The Featherston camp massacre

In February 1943, in the small town of Featherston on the North Island of New Zealand, thousands of kilometres from the front, one of the grimmest episodes of the Pacific War away from the battlefield took place. Japanese prisoners of war refused to go out to work, and the negotiations with them ended in a shooting in which 48 Japanese and one New Zealand guard were killed. Some chronologies place the incident under 22 February; in fact the strike and the shooting took place on 25 February 1943, as New Zealand sources consistently state, including the official history of prisoners of war and the materials of the Army Museum at Waiouru.

A camp in the Wairarapa

The military camp at Featherston, in the Wairarapa region north-east of Wellington, had been established during the First World War as a training centre for recruits. In September 1942, at the request of the United States, which did not want to hold prisoners behind the front in the Solomon Islands, it was converted into a camp for Japanese prisoners. The guard was made up of men who could not be sent to the front: too young, too old or unfit for overseas service. Nobody had trained them in handling prisoners, let alone prisoners from a country of whose culture they knew almost nothing. From mid-December 1942 the camp was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Donald Donaldson.

The prisoners came from the fighting on Guadalcanal. The first and larger group consisted of men from Japanese labour units, many of them Koreans, captured in August 1942 while building the airfield that the Americans, after landing on the island, completed and named Henderson Field. The second, smaller group – about 240 men – consisted of soldiers and sailors of the Imperial Army and Navy. Roughly half of them came from the crew of the heavy cruiser Furutaka, sunk at the Battle of Cape Esperance, and a dozen or so were survivors of the destroyer Akatsuki, sunk in the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. In February 1943 the camp held more than 800 prisoners; in all, 868 passed through Featherston. They were divided into four separate compounds: labourers and Koreans in one, servicemen in another, and officers in the remaining ones.

The dispute over work

The labourers from the construction units went out to work in the camp and the surrounding area without much resistance. The servicemen were another matter. Japanese soldiers had been brought up in the belief – expressed, among other places, in the 1941 field code Senjinkun – that being taken prisoner was a disgrace worse than death. Many of them regarded themselves as dead to their families and their country, did not want their names to reach Japan, and saw working for the enemy as a further humiliation, indeed as helping the enemy’s war effort. They did not know, moreover, that the 1929 Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war – which Japan had signed but not ratified – allowed rank-and-file prisoners to be made to do work not directly connected with military operations. The guards, for their part, did not understand where the resistance came from and increasingly saw it as simple disobedience.

The tension had been building for weeks. On 24 February Lieutenant Colonel Donaldson decided to settle the dispute: he ordered that the next day 105 men from Compound No. 2, where the servicemen were held, should go out to work with the labour parties.

25 February 1943

On the morning of 25 February some 240 prisoners from Compound No. 2 sat down on the ground in front of their huts and refused to report for work until the commandant met them. Donaldson was not in the camp, and command was taken over by his adjutant, Lieutenant James Malcolm. For about two hours talks went on, through an interpreter and with the help of Japanese officers, including Sub-Lieutenant Adachi, who acted as intermediary between the prisoners and the guard. Armed guards were brought into the compound and drawn up in a semicircle, and machine guns were set up, among other places, on the roofs of the latrines.

What happened in the following minutes is disputed. One of the Japanese officers was forcibly removed from the group. Malcolm, threatening another with his revolver, fired a warning shot and then another, which hit Adachi in the shoulder. Some sources state that the very first shot wounded one of the prisoners. The seated men leapt up, stones flew towards the guards, and according to the guards’ accounts the prisoners rushed at them with stones and sticks. The guards opened fire with rifles, submachine guns and pistols. According to the New Zealand findings, nobody gave the order to shoot – the firing began spontaneously, and the burst lasted, depending on the account, between fifteen and thirty seconds.

Thirty-one Japanese were killed on the spot and another 17 died of their wounds in hospital, 48 dead in all. The number of wounded, according to various tallies, ranged from 74 to more than 90. On the New Zealand side, a ricochet mortally wounded Private Walter Pelvin, who died on 28 February; several other guards were injured by stones and fragments. In all, then, the shooting cost 49 lives; the New Zealand Army Museum calls it the bloodiest event to have taken place on New Zealand soil at the time.

Inquiry and silence

The wounded were taken to hospital in nearby Greytown, where a separate ward with blacked-out windows was set up for them; the staff who cared for them were later replaced so that word would not spread in the area. The press reported only that Private Pelvin had died of wounds received at a prisoner-of-war camp. The Prime Minister, Peter Fraser, spoke of a “serious disturbance” that had called for firm action.

In March 1943 a military court of inquiry heard witnesses and laid the chief blame on the prisoners, while at the same time finding that the “extreme action of Lieutenant Malcolm” had been a direct provocation. It saw the main cause of the tragedy in the lack of a common language and the deep cultural differences between guards and prisoners; no one was charged. Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross who visited the camp and the Consul General of Switzerland – the protecting power representing Japan’s interests – submitted reports that differed in detail from the New Zealand version. Japan protested through Switzerland and rejected the inquiry’s findings; the government in Wellington replied that the prisoners had mutinied and attacked the guards with stones and tools. The authorities feared that the Japanese would take revenge on Allied prisoners in their camps, New Zealanders among them, and so the full findings of the inquiry were kept secret for many years.

After the shooting there were no further clashes of this kind in the camp. The prisoners tended gardens, made furniture, laid out a tennis court and put on plays, and in front of one of the huts they set up a stone in memory of the dead. Towards the end of the war they grew increasingly anxious about their fate in Japan, where, they believed, they had been declared dead. On 30 December 1945 they sailed from Wellington aboard two American landing ships; on the way, at Guadalcanal, they honoured the fallen, and at the beginning of February 1946 they went ashore at Uraga.

Significance

Featherston showed in an extreme form how wide a gulf separated Japanese soldiers from their opponents in their understanding of captivity. A little over two weeks earlier, on 9 February 1943, the Americans had brought the fighting on Guadalcanal to an end, and there were few prisoners from that campaign precisely because the Japanese generally did not surrender. Those who were captured, often wounded or unconscious, could not come to terms with their situation. A year and a half later, on 5 August 1944, the same mechanism led to the mass breakout of Japanese prisoners from the camp at Cowra in Australia, in which more than 230 people died.

In New Zealand the affair long remained a source of embarrassment. Only in later decades did former prisoners – among them Adachi, who had been wounded in 1943 – come to Featherston to honour the dead. They paid for a plaque bearing the inscription “Rest of souls”, and a memorial garden with Japanese cherry trees – sakura – was laid out on the site of the camp. When more trees were planted at the beginning of the 21st century, opponents of the memorial tore some of them out; they were replanted. The plaque bears a haiku by Matsuo Bashō about the summer grass that is all that remains of warriors’ dreams.