Sixty-one years ago today, the war in the Pacific came to an end, and with it an end to World War Two. In New Zealand, sirens blared, and people thronged on the streets, in some places throwing streamers and confetti. Fifteen August 1945 was VJ Day — victory over Japan. It marked the beginning of a return to normality for our small country which had thrown its heart and soul into the war effort for the previous six years.

It is very appropriate on an anniversary of VJ Day to launch a book of recollections of those who fought in the Pacific War. So many thousands of New Zealanders served in the Pacific, but as time marches on, fewer remain with us to tell their stories.

When the Ministry of Culture and Heritage asked people to fill in questionnaires about their experiences in the Pacific a couple of years ago, more than 130 people came forward. This book, Against the Rising Sun: New Zealanders Remember the Pacific War, tells the stories of fourteen veterans, set in the context of the recollections of others and of our knowledge of those tough times.

This book is the latest in the series of oral histories compiled by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. Earlier volumes have told the stories of New Zealanders at war on Crete, in Italy and North Africa, as prisoners of war, and in the merchant navy. As well, only a couple of months ago on the 62nd anniversary of D-Day I launched the oral history of New Zealanders’ memories of D-Day, as part of our ‘From Memory’ project to record this country’s war histories.

Against the Rising Sun tells of the war as it was fought in our own region of the South Pacific.

Australia was very vulnerable to the Japanese advance, and many New Zealanders feared that the battleground would move even closer to our shores.

That was especially so after what US President Franklin D. Roosevelt would describe as ‘a date which will live in infamy’ — 7 December 1941, the bombing of Pearl Harbour, and the opening salvo of the Pacific War. The events in that war had a profound effect on world politics and on New Zealand’s role in our near region.

As a nation previously so focused on our ties with Britain as the centre of Empire, we were forced to focus on security in our own backyard.

There’s a certain irony in that phrase ‘the Pacific War’. The ocean whose name conveys the concept of peace became the arena of battle between Japan and the allies: the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and others.

This was a conflict fought on a vast scale over huge distances: from Darwin to Midway, and from the Solomons to Iwo Jima. New Zealand fought in three main areas: in Singapore, in the seas around Japan, and in the western South Pacific Islands. The Pacific War brought all our forces together: the Navy, the Air Force, and 3 Division of the Army.

New Zealanders like Peter Tauwhare and James Murphy were in the great armadas of warships which ranged the ocean. Torpedos weren’t the only danger. John McKay recalls being on the Formidable when a kamikaze plane crashed deliberately on the ship’s deck. RNZAF planes were among those on patrol in the area, or involved in bombing raids. Dick Mapp spoke of bullets whizzing past his plane: ‘you could hear the sound of the guns going off above the sound of your engine, but you never knew whether they were shooting at you or not.’

In the Pacific War New Zealand worked very closely with the United States, In the course of it, American troops were based in our country. The buildings of the old American military hospital in Avondale stand to this day as classrooms at Avondale Intermediate and Avondale College in my electorate of Mt Albert, in Auckland. Many close relationships were formed, with New Zealand brides settling in the United States after the war, and some American servicemen coming here to stay.

A good deal of our operations with the Americans took place in the Solomon Islands. Tom White was one of fourteen New Zealand radar operators whom the Americans had dropped off on Lumbaria. ‘We just kept very quiet’, he said of his experience of being located four miles behind enemy lines.

One of the saddest sights in the Pacific today is at Red Beach at Tarawa in Kiribati, where the American marines stormed ashore with tremendous loss of life. I understand the beach takes its name from the blood which flowed there – and the lagoon still has much wrecked military equipment.

As well, on shore there is a memorial to the Kiwi coastwatchers from the New Zealand Post and Telegraph Department. They were captured from a range of islands by Japanese forces and interned on Tarawa, before one day being shot in cold blood – a tragedy witnessed by locals.

Many of the men interviewed for this book spoke of the desperate fighting on small island outposts where the rules of war ended up being ignored. Like all involved with war, these men lived constantly with anxiety: ‘the one fear in the jungle was being captured’, Harry Bioletti told us of his time on Rabaul. Ian Newlands’ story of his three years as a prisoner of war of the Japanese makes clear the reasons for that fear. My own uncle's memories of the war in the Solomons very much echo those of the men interviewed for this book.

Many of the New Zealanders who fought in the Pacific had never left our country before being sent to tropical islands of which they had never heard, like Mono, Nissan, Guadalcanal, Bougainville, and Okinawa. Having a "house-boy" was a novelty to Bill Mitchell in Singapore. He recalls the extremes of luxury and poverty that he saw there before it fell to the Japanese in early 1942.

In the Pacific islands, rain, heat, and humidity seemed never-ending: Now ‘when I open an oven, I’m back in Guadalcanal’, Doug Benge told our historians. Many of the men remembered, without any fondness, the wildlife: the ‘bull ants’ recalled by Ralph Williams, mosquitos, and huge land crabs. Rob McLean provides a great description of the sound of thousands of these enormous creatures, creeping along the beach at night.

The climate and conditions took their toll: ‘I was fair and ginger-headed, thin-skinned, and I wasn’t made for the tropics, I’m afraid’, Noel Rosoman reflected. Men came home with malaria and many other tropical diseases, as well as with trauma and ongoing illness and disability.

Some veterans felt their service was not fully recognised in New Zealand after the war. One told us that : ‘We were branded as coconut bombers as distinct from the men of steel in the desert.’ The stories in this book put to rest any such distinctions. Here are men who served their country with great skill and courage in an environment completely different from anything they had ever encountered.

One theme has stood out in all our oral history volumes: our New Zealand servicemen and women are determined not to be seen as heroes, but rather as ordinary Kiwis doing their jobs to the best of their abilities. “What were your thoughts”, our historian asked Alan Roberts, “when you were awarded the Military Cross.” His reply was : “Arrant nonsense….I believe that thousands made much greater personal contributions in ways that I simply couldn’t have done.”

This understated and modest sense of achievement is still a strong feature of our Defence forces today. It is the New Zealand way of doing things, and it is an important marker of what it means to be a New Zealander.

I congratulate all those who have been involved with this book: Megan Hutching, the team at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, and our publishers HarperCollins. Above all I want to thank all the veterans who shared their memories with us. It now gives me great pleasure to launch Against the Rising Sun: New Zealanders Remember the Pacific War.