Sunday, June 21, 2015

Don't mention the (race) war

After he had removed his cap the older soldier began repairing his hair. He ran the comb slowly from his forehead to the back of his neck, and fiddled with the mirror he had found in his breastpocket, just beneath the patch that showed an imperial eagle balanced on a swastika. When he had finished he put the mirror away, looked into the distance, and blew a long, phlegmy kiss.

The other soldier, who had SS markings on his helmet and his shoulder and pimple scars on his chin, looked embarrassed, and stared down at his muddy boots and at the muddy butt of his rifle.

I followed the kiss into the puddled field in front of the Nazis' tents. A few kids stood in the field, but they had their backs to the Nazis, and they were staring up at the louring sky, trying to distinguish spitfires from seagulls.
A few metres away a large man in a trenchcoat slowly mounted a German motorcycle. His helmet wore a pair of heavy black goggles. Underneath his helmet, his eyes angled downward and his nose was flat. I later found the man posing in a series of photographs on a website of the New Zealand Military Reenactment Society, and learned that his name is Michael Chong.

The motorcycle bobbled across a brown no man's land toward a tent that flew an American flag. Inside the tent two men sat on deckchairs; a map sat in their laps. The map was pale green, with brown and grey blotches that represented cities and towns and prison camps. It looked like an army issue blanket that had been burned with cigarette ends and smeared with cigarette ashes.

Hearing the motorcycle's muddy sound, the Americans stepped out of their tent, tugging at their skimpy garrison caps as the rain began to strike their hair. The motorycyclist had been joined by the vain old Nazi and the young SS recruit, and I wondered whether all three might be about to surrender to the Americans. But the enemies slapped each other's backs, giggled at each other, then wandered together towards the food stall near the edge of one of Ardmore airport's hangars. By the time the Nazis were finishing their hot dogs a spitfire was flying low over their encampment, dropping imaginary bombs.
Reenactors' Nazi impressions have not always been appreciated overseas. A Republican candidate for Congress was discredited after photos showing him hanging out with his SS Unit appeared on the internet. A Yorkshire town banned its reenactors from wandering round in Nazi uniforms, saying that their performances were offensive.

New Zealand's Military Reeanctment Society seems to have tried to preempt objections to its war games by pursuing a policy of multiracial Nazism. As it refights the battles of the Second World War, the Society will not hesitate to hand a mauser rifle or an iron cross to a Chinese or a Maori or a Jewish member. Historical authenticity may suffer, as the rigorous and ferocious racism of the Nazism is elided, but offence is avoided.

There is something inescapably absurd, though, about attempts to make Hitler's army a place of racial harmony.* The reenactors at Ardmore reminded me of an old Fry and Laurie sketch in which a kindly but very confused English vicar attempted to argue that, in the name of tolerance, the Church of England and Satanist covens should join forces.
I am sure that bad weather rather than quibbles about historical authenticity kept the masses away from this year's event at Ardmore Warbirds festival. Certainly, last year's event, which included many Nazis and was not raided by stormclouds, was a large and ebullient affair. New Zealanders remain fascinated by World War Two, and the fascination is perhaps especially strong in South Auckland and Franklin, districts that were occupied by many thousands of American troops during 1942 and '43.

As their commanders pondered defeats in the tropical Pacific and plotted the reconquest of Melanesia and Micronesia, American troops and airmen raised tents and barracks at camps in Papakura, Pukekohe, Helvetia and a dozen other bewildered suburbs and villages. They trained in local forests, hills,  pubs, and dance halls, scattering bullet cases and used condoms wherever they went.

My grandparents' farm was briefly occupied by hundreds of soldiers, who used it as a platform for the an assault on a Japanese-controlled island named the Drury Hills, and I grew up hearing vivid and ambivalent tales about the invaders.
Ardmore airport itself was built in 1943 for American and New Zealand corsairs and dive bombers. A wartime map shows the 'Aerial Ladder' that began in Auckland and ascended through the air bases on Norfolk Island, New Caledonia, Tonga, Fiji, and Espiritu Santo.

And yet Americans were not the first foreign power to occupy southern Auckland. Eighty years before the GIs, the British imperial army established a network of forts that extended from the little colonial town of Auckland to the border of the Maori-controlled Waikato, a region they would eventually invade and conquer.

These redoubts were linked by the Great South Road and its tributaries, and together housed more than ten thousand troops. The larger redoubts had libraries, chapels, and drinking dens. After the beginning of the Waikato War in July 1863 Maori guerrillas began to snipe at the forts, and to raid the armed convoys that supplied them with bullets and beef and brandy. For years after the end of the war, the redoubts were maintained and staffed by local militia.

The remains of one of the larger Waikato War redoubts lie a short distance from Ardmore airport. Ring's Redoubt protected the trail that ran east from Papakura to the port village of Clevedon. Its high earth walls made a square, and two of its corners boasted curved, specially strengthened 'bastions' where soldiers could fire at the guerrilla parties that sometimes emerged from the bush-barricaded hills behind Papakura.

But no crowds come to Ring's Redoubt to remember the Waikato War. For a long time the site was part of a farm, and in 2013 a businessman from Orewa announced plans to cover most of it in houses.
When a handful of local historians complained, the developer noted that almost all of the redoubt's walls and ditches had already been knocked down and filled in. Papakura's politicians and planners were apparently satisfied with his promise to create a tiny reserve, surrounded on three sides by houses, for the vestiges of the redoubt.

I talked recently with Ian Barton, whose Queen's Redoubt Trust is building a Visitor's Centre on the site of the largest of all the Waikato War forts. 'A lot of Pakeha don't want to remember the Waikato War' he told me sadly, after explaining the Trust's struggles to attract volunteers. Certainly, New Zealand's military reenactors seem much more interested in the wars of the twentieth than the nineteenth century. And the reenactors' coyness about Nazism can perhaps be linked to the silence that many Kiwis maintain about the Waikato War and other Maori-Pakeha conflicts.
Like the Second World War that is commemorated so curiously every year at Ardmore, the struggle for the Waikato was started by politicians and waged by commanders who believed that their race was superior to and bound to triumph over its enemies. Wartime Premier Alfred Domett spoke for the consensus when he declared his enemies 'savages', who needed to learn the necessity of 'the white man's domination'.  Just as the reenactors who meet at Ardmore do not want to remind their audiences of the racism of the Nazis, so much of the wider New Zealand population remains reluctant to remember a local war that was often justified and understood in racial terms.

*It might be argued that the Society's fantasy of a multiracial Nazism has an antecedent, in this part of the world.

In the late 1930s a few white residents of Samoa resentful of New Zealand colonial rule and nostalgic for German control created a Nazi Party. But the Samoan Nazis upset their mentors by admitting Polynesians and Jews to their party. Alfred Matthes, the Fuhrer of the Samoan Nazis, had a Polynesian wife. Polemical letters flapped back and forth between Apia and Deutschland, as the Nazis and their distant allies disputed the correct definitions of Aryan, Semite, and Savage.

I was recently astonished and depressed to learn, from a tiny article in a seventy year old issue of the Pacific Islands Monthly, that two young Samoan half-castes, one of whom bore the name Matthes, died in German uniforms, fighting on the Russian front of World War Two.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

28 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnpeqCcLD8s&feature=youtu.be
Bizarre

11:12 am  
Blogger Richard said...

Without reading all of this a point occurred to me. It is probably obvious. But New Zealanders are obsessed with all those events and wars and things apart from what happened in NZ history. (I mean by this most or many as there are aficionados who study NZ History and New Zealandia ad infinitum.

But it seems true that Americans (and those of many other countries) have a big or much bigger interest (almost to the point that it goes even further than nationalism, the US seems almost to be the centre of the world, the down side...) in their own history. The US can of course add the 2nd WW to their list but they are very aware of the US War of Independence, the Civil War etc Not all this awareness by these countries is so inclusive as such as Marlon Brando had to protest with the American Indians for their rights. But I think that there is more awareness. More in even say India know about the Indian Mutiny, and many Russians and Turks would know about the Crimean war and the earlier wars in the Caucusus (against local indigenous tribes such as the Chechens, Avarians, and the Tatar people, and the role of the Cossacks. This I learnt more about recently reading Tolstoy's 'The Caucasus and Other Stories' (it includes the terrible battle of Sevastopol in the Crimean War.)

And NZ'rs are obsessed with the ANZACS whose war efforts were largely futile of absurd. (As was the guts of the Crimean War which was almost a prelude, as was the US Civil War, for the First World War. How many know that Kitchener et al had concentration camps with thousands of Afrikaner men women and children in them, who he wanted to send to the West Indies as slaves on farms owned by the British?

But it seems to be an obsession NZrs have that they have glorious fought (mostly futile and barbaric) wars for Imperialist Powers.

James Joyce's words for those cheering a car race with British drivers were something like: 'Cheers were hear. Great cheers. Cheers from the gratefully oppressed.'

People go in droves to Maungarei where Maori had a pa etc and they sculpted the mountain (terraced it) and they lived their for a long time. But visitors are mainly ignorant of that or uninterested. Instead they stare at the crater, as if it might erupt: and most are not interested when I mention that Maori had land in Auckland etc The look out to the Skytower, and most don't even know that they are on top of a huge water reserve.

In fact we seem still to be Euro or Engla or US-centred. I even think that many Chinese want to emulate what they see of the US.

Of course these are huge generalizations. But I myself as a boy was fascinated by the 2nd World War and we used to "attack" Mt Wellington (Maungarei)...we were fighting the Germans all over.

But we did have some lessons in history and I painted a water colour when I was 9 or so showing bush near Mt Wellington. I liked the idea of the place having been wild like a jungle. So I suppose there are glimmerings of being a "Kiwi" in the non-debased sense.

But my parents were English so I wanted to go to a school event dressed as a soldier with a rifle and a busby but none of the kids recognized who or what I was. I was a little disappointed...So we are all variously influenced.

10:40 pm  
Blogger Blaize said...

This story rings familiar to me. The US is not at all interested in its own wars of racial genocide. And when we reenact Civil War battles, it is precisely without the recognition that that war had anything to do with the enslavement of black people. We do like to think about our internal history, but only with the stilted and incorrect narrative that our history was solely about the heroic and stalwart white folks fighting for "freedom." All other causes are erased.

4:47 am  
Blogger Richard said...

It's a world wide phenomena. Indians wont talk about recent massacres in some of their states. These are overlooked as they take place in a "democratic" country. In the US and Australia and NZ we don't want to talk about the "bad" things. So we concentrate on the 'glorious' stuff. But when I asked my father (from London) why the failure of Scott to get to the pole and return alive (in fact he didn't really even reach the true pole, his only nvaigator was so massively ill and fatigued by that time he couldn't add numbers and kept forgetting where he was), whereas Amundsen of NORWAY knew exactly where he was); and that great poem 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' (which even in the 1850s they all knew was a monstrous blunder): why do the British glorify these things, he said: 'The British love to glorify their fuck ups.' !

In general the British had the arrogance of great power and stupidity!

And yet great culture arose from it.

In the US, as you say, the reality of war (possible reasons for and actuality) are overlooked. Or people will rationalize these events. In NZ (and undoubtedly in the US there will be groups of people who concentrate on NZ or US history as everywhere, but the great mass of the unwashed will ignore these events and look to either the latest rugby game or WWI and the "fight for freedom" and those who "died for their country" phrases made up for madmen and militarists. No one one wants to die for anything, ever.

10:32 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://time.com/3928411/south-carolina-confederate-flag-charleston-church/

12:15 pm  
Anonymous Scott Hamilton said...

Thanks for that comment, Blaize - chimes exactly with my impression of the discourse from conservatives in the south in the aftermath of the Charlrsston killings. The Confederate battle flag has miraculously been rinsed clean of black blood, because it was a battle flag, not the national flag of the CSA. Ingenious...

We have our own neo-Confederate history down here: http://readingthemaps.blogspot.co.nz/2011/06/new-zealands-slaving-history.html

8:39 pm  
Anonymous Scott Hamilton said...

Hi Richard,

I think we share some of the same ambivalent feelings towards these re enactors. Just as you assaulted the German stronghold of Maungarei as a child, so I pursued the Krauts into the Drury Hills!

I admire the fascination with history that the re enactors possess. What made me uneasy was their jocularity, when they were wearing the uniforms of the most evil army in history, and the decision to turn Nazism into a multiracial movement.

8:44 pm  
Blogger Richard said...

Yes. As a boy of course I just loved the films of battles we saw. One was a classic, The Battle of the River Platte. And the cowboys and itchy-bums and so on. But that was a stage. There is always an ambiguity about how we see war as it is necessarily abstracted (or we would be driven mad).

These fellows: they are part of those who like war games I suppose. I also knew a chap who had been shot (not in a war) but despite how bad that experience was he was studying history and thought that war was necessary. He was keen on the US Civil War. I got on o.k. with him.

But now days war is something one would rather not think about. I read Tolstoy's stories set in the Caucusus with the Cossacks (he was in the Russian army) and his experiences in the Crimean war recently). In none of those is there much evidence of any illusions about the realities of war. Tolstoy tells it pretty much as I imagine it was. Men mostly in terror and sometimes crouching at the bottom of fox holes (something I read by a British soldier who saw action at the start of WW2, this was not uncommon, the 'heroism' I think comes from a few mad men or by chance or what happens is there is a larger force).

Maori and the British had traditions of being 'warriors' but wars were relatively limited in most cases. The Nazis were trained and their most fanatical members, the SS, exhibited an insane kind of heroism.

But it is a worry they are wearing Nazi uniforms and enacting this stuff.

Well, none of it is my cup of tea. I have never owned a gun and have no desire for one.

BTW I 'shared' that video of Tama Iti (via Visesio Siasau ) talking about his life etc and the idea of mana, that everyone has mana, and seeing eye to eye (so he once got up a step ladder so he was on a level with Government officials!).

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Anonymous Roly said...

There have indeed been reenactors of the colonial New Zealand Wars for many years. The Armed Constabulary reenactment group was founded back in 1982: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Armed-Constabulary/191946247497515

And the 65th Regiment of Foot have also been around for some time: http://hicketypip.tripod.com/

In terms of reenacting the colonial New Zealand Wars in miniature, take a look at my blog:
https://arteis.wordpress.com/category/periods/colonial-new-zealand-wars/

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'Nazi'. Why is that word for the evil side of the German army during WWII used to describe WWII German army reenactors? I am a reenactor, I am one of those Americans you were talking about. We reenact to show the public what troopers of various armies would of worn, used, done and more during their brave fighting during WWI, WWII, Vietnam and much much more. We do it for educational purposes and we do this to teach our younger generations about their brave sacrifices so their sacrifice isn't forgotten. We are not glorifying war at all, we are teaching and respecting. I am sick of German reenactors being called Nazis. We are not Nazis, in fact to reenact a Nazi in our societies is completely wrong and if you do you are kicked out. We strictly reenact the German army, no Gestapo, no Nazi party member, nothing, just plain Heer infantry, the German army, the normal soldiers who were innocent and fought for their country like every other brave soldier who fought for theirs. We are NOT nazis. We are NOT disrespecting their memories, we are NOT joking around. We try to look the part down to the combat maneuvers we do in our battles that we do to teach the public how the troopers moved in combat and to show their firepower. We take this hobby seriously. Back to me being one of the American reenactors. I started at the age of 11. I have never once regretted my decision of joining up 5 years back. It has helped me understand and I have learnt a lot in this hobby. I can not believe you guys said we were looking at Prisoner of War maps when it was just the map of St Mere Eglise, a town that was liberated by the 82nd airborne division, a division we portray and teach the public about. If any of you want to know why we reenact email me please if you do not understand and still think we are neo-nazis. Thank you.

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