The Battle of Manners Street

On the Saturday evening of 3 April 1943 a brawl broke out in central Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, between American servicemen and New Zealand soldiers and civilians. It began outside the Allied Services Club on Manners Street, spread to the neighbouring streets and lasted several hours. It went down in history under the ironic name of the Battle of Manners Street. According to the most often repeated version, it was caused by Americans from the southern states refusing to let Māori soldiers into the club. No one was killed, and because of wartime censorship, for many years the incident was known mainly through rumour.

Americans in New Zealand

From mid-1942 New Zealand became one of the rear bases of America’s war in the Pacific. Depending on the period, anywhere from a dozen or so thousand to more than 40,000 American servicemen were stationed in camps around Auckland and Wellington, mainly from the Marine Corps. The 1st Marine Division sailed from Wellington for Guadalcanal in July 1942, and after the fighting on the island ended, the 2nd Marine Division rested and trained around Paekākāriki, north of the capital, before being sent to Tarawa in the autumn of 1943.

The country, which then had about 1.6 million inhabitants, received these guests at a particular moment. Many young New Zealanders were fighting far from home: General Bernard Freyberg’s 2nd New Zealand Division was in North Africa, where at the end of March 1943 it broke through the defences at the Tebaga Gap. The Americans were better paid, had access to goods that were scarce in the country and were popular with local women. In Britain they were said to be “overpaid, oversexed and over here”, and the saying was eagerly repeated in Australia and New Zealand. New Zealand soldiers back from the front or stationed at home felt this as a humiliation.

A second source of tension was the racial attitudes of some Americans. The United States armed forces were segregated at the time, and many soldiers from the South had grown up under the Jim Crow laws. The Māori, by contrast, although they themselves faced many inequalities in New Zealand, were formally citizens with equal rights and served in the armed forces on the same terms as white New Zealanders. Meet New Zealand, a guide for American servicemen published in 1942, reminded its readers plainly that the Māori held a position socially and politically equal to that of any white New Zealander.

The 28th (Māori) Battalion, one of the most decorated New Zealand units, held a special place. At the Tebaga Gap, a week before the events in Wellington, Second Lieutenant Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa Ngarimu had been killed and was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. Against this background any slight to Māori soldiers in their own country was taken as an insult to the whole unit.

The evening of 3 April

The Allied Services Club had opened in July 1942 in the premises of the former Waldorf restaurant on Manners Street. Run by volunteers, with a canteen, a dance hall and a lounge, it was intended above all for servicemen from overseas, but all military personnel were admitted. New Zealand at that time had a rule, introduced in 1917, that hotel bars must close at 6 p.m. The last hour before closing turned into a rush of drinking against the deadline (the so-called six o’clock swill), after which crowds of tipsy drinkers poured out on to the streets.

At around 6 p.m. on Saturday 3 April 1943 a fight broke out in front of the club. Accounts differ in detail. According to the version fixed in collective memory, a group of Marines from the southern states refused to let Māori soldiers in or to have them served at the bar. New Zealand servicemen, both Māori and Pākehā (white New Zealanders), came to their defence, and when the Americans took off their belts to use as weapons, the incident turned into a mass brawl. The fighting spilled over into Willis Street, to the ANA (Army, Navy and Air Force) Club, and into Cuba Street. Witnesses remembered a dense crowd, in the middle of which a few men at a time were fighting, surrounded by hundreds of cheering onlookers. American naval shore patrolmen with batons knocked out troublemakers and carted them off in trucks. According to An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, published in 1966, the riot lasted about four hours and involved more than a thousand American and New Zealand servicemen and several hundred civilians. It died down only when the Americans left by train for their camps.

How many took part, how many casualties?

The figures were doubted from the start. The Commissioner of Police told the Evening Post that there had been “some skirmishing” involving “a small crowd”; no one had been injured or taken to hospital, one drunken civilian had been arrested, one New Zealand soldier had been disciplined by the military authorities, and no American had been detained. An internal memo by a New Zealand major spoke of a few drunken merchant seamen who had decided to “sort out” the Americans. A military statement prepared in case the press asked questions described a fight between a British sailor and an American Marine, egged on by civilians, which other servicemen then joined; according to this statement four civilians were arrested. At around 8 p.m. the club, some of whose furniture had been smashed, was closed and barricaded.

Rumours of two dead Americans soon appeared. Some publications, repeat them to this day, but no documents confirm them, and it is accepted that no one was killed. Some modern researchers also believe that the scale of the incident has been exaggerated and that its racial background is not documented in sources from the time; different clashes may have merged into one in collective memory. Others, such as the historian Monty Soutar, author of a history of the 28th Battalion, stress that Māori complained repeatedly of racist treatment by Americans and regard the racial background of the brawl as credible.

Censorship and silence

The New Zealand press could print almost nothing about the incident. Wartime censorship covered anything that might damage relations with an ally or public morale, and Peter Fraser’s government had no interest in publicising a conflict with the Americans, on whom the country’s security depended. The results of any inquiries were never published. Knowledge of the “battle” circulated for years in the stories of participants and witnesses, gathering ever more dramatic details. It began to be written about more widely only several decades later, when historians turned to military and police records and to veterans’ accounts.

The incident of 3 April was not the only one. On 27 April 1943 there was a large brawl between New Zealand and American servicemen at the Basin Reserve ground in Wellington; in October 1943 in Ōtaki Marines fought Māori civilians after a Māori woman had been insulted; and on 12 May 1945 more than 150 Māori and Americans clashed on Cuba Street in Wellington. Military reports on this last incident recorded Māori complaints that the Americans had called them names, told them to walk on side streets and not to ride on the same trams as them. Although its racial background is far better documented, this clash never became as famous as the “Battle of Manners Street”.

Place in the war

The Battle of Manners Street had no effect on the course of operations in the Pacific, but it shows clearly the social cost of an alliance that for several years brought hundreds of thousands of foreign servicemen to small, distant dominions. Six months earlier similar tensions had led to the bloody Battle of Brisbane in Australia, and in February 1943 New Zealand had experienced the Featherston prisoner-of-war camp massacre, in which 48 Japanese prisoners were killed by New Zealand guards. All these events long remained on the margins of the official memory of the war.

Over time relations with the Americans turned out better than the riot had suggested: an estimated 1,400 New Zealand women married American servicemen. In November 1943 the 2nd Marine Division sailed from New Zealand for Tarawa, where it suffered enormous losses in the hard fighting for the Gilbert Islands, and the following year the number of Americans in the country fell rapidly. The 28th (Māori) Battalion fought on, in Tunisia and then in Italy. Some 3,600 men served in it over the course of the war, of whom 649 were killed or died of wounds. This blood sacrifice strengthened the post-war Māori campaign for equal treatment in New Zealand society, and the story of Manners Street eventually became a symbol of the clash between two different approaches to race within the Allied camp.