John Roughan: War was their defining experience

Very few are left now who remember what it was like. Photo / Greg Bowker

An old soldier wrote to me last week. He is nearly 88 years old, which you would have to be these days to have had a call-up.

Not many men get to 88. Ever more rapidly, like the last sand in an hour glass, World War II is sliding from living experience into history.

The handwritten letter on my desk is probably the last of its kind I will receive. The writer signs himself Cedric Watt B.Ed., Dip. Tchg. RNZMC., 2NZEF. He was a teacher for many more years of his life than he spent in the army medical corps near the end of the war.

But the war was his defining experience. When he writes about it all these years later, his words still carry the raw sentiments of the time. This is lived history, not the corrected version that will be left when the last old soldier has gone.

He writes: "I feel rather passionate about the sacrifices of Allied servicemen that preserved freedom. I wonder how many people today realise what lay in store had the Axis won.

"We did not know about the Holocaust until after the Nazis had been vanquished. We did know about the Japs. The Japanese murdered at least 15 million Chinese in the 1930s and two divisions of these mini-monsters were detailed to invade New Zealand.

"There were Jap subs in the Indian Ocean but the [troop ship] did about 30 knots, we were told. The navy boys in the cruiser and two destroyers that escorted us must have had a rough time in the high seas but it did not worry our liner much.

"When we arrived in Maadi [near Cairo] we immediately started training for the Burma jungle but were not looking forward to it.

"The Japs had already murdered everybody in a British field hospital."

Atomic bombs ended the fighting a few months later but the repercussions lingered. Mr Watt continues: "The casualties of war are not just those killed. Injured men had to struggle through life, many in constant pain. Widows and fatherless children had to make do on very little.

"Men returned to find their juniors now their seniors. 'Dear John' letters were common - I had one myself.

"A cousin lost his wife to an American soldier. He later died in Tunisia, in a suicidal attack that eliminated a Jerry machine gun post. He had written to my mother that he felt he had little to live for.

"My wife's cousin was on medication all his life after strangling a Jap, naked and greased, who had cut his way into their tent. The Jap had dealt to all the others.

"A chap my wife knew, a returned POW, topped himself in the basement. He couldn't stand the nightmares.

"Her first fiance, another returned POW, died from TB contracted in a German POW camp. Maybe I got her on the rebound but we had a happy 50 years.

"Some annoy me by saying, 'You had to go, you were called up.' Yes, but the medical had to grade you fit. There were no sophisticated eye or hearing tests. If you'd said, 'can't hear you, Doc' or failed to read the vision chart you would not be graded 'one'. . I knew a few who had deliberately failed their tests.

"So," he told me, "You have a job to do - don't let us forget."

Those of us born in the post-war boom became a bit impatient with returned servicemen. They wouldn't get over an ordeal that most of them found unspeakable. We were disgusted that they clung to a wartime view of the Japanese.

The war had taken a fraction of their lives when they were young. They returned to jobs, built houses and raised families in social security. They bought cars, boats, a fibrolite bach, followed rugby in winter and took their families to the beach in summer.

They enjoyed television, elected Muldoon, paid high tax rates, looked forward to universal superannuation and became Grey Power.

Yet the older they got, the more the war seemed to mean to them. They went more often to the RSA, organised reunions, revisited the battlefields and wept at the graves.

When their own death loomed, they arranged a military funeral with a flag on the coffin and The Last Post. They are buried in rows of identical plaques that give just their name and unit.

For a few vivid years of their lives, they were part of something bigger than we can imagine. It must have been monstrous, frightening, exciting, tragic and magnificent. Total war for a reason unequivocally right.

Nothing in our life compares with it; the best we can do is remember them.