By Rhonda Bartle

Luxury Liner: Discoloured by age, Don Glass's old newspaper clipping shows the Andes in all her glory. Image supplied.

A Luxury Liner

The Royal Mail Steamer Andes was built for luxury cruising, destined to one day carry Argentine beef barons, Bolivian tin magnates, Brazilian coffee kings and all their beautiful wives. Instead, the trip in October 1945 brought weary New Zealand servicemen home from WWII.

With her decks open to the North Atlantic sun and air, and her panelled apartments and rich fittings stripped and bare, she was a welcome sight to  men eager for home.

Built to accommodate 600 elite passengers per trip,  she would carry more than 400,000 soldiers, airmen and sailors across the sea. One of those men was Don Glass of Hāwera.

Glass arrived in Southampton, fresh from a week at Blackpool's Pleasure Beach. He'd travelled by overnight train.

"We still didn't know what we were doing, or where we were going, then all of a sudden it was 'you're on board,' and there were troops of us Kiwis and Aussies on the boat and excitement ran high."

Soon their ranks would swell as more servicemen from Australia and New Zealand joined them and the passenger list grew to a staggering 2,300.

A long time coming

Glass had left his family home in May 1941 to join the 2nd Battalion of Taranaki Regiment at Palmerston North. 

He was mobilised on the 14 December, 1941, when the Japanese entered the war by bombing Pearl Harbour and the regiment began manouveres. 

Nominated to go to Army School in Trentham during the middle of April 1942, Glass was commissioned in June 1942.

"Somebody had a finger on me," he says now, looking back. "Somebody must have said, 'he's the one, send him,' and I did my job well, so I got the next job. I came up with a commission in three months. I didn't have to come up through the ranks."

After being posted to 16th Heavy Anti-aircraft Regiment, Glass served in Searchlight Battalion until July, 1943.

Being Grade One, he found himself posted to the Air Force for pilot training through to Tiger Moth level, and was subsequently sent to Canada in May 1944.

"We left from the Manly depot in Auckland. The ship was unescorted so it was all secrecy. It was 'if I don't come home tonight, you know I'm gone'."

Glass spent just over 10 months in Canada, looking after personnel as Safety Officer on a bombing range.

During the winter, he did Engine training at Brandon, Manitoba, and after graduation, was posted to England to a Mosquito Squadron station at Little Snoring, in East Anglia.

There he flew Mosquitos and worked in the control tower when the squadron was training to land on aircraft carriers.

Luckily – or unluckily, depending on who you were and what you'd hoped for – Glass didn't see active service.

"We were getting pretty close but it was closing off. They'd been training Mosquito pilots to land on aircraft carriers. We'd been sent to Little Snoring to get familiar with the aircraft."

Neither disappointed nor relieved, Glass says, "we did our job and that was it."

Precious cargo: The Andes sailed from Southampton, loaded with servicemen. Image supplied.

One big boat

At Southampton, the size of the HMT Andes impressed him. At 643ft (196m) long and 83ft (25.3m) wide, it rose 43ft (13.1m) out of the water.

Built at the Belfast yards of Harland and Wolfe at the end of 1939,  she carried nearly half a million men back to their own backyard.

On a South American run prior to the war, she had been stripped to carry chilled beef to Britain - it was fast enough that the meat didn't need to be frozen – and now the holds held row upon row of narrow bunks.

Hammocks dangled in the forward compartment, with every inch of ship utilised to hold the troops destined for home.

"I only had a little suitcase, but there were six of us in a single room cabin so there wasn't much room and you took turns to get onto the floor to get dressed in the morning, and you balanced your suitcase on the end of your bed.

"The bathroom wasn't so bad. It had been a passenger ship so we had hot water."

Above deck was just as crowded.

"There was sitting room only, and if you got up, you lost a place to sit. If you could get close enough, you watched the boxing and the wrestling. Otherwise, you just rested."
 

Because the ship wasn't equipped to carry such nunmbers, the food was below par.

"The potatoes were out on the deck in sacks and they were going black. And when you cut your meat, it had a green tinge to it.

"We didn't eat much for 21 days. When we got to Melbourne, we bought fruit and condensed milk to make up for what we'd lived on across the Pacific, and ate that."

From the photo album: Port Said traders selling their wares. Image supplied.

A quick trip to Melbourne

The ship's first call was at Port Said to refuel, but the Australians, who had fought in the Middle East took exception to the workers on the docks.

"They turned the hoses on them so they couldn't fuel the ship. The chaps were pretty well cheesed off having to buy fuel from Egyptians, and who could blame them?

"The Captain sailed us down to Suez and we refuelled there before anyone was up."

Glass says Suez was interesting, very narrow in places, with the Ismelia Hospital halfway down the canal.

"Then we didn't see anything until we came around the Australian bight and a huge cheer went up from the Australians.

It took a record-breaking 21 days to make Melbourne to drop the Australian contingent home but after 14hrs on-shore leave, the Kiwis were faced with bad news.

"We were told it was going to take five days to cross the Tasman – almost double the usual time – because it was Labour Weekend at home and the wharfies wouldn't tie the boat up on a public holiday."

Though the ship had cruised easily at 21 knots for the first leg of the voyage, the next trip was so tediously slow, as Glass puts it, "The albatrosses were passing us."

A slow trip

To the many men who had been gone from home since the beginning of the war, it was unwelcome news – worse than no welcome home, it seemed an ungrateful snub.

Headlines in the Christchurch Star-Sun reflected the returned servicemen's displeasure.

MEN RETURNING IN ANDES RESENT LONG CROSSING OF TASMAN

BLAME HOLIDAY ON LABOUR DAY FOR TWO-DAY DELAY IN REACHING LYTTELTON

A large banner appeared over the side of the ship: WELL DONE, BOYS. WELCOME HOME EXCEPT ON SUNDAYS AND HOLIDAYS.

And then another: WELCOME HOME, EXCEPT ON LABOUR DAY, WE'RE GOING TO THE RACES.

"We broke the Mauretania's record from Southampton to Melbourne doing the trip in 23 days and 6 hours,' one soldier returning after four years in German prison camps was quoted as saying. "But we waddled across the Tasman like a dirty old duck."

Though the Minister of Defence, the Hon.F.Jones went to pains to explain that the date of arrival had been fixed ahead, the men on the ship felt aggrieved.

Egged on

Glass still finds it hard to understand the watersiders' viewpoint. "We were faced with this right through the war. I worked in the anti-aircraft gunnery and we had to go down and help load the boats to go to the islands. The wharfies wouldn't do it."

When the ship docked at Lyttelton to drop 859 mainlanders off, the men didn't hold back their displeasure.

"We'd been given hard-boiled eggs for breakfast. You know where they ended up? On the wharf. The politicians got the lot."

Wellington also got the boiled egg treatment. "You've never seen so many eggs floating about," Glass says happily.

But any lingering resentment for being late was soon laced with joy. A girl called Ngaire waited for Glass on Aotea Quay.

"Yes, after a two year separation, Ngaire was on the wharf. I didn't have to walk very far, did I?"

They'd met in Wellington, prior to Glass being posted overseas. "I had American competition," he smiles, "but I won through. We got engaged in 1943, but didn't get married because the future was so uncertain."

Because none of his personnel had known they were to sail when they did, it was a surprise to see her there.

"Someone must have advised next of kin. So when we came down off the ship there was a lot of excitement and cheering and what-not."
 
Carrying his kit, Glass jostled with the rest of the troops to make it down the gangplank onto Aotea Quay into warm familiar arms.

The last trip : After Don Glass's boat finally came in, he was too busy rebuilding his life to ever sail again. Image supplied.

Another life

With the war finally behind them, the couple married the following year. "I seemed to settle down quite easy," Glass says.

"I went straight back to work as draughtsman in an interesting job. I had a good boss to work with."

Taken on as a cadet in 1938 at the South Taranaki Electric Power Board, eventually, he soon worked his way up to draughtsman, working directly under the engineer.

"When we came back, the country was short of power, so I worked at the office eight hours a day, then went out to the power house to do another three hours at night on the diesel 800 horsepower generators.

"When we started running the power house 24 hours a day, I went onto eight hour shifts to help keep it going. I was there until 1950."

And post-war, while the big ship with the towering smokestack, all gussied up and refitted for the rich, plied the ocean waves for many more years to come, Don Glass reclaimed his life and never sailed again.

"I was too busy," he says.