By Virginia Winder

Retired school principal Don Taylor will never forget the night he heard New Plymouth take a direct verbal hit from Tokyo Rose.

It was near the end of World War II, and members of his Eltham family were huddled around a high-gloss wooden Phillips valve radio.

Don's grandfather, Harry "Jock" Anderson, was a shortwave radio expert and was able to find the different stations, including the Japanese programme.

"I can tell you with the utmost truth, cross my heart and hope to die and all the rest of it, one Sunday night we heard Tokyo Rose and her propaganda broadcast," says Don, now aged 75.

"I heard her say...'and you people in New Plymouth, that gap that you have got in the barbed wire down on Ngamotu Beach - we know where it is'."

Tokyo Rose was right on the button.

"You see there was a gap in the barbed wire and when people went swimming they were able to just zigzag through it and go and have a swim and come back out again," Don says.

The reason he knew this information was because his father, Hec Taylor, was an artillery Sergeant stationed at an army camp overlooking Ngamotu Beach.

After all these years, Don remains amazed at the accuracy of the vocal strike.

"It was a humorous session; we used to laugh our heads off. A bit like that guy in Iraq - you know - 'Comical Ali'. 'Tokyo Rose' was a little bit like that," Don says.

Sights set on port

The field gun at the port view post was no laughing matter.

Sergeant Taylor was in charge of the weapon. "He'd been given strict instructions: 'under no condition is it to be fired. It will cause more danger to the people firing it than any enemy'."

Don, who was 10 when war was declared and 16 when it ended, has clear memories of that gun - and others.

"Of course, Ngamotu Beach in the war years still had the palladium on it and I still recall vividly the ships coming in being loaded with meat, butter, wool, cheese - food for England. I still see those ships with a large gun mounted on their stern, ostensibly to protect themselves. But I don't know if it ever would have really helped them much."

Every scrap counts

On land, Don's father had found other ways to support the war effort. Before joining the army, Hec and his family were based in the central Taranaki town of Eltham. "He had a one-man campaign collecting scrap metal," Don says.

"He had somehow or other managed to get railway wagons parked at the Eltham railway station and he used to load the scrap metal from around the district on board".

The Taylor children also helped. "We all used to save our toothpaste tubes because they were made of lead. We used to put that into the collection that went into the trucks to be taken away. The factories were running out of steel as a resource to make more bombs and make more guns and all the rest of it."

As well as lending a hand with the scrap metal, Don helped with a variety of campaigns during the war years, from 1939 to 1945.

Stemming blood of soldiers

"I well remember getting on my bike and going out to pick ergot. Ergot is a fungus that grows on lucerne (alfalfa) or barley. It is a little black thing. A lot of people think that it's just a seed, but it's not, it's a fungus."

This precious substance was carefully picked off the plant and dropped into a bicycle repair tin with a lid or into a Marmite jar with a screw top.

"We would take it to the chemist, he would weigh it on his very fine scales and you were paid something like nine pence or a shilling an ounce. That was used to form a compound that stemmed bleeding. There were plenty of guys bleeding in the war and, you know, they needed it."

Don and his family also gave moral support to departing troops. "Every time a batch of servicemen went overseas there was a farewell in the (Eltham) Oddfellows Lodge Hall."

His sister, Janet, performed dance items for the soldiers, while Merle Attrill (now Crawford) played the piano. Les Haycock was master of ceremonies for the farewell concerts.

"We used to sing Lily Marlene, We're Going To Hang Our Washing On The Siegfried Line etcetera and end up singing Maori Battalion, which made everyone feel a hell of a lot more happy because that was stirring. Then we waved the guys goodbye," Don says.

As he grew older, Don began his own journeys - not to war, but to Nelson College in the South Island. He attended the prestigious school from 1942-45.

Train trips and ferries

He journeyed to Nelson by train and boat. "To travel on the train you first had to get a permit," Don says. "Trains in the war years were for carrying troops and all the accoutrements of war and there was no unnecessary travel."

Don says it was all part of the savings and sacrifices of wartime. "Frequently, I sat on my upturned suitcase between Eltham and Wellington because you couldn't get a seat and because the train was full of soldiers off to war. Or they had been home on leave and were going back."

When the train neared Paekakariki the American tanks and troops began to appear on the landscape. In Wellington Harbour there were more signs that New Zealand was prepared to defend itself against Germany and Japan.

To cross the Cook Strait from the capital to Nelson, passengers had to sail on the old Arahura, or even worse, an old riverboat called the Matangi.

Fear of torpedoes

Before the vessels were allowed to sail into the deep waters of the strait, they had to pass small ships with lights upon their masts. "The three coloured lights were in a certain arrangement and they had to be responded to by the ship going out. If all was clear, the boom was opened - there was a boom across the Wellington Harbour, this was a gateway - and you sailed out. The boats were blacked out and you weren't allowed to shine a light."

Don made the trip 24 times during the war years, but only once feared an attack. That was one bright moonlit night when something fast and sleek came speeding through the water towards the boat.

As the ferry sailed down French Pass most of the passengers were in bed down below in the cabins, Don among them. "I heard this yell, 'Torpedo!'"

He retells what those on deck saw. "Here was this white wake coming straight towards the boat. When it got closer it sort of dived away and it was a local dolphin welcoming the ship." 

Picking for England

In Nelson, Don and fellow schoolmates cycled to orchards and market gardens to earn pocket money and help with the war effort.

"We picked apples, we picked tomatoes, we picked potatoes up off the ground and the most back-breaking job of them all was picking peas."

The early commercial pea crops weren't sown in rows like home gardens, but were planted over the whole paddock and required a great deal of bending over to harvest the sweet green pods. "When your kerosene tin was full - and it took quite a while to pick enough peas to fill a kerosene tin - you took it up to the person who was weighing them and they clipped your card. Every time the card was clipped you got sixpence. At the end of the day you might have picked ten kerosene tins so you got five bob (five shillings) for the day."

Don explains why these pickings were so helpful.

"The manpower was all overseas, but life still had to go on."

Much of the food produced in New Zealand was sent to England, where people were busy working in the munitions factories, building aircraft and ships. "The British Empire, as it was then, had to supply the food to feed the people of England, and ourselves as well - and it was all rationed. It was hard going.

"The ration book ruled supreme. It was pretty austere, the whole thing."

Ample apples for everyone

Not all the natural produce picked in Nelson was rationed. "Apples of course grew magnificently on the trees and there were no ships to take them overseas," Don says.

"So what do you do with them? You stick them in wooden crates and you deliver them to the schools and you get the kids to eat them. That was the Apples in Schools programme."

Don says that even though many crates of apples were given away, there was still a surplus.  "I have seen Nelson Bay covered in apples because they just tipped them there," he says. "They had to pick them otherwise the trees wouldn't have borne fruit the next year."

Carrots in cover-up job

Vegetables were even used to sidetrack the enemy. "All the airports of the day had acres and acres of carrots growing around them."

He tells why the orange root vegetable was ideal for these military spots. "You couldn't have anything tall growing around an airfield and the carrots were useful for feeding all the people in the forces," Don says.

Also, if a plane overshot the landing strip, it didn't matter because they only ended up in the low-growing, frothy-topped crop.

Reports said the airmen in combat had been eating so many carrots that they were able to see the enemy planes at night. The truth was they had the radar system.

So, after all these year of parents telling children to eat their carrots so they can see better - is it true?

Nutritionists say yes, to a degree. Carrots contain beta-carotene (Vitamin A), which does help eyes adjust to dim light. But whether airmen could eat enough carrots to see enemy planes on moonless nights might be a bit far-fetched.

The threat of war wasn't.

German raiders kill Kiwis

"We were fighting for our lives," Don says. "Those bloody Japanese had taken over the Pacific. There was only Australia between us and them."

Also, German raider ships slunk through southern waters like sharks seeking prey.

On 20 August 1940, one raider, Orion, intercepted a refrigerated cargo-liner in the Tasman Sea about 400 kilometres off Cape Egmont.

Like many merchant ships, the British merchant ship, SS Turakina, had been fitted with a defensive gun on the stern as part of wartime preparations. Despite her name, she was British-owned and registered in London.

Boat of Death: The SS Turakina lost 35 crew during a one-sided gun battle with the Germans in World War II.

SS Turakina's broadcast of a raider warning signal led to a one-sided gun duel and there is some uncertainly over the exact number of crew killed, but it seems likely that 36 out of some 56 crew died in the battle. 

This was the first engagement ever fought in the Tasman Sea and the closest to New Zealand.

There were also mine casualties closer to home.

On the night of 13-14 June 1940, a German raider slunk into the Hauraki Gulf to lay 228 mines across several approaches to Auckland. Twelve days later, the mail steamer, Niagara, struck the mines and sank with 136 passengers on board. Nobody was killed, but half of New Zealand's small-arms ammunition (intended to help replenish Great Britain's supplies after the Dunkirk evacuation) and ₤2.5 million worth of gold bullion went down with the ship.

Later, a minesweeper hit one of the mines and five men were killed.

NZ next in line

The Australian coast also came under attack.

Don says that Darwin was bombed 64 times by Japanese aircraft and 29 ships were sunk off the coast of New South Wales and Queensland. One of the worst incidents happened just after 4am on 14 May 1943, when an Imperial Japanese submarine torpedoed the Australian hospital ship, Centaur. The ship, carrying 332 non-combatant passengers, sank in less than three minutes and 268 people died.

"So Australia was under fire and we would have been next. Simple as that," Don says. "It was only the Americans who saved us. We are only here by the grace of the Americans. Tens and tens of thousands of American men lost their lives getting the Pacific back for the people who rightfully owned it."

Don was too young to fight for his country. "If the war had gone on for another three months I would've been called up. In 1945 I was the battalion Sergeant Major of the Cadet Corps at Nelson College. Top job."

He would have gone to war - unlike the small proportion of conscientious objectors. Don talks with derision about these pacifists. "They were disloyal to their country and they didn't have enough guts to stand up to a bully. Bullies have to be stood up to."

Don defends dropping bombs

To him, Adolf Hitler's Germany and the Imperial Japanese Army were the ultimate bullies. "You don't give way, you face them. And that's what happened. And as a result of facing them, in spite of all the terrible things that had to happen, we won out in the end."

VE Day: Don Taylor and his mate, Derek Best, are among the crowd of young people on a truck in Nelson celebrating the end of World War II in Europe on 8 May 1945.

Don is referring to the atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. "We were jubilant when that happened, because what did it do? It stopped the war. Two atomic bombs were dropped and suddenly there was peace. That to me just sums the whole thing up.

"I'm a product of my time. I lived through that era and I say you don't know what you're talking about if you start to weep and wail and lament about the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan. It was necessary at its time, as much as we detest that, it had to happen. So that finishes the war off. That's the end of World War II."

VJ Day: In New Plymouth, Don Taylor (left) and mate Derek Best celebrate victory over Japan on 15 August 1945.

However, Don's life-long interest in those tumultuous years continues. He is now working on a book project, collecting accounts of personal experiences from those who were in the armed services during WWII, as well as those civilians who lived through the war years.

The project is one of many marking the centenary of Rotary in 2005. "Every club in the world has been asked to do a project," says Don. He is a member of the Fitzroy club.

So far, he has interviews and material for 56 stories.