“New Zealand was really scraping the bottom of the barrel for able-bodied men to replace those often battled or wounded,” Husband said.
The Napier man had just turned 18 when the government introduced conscription. Three months into his carpenter apprenticeship, he was put into the army, serving for the next four years.
“It was like they had turned the country into a military state.”
When asked how he felt being conscripted in the middle of a world war, he said, “We had no option. It didn’t matter how we felt.”
Husband was an only child, and his mother was “badly cut up” when the government brought in the conscription decree.
At the time, 18-year-olds who were conscripted into the army had to have parental consent to serve overseas, in the Army, Navy or Air Force.
Tom Husband was conscripted into the New Zealand Army at age 18 during WWII.
“My father had been overseas in the First World War and wasn’t very impressed with it, so there was no way he would consent for me to go over.”
At 21, Husband finally went overseas to fight in the war and was in the middle of the Indian Ocean when V-E-Day took place, and the war in Europe ended.
Hearing the war had ended “We all thought the boat would turn around and we could go home, but it didn’t.”
The boat took the more than 3000 men to the entrance of the Suez Canal, where they touched dry land for the first time in months.
A fleet of army trucks was waiting to take soldiers to the base camp set up in Egypt. Husband said it had rained the whole way to camp.
“We all thought it didn’t rain in the desert, but it did the whole way to camp, and then it didn’t rain the rest of the time we were in Egypt.”
100-year-old Tom Husband speaks about his experience during WWII and being a part of the first occupation force in Japan. Photo / Warren Buckland
From Egypt, the troops went to Italy, and when all was said and done in Italy, Husband and his fellow soldiers thought they would now get to go home. However, that was not the case.
With no sign of peace in the Pacific, Husband, along with 3500 troops, was sent to Japan as an occupation force known as J Force.
He was a part of the first group of New Zealanders, Australians and Americans to touch down in Japan as an occupation force.
Husband said the trip from Italy to Japan was terrible, and due to port quarantines at that time, the men didn’t get off the ship during the six weeks of travel.
“Everybody like myself had already been in the army for years, so we weren’t very impressed.”
Eventually making it to Japan, the ship landed in Kure Port, an old Japanese naval shipyard located north of the Geiyo Islands at the east entrance of Hiroshima Bay near the centre of the Seto Inland Sea.
After what felt like endless months of occupying Japan, Husband and the rest of the soldiers got word that New Zealand was sending replacement soldiers, and they would get to come home.
Tom Husband's War Medal 1939-1945 and New Zealand War Service Medal given to him for his service during WWII. Photo / Warren Buckland
The replacements came in two parts. He said the first group replaced those who had been overseas the longest. Finally, he was given a date to come home and had a day of leave to see another part of Japan before going home.
They had the option of visiting Tokyo, Hiroshima, Fuji, and another place he could not recall the name of.
He settled on visiting Hiroshima.
“I was just amazed at the damage.
“When in Hiroshima, we were standing in a basin surrounded by levels, and you could see how everything the bomb touched had died and there was hardly anything left standing,” he said.
Husband remembers the people who survived the bombing being riddled with radiation and the sides of their bodies that had faced the blast had caused the skin on their legs to their arms and faces to have “bubbled and burned”.
All the houses in the area affected by the explosion were crumpled, as the heat was so great that the reinforcing steel rods inside the concrete buildings had melted.
“It absolutely burned the ground off, so there was nothing left,” and just above the surviving scrub, he could see the opening of a man-made mine.
He added, “I don’t remember what they were mining, but that mine is where they were keeping prisoners of war.
“I could see the nuclear blast had stopped burning just before the mine entrance. You could see where the mine was and that all those prisoners of war and the guards in the mine hadn’t been touched by the radiation.”
Husband said he remembered thinking if this was the smaller bomb, then he couldn’t imagine the damage done to Nagasaki when the second atomic bomb was dropped.
After spending his final day in Japan seeing the devastation of Hiroshima, he was finally on his way back home.
Landing in Wellington, the soldiers left the ship and were placed on a train that would see them all home.
All the way up, the North Island soldiers would get off at various stops making their way home.
When reaching his Hawke’s Bay stop he was stopped by a man giving soldiers their final passes and pay. The man told Tom the army was looking for permanent recruits and offered him a spot if he wanted it.
He said no, “It’s already been four years and so many days, far too long for me.”
The boy, returning a man to a country completely changed, made his way to his parents’ little home near Napier port, where he was reunited with his mother and father, who couldn’t have been happier to see him.
Maddisyn Jeffares became the editor of the Hawke’s Bay community papers Hastings Leader and Napier Courier in 2023 after writing at the Hastings Leader for almost a year. She has been a reporter with NZME for almost three years and has a strong focus on what’s going on in communities, good and bad, big and small. Email news tips to her at: maddisyn.jeffares@nzme.co.nz.
