The horror of war lingered for a lifetime

Colin White. Photo / Supplied

Colin White performed such daring heroics from the air in World War II he was awarded a medal for gallantry.

He also nearly starved to death.

His son David knew a few of his bomber pilot dad's war stories, but only the tamer ones.

Like the one about the commode during the time White stayed at the Savoy Hotel in London when he was going to Buckingham Palace to get his Distinguished Service Cross (DSC).

This involved a few of the lads, the contents from a commode, a pompous hotel concierge and an open window.

There were other stories, too, like the fishing trips White would go on after the war, when David was a kid on the farm in Cheviot, North Canterbury.

White and his mates would head to the mouth of the Waiau River, get drunk as skunks and carry on like schoolboys, says David.

He guesses now that this was how they coped with the aftermath of war.

As a child David never heard the horror stories because his dad, who died late last year aged 90, didn't tell them.

Late in life he couldn't stop telling them as the war, once again, crashed in on his peace of mind.

White had been in the thick of the Siege of Malta, sunk enemy ships from the sky and lost nearly half his body weight as the Germans and Italians mounted one of the most intensive bombing and starvation campaigns of the war.

He was recruited by the British to fly for the Royal Navy's Air Arm Fleet and was recommended for the DSC by Sir Keith Park, the New Zealander who was Air Commodore of Malta during the siege.

White flew Park's Hurricane OK-2 a number of times.

In Malta the troops used to hunt for seagull eggs to eat, all the while trying not to get blown to bits from the butterfly bombs that the Germans had scattered thick over the rocks.

When White was evacuated to England he had impetigo and jaundice. His weight had dropped by almost half.

He had one of those whirlwind wartime romances and brought his new wife, RAF nurse (the late) Anne Oddie, back to Cheviot.

The pair settled on the family farm and White became a model farmer and dearly loved father to five children. The couple threw themselves into community life.

Perhaps there wasn't time to think about the war. White was a modest local hero, along with two other outstanding Cheviot men, two-time Victoria Cross recipient Charles Upham and Desmond Scott, one of the most decorated of New Zealand's war pilots. It wasn't until much, much later that David truly realised what his father had been through.

Like some other veterans, now in their 80s and 90s and whose names are beginning to feature regularly in the Herald's death notices, White may have had post-traumatic stress disorder for years.

"When he was young he never talked about the war at all but when he got old that's the only thing he ever talked about, quite frankly," recalled David. "It was like nothing else ever happened in his life ... He suffered from post-traumatic stress, I think that's the modern name for it. He never even realised he had it until he was diagnosed with it in his 80s."

Nightmares and stomach complaints stemmed from a tremendous sense of guilt he felt because of all the people who had died at the hands of his bombings, David said. "He said that when you're young it's a question of 'It's you or me buddy and it's not going to be me'.

"But when you get older and you develop a more sophisticated view of it you realise the person you're fighting wasn't necessarily imbued with that terrible Nazi dogma anyway, that he was just a poor bugger who had no choice but to fly a plane and fire bullets.

"He felt awful about that. I think probably the more he had time to think about it the more he had time to intellectualise it, and the more he ended up emotionalising it."

White sought medical advice and was treated for the physical manifestations of PTSD but as far as David was aware he never lay down on a couch and let it all out. His father belonged to a stoical, stiff upper lip generation, David says.

New Zealand doesn't know how many of the 150,000 to 160,000 who served in the war are left alive.

Veterans Affairs says around 7500 are on war disability pensions and estimates there are probably another 10,000 not on their books.

If you go on the ages of the last World War I veterans, who have lived into their 100s, our last World War II veteran may still be alive in the 2030s. Which means a lot of old soldiers could be out there suffering in silence from war trauma. The RSA would like to know about them.

Chief executive Dr Stephen Clarke says the Census used to ask about war service but the question was removed in the 1970s. The association wants it reinstated.

Clarke urges families and neighbours to look out for veterans they know. With medical improvements, people are living longer and the concern is that as wives and old friends die, people may feel very alone. They are at the stage of reviewing the major events of their lives and the war was the biggest.

There is huge respect for World War II veterans and children and grandchildren want to know their stories, Clarke says, but along with the resurgence of films about the war, dark memories some have blocked out for years can return.

He thinks some men have never stepped forward to get their due entitlements because of the stoic nature of the generation who fought.

But changes are being proposed in a Law Commission review into veterans' entitlements, the first major review of war pension legislation since 1954.

Dr John Moremon, a defence studies lecturer from Massey University, worked with Veterans Affairs in Australia and says it is common for veterans to have elements of trauma later in life.

"One bloke I interviewed worked until he was 79 so he didn't have time to think about the war. Once retired, the dynamics of your life change and he ended up with PTSD, getting treatment and counselling ... he was off to a counsellor every week."

Moremon has heard anecdotally of men in their 80s who have committed suicide partly because of the passing of the men they used to go to the club or pub with.

Though they may not have talked about the war, it was enough to know each had gone through similar experiences.

Moremon, too, says look out for your grandfather - or grandmother - and says for some it can be a cathartic exercise to write experiences down.