“No one wins at war”: Military memories of a 100-year-old WWII veteran

World War II veteran and Pukekohe resident Desmond Mitchell can’t believe he’s 100 years old. “I think there were three years of being ninety-nine,” the centenarian jokes. “It seems to have been an awful long time coming.”

As well as being the oldest member at the Franklin RSA, he is also the longest-serving member. “My father served in the First World War, and he’d been on the committee, and so I naturally joined in 1946.”

Des was working at the auditor’s office in Hamilton when he was conscripted into the army at the age of 18. He spent three months at Ngāruawāhia Military Camp. Then, after the Japanese entered the war, he was sent to Claudelands Racecourse before marching for four days to Papakura Military Camp. His battalion was later set to work making raupō mess areas in Bombay before being relocated to Ruatangata, near Whangārei.

“While there they decided that those who had reached 21 or over were eligible for overseas service, while those under that age went to Great Barrier Island as on-guard duty to protect the island from Japanese invasion,” he recalls. “We stayed there for 10 weeks at a time. I didn’t enjoy that very much because you could see the bright lights of Auckland.”

Finding his work auditing the quartermaster’s store rather monotonous, and remembering his father’s stories of WWI trench warfare, Des decided to join the Royal New Zealand Air Force. Instead of applying to be a pilot, Des – who’d never even driven a car – applied to be a navigator, and headed to the Delta Military Base near Blenheim for training.

After training near Blenheim, Des was sent to Canada where he got his wings.

Des enlisted in the army at the age of 18 before training to be a navigator and bomb aimer with the Royal New Zealand Air Force when he was 19. He was almost 23 by the time he became a civilian again.

In May 1942, Des was posted overseas. “Only my mother came down to the railway station,” he remembers. “I said to her, ‘You can only come with me if you don’t cry.’ She came down. She didn’t cry. The next day I sailed away.”

After further training in Canada, where Des received his navigator wings, he sailed to the United Kingdom on the Nieuw Amsterdam. Not long after arriving, while travelling from Liverpool to Brighton on the train, there was an air raid. “My word, the bombs made a big noise when they fell,” recalls Des, describing this as his closest contact with the fighting (the war ended while he was still based in the UK).

However, even training was a dangerous exercise. “My two friends both got killed training to be pilots – Stan got killed in Canada and Graham at Wigram. They were the closest friends that got killed, but there were plenty of others from Pukekohe.”

Des and his fellow air force trainees. Two of his friends were killed training to be pilots.

Des has been attending Anzac dawn parades and services in Pukekohe ever since he returned in 1946. As time has gone by, he’s noticed more acknowledgement by New Zealanders of the sacrifices his generation made.

“The thing I’ve noticed most is that when we first used to march in the dawn parade in Pukekohe, there would only be about 14 or 20 people watching, but as the years rolled by the numbers have increased, and now there’s hundreds of spectators out. It shows that the young people really appreciate what happened before,” says the grandfather and great-grandfather, who is a patron of the Franklin RSA and the RSA Pipe Band.

“War’s a fruitless exercise. People get killed on both sides. I think if you’re invaded you should fight for your own country, but I don’t know if we should fight for other people’s countries. Try very hard to keep the peace in the future, because no one wins in wars.”

Des at his 100th birthday at Franklin RSA, Pukekohe, surrounded by his grandchildren.