Newspaper Feature

Several groups of New Zealanders went into Libya, on long-range desert patrols: some went as drivers for the Australians, and took their rifles along with them. But the men of the main body, in their comfortable Cairo camp, just drilled and bit their nails. Even Greece and Crete were shared with the Australians. Syria was a complete miss.

Now, in the second battle of Libya, it is the New Zealanders’ turn, the turn of the conscript-volunteers, the men with the boy scout hats, the wild-eyed Maoris, the cow-spankers, and the earnest youths who think in terms of Ruby Union.

The British coastal force in Libya is the best that little New Zealand will ever be able to send across the world. It contains most of the Dominion’s fit single men; the rest are preparing to join them. New Zealand, within a month or two, will be calling up her married men. She has a lot depending on Libya.

EIGHTY thousand men from a population of less than million and three-quarters, are on active service overseas, or in training to go overseas. Many of them are on garrison duty in Fiji and other outposts. But most of them are with Freyberg in the Middle East. People ask: What type of  man is this New Zealand soldier?

Berlin Radio not so long ago described him as ‘a poor country lad, innocently come across the seas to die bleeding on some desert rock’ – bucolic, non-political, easily led.

Others have found him indistinguishable from the Australian – toughened, independent, happy-go-lucky, hard-swearing, formidable.

There may be a smattering of truth in each. The New Zealanders are country lads, many of them, but poor in no sense of the word. They are bucolic – if it is bucolic to stand in Sydney’s streets and gaze at tall buildings.

They are easily led, not politically, but in battle. They are tough enough by any standards, and they are formidable in war. Ask any Digger!

Three men of the Expeditionary Force won the Victoria Cross in Greece and Crete, in extraordinary feats of sustained courage and enterprise. In two campaigns the troops’ award list has almost caught up on that of the Royal New Zealand Air Force – and that is saying something. One hundred and fifty-three New Zealand airmen have been decorated, 100 with Distinguished Flying Crosses, one with the V.C. ‘Cobber’ Kain’s spirit burns bright among the men who have followed him.

New Zealand, up to this Libyan advance, has won more V.C.’s than any other Dominion. Award figures don’t mean much, but they can at least give the lie to Nazi sneers.

The New Zealand soldiers are reserved, serious, often dour. They are non-demonstrative. They would blush and boorishly turn aside if women rushed them while they marched, as sometimes happens to the Diggers in Australian cities. But in spite of their earnestness they know how to enjoy the military life.  They have their own ideas about exaggerated forms of discipline. The first New Zealand contingent was marched from Fremantle to Perth, in summer heat, after a long voyage without exercise – as a disciplinary measure. Its first ‘casualties’ were on  Australian soil.

The New Zealand troops are intensely individualistic. Private enterprise is at a discount in New Zealand these days, but not in the New Zealand army. The men are trained to use their initiative, to rely on themselves first and last.

They are officered, as far as is practicable, by men and youths who have shown their worth. Most officers are selected in the Middle East. General Freyberg cabled out early in the war that he did not want any half-baked subalterns chosen in home training camps, from the leading social groups and schools.

Pride of the New Zealand Army at the moment is a brand-new armoured brigade, which may be in action overseas in the next New Zealand adventure. Tanks from America, plus the pick of army personnel, will make the formation a force to be reckoned with.

The New Zealanders’ service conditions are good. They are the highest-paid troops in the world. Privates get 7/- a day with liberal  allowances for wives and children.

A military financial assistance board, in cases of hardship, helps soldiers to meet their interest, rent, rates and insurance charges. Grants of up to £156 a year may be made to individuals.

The New Zealand service uniform, an adaptation of the British battledress, is acknowledged generally by Australian troops to be superior to theirs. Its cloth is soft and wearable, its pockets generous and its appearance smart and businesslike.

New Zealand returned soldiers do not complain that the young men have departed from the Great War dress. They applaud the improvements, happy that the Anzac link is retained with the peaked felt hat.

New Zealand has done so well in the manufacture of uniforms that it will send Britain this year 100,000 suits of British battledress.

And the boots also are good. The Minister of Defence, homely Mr Jones, used to be a boot clicker. Nothing shoddy gets past him. Nothing shoddy gets past, either, in camp facilities and equipment. New Zealand training camps are, if anything, over-comfortable. The troops are subjected to little hardship until they go overseas.

‘Compared with the Australian recruit,’ one soldier wrote, ‘we New Zealanders live in the lap of luxury. When I went into camp at  Waiouru training camp, after an experience in Australia, I thought I was in a first-class tourist hotel.’ Take that with a grain of salt; but it is broadly true.

People who criticise the Labor Government’s lavish expenditure on military ‘non-essentials’ don’t get much of a hearing. ‘Snivelling snufflebusters,’ the Minister for National Service (Mr Semple) calls them.

Mr Semple is an original. During the last war he was in gaol for some of his opinions. In this war he is the Labor Cabinet’s principal energiser. And it is largely due to his foresight and drive that the military camps are healthful, paved townships instead of meningitis breeding grounds.

Mr Semple spent millions on importing American mechanical builders – outsize bulldozers, angledozers and shovels – which Labor used to hack roads through mountains and straighten main highways. These, when war came, transformed rough paddocks into mobilisation camps at half the expected cost and in one tenth the expected time.

The bulldozers, or many of them, are now overseas. New Zealand was able to supply machines for military construction which Britain at the time could get from no other country. 

Many of the New Zealanders now in Libya come from schools and colleges where, beneath draped battle flags and portraits of generals, masters vehemently preached Empire and low tackling. Others come from mixed farms where sheep run fat in grass to their bellies, and others from half a hundred Government departments.

Others, still, come from the pah, the Maori village.

These men have added cheerfulness to the New Zealand army. They have also given the New Zealanders – known in the last war as the Silent Division because they seldom sang – their most stirring marching song – a vigorous, lilting hotch potch of bravado and sentimentality, in two languages.

More than 50 per cent of Maoris of military age have enlisted with the Expeditionary Force. Many Maori communities have one in 10 of their population away with the forces.

Natives of Samoa and the Cook Islands have long been petitioning for permission to join them. The Maori peoples have always liked a fight that they can understand. Brown men v brown shirts. The bayonet and the haka v the tommy-gun and the stuka.

There is yet no conscription of Maoris. New Zealand has confined  its conscription to white men.

It was a bold move, this conscription – applied as it was by a Government which had sworn black and blue that it would never conscript, applied without Empire precedent outside Britain. But it has proved acceptable.

New Zealanders are an orderly people, and they can see this point of view: (a) that conscription enables the military authorities to plan ahead, and (b) that it imposes equality of service and sacrifice.

What it does to Labor principles does not seem to matter at the moment: that problem may arise after the war. ‘Our mandate,’ said the Prime Minister in May, 1940, ‘is the necessity of the occasion.’ There appeared to be no answer to that one.

New Zealand men now go to war to join the volunteers and conscripts now in Libya, without the urgings of recruiting booths and street processions. The ballyhoo, which under the former system seemed inescapable, has gone out with the white feathers.

Every man knows that his turn will come when the ballot marbles spin his number up. He knows, approximately, when it will come. General Freyberg wanted conscription, and so did most of the 60,000 volunteers. They welcome the conscript now, as one of themselves. There is no distinction. They are well mixed up.

The Expeditionary Force is not the Dominion’s only army. Fit men who are temporarily or permanently ineligible to go overseas are obliged to serve in the New Zealand Territorial Force (corresponding with our Militia). This force is now partly mobilised in cadres.

Home service conscription takes youths from 18 to 20 and unmarried men from 40 to 45. Volunteers are accepted from all male groups. Youths reaching 21 automatically go on to the overseas register.

Other men find opportunity for service in New Zealand’s Home Guard, a citizen army of 100,000 now under direct military control. Most of the Home Guardsmen are fathers and uncles of the men in Libya. Many of them fought at Gallipoli, Messines and Passchendaele.

While the New Zealanders are in action again, there are some politicians at home who insist that New Zealand has dangerously over-committed her manpower.

She has the highest soldier-to-civilian ratio of any country outside the Axis. She has sent overseas half the number of troops that Canada has sent, from a population one-eighth of Canada’s.

‘Yet,’ say these critics, ‘Canada is not menaced in the Pacific as are Australia and New Zealand. Too many men abroad and not enough at home. Let us do our share, but only our share.’

Every New Zealander will be hoping that this month’s casualty figures will not lend this argument weight.

The full column is available at: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/245351797?searchTerm=Douglas%20brass,. 

New Zealand casualties totalled 4620: 671 killed, 208 died of wounds, 1699 wounded and 2042 prisoners of war. These losses were higher than any other Eighth Army division in the campaign (Peter Cox, Desert War: The Battle of Sidi Rezegh, Exisle Publishing, Auckland, 2015.)