From witnessing the horror of Hiroshima to helping a shattered nation get back on its feet, the members of J Force experienced plenty. As Anzac Day looms, Shane Gilchrist explores an overlooked chapter in New Zealand's military history with author Alison Parr.
A few years shy of seven decades ago, towns and cities throughout New Zealand bore witness to dancing in the streets.
The occasion? VJ (Victory over Japan) Day. World War 2 was over.
It was an entirely different mood in Japan on August 15, 1945, when Emperor Hirohito, by radio, urged his compatriots to "endure the unendurable" in announcing his country's surrender, an inevitable move following the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9) by the United States.
During the next seven years, 300,000 Americans, augmented by 40,000 members of the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces, occupied Japan. Among them were 12,000 New Zealanders, who became known as J Force.
The first Kiwis to arrive in Japan in early 1946 comprised two small advance parties of troops from the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force (2NZEF).
They were followed in February by a 4239-strong contingent of soldiers, some of whom had seen action in the latter stages of the Italian campaign and would prefer to have been heading for ports in Auckland or Lyttelton.
Instead, they arrived in the bombed-out port of Kure, in the south of Japan, where they found a country broken: Japan lost 2.7 million civilians and servicemen in the conflict; millions more were injured and nine million were made homeless as a result of Allied bombing of 66 major cities (more than half the houses in Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka were destroyed).
Alison Parr, author of The Occupiers: New Zealand veterans remember post-war Japan, believes the story of J Force is an important one.
"Like many New Zealanders, I knew almost nothing about the New Zealanders' story within the occupation of Japan," she says by phone from her Wellington home earlier this week.
Dunedin born and bred, Parr attended Bayfield High School then the University of Otago.
On graduating, she began working in television and radio, before leaving for Wellington in the late 1970s.
Senior oral historian at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, Parr has been master of ceremonies for the Anzac Day dawn service at Gallipoli and the unveiling of the New Zealand Memorial in London.
She also accompanied the team that brought New Zealand's Unknown Warrior home from France in November 2004.
The Occupiers is a continuation of the Ministry for Culture and Heritage's series of histories related to World War 2, including printed and digital publications as well as oral histories.
Since 2000, the ministry has recorded more than 150 interviews with veterans of the major World War 2 campaigns in which New Zealand forces were involved.
"We worked our way through Greece and Crete, Italy, North Africa, the Pacific, merchant sailors ...
I also worked on a book about New Zealanders who had served with the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy around the time of D-Day.
Then a few years ago we decided to do Home: Civilian New Zealanders Remember the Second World War, because that was where most New Zealanders spent the war."
Parr describes The Occupiers as a logical conclusion to the ministry's series. "We felt we needed to do it.
About 12,000 New Zealanders served in Japan and not many people know that.
"There is some sadness with this project, because this is the end of me interviewing that generation.
"It has been really rich and interesting having this opportunity to talk with a real cross-section of New Zealanders about a time that is now well gone. I look at this as social history."
Parr and her team of researchers took more than two years to complete the project.
Typical to the series, they devised a questionnaire related to the J Force campaign, then contacted service groups to help locate veterans.
"We usually have about 100-150 completed questionnaires related to each project.
"From those we select what we hope is a representative cross-section of veterans to be interviewed. From there we make the book.
"I've been working with Second World War veterans for well over a decade now.
"My feeling is if you ask [for their recollections] in a way that is open, most of the men and women will talk to the right person.
"As the generation has seen their mates dying, they have become aware that if they don't tell some of the experiences they've been through, then they will be lost.
"It's kind of a duty to posterity - though that sounds a bit grand given the humility of that generation - but they know that if they don't tell the next generation then they will know nothing."
In contrast to those New Zealand troops drafted from Italy to Japan, the idea of service in Japan was more popular among those back home.
By March 1946, more than 9000 Kiwis had volunteered; these included ex-servicemen struggling to return to civilian life and others who thought they had missed out on wartime service and spied an opportunity for overseas adventure.
Four relief drafts left New Zealand for Japan between May 1946 and August 1947.
The Royal New Zealand Air Force received an overwhelming response in its call for volunteers to join the British Commonwealth Occupying Force (BCOF), with a re-formed No 14 Squadron, which had served in the Pacific in World War 2, attracting more than 1500 applications (for 24 flying positions and 250 ground staff roles).
Women, too, were among the volunteers. Members of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps were joined by fully-trained nurses and Red Cross staff.
"The men and women who had served in Italy couldn't wait to get home (those in the Italian drafts returned in two stages, the first leaving Japan in mid-1946, after the arrival of their New Zealand volunteer replacements).
"The conscripted soldiers couldn't wait to get out of the place, but those who came later did have a much easier life over there; they had much better living conditions and better food.
"They also had more freedom and were able to see a bit of Japan. The earlier ones didn't have that adventure," Parr says.
The recollections of those interviewed for The Occupiers are fascinating for a number of reasons, not least because of the stark differences in attitudes towards the Japanese.
"I was very keen to include perceptions of the Japanese before we went there as well as afterwards.
"Hatred wasn't too strong a word for how New Zealanders felt about the Japanese at the time.
"They had heard all about atrocities and the treatment of prisoners.
"At the time there was also a very real fear of invasion for at least two years after Pearl Harbour.
"People lived with this weight on their shoulders."
(Following the Imperial Japanese Navy's attack on Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, New Zealanders had prepared for a Japanese invasion - in towns and cities across the nation, Kiwis dug trenches, practised drills and made emergency plans.)
"There was this perception of what they were going to meet when they got to Japan.
"Then they worked alongside the Japanese, formed personal relationships with interpreters and others, including housegirls, who did their dirty washing, literally.
"They formed friendships with them," Parr said.
"To me, the most interesting thing to come out of the project was the change in attitude.
"I don't think they came back to New Zealand and suddenly everything was fabulous between the two peoples, but I do know those face-to-face encounters broke down stereotypes."
Significant also to altering perceptions was the aftermath of war in Japan.
Although J Force was stationed in Yamaguchi prefecture, in the south of Honshu, largely away from the industrial targets that had been strategically bombed, most of the area's inhabitants were living in a state of subsistence.
To get to Yamaguchi prefecture, many in J Force travelled by train through Hiroshima. Among them was the late Te Mata Poet Laureate Hone Tuwhare.
In the first relief draft from New Zealand, Tuwhare passed through Hiroshima and what he saw left him strongly opposed to nuclear weapons (one of his best known poems,"No Ordinary Sun", deals with the subject).
New Zealand intelligence officer Rod Miller offers a chilling description: "The thing I remember most about it - I wish I couldn't - was the sight of the people ... kids with no hands, just keloid scars, just lumps of reddish kind of claws and no faces, wandering around."
According to Parr's research, including questionnaires and first-hand interviews, none of the New Zealanders who visited Hiroshima worried about the potential health dangers from radiation fallout.
In a 2010 email to Parr, Dr Bernard Barry, specialist in radiation measurement and safety education at GNS Science, Wellington, stated: "The major dose of radiation [in Hiroshima and Nagasaki] came from the first flash of the bombs at altitude, with low doses from contamination on the ground occurring in the days immediately afterwards."
However, in 2007, Veterans' Affairs New Zealand introduced presumptive lists of disorders that allow for automatic acceptance of certain disabilities for a war disablement pensions for veterans of some theatres.
J Force veterans are included for disabilities presumed attributable to nuclear radiation.
Last year, there were 29 J Force veterans receiving such pensions for conditions, mostly cancers, presumed attributable to exposure to nuclear radiation.
Parr says though she was well aware of what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she knew less about other devastation in Japan.
For instance, the sustained firebombing of Tokyo, included a raid on March 9-10, 1945, that killed more than 100,000 residents, the single deadliest air attack of World War 2.
"There is a photo of Tokyo after the fire-bombing ... I think because the two atomic bombs were so devastating, the appalling devastation of other parts of Japan haven't been fully acknowledged."
While adjusting to unfamiliar customs and living amid challenging conditions, J Force members were engaged in a range of duties, from rebuilding infrastructure, patrolling for weapons caches, enforcing curfews to helping with the repatriation of Korean and other civilians held as forced labour; they also oversaw elections in which Japanese women were able to vote for the first time.
The Occupiers reveals there were mixed feelings when it came time to leave.
The last to finish service in J Force returned to New Zealand in late 1948 (though the Allied occupation officially ended in 1952).
For some, it meant the end of romantic relationships - including between New Zealanders and Japanese.
Likewise, the romance of adventure in a foreign country, a key motivation for many New Zealand-based volunteers, had drawn to a close.
And when they did arrive back home, many of those who served in J Force were hurt by a lack of recognition for their efforts.
It was only in 1995 that the New Zealand Defence Force officially recognised their contribution, with the issuing of the New Zealand Service Medal 1946-1949 for service in Japan to more than 4700 veterans or their families.
William Kinnaird, who returned to Dunedin to do a carpentry course, found he was either ignored or belittled by ex-servicemen who had seen action during World War 2.
"When they found out that there was another guy and myself, we were both J Force, they wouldn't have anything to do with us.
"As far as they were concerned, we hadn't been in the war."
His experience wasn't rare.
The then Returned Servicemen's Association also didn't recognise service in J Force as an entitlement for membership, on the grounds Japan was not a war zone.
