Veteran recalls being called up
| Published date | 24 April 2024 |
| Author | Maddisyn Jeffares |
| Publication title | Hastings Leader, The |
“When they bombed Pearl Harbour, it changed the whole direction of the war,” he said.
After Pearl Harbor, the war in the Pacific included Japan taking occupation of half of New Guinea and bombing Darwin 64 times.
Due to a lack of men enlisting in the New Zealand forces, the government at the time introduced conscription for those 18 and older.
Two years before the Pearl Harbor attack, both Australia and New Zealand panicked because all the able-bodied servicemen were overseas fighting in the war.
“New Zealand was really scraping the bottom of the barrel for able-bodied men to replace those often battled or wounded,” Husband said.
The Napier man had just turned 18. Three months into his carpenter apprenticeship, he was put into the army, serving for the next four years.
“It was like they had turned the country into a military state.”
When asked how he felt being conscripted in the middle of a world war, he said, “We had no option. It didn’t matter how we felt.”
Husband was an only child, and his mother was “badly cut up” when the government brought in the conscription decree.
At the time, 18-year-olds who were conscripted into the army had to have parental consent to serve overseas, in the Army, Navy or Air Force.
“My father had been overseas in the First World War and wasn’t very impressed with it, so there was no way he would consent for me to go over.”
At 21, Husband finally went overseas to fight in the war and was in the middle of the Indian Ocean when D-Day took place, and the war in Europe ended.
Hearing the war had ended “We all thought the boat would turn around and we could go home, but it didn’t.”
The boat took the more than 3000 men to the entrance of the Suez Canal, where they touched dry land for the first time in months.
A fleet of army trucks was waiting to take soldiers to the base camp set up in Egypt. Husband said it had rained the whole way to camp.
“We all thought it didn’t rain in the desert, but it did the whole way to camp, and then it didn’t rain the rest of the time we were in Egypt.”
From Egypt, the troops went to Italy, and when all was said and done in Italy, Husband and his fellow soldiers thought they would now get to go home. However, that was not the case. With no sign of peace in the Pacific, Husband, along with 3500 troops, was sent to Japan as an occupation force known as J Force.
He was a part of the first group of...
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