry and recording engineer Norman ‘Johnny’ Johnston of the New Zealand Broadcasting Unit (NZBU) had been travelling with the ‘Div’ since October the previous year, covering months of hard, desert fighting through Egypt and Libya.

They had covered pivotal moments such as the Second Battle of El Alamein in late October 1942. Arch Curry’s reporting on the start of this action had been a scoop, broadcast worldwide on shortwave radio via the BBC Overseas Service. The NZBU men had come under enemy fire on several occasions and were travelling and living alongside the New Zealand troops, enduring the same hardships of life in the desert where water was always in short supply.

“I haven’t washed any part of me except my face and hands for the past three weeks”, 25-year-old Johnston cheerfully wrote to his parents in November 1942, “but I’m not lousy yet! My hair is at least a foot long but by sprinkling water on it each morning it forms into a cake of mud and stays in place for an hour or so.”1

NZBU engineer Johnny Johnston (right) and an unknown man in the North African desert c. 1942 (Johnston family collection)

Johnny’s colleague in the desert was seasoned Christchurch radio announcer Arch Curry. He wrote voice reports on New Zealand military action which were recorded by Johnston onto 12-inch lacquer discs using a portable ‘Presto’ recorder. This equipment was travelling with them and their supplies in an army-issue truck, allocated to the NZBU by the military authorities, together with an army driver. In April 1943 their driver was Donald ‘Chris’ Ruhi, a young Te Arawa man from the 28th Māori Battalion. Men from the Battalion’s B Company (Te Arawa and Mataatua iwi) were about to feature in an episode of exceptionally tough fighting, which would be reported on by Curry.

Once recorded onto discs, Arch’s voice reports or ‘despatches’ as they were called, were sent by the fastest means possible, back across the desert to the NZBU base at New Zealand’s Maadi Camp outside Cairo. Many, such as the Alamein scoop were sent via an army motorcycle despatch rider, but occasionally they were able to get discs onto an Allied plane headed back to Cairo. Once Arch’s report was cleared by military censors, it was played over radio links to the BBC in London, who would record it there and then broadcast it out to the world via their Overseas Service. This seems a laborious process, today, but in 1943 it was a new immediacy in broadcast news coverage, and it meant within days New Zealand radio listeners could hear about the actions of their men on the far side of the world, reported by a New Zealander who was actually with them.

NZBU correspondent Arch Curry standing on an army truck watching a burning vehicle at El Alamein, Egypt. Photograph taken by H. Paton, c. 9 July 1942. Ref: DA-06752-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

In April 1943, two of Arch Curry’s despatches reported on fighting around the Tunisian town of Enfidaville and the incredible effort by men of the Māori Battalion in particular, to capture a rocky desert outcrop and village called Takrouna. Its sheer rock sides were topped by an old Berber fort, occupied by several hundred Italian and German troops who had a prime vantage point from which to fire on the New Zealand troops on the desert floor below.

General view from Takrouna. Photograph by M.D. Elias, 1 June 1943. Ref. DA-02251-F
Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

Reporting from Takrouna

“All eyes are on Takrouna…where one of the most dramatic episodes of the Middle East campaign is being enacted, ” Arch’s first report begins, recorded on 21st April 1943. “Takrouna is the enemy strong point in the centre of what we may call The Front. It rises menacingly high above the positions occupied by our advance. .. and its possession by the enemy actually placed an almost impregnable rock height, square in the middle of our line. Further advance and consolidation may be held up until the enemy is shaken from the top.
Well, the process of shaking him out has been given a good start by a remarkable action carried out by a handful of Māoris. At first light after the main night attack, just when a light mist was melting away around formidable-looking Takrouna, five Māoris, one of them a sergeant, set out to do the impossible.”2 (Note that in his reporting Arch used the plural “Māoris”, common in the 1940s but grammatically incorrect.)

Sergeant Haane Manahi (Te Arawa, Ngāti Raukawa) Photograph taken by George Bull, Maadi, Egypt, c. 10 June 1943
Ref: DA-04139. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

The sergeant was Haane Te Rauawa Manahi of Te Arawa and Ngāti Raukawa, and for his exploits at Takrouna he was recommended for a Victoria Cross by six high-ranking officers, including New Zealand’s Lieutenant General Bernard Freyberg and General Bernard Montgomery, commander of the British Eighth Army. However for reasons that still remain unclear, this was later downgraded to a Distinguished Conduct Medal. The feats of his small unit of B Company men, and the subsequent V.C. downgrade controversy are the subject of Sgt. Haane, a new film by director Tearepa Kahi, opening in New Zealand cinemas on April 23, 2026.

Arch Curry’s 1943 Takrouna reports have been transcribed and can be heard online on Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision’s catalogue. They are full of praise for the actions of Manahi and the men who accompanied him: “Takrouna could not be scaled, it was said… But these men were Māoris and so, it was otherwise. On their own initiative, they began a most daring hand-over-hand ascent under fire….with tommy guns fastened to their backs.”

After scaling the 600 foot cliff carrying their weapons, Manahi’s party of 12 engaged with the enemy and forced the surrender of nearly 100 Italian troops. “A daring act by a few lightly armed men has played a vital part in a major operation. Their story rises clear above the heavier news of shells and metal, as a tale of personal skill and initiative, which has always been a characteristic of the Māori soldier”, Curry concluded.

View of Takrouna Heights, Tunisia taken by Māori Battalion. Photograph taken by J.C. Pattle, May 1943. Ref: DA-10929-F.
Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

The following day he was able to record another report on how further fighting on top of Takrouna had unfolded over the next 24 hours. The enemy was able to retake the Berber fort, with reinforcements appearing via a previously unknown tunnel hidden under one of the buildings. But further fighting, again lead by Sgt Manahi, eventually forced a final surrender of some 300 German and Italians.

The first New Zealand newspaper coverage of the heroic action at Takrouna appears over a week after assault, on the 29th and 30th of April, in articles like the one below from The Christchurch Press. It would be nice to think Arch Curry and the NZBU had scored another world scoop with his reports, recorded over a week earlier on the 21st and 22nd.

The Christchurch Press, 30 April 1943, p.5 [via Papers Past]

However, it is unclear when Curry’s Takrouna reports actually made it to the BBC, or exactly when they were heard in Aotearoa.

Censorship woes

In early 1943 the previously well-established path for clearing news reports via the British military censors in Cairo had changed, with the arrival of American troops in North Africa and the establishment of Allied Force Headquarters in Algiers. Now Arch Curry’s reports had to be cleared there by American censors, with whom the NZBU had no prior relationship. Previously, if censors found problems with a report, the NZBU base at Maadi was available to edit recordings and re-send them, but they had no such facility in Algiers. Also, it was found the radio links between Algiers and London were poor, with voice reports sometimes unintelligible when received in London.3

New Zealand Broadcasting Unit engineer Norman ‘Johnny’ Johnston in North Africa c. 1942 [Johnston family collection.]

Johnny Johnston ranted about the problems getting their output on air in a letter in early April 1943: “Since this action started Arch has sent four darned good despatches to the American censors in Algiers (they now handle all our stuff) but up to the present not a sign of any of them has come back from the BBC… As we know from past experience how keen the BBC are to get NZ news, we can only assume that the bloody, worthless Yanks have stopped the lot.  This is borne out by the fact that even the BBC men’s own stories on the NZ actions, which we know have been sent, have not been broadcast either. Unlike the excellent censors in Cairo, these new and nervous ninnies apparently object violently to accounts of battles which are in any way detailed. “4

Station 2YA Wellington technician Basil Clarke on ‘listening watch’, records an incoming BBC news bulletin during World War II. (RNZ photographic collection, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision)

By 1943, BBC shortwave news bulletins were being picked up and re-broadcast eight times a day over New Zealand Broadcasting Service YA stations (now RNZ National), so there was plenty of opportunity for New Zealand to hear Curry’s reports – if the BBC received them. For 24 hours a day a “listening watch” was maintained at station 2YA Wellington and a staff member (such as Basil Clarke in the photo above), would spring into action and record any momentous war news they heard. These could then be replayed on NZBS domestic broadcasts. The only evidence I have found of Arch Curry’s reporting from Takrouna being heard on air here, is an archived recording of such a BBC news bulletin, held at Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision in the RNZ Sound Archives.

On 29 April 1943, the listening watch recorded a BBC “despatch from Tunisia.” 5 On listening to this 83-year-old recording, I recognised several phrases through the crackle and hiss of shortwave radio. The despatch was Arch Curry’s first Takrouna report from 21 April, filed over a week earlier. However it was not Arch’s voice. His report had been abridged and re-voiced crisply by a BBC announcer in London. Presumably the troublesome American censors in Algiers had eventually passed it, but perhaps the audio quality as it was received in London was not good enough to play on air – so a BBC announcer re-voiced his report for broadcast. This delay meant it went to air at the same time as the newspaper reports on Takrouna were being printed in New Zealand papers. So, no scoop for Arch and the NZBU this time, but at least their reporting of the Māori Battalion at Takrouna made it to home airwaves in some form.

The New Zealand Broadcasting Unit prided themselves on being as close to the action as possible, travelling alongside the men they were recording and reporting on, unlike some press correspondents, who they felt remained in more comfortable conditions well back from the action. Johnston concluded in his letter, “At Tebaga [a scene of fierce fighting in March 1943] we were the only correspondents actually up with the show and had a clear beat of 36 or more hours on a really big story, over the teeming hordes who inhabit the rear areas, and up to the moment [we] have not a darned thing to show for it.  No doubt the stuff will eventually come to light, but by the time it does it will be as dead as forty doornails…This episode illustrates most strikingly what a discouraging and often futile game news gathering in war time can be.”6

Two weeks after the action at Takrouna, fighting in North Africa came to an end with the surrender of the German and Italian Axis forces on the 13th of May. The NZBU returned to the rocky fortification to see it up close for themselves, as Johnston described in another letter home.

“We spent all day on the 13th pottering about Takrouna and other enemy positions, while streams of prisoners came pouring out of every defendable ridge carrying their wounded. Had it not been for the splendid action of the Māoris, Takrouna would have been the most depressing place imaginable… We reached the top by means of a scaling ladder but the Māoris didn’t even have that and how they managed to get up under heavy fire I can’t imagine. They certainly deserve to get a high decoration for the job.  Ngarimu’s V.C.7 has made them about the proudest battalion in the Div and if they get another, they’ll be right on top of the world.”8

From those comments, it seems the New Zealand broadcasters had heard about Sgt. Manahi being recommended for a Victoria Cross. New Zealand Prime Minister Peter Fraser also believed the Māori Battalion action at Takrouna was worthy of the highest recognition, as you can hear in this recording of him speaking in Auckland on 21 June 1943. However as history has shown, it was not to be and in July, Sergeant Manahi was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal instead.

New Zealand’s 5th Brigade suffered over 500 casualties taking Takrouna, many as a result of the heavily mined land around the rocky outcrop. Forty-six men were killed. The Māori Battalion lost almost all its officers who were either killed or wounded in the fighting, 124 casualties in total. To read a detailed account of the Battalion’s actions at Takrouna, visit the 28 Māori Battalion website. Moe mai rā e ngā toa.

Thank you to the family of Norman “Johnny” Johnston (no relation to the author) for sharing his wartime photographs and correspondence.

References:

  1. Norman Johnston, personal correspondence to his parents, 19 November 1942. Private collection.
  2. A.L. Curry, News despatch from Enfidaville, 21 April 1943. ID17871 RNZ collection, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision
  3. J.H. Hall, A history of broadcasting in New Zealand, 1920-1954 (1980), Broadcasting Corporation of New Zealand, pp.131-132
  4. Norman Johnston, personal correspondence to his parents, 3 April 1943. Private collection
  5. British Broadcasting Corporation, Despatch from Tunisia; BBC news. 1943-04-30. ID177434 RNZ collection, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision
  6. Norman Johnston, personal correspondence to his parents, 3 April 1943. Private collection.
  7. In early June 1943, 2nd Lieutenant Te Moananui-a-kiwa Ngarimu (Te Aitanga-a-Mate, Ngāti Porou) was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for his action at the Tebaga Gap, Tunisia on 26 March 1943.
  8. Norman Johnston, personal correspondence to his parents, 14 June1943. Private collection

With the Kiwis in Japan – voices of J Force

J Force recruitment advertising, The New Zealand Listener, 29 Mar !946 p.3 via Papers Past

On August 15, 1945 Japan surrendered to the Allied forces marking the end of World War II. With hostilities over, a new relationship with Japan was required. The United States took over military government of the country while a British Commonwealth Occupation Force, or BCOF, was set up to de-militarise Japan. Around 12,000 New Zealanders served in BCOF between 1946-1948, alongside Australian, British and Indian troops, largely in the south and west of the country. The New Zealanders were referred to most commonly as Jayforce (or J Force.

The first New Zealanders arrived in Japan from Italy in March 1946. This party included men from the reinforcements of 28 Māori Battalion, who had been at sea on their way to Italy from Aotearoa when the war in Europe ended in May 1945. While some men in the draft from Italy were conscripts, all Māori were volunteers.

Māori soldiers of 2 New Zealand Battalion and Senior chaplain Padre Harry Taylor at Ozuki, Japan, 1948. alexander Turnbull Library, Ref. J-1485-F

Further volunteers came directly from New Zealand attracted by advertisements like the one at the top of this page. Service in J Force offered young men an opportunity to serve in a country very few New Zealanders had ever visited – and now, without the dangers of facing active combat. A Royal New Zealand Air Force Squadron and a party of New Zealand Army nurses were also recruited, again from volunteers.

Once in Japan, a Māori unit was established, this time as D Squadron of the New Zealand Divisional Cavalry, with platoons formed along tribal lines similar to the way men were organised in the 28 Battalion. Like most J Force units, they were based in Yamaguchi Prefecture, not far from the atomic bomb-devastated city of Hiroshima. The New Zealanders oversaw demilitarisation of the rural area, rounding up and destroying weapons and military equipment. They were involved in organising the repatriation of Japanese soldiers and ex prisoners-of-war who were returning home from the Pacific and south-east Asia. They oversaw elections and worked to stem illegal immigration to Japan from Korea.

Camp Canterbury, one of the J Force camps in Yamaguchi Prefecture. Alexander turnbull Library, Ref. J-1424-F

With the Kiwis in Japan

The New Zealand National Broadcasting Service sent a two-man recording unit to Japan in June 1946. It was no doubt hoping to replicate the success of its wartime mobile units which had travelled with New Zealand’s fighting forces in North Africa, Italy and through the Pacific from 1940 to 1945, recording their voices for the popular weekly radio programme With the Boys Overseas, which I have written about extensively.

The J Force version of this programme was called With the Kiwis in Japan and was initially hosted by Ulric Williams, a banker-turned-radio-announcer from Napier, who also had a background in music and theatre production. As there would be no military action in Japan for him to report on (this had made up a large part of the wartime mobile broadcasting units’ work), it was hoped the broadcasters would help the New Zealand men set up bands and put on concerts and other entertainments for fellow troops. Williams later went on tour in Japan with the Kiwi Concert Party and was replaced as host by Palmerston North radio announcer Doug Smith.

The other member of the J Force broadcasting unit was technician and engineer Linden Martin, who had worked at station 2YH Napier before joining the Army during the war. Both he and Williams can be seen at work in the photograph below, taken on the roof of Empire House, Tokyo in October 1946. This was the headquarters of BCOF and a useful vantage point overlooking the Japanese Imperial Palace, where they watched New Zealand troops take over duty as the Tokyo Guard Battalion. This was a body of men which stood guard outside the Imperial Palace, the British Embassy and other key buildings in the occupied Japanese capital.  

Ulric Williams of the New Zealand Broadcasting Service unit in Japan, interviews Warrant Officer Stuart Nicholla of the New Zealand Guard Battalion, in Tokyo, October 1946. Alexander Turnbull Library Ref. J-0541-F

In one of the earliest recordings on the surviving J Force discs held in the RNZ Sound Archives collection at Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, Ulric Williams describes the guard-change ceremony and interviews two officers who took part. In the photo, Williams holds the microphone up to Stuart Nicholls of Christchurch (far left) who was the Regimental Sergeant-Major in charge of the Guard Battalion. Linden Martin wearing headphones, is operating the disc recorder. The Māori officer on his right is most likely Lieutenant Te Wananga Haig (Ngāti Porou) who provided radio commentary in te reo Māori about his D Squadron men who had been chosen to be part of the Guard Battalion.

Following the commentary of the guard changeover, the broadcasting unit recorded greetings from several of the men taking part, who tell their listening families what they have been up to while in Tokyo: shopping for cameras, sight-seeing, visiting an American forces theatre and going for a rickshaw ride. The Guard Battalion greetings (which can be heard here) include two messages to whānau in te reo Māori, from Guard commander Lieutenant Charles Tarei Taite (Ngāti Tūwharetoa) and Ted Erihe Emery of Kaeo, in Te Tai Tokerau. Ted Emery also sends multiple greetings to whānau Māori on behalf of other men who were not lucky enough to be chosen to make a recording themselves.

J Force recruitment advertisement, the New Zealand Listener, 14 March 1947, p.2 via Papers Past

Life in postwar Japan

Apart from the greetings recordings and commentary on military events like the Tokyo Guard ceremony, many of the J Force Broadcasting Unit recordings I have listened to so far seem to be an attempt to explain Japan and its people to a New Zealand radio audience. In 1946, Japan was a country few New Zealanders had visited and most knew very little about, except that up until a few months previously, it had been a feared enemy. This wartime mind-set may explain some soldiers’ comments in the recordings which today seem like casual racism towards the Japanese people. However, a recording like this interview with Lieutenant Jim Goodwin of Blenheim who spent 15 months enduring horrific conditions in Japanese prisoner of war camps, provides some insight into what lay behind feeling towards Japan at the time.

Yet in other recordings there is an appreciation by some of the J Force men for the hard lives of ordinary Japanese civilians, for whom the war had brought devastation, famine and poverty.

In rural Yamaguchi where the New Zealanders lived and worked, many Japanese people were still living a subsistence agricultural lifestyle. Food was so scarce that the occupation forces were forbidden from buying food in Japanese stores and most of the military’s rations were imported. This led to a thriving black market with occupation troops exchanging rations for Japanese souvenirs such as silks, pearls and craft items to send home.

A child carrying a baby in the rubble of Hiroshima. Alexander Turnbull Library Ref J-0012-F

Most of J Force experienced Hiroshima as it lay between their arrival port at Kure, and Yamaguchi where they were based. Visiting the atomic bomb-damaged city was also something of a tourist attraction for soldiers on leave and concern about lingering radiation was apparently not an issue. In this recording, three New Zealanders, John Macnab, Larry Zampese and Johnny Overend are interviewed about a recent visit to Hiroshima in late 1946. They matter-of-factly discuss the incredible damage caused 15 months earlier by just one bomb. (Fifty years later in 1995, one of the three, Dr John Macnab was interviewed again, this time by RNZ’s Jim Sullivan and he looked back on the morality of dropping the atomic bomb on Japanese civilians and whether it was justified in shortening the war).

A New Zealand hospital was set up at Kiwa and there are several recordings of J Force nurses in the collection. In this one, Sergeant Joyce Ford of South Canterbury talks about what she has observed of the lives of Japanese women who were employed in the hospital as housekeepers. She remarks on the hard physical labour expected of rural women, but notes that already modernisation is taking place. The occupation of Japan by the United States and British Commonwealth forces aimed to democratise the country, and the introduction of female suffrage was one of the early reforms it introduced.

Doug Smith of the New Zealand broadcasting unit, records a programme about rice planting, in a paddy field in Yamaguchi. RNZ collection, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision.

Eighty years after these J Force recordings were made, Japan is now a leading democratic and economic power, and one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations. Attractions such as the charms of Japanese onsen (hot springs), ski fields and traditional cultural practices such as the tea ceremony were also experienced by the New Zealanders of J Force, and reported to New Zealand radio audiences in recordings by the broadcasting unit. In these, we occasionally hear voices of the Japanese people themselves, such as Mr Nakamura-san of Yuda and his daughter Ikoku-san who serves the tea ceremony, or in short interviews about aspects of Japan with an English-speaking young woman interpreter, Yunko-san.

My current research work on the J Force recordings will continue for several more months. I am verifying the identity of all the speakers in the recordings and enhancing the existing descriptions of the recordings in the Ngā Taonga online database. The digitised recordings will also be uploaded enabling descendants and researchers to listen to them and learn more about J force and those who served in it.

You can hear me talking on RNZ’s Afternoons programme on the 80th anniversary of V.J. Day and sharing a few of the J Force recordings here.

 

Some recent(ish) activity and こんにちは、日本 Hello Japan!

In April, Radio New Zealand featured an interview with Dan Clifford’s daughter Margaret, as part of its Anzac Day programme. You can listen to host Stacy Daniel’s interview with Margaret (and a few comments from myself about the recording of Dan) on RNZ’s website here.

(And if you haven’t already read “Her father’s voice” the blog on Dan’s recording finding its way back to his family, it’s here .)

Pilot Officer Daniel Joseph Clifford, NZ401753. Killed in action, 18 Jan. 1942.
Courtesy Auckland War Memorial Museum Online Cenotaph

Also on Anzac Day, I gave a presentation at Ashburton Museum about broadcasting unit recordings of New Zealand nurses. I turned this into a blog post for Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, which you can read here

こんにちは、日本 – Hello Japan!

In the blog, I explain how my current research has taken a slight detour from World War II recordings, to those which are “World War adjacent” – made in Japan between 1946 and 1948 by the Broadcasting Unit sent there alongside New Zealand’s “J Force”. This was our contribution to the British Commonwealth Occupation Force or BCOF, which together with a much, much larger United States occupation force, took over the roles of demilitarisation and democratisation of post-war Japan.

J Force recruitment advertisement, The New Zealand Listener magazine, 29 March 1946 p.3

My listening research has taken this detour while I wait for the World War II broadcasting unit recordings to make their way through the Utaina mass-digitisation project (a joint effort by the National Library, Archives New Zealand and Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision to digitise at-risk, Crown-owned, audio-visual collections, such as RNZ and TVNZ’s archives.) Once they come out the other side of Utaina, the discs recorded in North Africa, Italy and the Pacific will be available as digitial files and I’ll get back to “listening to the war”.

So in the meantime, I am listening to the much smaller collection of J Force recordings, which had already been digitised in the 2000s by the RNZ Sound Archives. (A post about what I’m hearing there is on its way…)

And finally, I am very excited to have the newly digitised New Zealand Listener magazine made available online on the wonderful Papers Past website. The J Force recruitment advertisement above is just one of the many gems relating to broadcasting during World War II ( and immediately after) held in its pages. I know this has been a long-term project by Papers Past and the National Library so a huge ngā mihi to them for making this happen. At a time when funding for history and heritage is under attack, this is a wonderful resource for historians and anyone interested in the cultural life of Aotearoa since the 1930s.

Her father’s voice: the travels of a wartime sound disc

From Canada to New Zealand, then to Egypt and back – this blog explores the travels of one wartime sound disc and how its contents enabled a New Zealand woman to hear her father’s voice for the first time, 82 years after it was recorded.

New Zealand aircrew training in Canada c. April 1941. Ref. 006757 Australian War Memorial.

The observant reader will notice it has been a long time between posts on World War Voices. My day job has been taking priority in recent months (sadly, listening to wartime radio does not pay the bills.) However my research into New Zealand’s World War II sound recordings has been continuing, and recently I unpicked the story of one disc – or rather, one side of one disc. This ultimately gave me the great privilege of reconnecting a New Zealand airman’s wartime message home, with his family who had never heard the recording.

The disc in discussion raised many questions when I first came across it. One side is a recording made in Egypt, possibly in the port of Alexandria, by the N.Z. mobile unit broadcasters in May 1941. It is part of a talk by a New Zealand nurse about her experiences in Greece and Crete. The mysterious part is the reverse side, which holds a recording which had been named in the RNZ Sound Archives catalogue as “Greetings from New Zealand troops in Canada.”

How did messages from Canada end up sharing a disc with a talk recorded in Egypt?

The Canadian recording is an anomaly in the Broadcasting Unit collection that I am researching.  By rights, it doesn’t belong as it was not created by the New Zealand mobile unit broadcasters nor was it recorded in one of the theatres of war in which they operated. The answer is most likely that it found its way into this collection by default, because the disc it is on was sent to Egypt, where the blank side of it was used by the broadcasting unit in May 1941. But why was a half-used disc sent across the world?

The answer to that probably lies in my previous research into correspondence between the New Zealand Broadcasting Unit based at Maadi Camp in Egypt and National Broadcasting Service head office in Wellington, which has revealed some recurring themes. One is Wellington asking for more recordings of troops’ messages home to meet listener demand for the weekly radio programme With the Boys Overseas. Another recurring theme is the Egypt unit repeatedly asking Wellington via letters and telegrams, to send more blank recording discs for them to work with.

The 12-inch transcription discs on which the Broadcasting Unit recorded (at 78 and 33 ⅓ rpm) had a core of aluminium, a scarce commodity which was in high demand worldwide during the war for use in aviation.  This was coated with cellulose nitrate lacquer into which sound grooves were etched by the recording lathe, as depicted in this wartime Presto Recording Corporation advertisement.

[Image courtesy http://www.prestohistory.com]

This aluminium core is the reason why the 1,600 discs which survive today in the RNZ Sound Archives at Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision may represent less than half the wartime broadcasting units’ original output. My research has established that owing to wartime shortages, after their contents went to air in New Zealand, many discs were sent by the NBS across the Tasman to Sydney, so that Amalgamated Wireless Australasia could re-coat them with more lacquer for re-use. Correspondence shows at least several thousand discs were recycled in this way,  sadly meaning their original recordings were lost forever. [1.]

The disc shortage probably explains why in early 1941 the NBS sent the disc from New Zealand to the Egypt-based unit, even though it was already recorded on one side. Only one side of it was therefore of use, but presumably that was still better than nothing and the blank side could still be recorded on and sent back to New Zealand.

If this is the original disc, it is an extremely well-travelled object that made its way from Canada to New Zealand, to Egypt and then back to New Zealand – quite a feat in the 1940s, let alone during war time restrictions on air and shipping.

The original Canadian side was marked “Defective” in yellow chinagraph pencil and the recording on it is incomplete.

A wartime broadcasting unit disc showing playback instructions written on it in chinagraph pencil. (Image Sandy Ditchburn, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, IASA Journal, no.52, Sep. 2022 p.35 )

The waxy, yellow chinagraph was used by broadcasting engineers to leave messages for their colleagues back in Wellington, such as where to edit a disc or to indicate when a disc was defective and therefore should not be played. The chinagraph wax gets into the grooves of the disc and makes playback noisy.

The “defective” side of the disc holds an incomplete series of messages home from New Zealand air crew who were training to serve with the Royal Air Force in Ontario, Canada. They were there as part of the Empire Air Training Scheme or EATS, which was renamed in 1942 as the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan or BCATP. This scheme was initially established by the R.A.F. in 1939 as Canada could provide more open air space for training the huge numbers of aircrew Britain was going to require in the war. It took on greater impetus during the Battle of Britain in 1940, when many R.A.F. non-operational facilities and aircraft were moved to Canada to avoid German bombing raids. Over 8,000 New Zealanders (as well as thousands of Australians and men from other Commonwealth nations) received air training in Canada during the war before being posted across the Atlantic to British air bases. Yet today, most New Zealanders are unaware of the scheme. (Anyone wanting to know more about this remarkable story should read In the Heavens Above, a lifetime project by New Zealanders Ivan and Lorna Lindsey to ensure the role played by BCATP trainees in winning the war is not forgotten. Most New Zealand public libraries should be able to find you a copy.)

The messages home from Canada, like the many thousands of messages recorded by the New Zealand broadcasters of Kiwis serving in the Middle East, North Africa, Italy and the Pacific, were all sent to NBS head office in Wellington, where the discs were edited together to be played as part of a programme called With the Boys Overseas, which broadcast on Sunday mornings throughout the war on National Broadcasting Service stations nationwide. I explored the popularity of this programme in an article for the New Zealand Journal of Public History last year.

Listening to the “With the Boys Overseas” radio programme featured in this print advertisement for Victory Loans war bonds, in The Listener, 15 Sept 1944, p.4

Given the enthusiasm for the messages home heard in Boys, it is not surprising that efforts were made to give New Zealand men training in Canada the opportunity to send greetings as well. Wartime co-operation between the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the NBS facilitated the recording of messages, so it seems most likely that the ‘anomalous’ recording was made by the CBC. [2]


New Zealand airmen, led by Pine Takarangi, rehearse shipboard haka on arrival at Vancouver for training in the Empire Air Training Scheme. Taken in November 1940 by an official photographer. DA-00667-F Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. https://natlib.govt.nz/records/22311575

I believe the messages from the New Zealand air trainees in Ontario were recorded in a Canadian radio studio, given the studio-quality ambient sound and the fact that each man is encouraged to the microphone by a professional-sounding announcer with a Canadian accent.

The “defective” Canadian side of the disc has no label at all, so I could only establish the names of the speakers by listening closely and then researching the names in Auckland War Memorial Museum’s invaluable Online Cenotaph database. This is a process I go through with all the discs I listen to, to verify the name and military service number of each speaker. I am supplying Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision with the verified names for their records and I send Online Cenotaph links to each recording to add to their database.

I have been able to establish the six airmen heard on the Canadian recording are John Jasper of New Plymouth, Dan Clifford of Helensville, Jack Goodlet, from Dunedin, Bert Hibell of Palmerston North, Ken Wright of Roxburgh, and finally a few words are heard from Harold Holtom of Paekakariki, before the recording ends part way through his greeting.

Further research into the air training scheme established that all six men sailed for Canada on the same troop-ship, the Aorangi in December 1940. New Zealanders enlisted in the Empire Air Training Scheme arrived in Vancouver or San Francisco, and then travelled by train to training schools throughout the Canada. The six speakers on the disc trained together as air observers/navigators for bomber crews.  This was firstly at No. 4 Air Observer School in London, Ontario.

Members of the Royal New Zealand Air Force arriving in Vancouver, Canada, Taken in November 1940 by an official photographer. DA-00658-F Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington

They graduated from No. 4 A.O. School in April 1941, so it seems likely that they were recorded at the CBC-affiliated radio station in London, Ontario in early 1941, not long after arriving in Canada. Their recording would then have taken several weeks to get to New Zealand and then several more weeks for the disc to be packaged up by the NBS in Wellington and sent with other blank discs to the unit in Egypt.

We know the disc was in Egypt by 17 May 1941 as this was the date when the remaining blank side was used by the broadcasters there to record nurse Matron Eva McKay of No.1 New Zealand General Hospital. (It is a fascinating talk which I hope to write about in a future blog, describing how she led a party of 100 New Zealand, Australian and British nurses to escape from the German invasion of Greece and Crete.)

Tragically, Online Cenotaph records also revealed three of the six young men on the disc’s Canadian side, John Jasper, Bert Hibbell and Dan Clifford, would lose their lives the following year,  in operations with R.A.F. Bomber Command from various bases in England. This sad outcome was in keeping with Bomber Command’s extremely high casualty rate of 51%. [3]. It is said that a Bomber Command crew member had a worse chance of survival than an infantry officer in World War I.

Pilot Officer Daniel Joseph Clifford, NZ401753. Killed in action, 18 Jan. 1942. Courtesy Auckland War Memorial Museum Online Cenotaph

Dan Clifford grew up in Helensville, north of Auckland and was working as a clerk for New Zealand Railways when he applied for aircrew training shortly after the outbreak of the war in October 1939. For the next year he trained in Levin, New Plymouth and Ohakea, and he married his fiancee Jean Wemyss shortly before he left for Canada in December 1940. Jean was pregnant with their daughter when he sailed.

After navigation and air observer training in several locations in Canada, Daniel was commissioned as a Pilot Officer and moved to Britain, where he was finally posted to No. 142 Squadron based in Binbrook, Lincolnshire in July 1941. A month later, his baby daughter Margaret was born on the other side of the world. No. 142 Squadron was at this time running night bombing raids over Germany and Dan served as an air observer on a Vickers Wellington aircraft, one of the mainstays of Bomber Command. Tragically, in January 1942 while on a mission to Bremen the bomber on which Dan was serving was lost over the North Sea. His body was never recovered and he would never meet his baby daughter Margaret. He was just 23 years old.

Dan is remembered in Britain on the Runnymede Memorial for the over 20,000 Commonwealth Air Forces dead of World War II who have no known grave. His name is also engraved on the International Bomber Command Memorial in Lincolnshire, England, not far from his last home at Binbrook.

Commonwealth War Graves Commission Air Forces Memorial, Runnymede, England {courtesy CWGC)
Dan Clifford is remembered on the CWGC Runnymede Memorial. (Photograph courtesy Ian Banks and Online Cenotaph)

Back in Aotearoa, Daniel Clifford is remembered on the marble walls of the Hall of Memories at Auckland War Memorial Museum and in its Online Cenotaph database. In 2016, Margaret’s own daughter Rochelle Cook contributed to the Online Cenotaph page for Daniel, the grandfather she never knew.

Fortunately she left an email contact and through this I was able to get in touch and alert her to the existence of a recording by a Daniel Clifford on the ‘defective’ disc. I sent her an mp3 file of the message to see if this was her grandfather. Rochelle was able to play her 81 year old mother Margaret the message recorded in an Ontario radio studio a few months before she was born. Margaret recognised the place names Daniel sends greetings to, as locations that were home to family members and friends, and was able to hear the voice of her long-lost father for the first time.

It is unclear if the greeting from Canada was ever played on-air in New Zealand during the war. Certainly the Clifford family had never heard it. The fact that this disc was labelled ‘defective’ may mean it was never aired because of its incomplete content, although the complete greetings on it could have been edited into an episode of the With the Boys Overseas.

Daniel’s wife Jean had been able to send him a photograph of his new baby daughter Margaret in late 1941 and the family knew he received it before he was killed, which Rochelle told me gave the family some comfort. After Daniel’s death, Jean eventually remarried and had two more children. Rochelle said hearing Dan’s voice for the first time was a very moving experience and it had a deep impact on Margaret as well as the wider whānau. The message has been shared with the children of Daniel’s brothers and sisters, cousins Margaret only reconnected with several years ago, again through Daniel’s Online Cenotaph web page.

Reconnecting families with the voices of departed loved ones is an incredible privilege and in this case, a very moving one. Thank you to Rochelle Cook and family for sharing Daniel’s story with me. Ngā mihi nui, moe mai rā Dan.

(Elements of this blog first appeared as an article in the Australasian Sound Archive journal no.46, 2024.)

[1] ‘2,000 used discs sent to AWA, Sydney for resurfacing’ NBS Chief Engineer J. Smith to Noel Palmer, 8 July 1942, R22011495, Archives New Zealand, Wellington

[2] Hall, J.H. (1980) The History of Broadcasting in New Zealand, 1920-1954, Broadcasting Corporation of New Zealand, Wellington. p.130.

[3] Life and death in Bomber Command, Imperial War Museum website [Accessed 14 September 2024]

Listening to the “Boys Overseas”

Victory Loan advertisement, The Listener, 15 Sept 1944, p.4

An article I have written about how radio listeners back home in Aotearoa New Zealand responded to the work of the mobile Broadcasting Units, has just been published by the New Zealand Journal of Public History.

It discusses the overwhelming audience reaction to hearing the voices of New Zealanders serving on the other side of the world, and how this response shaped the work of the unit broadcasters during the war.

I was also very interested in Māori radio listeners’ responses, and the powerful need to hear the voices of their men.

The broadcasters of the NZBU mobile units had to juggle different demands and priorities while carrying out their work, in often difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions.

You can read my NZJPH article here

Voices of the Long Range Desert Group: the brains behind the S.A.S. “Rogue Heroes”

In World War II, a new British military unit was formed for raiding and reconnaissance missions behind enemy lines in the desert regions of North Africa.  It was made up of men who were independent, self-reliant, physically and mentally tough. They had to be able to survive in the desert, without support, enduring extreme conditions with few resources.

Men and vehicles of the Long Range Desert Group on patrol, 1941. [Alexander Turnbull Library. Ref. DA-01085-F]

Viewers of the 2022 BBC drama series “Rogue Heroes” (seen below), might be thinking of the Special Air Service or S.A.S.  The television series charts the regiment’s formation in North Africa, and covers several of their actual raids on German and Italian installations and airfields (all set to an AC/DC rock and roll soundtrack.) But the subject of this blog is another military unit that pre-dated the “Rogue Heroes” by 18 months.  It was the Long Range Desert Group (above), which formed in June 1940. With a close connection to the New Zealand Division, the Group worked alongside the ‘rogues’ on occasion and has been called ‘the brains behind the S.A.S. brawn.’1

“Rogue Heroes” (2022) BBC Television [Photo by Sophie Mutevelian – © Kudos/Banijay Rights]

The L.R.D.G. appear in the television series, in the real-life character of navigator Mike Sadler, who helps the S.A.S. find their way over the vast, unmapped Libyan desert, as his unit did in real life. Sadler was from Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and while the L.R.D.G. drew members from various Empire forces, initially the majority of its men were New Zealanders. As such, they were a natural target for the New Zealand Broadcasting Unit’s radio microphones and the surviving sound archives held by Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision contain a collection of fascinating wartime recordings of the voices of these hardy and resourceful men. (The links to listen to all the recordings mentioned here can be found at the end of this blog. ) Military author Gavin Mortimer drew on this rare audio archive several years ago for research when writing his books ‘The Men who Made the S.A.S.’ (Constable, 2016) and ‘The Long Range Desert Group in World War II ‘ (Osprey, 2017)

We are also fortunate in New Zealand to have a collection of photographs of the unit on desert patrol. Personal cameras were forbidden in the Division as a security risk, but some of the L.R.D.G. men carried unauthorised cameras with them, and amazingly, one even had a film camera. The majority of images used here are from the collection held by the Alexander Turnbull Library, many taken by men themselves.

The L.R.D.G. was the brainchild of Royal Signals officer Major Ralph Bagnold, a Briton who had spent a decade between 1925 and 1935 exploring the geology of the Libyan Desert, including the vast interior region known as the Great Sand Sea.  He pioneered many techniques for navigating the impassable wastes, such as a ‘sun compass’ that was unaffected by iron ore deposits in the soil or metal motor vehicles, and learned to reduce tyre pressure to help drivers negotiate loose sand dunes.

Major Ralph Bagnold, desert explorer and founder of the Long Range Desert Group [Image via Eland Publishing]

When war broke out these became useful skills for gathering tactical intelligence in the North African theatre of war, and Bagnold suggested to British military chiefs that he establish a mobile scouting force for desert operations. Bagnold felt New Zealand farmers would have the necessary mental and physical resilience to cope with the remote, desert conditions, as well as familiarity with repairing motor vehicles and driving in rough terrain. He approached the First Echelon of the New Zealand Division for volunteers and was overwhelmed with the response – it has been said half the Division in Egypt at the time offered to join him.2 Later, men from British, Indian and Rhodesian regiments also joined the L.R.D.G., but it remained a small unit, never numbering more than 350 men.

The L.R.D.G. captured public imagination in New Zealand once news of its exploits began to reach home. After raiding and patrolling through Libya in the second half of 1940, their successes were made public by the military with a report by official war correspondent Robin Miller, published throughout New Zealand in February 1941. Somewhat breathless headlines (such as these from the Northern Advocate newspaper) announced: “N.Z. Troops rove Sahara. Become heroic modern outlaws in Long Range Desert Group.” Miller (who also recorded several radio reports with the Broadcasting Unit) likened the L.R.D.G. to ‘desert pirates… swooping and darting in swift trucks throughout the length and breadth of Libya like modern outlaws.’ 3

Northern Advocate, 15 February 1941, p3. [via Papers Past]

The swash-buckling image was reinforced when photographs were published of the men swathed against the desert sun and sand in traditional Arab head dress. Many also grew beards when out on patrol, which was unconventional at the time, except amongst men of the Royal Navy.

Men of the Long Range Desert Group on parade for General Auchinleck, Cairo October 1941. [Alexander Turnbull Library. Ref. DA-02076-F]

The New Zealand Broadcasting Unit made its first recordings with the L.R.D.G. in February 1941. As this was the same time as the first newspaper articles were published, it was probably part of a coordinated publicity campaign by the newly-formed Public Relations Service of the 2N.Z.E.F. (The broadcasters came under this office’s purview, together with press war correspondents, official photographers and the government film unit cinematographers.) In the first recordings, commentator Doug Laurenson introduces the L.R.D.G. and describes the harsh terrain in which they operate, including areas ‘as lifeless as the moon where it rains only once or twice every 25 years.’ Unusually, he then hands the microphone over to one of the men, ‘Tony’ (Lawrence Hamilton) Browne of Wellington (military service number 4444) who carries out the series of short interviews with his comrades, speaking to a further 10 L.R.D.G. men.

Lawrence Hamilton ‘Tony’ Browne.MC, DCM, m.i.d. Long Range Desert Group R1 Patrol
[Image via Online Cenotaph, Auckland War Memorial Museum]

Tommy McNeill of Hawkes Bay (1253) and Cyril Eyre of Te Awamutu (1305) talk about techniques for driving in soft sand and explain how the New Zealand patrols’ vehicles are given Māori names. Roy Kitney (3863) a cook with the unit, talks about rations and how they cook when out on long range patrols, while Eric Smith of Hamilton (1065) recalls receiving rations from the Free French troops and confusion amongst the New Zealanders over how to prepare coffee beans. Second Lieutenant Dick Croucher (8803) is interviewed about navigating in the unmapped desert using sun compasses and star observations at night. Sergeant Ian McInnes of Whangārei (1052) recalls a nine-day patrol in the Libyan desert in which they attacked and destroyed an enemy fort. (This was at Murzuk and McInnes was later awarded the Military Medal for his bravery during this action.)

Len Hawkins of Christchurch (7377)  a fitter and gunner with the Long Range Desert Group talks about how vehicles are maintained in the desert, with few supplies or spares available. Next to speak is Peter Garland of Auckland (1366) who tells New Zealand radio listeners about the incredible heat the men endure in the Libyan desert. Edgar ‘Sandy” Sanders (598) of Christchurch outlines his work as a member of the gun crew and finally Frank Jopling (1314) describes meat provided by local tribesmen who killed goats and bullocks for them, when they were travelling with the French forces in the Tibesti Mountains. These were the Senussi, a Libyan clan who had long fought against Italian occupation of their lands and allied themselves during World War II with the L.R.D.G. and Free French.

Members of the Long Range Desert Group, in Libya, with members of the Free French and Senussi in January 1941. From left to right: Captain F B Edmundson, “Midnight”, Sheik Abd el Galil Seif el Nasser, Free French troops, and (on far right) Lance Corporal L Roderick. [Alexander Turnbull Library
Ref. DA-00869-F]

From late 1940, the L.R.D.G. and the Free French forces from Chad, south of Libya, carried out raids against Italian garrisons in the Fezzan region. The broadcasting unit recorded a second group of L.R.D.G. men, who describe this campaign and the toll it had taken on their unit. Captain Leonard Ballantyne of Pongaroa, Hawkes Bay (1398)  explains how the New Zealand men were selected for the L.R.D.G., and then describes the recent loss in action of two men,  Corporal Rex Beech (1093) who engaged Italian machine guns (at Kufra) and saved many lives, and Sergeant Cyril Hewson (1030) who led his troop into action at Murzuk and was killed in action there. He also mentions the decorations recently awarded to Lieutenant James Sutherland  (1013) who gained the Military Cross and Trooper Leslie Willcox (1290) of Hawera who was awarded the Military Medal for gallantry.

Next, one of the L.R.D.G.’s medical officers is interviewed. Captain Francis Edmundson of Napier (993, seen in the photos here with the Senussi and Free French) describes the health issues the men face in the desert, and Sergeant Jack Shepherd of Hamilton (1328) talks about radio and signals, and how code is used to communicate between patrols.

Captain F. Edmundson (right) medical officer with the LRDG and Senussi Chief Sheik Abd el Galil Seif el Nasser. Taken during the Fezzan Raid, January 1941 by Trooper F Jopling.[Alexander Turnbull Library Ref. DA-00871-F]

Something of a “scoop” for the New Zealand broadcasters came two days later, in the form of an interview with the L.R.D.G. founder, Major Ralph Bagnold. Due to wartime censorship, his name and rank could not be mentioned at the time of the recording, but Bagnold opens the 20 minute recording by noting how pleased he is to speak via radio to the families and friends of the men he commands.  He credits their upbringing in New Zealand for the self-reliance which has allowed them to quickly adjust to the difficult life in the open desert. Bagnold then gives a report on their activities over the past few months in the Fezzan, harassing Italian forces, capturing forts, blowing up aircraft and fuel dumps.


Aerodrome at Murzuk set on fire by part of the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) T patrol under Lt L B Ballantyne. Three planes were burned. Taken during the Fezzan Raid in January 1941 by Trooper F Jopling. [Alexander Turnbull Library Ref. DA-00889-F]

In letters to family and to their employer back in Wellington, the New Zealand broadcasters expressed their delight with making these extensive recordings of the L.R.D.G.’s exploits. Young assistant engineer Norman ‘Johnny’ Johnston wrote to his parents on 19 February 1941, “Last Friday one of the most amazing stories of the war in the Middle East was released, that of the Long Range Desert Group….their adventures have been far more exciting than fiction and no praise could be too great for these men of ours.” 4


Group of New Zealand and French troops during Fezzan Raid. Photograph taken in January 1941 by Trooper F Jopling.
[Alexander Turnbull Library Ref. DA-00877-F]

The National Broadcasting Service and the Long Range Desert Group men themselves were also pleased with the radio listener response in New Zealand to the recordings, when they were broadcast. In April, Johnston writes again: “Recording more stories from two L.R.D.G. men – glad you enjoyed the previous ones. The men were very pleased and nearly all have had letters from their people about it. One was Moore who walked 210 miles across the desert” 5. This was Trooper Ronald Joseph Moore of Taihape (1248), who was injured in the action at Kufra and believed to be a prisoner of war. 

Trooper Ronald Moore, DCM, on parade for General Auchinleck, Cairo, 1941. [Alexander Turnbull Library

However, he had avoided capture, and incredibly, walked some 200 miles through the desert with minimal supplies of food or water, until he met up with a Free French patrol some 10 days later.  (He was later awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal. )The broadcasting unit recorded Moore telling his own amazing story, and finally, made an extensive series of recordings with Trooper Frank Jopling of Okoroire in Waikato (1314) who reads from the diary he kept during patrol missions between September 1940 and January 1941, including the raids in the Fezzan region.


A group of New Zealanders in the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) in July 1942. It includes several men heard in the NZBU recordings [in bold] Top, L to R: Sgm Tommy Siven, Tpr R E Hay, Tpr ‘Ned’ Kelly, Tpr Parker, Tpr ‘Paddy’ McKay, Tpr Tippett. Middle row: Tpr Shepherd, L/Cpl A Nutt (Canty), Cpl R Lewis (HB), Capt N Wilder (HB), Cpl M Craw (PN), Pte Ritchie (Pukekohe), Tpr F W Jopling (Okoroire). Botton row: Gnr E Sanders (Chch), Tpr Dobson, Tpr Milburn, Pte J L Davis, Tpr P Mitford (HB). [Alexander Turnbull Library Ref. DA-02561-F]

It appears a good relationship developed between the broadcasters and the men of the L.R.D.G. Later in April 1941, when the broadcasting unit tried unsuccessfully to get permission to accompany the New Zealand Division to Greece,  Johnny Johnston wrote home; “ We were trying to get away to Greece last week but G.O.C [General Officer Commanding] has flatly refused…We are very fed up. L.R.D.G. chaps are very kind – we have grown very fond of them and they drop in to see us whenever they come in from patrol”6.

General Wavell, the Allied Commander-in-Chief in the Middle East, made special mention of the L.R.D.G. in his official dispatch covering Feb–Jul 1941: “Operating in small independent columns, the group has penetrated into nearly every part of desert Libya, an area comparable in size with that of India. Not only have patrols brought back much information, but they have attacked enemy forts, captured personnel, transport and grounded aircraft as far as 800 miles inside hostile territory… Their journeys across vast regions of unexplored desert have entailed the crossing of physical obstacles and the endurance of extreme summer temperatures, both of which would a year ago have been deemed impossible. Their exploits have been achieved only by careful organisation, and a very high standard of enterprise, discipline, mechanical maintenance and desert navigation. The personnel of these patrols was originally drawn almost entirely from the New Zealand forces; later officers and men of British units and from Southern Rhodesia joined the Group.”7


Long Range Desert Group patrol members sitting around a campfire on the Libyan Sand Sea near Siwa., 1941. Taken by Trooper F Jopling.
[Alexander Turnbull Library Ref. DA-00888-F]

The New Zealand Division’s Public Relations Service war diary notes that in November 1941, all further news of the L.R.D.G. activities was blocked by military censors. This was the start of the Crusader Offensive, when the Allies began pushing the German and Italian forces back across Libya, in an attempt to liberate Tobruk. It was at this time that the Group began supporting the newly formed Special Air Service, under Captain David Stirling, as depicted in the “Rogue Heroes” TV series. No further recordings of them survive in the New Zealand sound archives, although the P.R.S. diary noted in May 1943 that broadcasting unit member Noel Palmer was setting out in the recording van to record ‘messages home’ by the L.R.D.G. (This was one of the New Zealand Broadcasting Unit’s key roles – supplying recorded greetings for the weekly radio programme “With the Boys Overseas”. ) Sadly, many of the discs of ‘messages home’ appear to have been lost due to wartime shortages. Recording discs were in short supply so many were reused after being broadcast and the original messages on them recorded over. The L.R.D.G. messages from May 1943 may well have been among them.


Trucks of the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) patrol halted in the desert on the edge of the Egyptian Sand Sea, Libya. Photograph taken in January 1941 by Trooper F Jopling.[Alexander Turnbull Library Ref. DA-0881-F]

Military historian Gavin Mortimer, who has written extensively about both the L.R.D.G. and the S.A.S. believes the former was of greater value in the Allied North African campaign: “They were the brains of the operation in the desert while the SAS were the brawn. It was their role to navigate them to their targets… They would drop deep behind enemy lines and their surveillance was crucial as they reported back to General Montgomery the strength of the Germans and where to attack them. They were the eyes and ears of the offensive. What they did was painstaking – they would spend days hidden just yards from the main coastal road which the Germans would use. They would take notes of how many vehicles passed, how many soldiers there were and even the mood of the soldiers – if they were singing or depressed – and this information would be radioed back.”8

Recordings and film footage of the Long Range Desert Group

The recordings written about here have been digitised by Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision and can be listened to online on their website via these links. [Note the length of the original recordings mean they sometimes had to be recorded over multiple discs, which is why each is split into many ‘parts’. These divisions have been maintained in the archival record, although when the interviews were broadcast on air, they would have been edited back together to form one item.]

U-series. Long Range Desert Group. [Parts 1-8] Tony Browne interviews 10 members of the L.R.D.G.

U-series. Further talks on the Long Range Desert Group [parts 1-6] Captains Ballantyne, Edmundson and Sgt Shepherd of the L.R.D.G.

U-series. A talk by the LRDG commander parts 1-6 Major Ralph Bagnold

U-series. A soldier’s 200-mile desert walk [Parts 1-3] Trooper Ronald Moore describes his gruelling desert trek

U-series. Diary of a member of the Long Range Desert Group [Parts 1-12] Trooper Frank Jopling reads from his diary.

U-series. Further readings from the diary of a member of the LRDG [Parts 1-9] Further readings by Trooper Frank Jopling

Also held in the archives at Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision are three short pieces of silent film footage shot in the Fezzan campaign, by this man , Walter “Wink” Adams, [military service number 1074] another New Zealand member of the L.R.D.G.

Walter Russell Adams of the LRDG [Courtesy Online Cenotaph, Auckland War Memorial Museum]

Incredibly he had a film camera with him on desert patrol and captured not only day to day life in the group, but also the meeting at Kayugi in the Tibesti Mountains, with the Free French unit from Chad. They arrive on camels, lead by the striking figure of their commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Claude d’Ornano, who is swathed in full Arab desert robes. He was tragically killed in action at Murzuk, only a few days after this film was shot.

A full account of the Fezzan raids and more photographs of the L.R.D.G. in action can be found in the Official War History volume, Long Range Desert Group in Libya, 1940–41 by R.L. Kay which is available online.

References:

1. Military historian Gavin Mortimer quoted in ‘The little-known story of a crack Kiwi World War II unit, the Long Range Desert Group’, The Daily Mail, 14 April 2017. Reprinted in The New Zealand Herald.

2. Doyle, Peter and Bennett, Matthew R., Fields of Battle: Terrain in Military History. New York: Springer Publications, 2002, p.316

3. ‘N.Z. troops rove Sahara’, Northern Advocate, 15 February 1941, p.3

4. Johnston, Norman Balfour. Personal correspondence,  19 February 1941.

5. Johnston, Norman Balfour. Personal correspondence,  4 April 1941.

6. Johnston, Norman Balfour. Personal correspondence,  19 April 1941.

7. Wavell, Archibald Percival, Official Despatch for 7 Feb- 15 July 1941, cited in Documents relating to New Zealand’s participation in the Second World War 1939-1945 vol. 1 Long Range Desert Group

8. Gavin Mortimer quoted in ‘The little-known story of a crack Kiwi World War II unit, the Long Range Desert Group’, The Daily Mail, 14 April 2017. Reprinted in the New Zealand Herald

Jazz at Shepheard’s Hotel, 1941

British officers on the terrace at Shepheard’s Hotel during WWII

[Photograph by George Rodger]

In both World Wars of the twentieth century, New Zealand forces found themselves fighting in the Middle East. When on leave in Cairo, a fortunate few with sophisticated tastes and cash to spend, might have found themselves enjoying a drink at the famed ‘Long Bar’ or on the terraces of Shepheard’s Hotel, one of the world’s most famous hotels for over 100 years. The 1917 Shepheard’s luggage label above, held in the collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library, is testament to the place the hotel held in New Zealand memories, as a moment of respite from war.

Since opening in 1841, Shepheard’s hosted any visitors of note passing through the Egyptian capital. In World War II, it was an alternate HQ for the Allied 8th Army, and when the tide of the North African campaign was in Germany’s favour, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was rumoured to have picked out a room and proclaimed that he would “soon be drinking champagne at Shepheard’s.” Attempting to foil Rommel’s plans, was the New Zealand Division, part of the 8th Army. With the 2NZEF was the New Zealand Broadcasting Unit, who in March 1941 found themselves in this legendary establishment to make sound recordings.

British, Scottish, Australian, Free French, American pilots and soldiers and civilian patrons relaxing on terrace at Shepheard’s Hotel while on leave from WWII. (Photo by Bob Landry, Life magazine, 04 Dec 1942)

From King Farouk of Egypt to the Greek government-in-exile, film stars, archaeologists, Nile explorers and Winston Churchill, Shepheard’s hosted a fascinating array of guests. In 1942, American magazine Life, described its colourful clientele: “The well-to-do British officers in Egypt, the ambassadors with letters plenipotentiary, the Americans with fat purses, the glamor girls of the Middle East, the Russian commissars, the famous war correspondents and the civilian tank experts, all stay at just one hotel in Cairo: Shepheard’s. When the war in the desert went really badly, a favorite criticism back home was that it was being fought from the terrace at Shepheard’s.“1

Shepheard’s Hotel and terraces in the early decades of the 20th century. [Photograph: Bibliotheque Nationale de France]

New Zealand Prime Minister Peter Fraser would be a guest himself in May 1941, where he was photographed meeting Egyptian Army officials and New Zealand nurses at Shepheard’s.

Prime Minister Peters Fraser and New Zealand nurses at Shepheard’s Hotel, Cairo, May 1941 [Alexander Turnbull Library
DA-01096-F ]

The 1996 Oscar-winning film The English Patient, based on Michael Ondaatje’s novel of the same name, was set amidst the glamour and intrigue of wartime Shepheard’s. The film’s lead characters, Count Almasy and Katherine Clifton (played by Ralph Fiennes and Kirstin Scott-Thomas) begin their doomed love affair at the hotel (although the scene was actually shot at a hotel in Venice, because the original Shepheard’s was destroyed in 1952.)

Ralph Fiennes and Kirstin Scott-Thomas at “Shepheard’s Hotel” in The English Patient. [image via Sceen-It .com ]

In March 1941, the New Zealand broadcasters would have found Shepheard’s legendary barman Joe Scialom behind the Long Bar, (one of the 20th century’s most famous mixologists2 ) together with staff dressed in long white robes with red tarboosh hats (fez). Scialom was famed for inventing a cocktail for Allied officers nursing hangovers; the “Suffering Bastard,” , whose name was sometimes sanitised to the “Suffering Bar Steward.” According to legend (unverifiable), the gin, bourbon, lime juice, mint and ginger beer concoction was such a hit that in 1942 he was asked to send several gallons of the mix out to the Western Desert to fortify men ahead of the Battle of El Alamein. (You can read more about Joe – and his recipe here )

Barman Joe Scialom with the cocktail he made famous at Shepheard’s “Long Bar” during the war.

But in March 1941, Alamein was still over a year away. A week before this recording session, men of the New Zealand Division had begun departing Egypt for the start of the ill-fated Greece campaign, but military authorities refused to give permission for Noel Palmer, Doug Laurenson and Norman Johnston of the NZBU to join them.

The broadcasting unit’s officer-in-charge, Noel Palmer campaigned for them to be allowed to go to Greece and report on the New Zealanders in action. His frustration at being left behind at Cairo’s Maadi Camp is revealed in letters to former colleagues at National Broadcasting Service Engineering back in Wellington: “We are sitting on our tails at Base. We confidently anticipate ‘OBE’s’ at the end of the war: “Only Been in Egypt,” he wrote.4 Palmer eventually went as far as getting his request to go to Greece in front of 2NZEF commander General Bernard Freyberg, but the answer was still “No”. As it turned out, this was fortunate. The Greek campaign was a disaster and had the NZBU gone with the 2NZEF any recording equipment they took with them would have had to be abandoned in the Allies’ hurried retreat from Greece and Crete. This would likely have spelled the end of the Broadcasting Unit’s work in North Africa.

Postcard of Shepheard’s Hotel interior [via Historichotels.com.eg]

So it was that the unit found themselves not in Greece, but cooling their heels at Shepheard’s Hotel to record a live performance by a dance band as part of the Middle East Forces Programme. This was a radio show for all Allied forces in the region, broadcast daily during the war by Egyptian State Broadcasting and usually presented by the urbane British actor Peter Haddon.

When Haddon was unavailable, the New Zealanders occasionally stepped in to host. The New Zealand, British, Australian and South African broadcasters in Egypt had formed the grandly titled “Empire Broadcasting Co-ordinating Committee” in late 1940 to pool resources and try and present a united front when dealing with censors and other military authorities. British-run Egyptian State Broadcasting was a particular source of help to them and shared facilities with the New Zealanders and vice versa. (ESB was impressed with the custom-built New Zealand recording van brought over from Wellington, and highlighted it in a three-page article about the New Zealanders in its magazine Cairo Calling.)5

New Zealand broadcasters Noel Palmer (rear), Doug Laurenson and Norman Johnston in the doorway of ‘Esmerelda’ , the New Zealand Broadcasting Unit recording van. A photograph published in Cairo Calling, the magazine of Egyptian State Broadcasting, November, 1940.

The Middle East Forces Programme was “one radio show to which all New Zealanders tune in, if they are within five miles of a radio set,” Doug Laurenson reported, in his introduction to a short talk by Peter Haddon for broadcast back in New Zealand in February 1941. An ebullient Haddon tells Kiwi radio listeners that he has enjoyed building the programme for their men in the Middle East, even though he had few resources except a ‘bucket-load of enthusiasm and a basin-full of goodwill’. They broadcast for an hour every day: 15 minutes dedicated to Indian troops and the rest to British forces (which included the New Zealanders.) The show was mostly musical entertainment – often performances by the troops themselves. Haddon pays warm tribute to the New Zealand Broadcasting Unit in his talk, saying the success of the programme was largely due to their support, as he initially had no radio experience: “They took one look at me and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry”, he jokes. 6

Actor turned radio presenter Peter Haddon, in a 1936 role in The House of the Spaniard [image via Rank and File – British cinema blog]

In order to give home-front radio listeners a taste of what their husbands, sons and sweethearts were listening to in Egypt, the NZBU recorded a Middle East Forces session that they presented – and it includes the relay from Shepheard’s Hotel. A portion of the programme survives on discs in the RNZ Sound Archives at Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision. The discs were sent back to Wellington from Cairo and would have aired at home in the weekly radio programme “With the Boys Overseas”, which played on Sunday mornings throughout the war.

Listening to them transports you to Shepheard’s palm-lined ball-room: “Hello Middle East”, begins announcer Doug Laurenson, “We are on relay from Shepheard’s Hotel, Cairo.” 7 He describes the hotel and reassures New Zealand listeners that those who fondly remember Shepheard’s from their time in Egypt in World War I, will find it has changed little since then. In what may be an oblique reference to the New Zealand troops now tuning in from Greece, he also acknowledges “those listening in from another country, not in the Middle East.” Military censorship would have prevented him making any direct reference to the fact that, as he spoke, several thousand New Zealanders were in the process of joining the British and Australian forces assembled in Greece.

Doug then introduces the dance band for the broadcast, The Continental Savoy Orchestra, under band leader Maio Reiniger. The band is to play some popular dance numbers, with new arrangements ‘just arrived from America.’ The first is Louis Armstrong’s 1936 composition “Swing that Music”, followed by “Mary Lou,” a 1920s hit.

Sadly those two numbers are all that survive in the archives of that broadcast from Shepheard’s, but if you fancy time-travel to wartime Cairo, shake up one of Joe Scialom’s “Suffering Bar Steward” cocktails, tune in to the Continental Savoy Orchestra via the online recordings on Ngā Taonga’s website, and browse the 1936 Story of a Historic Hostelry below.

The Story of a Historic Hostelry: Shepheard’s, Cairo (1936)

References

  • 1. Robert Landry, Life magazine, 14 December 1942. Cited in Shepheard’s Hotel: the British base in Cairo
  • 2. Joe Scialom, Cocktail Kingdom
  • 3. Noel Palmer to J.R. Smith, 14 April 1941. Accounts Correspondence received from the Broadcasting unit with 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force  Box 37c Record no.  2/4/43, Archives New Zealand, Wellington.
  • 4. “New Zealand Broadcast”, Cairo Calling, November 30, 1940. 2NZEF – Public Relations Service – Broadcasting Unit – General Box 52/  Record No. DA 8/9/10/1 Part 2, Archives New Zealand, Wellington.
  • 5. Peter Haddon in U-series. Here, There and Everywhere, Parts 12 and 13, ID1183-4 Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, Wellington
  • 6. U-series. Portion of Forces Programme Parts 1-3, ID11914, 11916, 11917 Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, Wellington

Thanks also to Andrew Humphrey’s blog Grand Hotels of Egypt

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Hugh Sullivan’s escape: a soldier’s tale from Greece

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Uncovering J Force speakers’ names

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With the Kiwis in Japan – voices of J Force

On August 15, 1945 Japan surrendered to the Allied forces marking the end of World War II. With hostilities over, a new relationship with Japan was required. The United States took over military government of the country while a British Commonwealth Occupation Force, or BCOF, was set up to de-militarise Japan. Around 12,000 New Zealanders…

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Some recent(ish) activity and こんにちは、日本 Hello Japan!

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Listening to the “Boys Overseas”

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Voices of the Long Range Desert Group: the brains behind the S.A.S. “Rogue Heroes”

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Jazz at Shepheard’s Hotel, 1941

British officers on the terrace at Shepheard’s Hotel during WWII [Photograph by George Rodger] In both World Wars of the twentieth century, New Zealand forces found themselves fighting in the Middle East. When on leave in Cairo, a fortunate few with sophisticated tastes and cash to spend, might have found themselves enjoying a drink at…

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Public history talk on “With the Boys Overseas”

The online presentation I gave in May as part of Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage’s Public History series, is now available for viewing – or listening, if you prefer. The podcast version is on Spotify and Apple (Thanks to MCH for recording and uploading)

It focuses on the home-front radio listener response to the recordings of ‘messages home’ from the men of the New Zealand Division – and how that response influenced the on-going work of the Mobile Broadcasting Units.

The sound quality is a bit lag-gy in places (the joys of Zoom) but the 80- year old recordings sound pretty good!

Here are the links I mentioned in the presentation:

Miranda Harcourt’s film ‘Voiceover’ on NZ On Screen

28th Māori Battalion audio recordings: https://28maoribattalion.org.nz/audio…

Mobile Unit recordings currently available to listen to online on Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision’s online catalogue: https://tinyurl.com/mrsvtdz4

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Life on board a 2 N.Z.E.F. troop ship: cramped, concerts and “Crossing the Line”

Some of the first recordings sent back to New Zealand for radio broadcasts in late 1940 give some insight into life on board the troop ship on which the Broadcasting Unit was travelling, as part of the Third Echelon of the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force.

The ship was the “Empress of Japan”, a luxury Trans-Pacific passenger liner belonging to the Canadian-Pacific company, but requisitioned for war work in late 1939. She only 10 years old, with what was described as “an extremely impressive interior – lofty public rooms decorated and furnished with extensive use of natural wood. The main lounge, two decks high, had a large oval domed ceiling and a musicians’ gallery. A Palm Court and ballroom extended across the whole 83 feet width of the ship at the forward end of the promenade deck.” 1

Although many of her luxury fittings would have been stripped out for war service, some still remained and New Zealand officers enjoyed the privilege of being able to swim in the ship’s rather magnificent tiled, indoor swimming pool. (A canvas pool was set up on deck for the enlisted men.)

The tiled swimming pool on board the troopship, the former Empress of Japan [Courtesy Empress of Scotland: an illustrated history]

The Broadcasting Unit staff had honorary military ranks and the privileges of officers, even though they were still employed by the National Broadcasting Service. (They would later come under the control of the 2NZEF Public Relations Office, but that was not fully set up until May 1941.)2 As officers, they enjoyed better quarters on board, with cabin service provided one of the Canadian-Pacific line’s Chinese stewards.

In September 1940, soon after sailing from Wellington, “Johnny” Johnston, the Broadcasting Unit’s 23 year old assistant engineer wrote to his parents about his very civilised introduction to military life: “We are being wonderfully looked after on this ship…At 7am Ah Chow our cabin steward comes in with a cup of tea and asks if he can run our bath. Breakfast is at 8.30 starting off with prunes or figs, then poached mullet, half a dozen sorts of omelet and rolls and coffee… All the servants are Chinese and the soul of perfection. When you walk into mess, one is always ready to pull your chair out and pour your iced water. ”

Sunday, September 8, 1940. “We are now in the tropics and it seems to get hotter every day. Yesterday they opened the swimming baths. There is one aft for the men and we [the officers] use the ship’s permanent one which is extremely good. It is all tiled and about 30 feet long and 15 feet wide. You can just imagine what a boon it is being able to have a swim after sweating like a pig in the [recording] truck.” 3

The Broadcasting Unit’s recording truck was travelling with them, with microphones cables running from the hold up onto the deck, to enable recordings. After making their initial discs from the Wellington wharf-side as the Echelon prepared to embark , the Unit’s staff continued testing their new equipment by making recordings of the crew and fellow passengers. Few of the New Zealand men had a lot to say at this point – their war experience being only a few weeks old. The Broadcasting Unit had better luck with the seasoned crew of the “Empress of Japan” finding some radio ‘talent’ in the form of the ship’s First Officer L.M. Goddard who recalls his colourful sailing career which began at the age of 13, in the late 19th century. The ship’s Scots boatswain, Bosun Wilson also seems a natural at the microphone. In a ‘radio talk’ he details his life story, which included serving in Canada’s Royal North-West Mounted Police in the Yukon Territory. At the start of World War I he was working as a gold miner and walked 360 miles through the Yukon to join up, serving with a Western Scottish Regiment.

A few days after making this recording, the broadcasters again handed Bosun Wilson the microphone, allowing him to commentate as the New Zealand men took part in one of the maritime world’s oldest ceremonies,  “Crossing the Line”. This is a centuries-old old naval tradition that marks the first time a person sails across the Equator. Bosun Wilson and Doug Laurenson of the Broadcasting Unit recorded a commentary on deck describing the good-natured hi-jinks, which involve the ship’s crew dressing -up and taking the roles of various members of “King Neptune’s Court”. Neptune’s “Bears” cover the “land-lubber” initiates (who are Crossing the Line for the first time) with flour-paste lather, pretend to shave them, and end by dunking them in the swimming pool. An old hand at the ceremony, Bosun Wilson wryly evaluates the performances of the New Zealanders taking part.

Broadcasting engineer “Johnny” Johnston wrote home to his parents about making the recordings, and wondered if the Unit was making history, being perhaps the first to record the ancient ceremony? “Everything was done with great formality, all the characters were in costume…and the commentary by the Bosun was quite good. The entire ship’s crew were delighted when we played the records back to them, so much that we had to leave a copy of the discs with them.”4 The Officer Commanding the troops on board, Colonel Clayden Shuttleworth (24 Auckland Battalion), was able to provide a certificate showing he had already Crossed the Line, so he is spared and Captain Jack Redpath of Christchurch becomes the first officer ‘victim’ instead.

Crossing the Line on the troop transport Empress of Australia, August 1941. The initiate being ducked by the ‘bears’ after being shaved by King Neptune’s barber. Imperial War Museum A5176 via http://hmsgambia.org/

Two nurses and several men of the 14th and 15th New Zealand Forestry Company also receive a dunking, but as the ship was travelling through the steamy tropics, it was probably a welcome dip – and a diversion from boredom which was an issue for many men on board.

The staff of the Broadcasting Unit may have enjoyed the novelty of being treated as officers with tea delivered to their cabin, but the official war history of one of the Army units on board, 24 Auckland Battalion, describes a less-pleasant voyage for enlisted men, who slept in hammocks in cramped conditions: “The [ship] carried a total of 2635 men. Accommodation provided for no more than 2250 and the ship was considerably overcrowded... As for training, the chronic shortage of equipment was still in evidence, but now among the other things lacking was space for movement… military activity assumed two forms, one consisting of lectures and the other of physical training and route marches round and round the promenade deck. As for amusement, concerts were arranged, films were shown…but sports and deck games were limited by the cramped conditions.” 5

Additionally, the men on board suffered through several outbreaks of disease, including measles, which struck Noel Palmer, the Broadcasting Unit’s officer-in-charge.

The Unit tried to alleviate some the boredom, playing recorded music through the ship’s loud-speaker system for the men: martial tunes to accompany the daily route marches around the deck, but as Johnny Johnston wrote, “The universal favourites with the men are George Formby and Gracie Fields. I’m sure they would be quite content if we played no others at all. “6 The Unit also recorded two ship’s concerts organised by the men. This concert, featured two numbers by tenor Tony Rex. Already an established performer in Auckland, within a month of arriving in Egypt in October 1940, he would become a founding member of the famous Kiwi Concert Party, which entertained the New Zealand Division throughout the rest of the war. 7

Tony Rex and one of the Kiwi Concert Party female impersonators, performing in Maadi, Egypt, 1941. Ref: DA-01442-F, Alexander Turnbull Library

Rex sings two popular numbers, “If I were King” and “On the Road to Mandalay”, which would have been familiar to the men. More novel, is another number, written on board and performed by Dr Jock Caughey of Auckland.

Portrait of Dr. John Egerton Caughey, taken by Clifton Firth, 7 June 1939. Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, 34-C28A [via Online Cenotaph]

Major Caughey would eventually become Commanding Officer of No. 3 New Zealand General Hospital during the war. He was Mentioned in Dispatches and after the war, became New Zealand’s leading neurologist and Dean of Otago Medical School. 8

In September 1940 however, he was on board an over-crowded troop ship, singing a doggerel soldier’s song with lyrics penned by the on-board army medical staff. The title is not given, but the refrain, which the audience also sings, repeats, “A soldier leads mostly a dog’s life.” It is a humorous litany of complaints about the voyage and life on the troop ship, including the hot weather, the outbreak of measles, the dunkings by “King Neptune” and even the painful vaccinations inflicted on the men by Caughey’s own unit. There is good-natured ribbing of the nurses and fellow officers, but Colonel Shuttleworth, the ship’s C.O., again escapes, this time thanks to his surname:

“One Shuttleworth here, is the Colonel. Of course he should be in this song. But I can’t find a rhyme for his name dear, I guess that it’s just too, too long!”

References: 1. Sharp, P..J. The Empress of Scotland: an illustrated history [online] https://www.angelfire.com/pe2/pjs1/index.html

2. Oosterman, A. ‘The silence of the Sphinx’: the delay in organising media coverage of World War II, Pacific Journalism Review 20 (2) 2014. [online] https://ojs.aut.ac.nz/pacific-journalism-review/article/view/173/136

3. Johnston, Norman Balfour. Personal correspondence, “At sea”, 06 September 1940

4. Johnston, Norman Balfour. Personal correspondence, “At sea”, 14 September 1940

5. Burdon, R.M. 24 Battalion p. 7. Part of: The Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War 1939-1945. Historical Publications Branch, 1953, Wellington [online] https://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-WH2-24Ba-c1.html

6. Johnston, Norman Balfour. Personal correspondence, “At sea” 23 September 1940.

7. Ward, Aleisha. Musicians at war: The Kiwi Concert Party of World War II, [online] https://www.audioculture.co.nz/articles/musicians-at-war-the-kiwi-concert-party-in-world-war-ii

8. McDonald, W.I. Inspiring Physicians: John Egerton Caughey. The Royal College of Physicians [online] https://history.rcplondon.ac.uk/inspiring-physicians/john-egerton-caughey

More blog posts:

The Voices of HMS Neptune

Neptune Calling exhibition, Torpedo Bay Navy Museum Some of the most poignant recordings made by the Mobile Broadcasting Unit are now able to be heard in a new exhibit at the Torpedo Bay Navy Museum in Auckland, which opened this week. They contain the voices of 50 New Zealand sailors, recorded on board the Royal…

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Farewell Achilles, welcome to Perth, and a Canadian hero

As members of the first New Zealand Broadcasting Service mobile unit sailed towards the war in late August 1940, they began making recordings on-board their ship, the converted Canadian passenger liner, Empress of Japan. In these we hear a high seas farewell, a warm welcome to Perth and the voice of a Canadian war hero.

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“With the Boys Overseas”

For the radio listeners back in New Zealand, the Mobile Unit’s most important role, the one for which it became best-known and remembered, was recording thousands of simple 15-20-second “messages home” from New Zealanders overseas.

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On their way

The Mobile Units were initiated in February 1940 when the Director of the National Broadcasting Service, Professor James Shelley wrote to the government suggesting it might be a good idea to send broadcasters with the New Zealand Division to boost morale

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Becoming mobile

In August 1940 the Listener magazine profiled the specifications of the Mobile Unit truck which had recently been tested at Trentham Army Camp and then driven through the streets of Wellington where it “caused considerable interest..

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Wounded,  then shipwrecked: the powerful story of  “A Simple Country Lad”

Battlefield at Sidi Rezegh, November/December 1941 Artist: Peter McIntyre (R122497098 Archives New Zealand)

Among the recordings made by the National Broadcasting Service mobile recording unit in North Africa during World War II is a series of discs in which a soldier tells the story of a New Zealand Divisional Cavalry gun operator, who was wounded in a tank battle in Libya in 1941.

The story is that of a soldier who goes by the nickname “Sparks” and the speaker who tells it is Corporal Robert Loughnan. Loughnan was a former Canterbury high country shepherd, now a gunner with the ‘Div. Cav.’ and the story he tells is, in fact, autobiographical. The gunner, who he named “Sparks” in his story, was in fact Loughnan himself, and the story is of what he endured during and after the battle of Sidi Rezegh in Libya in late November 1941. 

The story which “Bobbie” Loughnan recorded in Egypt has been digitised and can be listened to in two parts on Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision’s online catalogue.  Part 1 covers the battle and how he was wounded when his tank was hit by German fire. Part 2 tells how, around a week later, he survived the sinking of the ship “S.S. Chakdina”, which was torpedoed and sank while carrying wounded men from Tobruk to Alexandria.  Together, they form a powerful first-person account of two important moments in the history of the New Zealand Division during the North African campaign of World War II.

Photograph of Div. Cav. members from Bobbie Loughnan’s own collection (He is second from the right) Published in the Official War History of the Divisional Cavalry, 1963, by R.J. M. Loughnan.(via the New Zealand Electronic Text collection)

The story was written by Bobbie Loughnan as his entry in a short story competition run by the 2NZEF Archives in 1942, asking members to send in a written ‘eye witness account’.  Loughnan called his tale “A Simple Country Lad”,  reclaiming the dismissive phrase Adolf Hitler had used when he referred to New Zealand’s forces as “poor, deluded, country lads.” (The phrase was also co-opted by the National Film Unit in this 1941 film-reel about New Zealand men training for war.)

Bobbie had a talent for writing and he tells a gripping tale of the intensity of a tank battle, in which he was wounded badly in both hands and transferred to an overcrowded hospital in Tobruk.  A few days later he was taken on board the converted cargo vessel “Chakdina”, which was carrying 400 Allied men to other hospitals in Egypt, plus 120 crew and 100 German and Italian prisoners of war.  However, it was torpedoed by an enemy plane at around 9pm on 5th December 1941, and sank rapidly with the loss of 400 lives, including 80 New Zealand wounded.  Thanks to the efforts of a fellow Div. Cav. member Morven Stewart, Bobbie survived the sinking and he describes floating in the Mediterranean for several hours before being rescued under fire by the Royal Navy destroyer “HMS Farndale.” Unable to use his wounded hands, he clung with his teeth and toes to a cargo net on the side of the ship, until he was able to be pulled aboard.

“The most outstanding ‘Personal Experience’ we have yet recorded”

For me, it stands out as one of the few accounts of the war recorded by the mobile broadcasting unit, in which a man speaks openly of his emotions and mental state during combat and at times of great stress. During a period when many New Zealanders (particularly men), publicly maintained a ‘stiff upper lip’ about the hardships of war, Bobbie’s story seems almost modern in his description of enduring what we would now call a panic attack and post-traumatic stress.

Bobbie Loughnan in his ‘hospital blues’,  Egypt, 1942. [Courtesy Robert Loughnan]

It certainly stood out to broadcaster Noel Palmer, who recorded it on discs at Maadi Camp in September 1942. Palmer wrote to the Director of the National Broadcasting Service, James Shelley, in a letter that accompanied the discs back to New Zealand, saying:  “It is, I think, quite the most outstanding “Personal Experience” we have yet recorded.” [1]

Army archivist Captain E. Halstead agreed, writing to his counterparts in Wellington that the story was “excellent” and recommending it should be published in booklet form as an official Army publication. [2] (It is unclear if this ever actually happened – so far I have not found any trace of such a publication.)

When it was recorded in 1942, the title “A Simple, Country Lad” was hand-written (probably by Noel Palmer) on the disc labels. The story would have played on air in New Zealand sometime in late 1942 or early 1943, in one of several radio programmes dedicated to recordings sent back from the war fronts by the mobile broadcasting units. However, when the discs came to be catalogued by the RNZ Sound Archives, the connection to Bobbie Loughnan’s story and the context of the title was no longer known.  Cataloguers possibly felt the title seemed a little dismissive, and so listed the recordings with a title more descriptive of the contents: “The story of a gunner injured in Libya.”

And so they remained until February this year when Bobbie Loughnan’s son, Robert contacted me via this blog, mentioning his father had recorded a story entitled “A Simple Country Lad.”   The name rang a bell as I had come across the correspondence from Noel Palmer and Captain E. Halstead in my research at Archives New Zealand. A quick search on his father’s name in Ngā Taonga’s catalogue found the recordings – albeit, under the later title “ The story of a gunner injured in Libya.”

Robert Loughnan very kindly shared with me the journey he has been on uncovering the details of his father’s wartime experience and recovery, and with his permission, I can share some of those details here. After recovering from his wounds, Bobbie Loughnan was eventually furloughed back to New Zealand in 1944. He married, raised a family and worked as a stock buyer and then as public relations officer for the Canterbury Frozen Meat Company.  He had some involvement with rural radio programmes in this role, on station 3YA in Christchurch. Additionally,  as publicity officer for the Canterbury Ski Association he used to present weekly snow and ski reports on air during winter months. 

Bobbie passed away following a series of strokes in 1984, and some months later, his son Robert visited the Radio New Zealand Sound Archives (which were then in Timaru), hoping to be able to hear some of these reports if they had been archived. To his great surprise, he heard instead, the recording his father made in 1942 – a very emotional experience as Bobbie had never shared the details of his wartime wounding and shipwreck escape with his family.

This prompted a long period of research by Robert into his father’s war and he was able to meet Morven Stewart, the fellow New Zealand Div. Cav. member who Bobbie mentions in the recording and who was responsible for him surviving the sinking of the “Chakdina.”  Robert also eventually met former New Zealand army nurse Gaye Collington, who had nursed Bobbie in Egypt.  It was she who had encouraged him to initially write down his experiences as a way of processing the trauma he had gone through.  It was Gaye who took the photo of Bobbie Loughnan above, in his ‘hospital blues” (patient’s uniform) on the roof of the Egypt hospital in 1942.  She talked about her experience nursing Bobbie in an oral history, which was published in the book “Mates and Mayhem” by Lawrence Watt (HarperCollins, 1996).

Incredibly, Robert also met a former British seaman Les Edwards, who was the Royal Navy sailor who had pulled the wounded Bobbie out of the Mediterranean and aboard the “HMS Farndale.”  Les had eventually settled in New Zealand and advertised through the R.S.A. Review newspaper that he wanted to meet any survivors of the “Chakdina” sinking.  Morven Stewart saw the notice and eventually Robert Loughnan was able to meet up with Les and Morven in 1999.  As he wrote, “How do you say thank you in some adequate manner to the very men who in rescuing my father, gave me life?… What a lucky man I am to have met, and known, Gaye, Morven and Les. All three in some way responsible for the life I have enjoyed.” [3]

Morven Stewart, Robert Loughnan, Les Edwards in 1999 [Courtesy Robert Loughnan]

Robert also kindly shared with me a letter his father Bobbie wrote to his parents during the war,  telling them about the story and how he came to record it. 

“I read in the NZEF Times of a competition instituted by the Official Archivist for personal account stories of the Div, fighting.  The Archivist, one of the Public Relation blokes, was looking for material of a more personal nature than the bald statements of fact which come to him in each Unit’s War Diary.  He required this stuff to use in the eventual writing of the Division’s History after the war…  I wrote and wrote and wrote and found myself getting really excited over it all.  And for two nights I wrote away there till the small hours.  When it was done I  borrowed a typewriter and typed a draft.  20,000 words it was and some effort for me to type.  Then I got busy with a blue pencil and gave it an awful hiding.  Finally produced the finished article… I handed the manuscript to Murray, to pass in, as we went through Cairo and up the line. I was thankful to see the last of it – so I thought.

A week or so later I had a message from Murray saying that my story had been lodged all right and had produced a visit to him in Base by another Public Relations bloke – the wireless recorder – to find out whom this Loughnan bloke was and whether he would make a recording for broadcast.

In September the Div was given four days Cairo leave before the big fight, so I went out to Maadi expecting to be introduced to a microphone and with a commentator, to make this sort of record:

Commentator: “What’s it like in battle?”

Me: (nervously) “Pretty bloody”

C: “What’s it like when the Stukas come?”

Me: “Pretty bloody”

C: “Do you like fighting?”

Me: “Not bloody likely”

…….etc. etc, ad lib.

But I was greeted instead by my whole manuscript all jacked up for easy reading and ready annotated for emphasis and inflexion etc. with every page (there were some twenty of them) stamped by every censor imaginable.  There was the Chief Naval censors stamp, RAF Middle East, GHQ Middle East and Lord knows what.

I was coached up in reading.  We had a trial run for a page or so and finally got to work.  The whole business burnt up the best part of a day.  In one place I broke down (did my scone) and the recording wallah took the record, 12 inches of it, broke it over his knees and just said “OK, take a spell and then go back to so-and-so.”  Oh yes.  They turned your son into quite a showman.

Then, when it was all over, I got the biggest kick of the lot.  He played it all back to me and made me follow very critically right through.  While this was going on the door opened and in came someone in a, then, strange uniform.  The recorder turned down the volume for a minute and introduced me to this bloke.  As usual I played no attention to his name but shook his hands, sat down and went on listening.  After the last record – there were some 16, 12” sides – this fellow said: “Did you make that recording?”  The recorder pipes up: “Yes, and wrote it.  He happens to be the hero too.”

In the broadest of accents comes the spontaneous remark: “Boy, you’ve a natural commentator’s voice” (pronounced – commentah).  He was a technician from one of the big American Commercial Radio Links!!  That was the biggest “kick” of the lot.” [4]

Bobbie Loughnan’s skill with words continued after the war.  As well as some radio work, he was tasked with writing the official war history of his unit, the New Zealand Divisional Cavalry. It was published in 1963 and can be read online.

(Many thanks to Robert Loughnan for his help in writing this story of his father’s recording and permission to republish photographs and excerpts from his correspondence.)

[1] Noel Palmer to James Shelley, National Broadcasting Service, 17 Sep 1942. Archives NZ R22011495

[2] Captain E. Halstead to E. McCormick, Army Archives, HQ Wellington, 18 Sep 1942. Archives NZ R22011495

[3] Robert Loughnan, The sinking of the Chakdina, March 2022

[4] Personal correspondence, R.J.M. Loughnan to his mother, 21 September 1943.

The Voices of HMS Neptune

Neptune Calling exhibition, Torpedo Bay Navy Museum

Some of the most poignant recordings made by the Mobile Broadcasting Unit are now able to be heard in a new exhibit at the Torpedo Bay Navy Museum in Auckland, which opened this week. They contain the voices of 50 New Zealand sailors, recorded on board the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Neptune, on 13 November 1941.

Broadcasters Arch Curry and Noel Palmer went on board the Neptune while it was docked at Alexandria, Egypt, and recorded radio messages from 50 of the 150 New Zealanders who were serving amongst its crew of nearly 800 men. They also recorded the ship’s British officers, Captain Rory O’Conor and First Lieutenant Frank Woodward, who spoke about about the history of the ship and the part the New Zealanders were playing in its crew.

Tragically, just over a month later on 19 December 1941, HMS Neptune struck a minefield in the Mediterranean and sunk, with the loss of all but 1 of its crew, including 150 New Zealanders.

Northern Advocate, 3 January 1942, Page 5 [via Papers Past]

Next-of-kin received the tragic news around Christmas, and it was announced publicly in New Zealand in early January 1942. The timing of the disaster added to the terrible poignancy of the men’s final messages, which are mostly Christmas greetings to family and loved ones. Two New Zealand families tragically lost two sons each in the sinking, and Dunedin was hit particularly hard, with the loss of 30 local men.

Dunedin’s Memorial to the local men lost on HMS Neptune, erected in 2008 [Wikimedia Commons]

By the time of the Neptune’s sinking, the recorded discs with the voices of the Kiwi crew were on their way back to New Zealand for broadcasting in the popular weekly radio programme, “With the Boys Overseas.” However, the standard National Broadcasting Service practice when a man had been killed or declared missing in action, was to not play his message on air. Instead, the grieving families were notified that they could come and listen to the recording in private at their nearest NBS station.

So the Neptune messages never went to air during the war, and for many years after they remained in the NBS archives un-played, as it was felt it would be too painful for any family members to hear their lost loved one on the radio. However, by the late 1990s broadcasters believed enough time had passed and most immediate relations would have passed away, so occasionally the Neptune messages began to be heard on programmes such as “Sounds Historical”, hosted by Jim Sullivan on RNZ.

HMS NEPTUNE (FL 2929) Underway. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205016628

A typical disc of the HMS Neptune messages can be heard online here. Arch Curry introduces 11 men, who each send a brief message to their friends and families. They had been chosen by ballot to record a message, and almost all add another greeting on behalf of one of their mates who had missed out.

With the arrival of the internet in the 1990s, family historians began to discover mention of the recordings online and RNZ’s Sound Archives made contact with the official HMS Neptune Association in the UK, to let them know the recordings existed and that copies could be supplied to family members. In 2012, RNZ’s “Spectrum” documentary team made a radio programme about descendants of one young Auckland sailor, Eddie Vazey, hearing his voice for the first time on the archived HMS Neptune discs. You can listen to “Finding Eddie Vazey” on RNZ’s website.

New Zealand Herald, 08 January 1942

Since then, the recordings have also been used by the Royal New Zealand Navy to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Neptune’s sinking in 2016, and now all the messages are available for visitors to listen to at the Torpedo Bay Navy Museum in Auckland The “Neptune Calling” exhibit opened this week and curator Jane Cotty hopes it will remain in place for the rest of this year, so visitors can hear and pay their respects to the New Zealand men killed in what remains our worst naval disaster.

New Zealand crew of HMS Neptune whose voices are heard in the surviving Mobile Unit recordings:

Jack Ball, Christchurch

Bill Brown, Christchurch

Stan Percival, Wellington

Allan Roper, Featherston

Reg Gillan, Dunedin

Ras (Kauru) Forgie, Auckland

Ross Jenkin, Dunedin

Bruce McKinnon, Wairoa

Doug Harvey, New Plymouth

Jim Leckie, Dunedin

Frank Leyland, Rotorua

Jack True, Auckland

Alf Simpson, Dunedin

Rolly (Roland) Morley, Outram

Mansell (Lloyd) Lord, Auckland

Ross Andrew, Island Bay

Jim Walker, Auckland

Hud (Hudson) Biggs, Dunedin

 

Keg (Kevin) Garrett, Onehunga

Derek Baron, Lower Hutt

Roy Hook, Dunedin

Darcy (Arthur) Heaney, Gisborne

Ted (Edward) Tamplin, Christchurch

Peter (Edwin) Alder, Auckland

Ian Kennedy, Auckland

Eddie (Edward) Vazey, Auckland

Howard Cooper, Auckland

Bill (William) Perry, Lower Hutt

George Hansen, Christchurch

Robert Cronquest, Shannon
Herbert Christie, Ashburton

Bruce Garlick, Auckland

Ron Clark Christchurch

Jim (James) Blackley, Masterton

 

 

Sam Wilson, Invercargill

Rob McDonald, Dunedin

Ernest Wright, Auckland

Bill (William) Wangford, Auckland

Donald Corbin Auckland

Ross Buckley Auckland

Norman (Arthur) Capon, Ashburton

Jack Scott, Dunedin

Geoff Hardy, Ohakune

Harry Marsden, Ohaupo

Desmond MacAulay, Wellington

Stanley West, Lower Hutt

Alf (Wally) Jenkins, Grey Lynn

Harry Vercoe, Auckland

Alan Brown, Invercargill

Ian Brackenridge, Wellington

Jim Brown, Wellington; 

Lewis Walkinshaw, Invercargill

Farewell Achilles, welcome to Perth, and a Canadian hero

Doug Laurenson (right) recording a crew member onboard HMS Leander in 1941. [The New Zealand Listener, 7 August 1941, cover]

As members of the first New Zealand Broadcasting Service mobile unit sailed towards the war in late August 1940, they began making recordings on-board their ship, the converted Canadian passenger liner, Empress of Japan. These discs were sent back to New Zealand from the various ports of call they stopped at en route. The surviving recordings, plus correspondence from the men themselves, convey a sense of anticipation that many members of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force must have felt; the trepidation of heading off to war tempered by the chance (for most) to travel overseas for the first time.

The Broadcasting Unit sailed from Wellington on 27 August 1940. Three days out from New Zealand, their troopship convoy of the Empress of Japan, Mauretania and Orcades, paused in the Tasman Sea to farewell their escort, the cruiser HMS Achilles, which was heading back to New Zealand. The convoy was joined by an Australian contingent sailing out of Sydney, and HMAS Perth and HMAS Canberra would take over escort duties for the next leg of their journey. 1

The Achilles was already the toast of New Zealand in 1940, after taking part in the Battle of the River Plate in the South Atlantic in December 1939, where it had become the first New Zealand unit to strike at the enemy, firing on the German pocket battleship Graf Spee. The German crew subsequently scuttled their damaged vessel and the battle was seen as a victory and great morale boost to Britain and the Empire. 2

HMS Achilles with some of the crew on deck. [Ref. 1/2-049007-F Alexander Turnbull Library]

On their return to New Zealand in February 1940, Achilles and her crew were given a hero’s welcome, with parades and receptions in Auckland and Wellington. In this silent film footage taken by Lt. Richard Washbourn, (who would earn a DSO, CB, OBE, and eventually become a Rear Admiral and Commander of the Royal New Zealand Navy) you can watch her crew in the South Atlantic. There is no footage of the battle (understandably) but the unscripted, home movie gives a great feel for life on board and leave onshore. At the end of the online footage, as the cruiser enters Auckland on February 23, 1940, we see huge banners “Well done Achilles” and “Bravo Achilles“, adorning harbourfront buildings, as well as hundreds of waving Aucklanders crowding the docks and small craft which sailed out to greet her.

In this British newsreel footage of Achilles welcome, the enthusiasm of wartime Auckland is captured, with streamers and tickertape showering the marching crew on Queen Street.

Therefore, it would have been quite a fillip for the men of the Third Echelon to have this famous New Zealand vessel as their escort out of Wellington, later that same year. So much so, that when Achilles prepared to hand them over to an Australian escort and turn for home, the Broadcasting Unit ran out their microphone and recorded the event on deck on 30 August 1940.

Mobile Unit commentator Doug Laurenson (who is seen in the Listener magazine cover photo at the top of this blog) narrates the recording, which was recorded in four parts over two lacquer discs which have been digitised and made available to listen to on Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision’s website. In the first, he explains Achilles is to cruise around all the ships of the convoy and farewell them each in turn. Men are lining the decks and clustered around portholes. It is 5pm and the Tasman Sea is “beautifully calm” as the sun sets. In the second, he observes on the decks of their sister ship (Mauretania) the scarlet capes of New Zealand army nursing sisters, dotted among the soldiers and crew. Laurenson describes Achilles as it pulls alongside, flying a string of signal flags, which are being interpreted by his ship’s signalmen. In an aside, the kind of minor detail which enriches so many of the Mobile Unit recordings, he notes the men on his vessel “have had their vaccine inoculations today and are all nursing rather sore arms, so they will be sure to wave to Achilles with the other arm.”

Finally, in the third part of the series, Achilles‘ crew is heard giving three cheers to the men on the Empress of Japan, and receive the same in return. Through the noise of the wind on the open Tasman, Achilles‘ band can be heard playing on deck as her ratings sing “the Māori song of farewell” (“Pō Atarau/Now is the Hour”) for the Third Echelon’s men. They return the compliment by singing “For They are Jolly Good Fellows” as Achilles slips astern and heads for home, severing one final link with New Zealand.

Nearly a week later, the first stop for the 2 N.Z.E.F. convoy was Fremantle, the port for Perth in Western Australia. Here the Mobile Unit reported that the Kiwis were given a grand welcome by the locals, with cheering crowds and cars meeting the ships, ready to whisk men off to see the sights, as most had 12 hours’ shore-leave.

New Zealand Broadcasting Unit assistant engineer Norman “Johnny” Johnston, labelling a lacquer disc [Photograph from “Cairo Calling” – Egyptian State Broadcasting Service magazine, 30 November, 1940. Archives NZ ADQZ 18886 WAII1 R20107884]

The unit’s assistant engineer, 23 year old Norman “Johnny” Johnston, wrote to his parents about visiting Australia: “The train journey from the port to the city was a great experience – people all along the way cheering and motor cars tooting their horns. Our first job was to post what records we had made back to N.Z. …They were 12 pounds weight of discs and as the rate is 5 pence per half ounce and we had to send them collect, it will be a pleasant surprise for the firm [the NZBS.]” Johnny also called on the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s local radio station and was given a tour of their facilities, and then visited an aunt of his mother’s who lived in Perth, before catching up with other NZEF men in town for an obligatory beer and dinner at a city restaurant.

“The New Zealanders took complete control of the city and there were some of the funniest sights I’ve ever seen. Two Auckland chaps pinched horses from somewhere and galloped up and down the main street. Others stood at crossings controlling traffic. The local inhabitants were fortunately very long-suffering and didn’t seem to mind a bit.”3

Hay Street, Perth, c. 1940s [Courtesy museumofperth.wordpress.com]

Back on board, the commentator Doug Laurenson made a six-part series of recordings about impressions of their first shore leave and the waving crowds that greeted the New Zealanders. (Note that due to wartime censorship neither Fremantle, Perth nor Australia are mentioned by name in his report.) Special troop trains carried the men from the port into the city throughout the day, with both sides of the track lined by cheering locals. “We were welcomed by thousands of waving hands: children lined up at the windows of their classrooms… people grouped in their gardens and back verandahs, on overhead bridges and shop doorways…all stopped to give us a cheer and the universal sign “Thumbs up New Zealand!”4

In Parts 2 and 3 of this series, which is entitled “News from the Troops”, they recorded the unit’s first greetings from New Zealanders for broadcast to families at home. It seems the unit was still establishing a format for this type of broadcast, and frustratingly, none of the speakers are fully named in these recordings: a sergeant named “Basil” sends greetings to Christchurch and Okuru and Jackson’s Bay (in South Westland), a man named “George” sends greetings to Auckland, Whangarei and Kaukau, and an unidentified nursing sister says hello to ‘Mangatawiri’ (sic. possibly Mangatāwhiri or Maungatāwhiri.) She describes how the nurses on board enjoyed their first shore leave, with hospitality provided by the local Perth nurse’s association, including dinner and dancing.

Happily, Parts 4 and 5 are more satisfactory, for although “Bert” the Quartermaster Sergeant interviewed in them is not fully named, he helpfully ends his recording by greeting “39 Tarikaka Street, Ngaio” (Wellington.) Using this detail and his rank, I was able to identify him on Auckland War Memorial Museum’s Online Cenotaph database as Albert John Wyeth 27368. Bert gives details of a typical day on-board a troopship, from reveille at 6.30am, through roll call, physical training, games and route marches on deck (to recorded music provided by the Broadcasting Unit.) A World War I veteran, Bert says this troopship is about four times larger than the one he travelled on “last time.” He notes boots must be worn during route marches, in order to keep the mens’ feet in shape for when they finally get back on land. Blackout is observed on deck after dusk, so no smoking is permitted outside. He says the weather has been splendid, making it a most enjoyable voyage, “especially for those lads, for who this is their first trip.”5

This first of what would be many thousands of recordings of messages for New Zealand radio listeners, ends with a Canadian. Captain John Wallace Thomas, master of the ship Empress of Japan, sends a few words to the friends and families of his New Zealand passengers. Before the war, his vessel was a luxury passenger liner of the Canadian-Pacific company, sailing the Vancouver–Yokohama–Kobe–Shanghai–Hong Kong route.

Empress of Japan in her pre-war livery. {Image courtesy of The Empress of Scotland: an illustrated history]

Her Canadian and Chinese crew carried celebrities such as American baseball legend Babe Ruth across the Pacific.6 Requisitioned in late 1939 for war service, she ferried New Zealand and Australian personnel to the Middle East for several years, changing her name to Empress of Scotland after Japan entered the war with the attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941.

After safely delivering the New Zealand Third Echelon to their destination, Captain Thomas and his ship were to have an eventful war, surviving several near misses. On November 9, 1940 off Western Ireland, they suffered a German air attack. During the air raid, Captain Thomas and Ho Kan, the ship’s Chinese quartermaster, heroically manned the wheelhouse, steering the ship to take evasive action. In the face of enemy machine gun fire, Ho Kan at the wheel calmly carried out his commander’s instructions from a lying position. Both men were later decorated, Captain Thomas with the CBE, and Ho Kan the BEM. Captain Thomas is one of 14 figures from Canada’s military history remembered with a bust at the nation’s “Valiants Memorial” in Ottawa.7

Statue of John Wallace Thomas, Valiants Memorial, Ottawa, Canada. [Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons]

References: 1. Ward, Michael. Middle East Troopship Convoys 2NZEF 1939-1945. Auckland War Memorial Museum – Tāmaki Paenga Hira. First published: 24 September 2020. Updated: 6 October 2021.
www.aucklandmuseum.com/war-memorial/online-cenotaph/features/Troopship-Convoys

2. MacGibbon, Ian. The Battle of the River Plate: the New Zealand Story. History Group, The Ministry for Culture and Heritage. https://nzhistory.govt.nz/files/documents/battle-riverplate-eng.pdf

3. Johnston, Norman Balfour. Letter dated “At Sea”, 6 September 1940.

4. Laurenson, Morgan Douglas. News from the Troops No. 2. Part 1 of 6. RNZ collection, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision ID10977 https://www.ngataonga.org.nz/collections/catalogue/catalogue-item?record_id=151945

5. Wyeth, Albert John. News from the Troops No. 2. Part 5 of 6. RNZ collection, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision ID10977 https://www.ngataonga.org.nz/collections/catalogue/catalogue-item?record_id=151945

6. Empress of Scotland: an illustrated history https://www.angelfire.com/pe2/pjs1/index.html

7. John Wallace Thomas, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wallace_Thomas

Where are the women? Recordings of New Zealand nurses in World War II

New Zealand nurses, waving farewell from a deck of a troopship during World War II. The Evening Post newspaper. Ref: PAColl-5482-018. Alexander Turnbull Library. /records/22299346

Over 90 percent of the voices heard in the Mobile Broadcasting Unit’s wartime recordings are male. As with any archive, it is important to consider what is missing from the official record: whose stories haven’t been written, whose voices are not heard? In the case of a sound archive, it can be a very literal ‘archival silence’.

The absence of female voices in the collection is largely due to the limited opportunities for New Zealand women to serve overseas during World War II. But there were women on active service – and some of them and the stories of their experiences were recorded. I’ll give a brief overview here of the Unit’s recordings of nurses of the New Zealand Army Nursing Service. Other women were also recorded by the Unit, such as WAACs and Tuis, and their recordings will feature in a later blog.

New Zealand nurses sailed with the First and Second Echelons of the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force. When the Third Echelon departed in August 1940, it too contained members of the New Zealand Army Nursing Service, as well as the staff of the National Broadcasting Service Mobile Unit. In all, around 600 NZANS members were to serve outside New Zealand between 1939 and 1945. 1

From the deck of the troopship “Empress of Japan” on 26 August 1940, broadcasting commentator Doug Laurenson described watching the loading of their sister vessel “Mauretania”, as both readied to depart Wellington . His recorded commentary painted a picture of the scene for radio audiences: “All along her decks, leaning out of port holes and perched in her rigging can be seen lines and lines of khaki-clad figures. …High up on her boat deck, the most vivid sight is that of the scarlet capes, the grey uniforms and white head dress of Army Sisters. In the sunlight they make an unforgettable splash of colour, flanked by the blue uniforms of the ship’s crew and the khaki drill of our own troops.” 2

Boyer, Charles Percy Samuel, 1902-1973. New Zealand nurses of the 3rd Echelon departing from Wellington during World War 2. New Zealand.
Ref: DA-07102-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/23023508

The women he was describing were staff of No. 2 New Zealand General Hospital (2NZGH) which sailed with the Third Echelon, some of whom can be seen waving goodbye in the photograph above. In early recordings the Unit made en-route to Egypt, we get small glimpses of what life was like for the handful of women on board a ship with over 1,000 men. In one recording, an unnamed nursing sister gives a brief description of shore leave. Due to wartime censorship, the actual location was not able to be mentioned on-air, but from the date of recording we know it was Fremantle in Western Australia She greets Mangatawhiri (presumably her hometown) and describes how the nurses were met by local (Australian) nurses and shown great hospitality. Arrangements were made at Perth clubs to provide meals and dancing for the women, as well as the New Zealand troops who were also granted shore leave.

Later in the voyage as the Third Echelon headed for its next port (Bombay/Mumbai, India) some of the nurses joined the men in taking part in a traditional “Crossing the Line” ceremony. This is a centuries-old old naval tradition that marks the first time a person sails across the Equator. The Broadcasting Unit recorded a commentary on deck describing the good-natured hi-jinks, which involved the ship’s crew dressing -up and taking the roles of various members of “King Neptune’s Court”. They cover the ‘land-lubber’ initiates who are crossing the line for the first time with soap-lather and them give them a dunk in a pool on the deck. A Sister Anderson, matron of the nurses on board (possibly Lucy Edna Anderson) is described entering into the spirit of the occasion, appearing on deck in fancy dress as an elderly woman complete with bonnet. She takes her lathering and dunking as a “good sport”, but turns the tables on “King Neptune” pushing him into the water as well, much to the amusement of the crowd! 3

Crossing the Line on the troop transport Empress of Australia, August 1941. The initiate being ducked by the ‘bears’ after being shaved by King Neptune’s barber. Imperial War Museum A5176 via http://hmsgambia.org/

Once the Third Echelon reached Egypt and settled into life at Maadi Camp near Cairo, the Mobile Broadcasting Unit staff began preparing one of its longest early broadcasts, which was to be played in New Zealand on Christmas Day 1940.

It was an ambitious programme, obtaining recorded messages from representatives of various branches of the New Zealand Division, as well as men serving with the Royal Navy and Air Force, a Christmas message from New Zealand commander General Bernard Freyberg himself and a talk by “a Middle East nursing sister.” Apart from the General, all participants in this programme are frustratingly unnamed. Perhaps it was intended that through their anonymity, the speakers would be representatives of all the New Zealanders overseas. However, the unnamed nurse is introduced as having been overseas for nearly a year at the time of the recording, which means she was most likely one of the 18 nurses in the First Echelon who had left New Zealand in January 1940.

In what would become something of a feature of the Broadcasting Unit’s recordings of women, the nurse in the 1940 Christmas programme addresses herself directly “to the womenfolk of New Zealand, whether wives, mothers or sweethearts.” She describes the conditions in Egypt: the weather, food, and the outings arranged for off-duty mento see the sights. She ends by telling listeners that “All the men in our care on Christmas Day will be looked after and we’ll see that their stockings are filled.” 4 Hearing these reassurances in the voice of a New Zealand woman on the other side of the world, might have gone some way towards the Broadcasting Unit’s stated aim of boosting morale on the homefront.

New Zealand nurses continue to appear sporadically in the Unit’s recordings throughout the war. As the “messages home” became a regular popular feature on New Zealand radio, they too were given an opportunity to appear in front of the microphone and send greetings to loved ones. In March 1941 the Unit visited the New Zealand General Hospital at Helwan, and recorded greetings from nurses, including the Matron Doris Brown.

Patient and nurse at the NZ General Hospital, Egypt. New Zealand. ca.1941 Ref: DA-01247-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/22336255

A couple of months later in May 1941 the Unit recorded a talk by Matron Eva Mackay who had been in charge of the party of nurses which went to Greece in February to set up a tent hospital for New Zealanders fighting there. However, as that campaign rapidly unravelled, she instead found herself helping to lead over 100 British, Australian and New Zealand nurses in a hurried evacuation away from advancing German forces. 

Their journey through Greece and Crete was a dangerous and arduous one, pursued by the advancing enemy and under fire from German aircraft.  In the New Zealand Nurses’ Journal she wrote “Never will I forget my few weeks in Greece. The last part will be like a nightmare for some time to come and the relief at stepping ashore in the Middle East was almost too much for me.” 5

New Zealand nurses in a cemetery, during the withdrawal from Greece, World War 2. Evening Post newspaper. Ref: PAColl-7796-87. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/22448626

In her interview for New Zealand radio recorded shortly after ‘stepping ashore’,  she described how the evacuating nurses’ truck convoy was bombed and strafed from the air, forcing the women to shelter for a day in an old Greek cemetery before continuing their journey in darkness. The interview was written up as a full-page feature article for The New Zealand Listener magazine in June 1941, under the headline N.Z. Nurses in Greece. Their experiences told by Miss E.C. Mackay in the N.B.S. session “With the Boys Overseas.” 6.

Other wartime recordings of nurses which survive in the sound archives include Sister Vera Hodges, who nursed in a casualty clearing station in the North African Western Desert campaign and gave an account of their work to the Broadcasting Unit in early 1943. (She noted the men were amazed to find New Zealand women so close to the front line. ) She had also been interviewed when the Unit travelled to visit New Zealanders in Syria in 1942 and recorded greetings from a handful of nurses in a CCS there.

Matron-in-Chief of the New Zealand Army Nursing Service, Emily Nutsey was interviewed shortly before her departure from that role in November 1943, when she had to return to New Zealand due to ill health. Her interview, in which she which reviews the work of the NZANS in the war to that point, is still awaiting digitisation. Once it is available it will become yet another useful resource for researchers interested in the role of New Zealand nurses on active service in the war.

References: 1. New Zealand Army Nursing Service Roll World War Two, https://www.nzans.org , 2. Doug Laurenson in Embarkation of the Third Echelon commentary, ID11155 Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, 3. Crossing the Equator Pts 1-5 ID11030 Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, 4. Talk by a Middle East nursing sister, ID 19066 Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision,
5. Eva MacKay in New Zealand Journal of Nursing 15 July 1941, cited in Anna Rogers, While You’re Away: New Zealand nurses at war 1899-1948 (AUP 2003) p223, 6. The New Zealand Listener, 20 Jun 1941 p7.

Ngā reo Māori nō te pakanga – Māori voices from the war

Awatea Maori Choir singing for the Kiwi Request Session at the British Forces Radio Station in Bari, Italy, 1945. Photograph by E.E. Winter. Ref: DA-08473-F. Alexander Turnbull Library. /records/22888595

The choir was made up of men from the 28 (Māori) Battalion. From left to right: J.H. Bowman, Coromandel; B.K. Ormond, Hawkes Bay; F.L. Bunting, Auckland; M.Mason, New Plymouth; J. Taingahoe, Ruatoria; H. Raukawa, Taihape; S. Taniora, North Auckland, J.J. Turei, Whakatane; N. Mate, Whakatane; T. Paora, Waitara. 

The recordings the Mobile Unit made with the men of the 28 (Māori) Battalion are probably the most well-known of all the recordings they made. Between 2010 and 2013, many were transcribed, translated and uploaded to the official Māori Battalion website, created by historian Dr Monty Soutar and Manatū Taonga, New Zealand’s Ministry for Culture and Heritage. Recordings of waiata sung by these men have become part of the rich legacy of this unit.

If you haven’t visited the Battalion website, I highly recommend it. It now features a page for every man who served in the 28 Battalion in World War II and also men of the Māori Contingent and Pioneer Battalion in World War I. It is rich in photographs, diary entries and letters, whānau contributions and archival audio. This website was my introduction to the Mobile Unit recordings. While working for the RNZ Sound Archives in 2012, I was asked to search for any Māori Battalion material that might have been overlooked in earlier searches. I came across this recording made by the Mobile Unit in Egypt in January 1943.

It was described in the existing catalogue as “Christmas in a NZ General Hospital with carol singing by a Māori party.” On listening to the recording, it was found to contain the voices of 14 men from the Māori Battalion who send greetings to whānau in te reo Māori, while others sing “Tapu te Pō – Silent Night”, together with Nurse Wiki Kātene (Ngāti Toa). It is an incredibly culturally rich recording, but one seemed to have been largely overlooked for the 70 years since it was recorded. With Monty’ s help we picked out the names of most of the men and the hapu and iwi to whom they sent greetings. They were men who had been wounded during the fighting of the Alamein campaign in October and November 1942.

Finding this taonga made me wonder what else could be hiding in this collection, and inspired a desire to work with it to enable the voices in it to be more widely known and available for everyone to hear.

Members of 28 (Māori) Battalion with the Broadcasting Unit. On the far right, Arch Curry holds the microphone for an officer – probably Captain Charles Bennett. He is possibly recording this radio talk about the Battalion’s actions in Libya, in January 1942. Photograph taken by Dr C N D’Arcy [Ref: DA-11481-F. Alexander Turnbull Library /records/22826929 ]

Captain Charles Bennett (Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Pikiao), who is seen being recorded in the photo above, eventually became the Māori Battalion’s Commanding Officer. Before the war he had worked for the National Broadcasting Service, providing commentary for some of their early broadcasts of major Māori events and hui. You can hear him at work in 1938 covering the hui at Tūrangawaewae when Princess Te Puea Hērangi was presented with her C.B.E. by the Governor-General. After the war he had an illustrious public service career, was New Zealand’s first Māori High Commissioner (spending several years in Malaysia), and was knighted in 1975.

In November 1944, while recuperating from severe wounds he received from a mine in North Africa, Charles Bennett was interviewed for The Listener magazine and commented on the work of the Broadcasting Service Mobile Unit. The interviewer asked about Bennett’s own work as a broadcaster while overseas, which included some commentary for the BBC and for the New Zealand unit: “When there were Māori broadcasts, I was the compere,” he said, noting that Māori men were recorded “not as often as we would have liked, but most acceptable when it happened. It means a good deal for Māori soldiers to be able to speak to their people. More I think than it does to Pākēha troops.” 1

Portrait of Lt-Col Charles Bennett, D.S.O., The New Zealand Listener, 24 Nov 1944. [Photograph by Spencer Digby]

Bennett observed that Māori soldiers themselves chose the men who would make recordings and speak on behalf of their unit, and this was often done along tribal lines. He explained that the messages home were highly valued by his people, because they were a continuation of Māori oral traditions. “As far back as our traditions go we have been moved by the human voice. We don’t write our thoughts. We utter them. Broadcasting makes our past live again,” he said.2

As well as the men of the Māori Battalion, it is important to note Māori who served elsewhere were also recorded. This recording from 1942 features greetings from several Māori men who were in the Royal Air Force in North Africa, while Tamaio Paiki (Kāti Huirapa, Kāi Tahu) who served with 2 Divisional Signals, recorded this talk about being the first Māori to enter the fortress of Tobruk in 1941.

Messages from Māori men to whānau and friends back home were recorded and broadcast as part of the programme “With the Boys Overseas” (which you can read more about here.) They were also recorded speaking and singing in special programmes such as these concerts recorded in Egypt and Italy. Māori officers were recorded delivering ‘talks’ about the actions their men had been involved in and sending condolences to whānau of the dead and injured. These were often presented in te reo Māori and English, and may have featured in the Sunday night Māori news bulletins presented by Wiremu Parker during the war.

How many Māori were recorded by the Mobile Unit? At this point we simply don’t know, because we don’t even have a total for how many New Zealanders as a whole were recorded on the 1600 discs of the Mobile Unit which survive today. On some discs there may only be one man speaking, on others up to a dozen. On some, there may be more men speaking than are currently listed in written metadata. A full survey of the surviving discs and identifying and counting all the speakers is part of the scope of the work I am doing this year. Uncovering the number of Māori who were recorded, and the hapu and iwi they are from will form part of this research. There may even be recordings of Māori soldiers in overseas sound archives – the image at the top of this page is of a broadcast being made by a Māori choir on British Forces Radio in Italy in 1945 – another avenue of research.

I hope at the end of my work to be able to create lists of men whose voices can be still heard, so that these can be shared with their iwi, hapu and descendants and linked to each man’s entry in databases such as the Māori Battalion website and Auckland War Memorial Museum’s Online Cenotaph

References: 1, 2 “When the Māoris come home again”, The New Zealand Listener, 24 November 1944, p.11.

“With the Boys Overseas”

Flight Sergeant A G Newman, one of the New Zealanders serving with the Royal Air Force in the Cassino area in Italy, records his message to be broadcast in NZ. Archibald Curry, of the NZ Broadcasting Unit, holds the microphone. Photograph taken in Venafro, Italy, on 27 April 1944 by George Robert Bull. DA-05602-F Alexander Turnbull Library /records/23236585 [Listen to his message here]

From late 1940 until the end of the war, the staff of the Mobile Units recorded hundreds of hours of radio broadcast material in the various theatres of war where New Zealanders were fighting.

There were interviews with men and women about their roles in the war or their recent experiences, such as the evacuations from Greece and Crete, or daring expeditions across the North African desert. Or more mundane but vital work such as nursing in a field hospital, operating an army bakery to keep the thousands of New Zealanders in bread and meat pies, or working in the Army Post Office to make sure the all-important mail from home got delivered.

There were also the voice reports by the unit’s commentators, describing military action (often, as it happened) which were sometimes broadcast via the BBC to New Zealand and the world within 24 hours – a new immediacy in international war reporting.

But for the radio listeners back in New Zealand, the Mobile Unit’s most important role, the one for which it became best-known and remembered, was recording thousands of simple 15-20 second “messages home”, from New Zealanders serving in both the 2NZEF and also in the Royal Navy or Air Force. These began to reach the airwaves back home in late 1940, appearing as part of a programme of various recordings received from the Mobile Unit. However, such was the response that in February 1941, a new dedicated programme was created, called “With the Boys Overseas.”

“So great has been the public interest in the messages from the New Zealand Broadcasting Unit in the Middle East, expressed in telephone calls, letters and telegrams after every broadcast”, 1 wrote the New Zealand Listener magazine, announcing that from Sunday 09 February 1941, the new programme would run for an hour from 9.00-10.00am, and would be repeated again the following Tuesday evening. At the beginning of the programme, a New Zealand-based announcer would read out a list of the names of men whose messages were coming up, allowing listeners to contact anyone who would be interested – a feature that the Listener felt, would be “of great help to mothers, sisters and sweethearts listening for personal messages.”

In a pre-internet era when even an international telephone call was impossible, these messages took on a significance for families that is almost unimaginable in our modern, hyper-connected world. “With the Boys Overseas” became appointment listening in many homes and its opening theme music, “Sons of the Anzacs” performed by the Trentham Army Camp Military Band, became one of the best-known New Zealand tunes of the war, after “The Māori Battalion March”. (A Mobile Unit recording of the song is not yet available online, but you can hear a slightly slower tempo, modern rendition here.)

In the photo above and in the one below, you can see the men being recorded are holding a small piece of paper, on which their greeting was written. Everything being recorded for broadcast had to be checked first by the military censor, in case a soldier accidentally revealed useful information that could be used by the enemy – no place names could be mentioned and the men could not talk about recent or upcoming action. It was also expected that their message would be cheery and reassuring – the sort of thing worried parents or wives would want to hear.

New Zealand soldiers on the Cassino Front, Italy, record messages to be broadcast home – Photograph taken by George Bull. Ref: DA-05596-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/22832174

This meant the contents of the messages tend towards the generic. You can hear Flight Sergeant “Pat” Newman’s message home to Timaru, (which he is recording in the image at top of this page), on Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision’s web catalogue. It follows the standard format: “Hello Mum and family, I am fit and well, ” followed by greetings to various friends and family members.

Wartime broadcaster Peter Harcourt who compiled “With the Boys Overseas” in Wellington from the Mobile Unit discs, explained that for New Zealanders at home by their radios, the content of the message was not so important – it was simply hearing that beloved voice. “It is often not what is said that matters, but merely the sound of the voice itself,” he wrote.2

In an interview recorded in later life, commentator Doug Laurenson reflected on his work with the Mobile Unit and the “With the Boys Overseas” messages. He felt there was an “infinite sadness to the long lines of men stretched out in the blazing desert sun, waiting to record their short messages: ‘Are you there love? Keep your chin up – it won’t be long now’, ‘Hello son. Are you being a good boy and looking after Mummy? That’s the chap, keep it up'”3

Occasionally a man might make reference to receiving a parcel from home – or ask for more mail to be sent – and most memorably, Doug recalled a dairy farmer who sent greetings to “Old Blossom” , the pride of his Jersey herd, urging her to “keep milking on all cylinders.” Sadly, that particular message has not survived in the sound archive.

Speakers of te reo would sometimes record their greeting in Māori – and a surprising number of Pākēha use “Kia ora” in their greetings. (It would be interesting to know if this indicates that the Māori greeting was in more widespread usage by New Zealanders in the 1940s, before dying out and then being revived with recent efforts to revitalise te reo since the 1970s. )

A New Zealand sailor on board H.M.S. Leander records a message home for the Mobile Unit’s microphone, with commentator Doug Laurenson [Detail from the cover of The New Zealand Listener, 07 August 1941.]

By 09 May 1941 the Listener headlines read “Boys Overseas radio feature receives huge mail.” Extra members of staff had to be hired by the NBS to cope with the influx: “No single feature ever presented by radio in New Zealand has been the cause of so many letters to the NBS as the Sunday morning programme “With the Boys Overseas”, the article explained. 4

Much of the correspondence was from families who had missed hearing a message from their loved one and wanted it repeated. Or from families who had received mail from their soldier saying he had been recorded, asking when they could expect to hear his message. (In a future post I will explain the delays and logistical nightmare involved in getting the Mobile Unit discs back to New Zealand – and then getting them on air.)

The NBS explained in the May article that repeating an individual’s message, beyond the full repeat programme on Tuesday nights, was impossible in most cases. However, if the soldier’s name was given, then the service would try to notify the family when an upcoming message would be broadcast. The problem of ‘correct names’ and matching them with the men heard in the recordings was already causing headaches, as the article concludes: “There are many thousands of soldiers in the Middle East and many of them have names like Smith or Brown. An inquiry for a message from “John Smith” or “Sergeant D.J. Smith” is almost useless, if the announcer with the unit refers to him [by his nickname] as “Jack Smith.” If inquirers would give the names that their soldier friends would be likely to use, it would save the NBS staff an immense amount of trouble.” 5

In another post I will explain how this very same problem is still causing headaches some 80 years later, as we try to verify the identity of all the “Boys Overseas” on the Mobile Unit discs, so their descendants can find them – and hear their messages home once again.

References: 1: The New Zealand Listener, 07 February 1941 p.7; 2: Downes, Peter and Harcourt, Peter, Voices in the Air (1976, Methuen); 3: Doug Laurenson interview, ID30392, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision; 4, 5: The New Zealand Listener, 09 May 1941 p3

On their way

Members of the first National Broadcasting Service Mobile Recording Unit, in August 1940 (L-R): Norman Johnston, Noel Palmer, Doug Laurenson [Image: The New Zealand Listener, 13 Dec 1940]

The Mobile Units were initiated in February 1940 when the Director of the National Broadcasting Service, Professor James Shelley wrote to the government suggesting it might be a good idea to send broadcasters with the New Zealand Division to boost morale and keep radio listeners at home in touch with what their men were up to on the other side of the world.

This would be the first time New Zealand broadcasters had gone into a conflict zone and working out how to transport heavy, cumbersome recording equipment was a challenge for NBS engineers. This was the era before magnetic tape recording, which did not come into use until after the war. In 1940, sound recording could only be achieved by cutting directly with a lathe or disc cutter, onto large, lacquer discs – something which was hard to do successfully outside a radio studio as it required an absolutely still, steady, level surface.

In the end, the engineering team built a recording van at the Petone Railway Workshops, fitted it out with two disc cutters, microphones, cables, blank discs and various other pieces of equipment. The team also took a “Presto” portable disc recorder, which eventually ended up being their most useful bit of kit.

“Presto” disc recorder advertisement [via Presto History ]

The First Echelon of men of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, (under the command of World War I hero Major-General Bernard Freyberg V.C.) had sailed from New Zealand in January 1940, bound for the Middle East. Shortly before their departure, Freyberg broadcast a farewell speech to New Zealand radio listeners, in which he poignantly recalled his service in World War I and the deaths of his friends and brother. Many young New Zealand men were enthusiastically signing up to fight, but he was under no illusions as to what ‘heading off to war’ meant.

In the next few months, while the Mobile Unit recording van was being built and equipped, the Second Echelon of New Zealanders also departed. The team to staff the Mobile Unit was named: NBS engineer Noel Palmer would be in charge, with young Norman Johnston as his assistant engineer. From Auckland station 1ZB of the National Commercial Broadcasting Service came the unit’s “commentator” Doug Laurenson, who was also a veteran of the previous war, having served with the Royal Flying Corps. (Eventually these three men would be rotated out and replaced by other NBS staff – and a second Mobile Unit would later travel to the war in the Pacific.)

None of the men were radio journalists – or even official war correspondents initially. They were government employees, embedded with the Army Headquarters Public Relations Office. They were not given military rank, but had the status and privileges of officers and wore military uniforms.

They left Wellington on 27 August 1940, onboard a converted Canadian passenger liner, the Empress of Japan. (At this point, Japan had not yet entered the war against Britain and her allies. Once she did in December 1941, the vessel was renamed the Empress of Scotland.) Together with another troopship, the Mauretania it was photographed moored at Wellington’s King’s Wharf (below). In the photograph, rail lines can be clearly seen running along the wharves beside the ships. In some of the first recordings made by the unit, as the ships were being loaded with thousands of men and their supplies, you can clearly hear the unmistakable sounds of steam locomotives, as they pull up alongside the ships.

Troopships Mauretania and Empress of Japan at the King’s Wharf, Wellington, August 1940. Photograph by William Raine. [Ref: 1/1-021750-G Alexander Turnbull Library.]

Commentator Doug Laurenson recorded his commentary describing the embarkation of the Third Echelon from the deck of the Empress. In the background, as well as the steam trains, you can hear the shouting and cheering of the men calling out to their mates and military bands on the wharves below playing jaunty marches. The actuality recorded in this, their first official recording, is a good demonstration of how well a radio microphone and recording equipment can paint a vivid sound picture of a time and place. Listening to archival sound recordings like this one, is to me a form of time travel. It forces the mind to imagine the scene the ears are hearing and in doing so, seems to evoke a more complete image of the past than a photograph or even moving pictures in a film. Archival sound can take you into the past.

RMS Empress of Japan [later renamed Empress of Scotland] as a civilian passenger liner in 1930. As a troop ship, she transported the New Zealand Division’s 3rd Echelon from Wellington to Egypt in August 1940 – including the Mobile Unit. [Image in public domain via Wikimedia Commons}

The embarkation recordings were not heard by New Zealand radio listeners until weeks after the ship sailed, when the discs were able to be sent back to the NBS in Wellington from Egypt. In them, we hear from the three broadcasters themselves who explain their hopes for what they wish to achieve in their work overseas, linking New Zealand listeners with their men on active service. Doug Laurenson signs off on behalf of their fellow passengers, the men of the Third Echelon: “They ask me to tell you to cheer up, to write often and look forward to their return, someday.” And to the strains of “Po atarau – Now is the Hour” , the ship departs, and they’re on their way.

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Becoming mobile

Mobile Unit engineer Noel Palmer inside the recording van at Maadi, Egypt in 1942. Photograph by M.D. Elias [Image: Ref. DA-04274-F Alexander Turnbull Library]

The New Zealand Listener magazine was launched in 1939. It was published by the National Broadcasting Service targetting New Zealand radio listeners. The magazine featured radio programme listings, previewed future programmes, reviewed recent ones and profiled personalities and issues debated on-air.

The magazine carried several features throughout the war about Mobile Unit. The issue of 23 August 1940 contained an article “Radio with our Troops. Travelling Broadcasting Unit now Complete.” This profiled the specifications of the Mobile Unit truck which had recently been tested at Trentham Army Camp and then driven through the streets of Wellington where it “caused considerable interest.. Like all other military vehicles, the unit has been camouflaged with futuristic patches of khaki and green paint. When it arrives at its destination if will be mounted on a Leyland [truck] chassis, a large Army one weighing 3 tons, capable of moving over any country in which the New Zealand forces may be operating.”1.

The article goes on to describe the recording van body and its fittings in glorious detail: “Outwardly the unit resembles a large rectangular caravan, though happily free from all fantastic shape. ..The interior is a marvel of compact arrangement.” Originally, it was envisaged that as well as making recordings, the unit would regularly broadcast news and programmes from New Zealand to the troops overseas from the van, so it was equipped with outside broadcast equipment, amplifiers and loudspeakers. This aspect of its work did not last long and that equipment was soon dispensed with in Egypt.

The Mobile Unit van and trailer, built at the Petone Railway Workshops. [ The New Zealand Listener, 23 August 1940.]

The recording equipment contained in the van consisted of disc cutters, which captured sound by cutting it onto blank lacquer or acetate discs (similar in size to a modern vinyl LP record, but heavier and more rigid, having a core of aluminium.) The cutters look something like a modern turntable and playback arm – two can be seen in the van’s interior image at the top of this page. Cutting into the disc produced a highly flammable fine ribbon of waste lacquer called ‘swarf’ – hence the fire extinguisher in the photo above the disc cutters.

The two cutters sit inside dust covers, which could be zipped up when not in use to protect the equipment from desert conditions. The Listener article continued: “The windows are fly-proof and sand-proof…the roof is insulated…on the outside hooks have been inserted in the walls to hold curtains for a “black-out” when the men are operating at night.”2

  • A Mobile Unit disc, prior to cleaning and preservation by Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision.
    [Image: Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision.]

The desert sand still managed to find its way onto the discs however. When they were first preserved in the early 1990s by the Radio New Zealand Sound Archives, dirt and sand still had to be washed from the grooves.

The recording van and its trailer power-unit were transported to Egypt with the first three Mobile Unit staff on board the Empress of Japan in August 1940. The men arrived in September and the van was finally delivered to them at Maadi Camp outside Cairo in October. However, the Leyland truck chassis which the NBS had ordered from Britain, did not arrive in Egypt until July 1941 – meaning the ‘Mobile’ Unit would have been rather ‘immobile’ for its first few months. Fortunately however, they also brought a “Presto” portable disc recorder with them from New Zealand and when the truck delivery delay became apparent, unit chief Noel Palmer got permission from Wellington to buy a Ford Mercury car in February 1941.

Prime Minister Peter Fraser outside the Mobile Unit recording van in Egypt, May 1941. (Note the van body is on the ground – waiting for the arrival of the truck, but still has its outside broadcast loudspeaker attached to the roof.) [Ref: DA-00818-F Alexander Turnbull Library]

Even after the Leyland did arrive, the Presto-plus-car combination made the unit much more mobile. The 3-ton truck proved too slow in keeping up with the New Zealand Division as it chased Axis forces across the desert, so in the end it was used largely as a base unit for sound editing and recording in Maadi Camp, while a lot of the off-site recording was carried out by a portable Presto, which can be seen in this photograph from 1943. Several more Prestos were eventually purchased.

Mobile Unit staff record greetings from recently liberated New Zealand prisoners of war, shortly after their arrival at 1 New Zealand General Hospital, Helwan, Egypt c. 03 Nov 1943. From left: Charles Goodwyn Lewis (with recording equipment), John William Proudfoot (holding microphone), Sergeant Harry A Taituha, Private C A Petrie. Photograph taken by George Robert Bull [Ref. DA-03223-F Alexander Turnbull Library]

For some missions in North Africa, the Army loaned the unit a light truck and a driver-mechanic, but by the end of the war the Ford Mercury had still racked up 80,000 miles and gone through three engine changes and several gearboxes.3

When peace came, the Mobile Unit found itself in Trieste in northern Italy. The recording van was stripped down and reusable equipment and parts were sent back to New Zealand. while the faithful Mercury was donated to the Army, whose mechanics had done so much work keeping it running.

Ford Mercury advertisement, [Northern Advocate, 1 November 1946 via Papers Past]

References: 1, 2: The New Zealand Listener, 23 August 1940 p.13; 3: Hall, John Herbert, The History of Broadcasting in New Zealand 1920-1954, (BCNZ, 1980) p.133.