Ministry of Defence sell-off of war medals sacrificed our history
Friday, 22 April 2022
John Stackhouse is a retired school principal with a Master of Education from Canterbury University. An amateur military historian, he is writing a book on New Zealand World War II flying ace Ernest Joyce.
OPINION: Niwha … Grit.
Ka mahi te tawa uho ki te riri. Well done, you whose courage is like the heart of the tawa tree.
News that whānau of the 28 Māori Battalion have received the hard-earned medals of their forebears was wonderful. However, tens of thousands of other New Zealand veterans of World War II never received the medals they earned. Many personnel of the army, navy and air force did not, or would not, apply for them. Two of these were my father and my uncle.
The reason many medals were not issued was encapsulated by my Uncle Jack. A veteran of the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force 1942-44, he fought through thick and thin with 23 Battalion and the bullets caught up with him in July 1944 in the advance on the Italian city of Florence.
Severely wounded, by some miracle he did not die. Uncle Jack was no storyteller, but I did glean some information from him over the years. I asked him about his medals once. His response was: “If they can’t send them to me with my name on them, and I have to ‘apply’ for them, they can keep them.”
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**
Keep the medals they did. Shelves and shelves of them, wrapped in their waxed paper packets, sat in the Army Medal Office. Some were issued to late applicants, including my father after I hounded him to apply.
But in the late 1970s a flood of medals left the shelves, sold to “registered collectors” and I was one of those at the time. The Medal Office “valued” all the World War II campaign medals at 45c each. Legislation forbidding the sale of war medals in New Zealand had been repealed, and so the shelves at the medal office began to empty.
Unnamed and “specimen” marked World War I medals also “escaped” on to the market, along with New Zealand Land War medals with names crossed out. Gallipoli medallions, long service awards, Korean War and Vietnam medals, General Service medals, medal clasps and emblems, all became available.
Even the sanctity of the beautifully poignant New Zealand Memorial Cross, issued to the next of kin of those who died while serving in the armed forces in World War II and after, was defiled as these were sold unnamed or marked “specimen”, for a few pieces of silver. I look back now and cringe because history was sacrificed by the Ministry of Defence, “custodian” of these taonga.
As a consequence today the descendants of veterans are presented with later-manufacture medals, shiny and attractive in their presentation boxes. The truth is that the original medals which their whānau members were entitled to have now nearly all been issued or sold. The ministry ran out of original medals.
I noticed this occurring some 20 years ago when a colleague proudly showed me his father’s medals, just claimed. The Defence Medal, War Medal 1939-45 and New Zealand War Service Medals were genuine 1950s items, but the 1939-45 Star and Pacific Star were recently manufactured approximations of the originals.
It would be correctly argued that they are official issues, purchased by the ministry, but it didn’t need to be like this. It seems it was purely a decision to “clear the medal office shelves”.
It was an insulting decision, a slap in the face for servicemen and women, an action that few realised would lead to such a depletion of stock that “new” medals had to be sourced in the 1990s.
The medals recently issued to the whānau of Māori Battalion members, in fact all whānau of ex-servicemen and women, now appear to be, unsurprisingly, the modern issue variety. Their forebears’ unnamed original medals now adorn military collections around the world.
A typical soldier’s group of World War II medals for North Africa/Italy would have been sold for less than $3 to collectors in the 1970s. Now they sell for $300 plus, 100 times more than the medal office price. To put it in Defence Force parlance, the original medals were “disposed of”. A cheap value was placed on our whānau and our nation’s history.
Today’s surviving World War II servicemen and women and their descendants deserved to have their original medals issued to them without having to apply for them.
Mind you, in World War II whānau had to pay two shillings and sixpence to the ministry to have a death certificate issued proving the war death of their loved one, and post-World War II the New Zealand Memorial Cross had to be, yes, you guessed it, applied for by next of kin!
All I can say is, “The damage is done.”