A world awaiting peace

Bob Hughes

Opinion

I was born in September 1932 during the Great Depression and was an infant when Hitler, leader of the Nazi party, became the chancellor of Germany in 1933.

Woodville was our home. Our Mum read us bedtime horror stories like Hansel and Gretel. I saw cowboy and Indian movies at the cinema (to learn that the only good Indians were dead ones). We played cowboy and Indian games with homemade bows and arrows, and scalped white men.

In 1937 when I started school I noticed the few Māori kids were treated differently. I was too young to realise Māori were being disallowed their language or to follow their traditions.

World War 2 began in 1939. PM Michael Joseph Savage said on the wireless, “Where Britain goes, we go.” Then killing German Nazis in style became our new game.

Our family visited Wellington for the 1940 Treaty of Waitangi Centennial Exhibition. To pay my way, I withdrew my hard-earned 6s/8p out of the bank.

Shortly afterwards, we shifted to Palmerston North so Dad could upgrade his railway linesman skills and become a higher-paid signalman.

At the end of the following year, December 1941, Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbour in Hawaii, bringing America into the war.

Our war games altered. We now had evil “Yellow Peril” Japanese to kill.

In April 1942 Dad was transferred to Gisborne for the completion of the Napier to Gisborne rail link and we settled here.

Dad joined the home guard as a signals operator, while I watched construction of the massive beachfront defence bunkers to fight the Japanese if they reached our shores.

By then I had learned most people did not mind too many others being slaughtered left, right and centre as long as they were the other guys and not us.

I think I had learned about human cruelty and injustice from those cowboy and Indian flicks, and pre-war movies like Les Misérables of 1935.

Dad took me to Charlie Chaplain’s The Great Dictator, satirising Hitler and Nazism, in 1941.

Germany surrendered in May 1945 and World War 2 ended soon after America dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945. The pictures of charcoaled Nagasaki and Hiroshima victims and shadowy images of vanished bodies as appeared in The Gisborne Herald still haunt me.

During my youth in Gisborne, I always had an after-school job — delivery boy, pushing hand mowers, selling and distributing newspapers, etc.

It was a few years after the end of WW2 that the futility of war impacted me more. Being a delivery boy with a listening ear, some of the traumatised returned soldiers spilt out their guilt — survivor guilt, needless killing of combatants, etc.

I had various jobs after leaving school in 1947, then early in 1950 I became a forestry trainee.

In September 1950 I turned 18 and signed up for my 14 weeks of intensive, full-time training and three years of part-time training under the Military Training Act.

Communism was a threat to the free world. The House Un-American Activities Committee viciously turned on likely communist suspects, who were not given a chance to clear their names and could be blacklisted and find themselves without friends or jobs.

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies had begun. This included the Korean War and a newfound enemy, Communist China.

At the world affairs lecture during my military training the yellow-faced villains were now Chinese Communists preparing to invade our country. During field training, and on the rifle range, we practised killing them. And me still a teenage lad.

My favourite author HG Wells once wrote: “If we don’t end war, war will end us.”