“The Germans whom we have come in contact with so far have treated us fairly well and are a contradiction of what we formerly believed when I was taken prisoner with the 21st Battalion Doctor, having volunteered to stay and look after the prisoners who were wounded,” he wrote.
The doctor was Captain Owen Hetherington, who was in charge of a front-line Regimental Aid Post with 70 wounded troops - including some Germans - who had camped under a fig tree following the first large-scale airborne assault in history.
Many of the thousands of German paratroopers who descended on Crete were killed before they landed, but the allied forces were eventually forced to retreat and evacuate after some heroic and ferocious hand-to-hand fighting involving the 28th Māori Battalion.
Among the wounded left in my father’s care was Austen Deans, who was with the 20th Battalion in the role of assistant war artist when he was badly wounded after setting off a land mine. “I am writing on the back of this portrait which I hope you will keep as a souvenir,” he told his aunt. “Besides it is a pretty fair likeness and it shows anyway that I am not very worried.”
In the first letter to his fianceé, later to become my mother, he wrote of his experience among about 3000 others at the Kokkinia POW Hospital in Piraeus – some of whom he described as “absolute wrecks who looked as if they never had a hope”.
But he was also looking on the bright side. “We have a canteen here and also get a few bottles of beer per week, how do you like that in a prisoner of war hospital.”
Three months later there was a somewhat different tone after being transported 2000km north in a cattle truck to face his first bitterly cold winter in Stalag 344 at Lamsdorf, Poland, which housed up to 15,000 POWs. Suffering from pleurisy, he wrote: “I am beginning to get hard and bitter here and I wish to God that this war would finish and that I could get home again”.
Two and a half years later in 1944, he wrote that he had begun to realise all that he had missed. “I was 21 when I left home, next birthday will be my 26th. The best years, or what should have been the best years, absolutely wasted.”
It would be another year before the war would finally end, and the certificate of discharge from the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force officially recorded his total service as six years and 146 days.
My father returned to his former life as a locomotive fireman for the New Zealand Railways and finally married his sweetheart. There were some happy days to follow, but he was understandably troubled by his wartime experience.
I recall him singing Silent Night in German, and the words “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht” still ring in my ears. But I also recall him speaking angrily about being paid three shillings a day to kill Germans.
I was 14 when I last saw my father in 1968, slumped in the back of a taxi in the darkness of a May evening after he had suffered a fatal heart attack clocking on for work.
His sudden death at the age of 50 came as a shock, and to this day I regret not having the opportunity to ask him about Crete and the horrible scenes that he must have witnessed from the field hospital overlooking Maleme Airport.
Sadly, I will also never know how he felt about staying behind to nurse the wounded and to throw himself at the mercy of a vengeful German military. What I do know is that he was a hero.
Owen Poland is a freelance writer who was named in honour of Captain Owen Hetherington.
