WWII vet mistakenly listed as dead on Rangiora War Memorial near Christchurch

World War II sapper David Dawson (inset) survived the war but was mistakenly included among the war dead on the Rangiora War Memorial.

How did a Kiwi soldier who died in 1994 end up on two World War II memorials honouring our fallen soldiers? Cherie Howie traces an 80-year-old family mystery.

My grandad is listed among the World War II dead on the Rangiora War Memorial.

He’s on the roll of honour at Rangiora High School for fallen former pupils, too.

But – spoiler alert – he was also married in 1947, raised six kids over three decades, and eventually counted 23 grandchildren among his legacy.

Grandad, who died in 1994 aged 76, wasn’t the kind of person to make a fuss.

When he heard his name read out among the war dead old boys at a school reunion in 1984, he thought it was funny.

“I thought about getting [the inscriptions] rubbed out, but then I thought, ‘Why bother?‘,” he told a reporter when the error went public.

The story, with headlines such as “Back from dead”, went international.

World War II sapper David Dawson's name on the Rangiora War Memorial. Dawson survived the war and was mistakenly – and mysteriously – included among the district's fallen soldiers.

But it was hardly new to our family.

Grandad had been showing his relatives the mistaken inscription at the cenotaph on the corner of High and Ivory Sts for years.

“We’d go there as kids,” says my mum.

“He used to laugh about it.”

What he couldn’t do was tell them how it happened.

Prisoner 159

Grandad made it out of the deadliest conflict in history with his life, more than can be said of the 50 million-plus civilians and military personnel killed in an almighty clash that dragged on for almost six years.

But the experience was no dance among the daisies for the man I remember in his sunset years as a prolific reader, the keenest of gardeners, and an all-round good guy.

After time in North Africa, a layover I know little about except that he summited one of the pyramids of Giza (now illegal), grandad found himself part of the Allies’ ultimately failed fight to push back the Nazi invasion of Greece in 1941.

Grandad (right) and a friend at the Great Sphinx near Cairo early in the war before he was captured during the Battle of Greece in 1941.

As a sapper (combat engineer), grandad and his comrades would be sent ahead to build reliable routes, and then kept back to make sure the enemy’s path was not so straightforward.

The story of how grandad ended up on two memorials to war dead has its provenance in the Battle of Greece, where, after escaping from the north, his unit was told to remain behind to blow up a bridge over the Corinth Canal.

But enemy tanks on their flank and paratroopers from above cut the unit off, forcing grandad and hundreds more to retreat into the hills.

(1941.) Men from the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, after the retreat from Greece. #WW2 #HISTORY pic.twitter.com/GQ9B7RPZCI

— rgpoulussen.bsky.social (@rgpoulussen) May 19, 2023

He’d later tell his kids how he hid as the Germans passed, remaining silent and still as one stopped to relieve himself in the bush grandad was concealed in.

Grandad soon wound up part of a group of about eight New Zealand and Australian soldiers evading capture, one despite a broken leg.

They were eventually discovered eating dinner at a local farmhouse.

In an act of kindness not shown to so many caught in a conflict not of their making, the German soldiers let the men finish their meal before taking them prisoner.

Grandad in his capture photo after he was among 10,000 Allied soldiers taken prisoner by the Nazis during the Battle of Greece in 1941. He looks a little pensive. Photo / Naturhistorisches Museum Vienna

Ten thousand Allied soldiers were captured in the military failure and sent to prisoner of war camps, including the massive Stalag XVIII-A in Wolfsberg.

The camp was one of the biggest for prisoners of war in Austria, with more than 50,000 incarcerated at its peak, including more than 1500 Kiwis – among them prisoner 159, grandad.

Cabbage water and ‘petty sabotage’

“Sometimes”, grandad would later reply, when asked if his experiences in a Nazi POW camp resembled any of the goofball antics on 1960s sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, set in the fictional Luft-Stalag 13.

Reality, for the most part, was quite different.

Prisoner 159 broke rocks as punishment and survived on meals as bleak as “cabbage water”, or nothing at all (family would describe him as a “skeleton” when he arrived home from the war).

Grandad's capture card after he was taken prisoner of war during the Battle of Greece in 1941.

Online histories of the camp include outbreaks of disease sparking months-long quarantines, inadequate sanitation and housing, and mistreatment of those sent to work camps.

Grandad talked of laying cobblestones in one Austrian town, and prisoner 159 is also included in records for Work Group 22, which laboured in a chalk quarry at Leitendorf.

He also helped build dams at Lavamund and in Schwabeck, which still stand despite the prisoners being known to indulge in “petty sabotage”, a poster to the stalag18a.org website writes.

POWs slept on bunks with straw-filled sacks for mattresses and British prisoners – in some histories a catch-all for those from the British Empire – each had just one blanket, according to an October 1941 Red Cross report.

Grandad pictured after his enlistment as a volunteer. He survived the war but returned home a "skeleton" after four years in a prisoner of war camp.

It wasn’t all bad.

Efforts were made to establish libraries, classes, theatre and music – grandad teaching himself to play violin after winning one from a guard in a poker game.

He also drew likenesses of fellow prisoners so they could send them home to their families, sourcing paper from “wherever he could get it – including pages torn from the Bible”, mum says.

But life was always fragile.

In December 1944, six months before the end of the war in Europe, the camp was mistakenly bombed by the US Air Force. Sixty-one prisoners died.

Grandad wasn’t one of them.

‘My Davey’

She didn’t live to see her youngest child return, but my great-grandmother never doubted he would.

“The Prime Minister desires me to convey to you on behalf of the Government, his sympathy with you in your anxiety”, Minister of Defence Frederick Jones wrote in a May 25, 1941, telegram sent in his name to tell my great-grandmother that with “much regret” her soldier son was missing after the Battle of Greece.

My great-grandmother, pictured with her sons and grandson in the 1920s, always believed her son David – front – would return from World War II.

It would be July 5 before the next telegram arrived with the news grandad, 23, was a prisoner of war.

This one came with the Prime Minister’s “sincere regrets”.

There are longer waits to endure, and worse news to get. But 42 days of not knowing whether your child is dead or alive sounds like agony.

Grandad pictured with gran and five of their six kids in about 1960. He would take his children to see the war memorial that mistakenly included his name.

Ultimately, the only bullet that would enter grandad’s body came from his own .22 when it fired as he climbed through a fence while rabbit hunting far from any battlefield.

He was left with a flesh wound to his shoulder from the post-war mishap.

And anyway, in defiance of the grim telegrams, my great-grandmother never believed her son wouldn’t come home.

A widowed mother-of-seven, she died just before hostilities ended.

“She called him ‘My Davey’,” says my mum, of the stories passed down through the family.

“And she always said her Davey would be back.”

‘He had a lot of sympathy for those who didn’t come back’

“I’ve searched the Online Cenotaph.” replies Auckland War Memorial Museum manager Victoria Passau to my email asking how a WWII survivor ended up on a WWII memorial.

“And [I] can’t find any World War II deaths under the name D. Dawson that would match someone from Rangiora.”

All the names listed alongside grandad appeared to be people killed in action or as a result of their service, says Passau.

“So it’s very likely that the D. Dawson on the memorial does refer to your grandfather, included in error when he was listed as missing.”

Grandad about to walk my mum down the aisle in 1971 – 30 years after he was captured by the Nazis during battle and sent to a prisoner of war camp, after which many believed he'd died and his name was mistakenly added to two war memorials.

A 1950 public notice lists names to be inscribed on the cenotaph after making what the RSA described as the “supreme sacrifice”, but it doesn’t include anyone named Dawson, Passau says.

“I notice some additions from this list on the final cenotaph so maybe someone sent information to the RSA? It looks like it was updated sometime in the early 1950s.”

I try the Waimakariri District Council, which is responsible for the cenotaph, and a spokesman refers me to Rangiora RSA.

President Malcolm Wallace is intrigued, but none the wiser.

David Dawson featured in stories nationally and internationally in 1984 after his "return from the dead" first went public.

Grandad’s Army record, according to the Ministry of Defence records’ office spokesman quoted in a 1984 Christchurch Press story, ends with his capture in 1941 – even though he later received a Battle of Greece Medal, army rehabilitation carpentry training and a war pension.

“There’s nothing more in the file, which may be where some of the confusion arose,” the records’ office spokesman said at the time.

Grandad was widely known in his hometown by his nickname, Bunny, which might explain why when D. Dawson came up on the war memorial, it wasn’t noticed, Rangiora RSA’s then-secretary Harry James says in the same 1984 story.

“We sometimes get chipped about someone who was killed and whose name is not there, but I have not heard of it happening the other way round.”

Grandad (left) with gran, my parents and a mixture of my siblings and cousins during a picnic at Marlborough's Momorangi Bay in the late 1970s. He never forgot his fellow World War II soldiers who didn't get to come home, family say.

It was the risk of the former that keeps grandad’s name on both memorials today.

Grandad might’ve laughed about the mistake with his old schoolmates, and curious reporters, but the possibility another D. Dawson from Rangiora did die in the war always lingered.

“He thought,” says one aunt, “that to remove it might upset someone.”

Like many from his generation, grandad didn’t dwell on his wartime experiences, my uncle – grandad’s only son – later tells me.

“[But] he had a lot of sympathy for those who didn’t come back.”

For the Fallen is for them.

But I’ll still be thinking of grandad as Laurence Binyon’s elegy is heard across two countries this Anzac Day.

At the going down of the sun, and in the morning ... dear grandad.

Cherie Howie is an Auckland-based reporter who joined the Herald in 2011. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years and specialises in general news and features.