Veteran recalls being called up
WWII experiences included visit to bombed Japan
“The war started for me the day that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.” It changed everything for Napier’s Tom Husband, 100, when Pearl Harbour was attacked on December 7, 1941.
“When they bombed Pearl Harbour, it changed the whole direction of the war,” he said.
After Pearl Harbor, the war in the Pacific included Japan taking occupation of half of New Guinea and bombing Darwin 64 times.
Due to a lack of men enlisting in the New Zealand forces, the government at the time introduced conscription for those 18 and older.
The Napier man had just turned 18. 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.
“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 D-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.”
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.
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.
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.
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 went from the ship and were placed on a train that would see them all 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.”
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