NZ honours blood debt to executed Australian soldiers

For years they had been the skeletons in the deepest recesses of their families' closets, their fate kept secret from three generations.

But in a tearful ceremony in Canberra yesterday, New Zealand made amends to the descendants of two Australians executed during service with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in France during World War I.

Privates Frank H. Needs (who enlisted under the name of John King) and John Joseph Sweeney were shot for desertion after surviving Gallipoli and then experiencing the trenches on the Western Front.

Private Sweeney had been sent back to the front despite twice being wounded.

Neither would have been executed had they joined their own nation's Army, because Australia absolutely refused to let British military courts sentence its soldiers to death.

But they had been working in New Zealand when war broke out, and volunteered to serve a country that would ultimately abandon them to what High Commissioner Kate Lackey described as the harsh military discipline of the day.

"The irony in respect of these men is that they were the victims of history," said Invercargill MP Mark Peck, who introduced the private member's bill that in 2000 became the Pardon for Soldiers of the Great War Act.

Five soldiers serving with the New Zealand Division were executed for mutiny or desertion.

Prime Minister Helen Clark last month presented the descendants of three New Zealanders with the medals they would have received - the 1914-15 Star, British War Medal and the Victory Medal, and copies of the Certificate of Honour awarded Great War veterans.

In Canberra Mr Peck, the High Commissioner and Defence Force Chief Air Marshal Bruce Ferguson presented similar packages to the descendants of Privates King and Sweeney. They also received the Anzac commemorative medal.

For Private King's granddaughter, Jill Dawson, of Perth, the discovery that her ancestor had been shot for desertion had come as a thunderbolt.

"I was shocked, absolutely shocked, and I was ashamed when I first heard, because of the stigma on the family," she said.

"Then when I thought about it, I thought, he did join up to serve in that horrible war ... now he's got something he deserved."

Private King, born in Victoria in 1885, served with the Canterbury Infantry Battalion on Gallipoli, and later with the Mounted Rifles in Egypt and finally with the NZEF in France.

In May 1917 he was absent without leave and escaped while awaiting court martial, but returned to the front after a one-year sentence was suspended.

Later the same month he again went missing, was declared a deserter, arrested and convicted, and shot by firing squad at 5.30am on August, 19, 1917.

Private Sweeney's grandson, Colin Saunders, of Devonport, Tasmania, still cannot understand why his grandfather was ordered back to the trenches.

"He was blown up two times then sent back to the front line," Mr Saunders said. "We know it now as shell shock, but they reckoned he was a deserter."

Private Sweeney, a Tasmanian, was working as a bushman in New Zealand when he enlisted in October 1914, and was wounded twice as a tunneller at Anzac.

After about six months in hospital he joined the New Zealand Division in France, was declared a deserter after being absent without leave for just over a month, and was shot in October 1916.