The re-enactment of a World War II dogfight above Auckland. Peter Best recalls a teacher telling students how she watched dogfights over British skies. Photo / Natalie Slade
“We haven’t learned a thing from history,” says Peter Best. But he believes we need to.
The Eketāhuna resident was 3 and living in England when World War II began.
“It was a horrendous war,” he says.
Although he has no memories of the Blitz, when the skies over Britain were filled with German aircraft for months, his teacher would tell the children stories of sitting in the garden watching the dogfights.
He grew up in the village of Sheet, near Petersfield in Hampshire.
While he recalls the excitement, he remembers his mother making him get under a table with his brother David and sister Janet, after an air-raid siren went off. They would look out from under and see her.
“Her face would be white with fear.”
These days, he will sometimes hear the fire siren go off and it will spark a memory of those days.
The children accepted the situation, for the most part.
“Children are very resilient.”
However, he can recall some of his fellow pupils being made to wear gas masks during a drill at school.
“They were horrible things. It scared us at the thought of putting them on.”
The headmistress seemed to take pity on the young children, telling them they didn’t have to wear them.
Peter remembers seeing the young men walking by their gate, going off to enlist.
At first, his father wasn’t one of them, but it soon became his turn and he went off to join the Royal Air Force.
He spent three years working as a clerk at various bases in England before being shipped overseas to stations in India and Burma.
When he finally returned home, for Peter, it was like welcoming a stranger into his home. He didn’t recognise his own father.
Other families weren’t so fortunate.
The children would see a boy on a bicycle riding in the village carrying telegrams and they knew a family had lost someone.
The village was not so isolated that they were untouched by the war — many children lost their fathers.
Men in trucks would occasionally come by and grab anything that was metal, all which presumably would be melted down — fences and gates and even toys were taken.
Peter had a tricycle he says was his favourite toy, even though the front wheel was broken, and he was upset when the men threw that in the back of their truck.
He was 7 on June 6, 1944, the day the allied forces invaded Normandy — known as D-Day.
Even in the village, they witnessed the build-up to the planned invasion.
Troops from the United States and Canada would camp in the village, playing with the local children and giving them treats.
Peter recalls his brother told him a story of encountering a Canadian soldier in a Jeep when a convoy stopped near the house.
An ambulance drove by going the opposite direction and the soldier said: “I’ll be lucky if I make it back in one of those.”
As a young teenager, Peter would join as a cadet in secondary school — a reaction, he believes, to the idea that Britain wasn’t prepared to go to war in 1939.
“Britain was never going to be unprepared again.”
He would later use that same training when he moved to New Zealand, for compulsory military training.
Having seen what is happening today, Peter believes the world has learned nothing from the events of World War II.
However, he says what is happening in Gaza is nothing compared with what Hitler did, especially when ordering his forces to target civilians.
He recalls munitions factories being built near slums, which would then become targets.
Are we in a world war again? He believes if we aren’t already, especially in regards to the war between Russia and Ukraine, we may soon be.
Leanne Warr has been editor of the Bush Telegraph since May 2023 and a journalist since 1996. She rejoined NZME in June 2021.
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