During the Second World War New Zealanders became prisoners of war in large numbers. Most Kiwi POWs were soldiers captured in Greece, Crete and North Africa. In total, more than 8000 were held in captivity - one in 200 of New Zealand's population at the time.
Wes Jack was a reporter on the 'Tiki Times', a POW camp newspaper. Here he describes how it was put together and how it survived the war. Hear Wes Jack discussing the camp newspaper.
Blowers are an example of the ingenuity of prisoners of war. Made from bits and pieces that the men found in their camps, they were used for heating up food.
Most of New Zealand's Second World War POWs were captured in the European theatre in the early stages of the war. Only about 100 New Zealand servicemen fell into Japanese hands, mainly airmen or seamen attached to the Royal Navy or Royal Air Force.
Two kilometres north of the quiet little Wairarapa town of Featherston a small memorial garden marks the site of a riot that resulted in the deaths of 48 Japanese prisoners of war and one guard.
The incarceration of most New Zealand army POWs began in transit camps where facilities were rudimentary in the extreme. Generally little more than holding pens, they were invariably overcrowded, lacked shelter, and had insufficient ablutions for large numbers of men.
POW camps tended to be rather bleak places. They could not, for security reasons, have trees and other greenery growing in them although many prisoners did receive seed from the YMCA in Geneva and plant their own vegetable and flower gardens.
The 'Tiki Times' was a hand- printed and illustrated newspaper produced weekly at prisoner of war camp E535, Milowitz, Poland from August 1944 to January 1945. Milowitz was a coal mining camp where 500 New Zealand POWs worked alongside Polish miners, together with a few English, Spanish and Cypriot prisoners.
As the war drew to a close, POWs in the more eastern of the German camps were often gathered together at short notice and marched off under guard in a westerly direction - away from the approaching Russian army.
The prospect of liberation was a key to POWs' morale. But a great many had no intention of passively awaiting the arrival of Allied forces, an attitude that was reinforced by the recognition that it was a POW's duty to attempt to escape.
Attention was given to the problem of repatriating POWs long before 1945. A New Zealand repatriation unit was established in the United Kingdom under the command of Major-General Howard Kippenberger late in 1944.
This graph shows that the vast majority of New Zealand Army POWs (6897) were captured between April 1941 and September 1942. Of these 1856 were captured in Greece, 2180 in Crete and the remainder in the Western Desert.
