Museums, Models, Memories
Band of Brothers, Steven Spielberg’s epic television series about a group of American paratroopers fighting in Europe in World War Two, is currently being replayed on television as a forerunner to a new war series, The Pacific, which promises to be an equally realistic portrayal of soldiers in combat. For New Zealanders at the time, the focus of the war was in Europe and North Africa, not the Pacific. After all, that’s where nearly all of our troops had been sent to fight – including Greece, Crete and, later, Italy. However the success of the Japanese army and naval forces across the Pacific during the first half of 1942 shook us out of any sense of isolation, and was reinforced by the arrival of thousands of American servicemen who were stationed between Palmerston North and Wellington – all of them destined to fight in the Pacific. (This was also the subject of an excellent exhibition at Pataka Museum of Arts & Culture a few years back).
The New Zealand government quickly accepted that we should make a major contribution to assisting the war effort alongside the allies. Today New Zealanders are becoming better acquainted with our role in the Pacific War. Academic research has recently been followed up by a number of books dealing with the experiences of our soldiers, sailors and airmen there.
Acknowledging this growing interest, Te Manawa later this month will host the exhibition War in Paradise: The Unofficial Story of New Zealanders in New Caledonia which has been developed by the Museum of Wellington. Few people realise that during the Pacific War, more than 20,000 New Zealand troops were stationed in New Caledonia as part of the wider Pacific campaign.
As a boy, visiting Auckland War Memorial Museum in the 1970s was always about going straight to the displays of war objects – the endlessly long hallway, on one side full of glass cases containing weapons from medieval times through to the 1940s. On the other side were located artillery pieces and heavy machine guns. For me it brought to life those objects I could only see in books, even though I couldn’t touch them. I was usually pretty eager to get to see these displays every year, and can’t really remember too much of anything else that was in the museum [I did regularly climb over the large naval guns that were – and I think still are – located outside the main doors of the museum].
There were also a number of other interesting things on display. For a long time I remember seeing on display a large model of Nissan, a big atoll located northeast of Papua New Guinea. New Zealand soldiers had landed there and recaptured Nissan from the Japanese, and some army engineers had been ordered to build a scale model of the atoll, which later was used as an air base for bombing Japanese positions. One of the two model makers was Maurice Parsons, an army engineer with the 37th Field Park Company, who also happened to come from Palmerston North. It seems that Maurice was a keen swimmer and member of the surf lifesaving club at Foxton Beach. By trade he was a builder. After the war Maurice returned to New Zealand with his 3rd Division mates and settled back into a quiet life in Palmerston North. In 1999 he donated his collection of photographs to Te Manawa. Among them were a couple of photos of himself at work on the Nissan Island model - the same model that found its way into the collection of the Auckland War Memorial Museum. As it turns out Maurice, like me, was a keen model maker.
I’m not sure if that model is still on display at Auckland Museum – if it isn’t, I hope it will be again someday.
Tony Rasmussen
War in Paradise: The Unofficial Story of New Zealanders in New Caledonia runs at Te Manawa from February 13 to 9 May.
Image Caption: Maurice Parsons, right, working on the Nissan model. Te Manawa collection 98/127/72
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