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1942 Tarawa Massacre
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By Michael Field, Auckland-based New Zealand and Pacific correspondent for Agence France-Presse
THE New Zealand corporal who mowed down Japanese prisoners with a tommy gun at Featherston camp in 1943 may have been acting in vengeance: weeks earlier, Japanese troops had beheaded his younger brother in a massacre on a Pacific island.
Whether Corporal Jack Owen knew of his brother Charles's death - the massacre was not yet common knowledge - is not proven. But some who knew Jack Owen say he had heard of the killings and was settling the score - and that two of the bleakest events of New Zealand's World War II experience have a strange and secret family connection.
Charles Owen was part of a mission early in the war to watch the seas around the atolls of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands as German raiders hit South Pacific shipping. Each atoll had a civilian radio operator and, where there were no other Europeans, two unarmed soldiers.
Radio operator John Jones, a volunteer from the Post and Telegraphic Department's training school in Courtenay Place, recalls that "it sounded like a nice job, something different and we were all young guys".
"And in our innocence we went away and when we got to Suva we knew we would been a tropical island."
Charles Owen had been born in Onehunga of William and Annie Owen. They were a strong Catholic Family. Charles's harelip made introspective, and his three older brothers shielded him.
On July 19, 1941, the 15 radio operators and 22 Soldiers left Suva on a new Fiji government Ship, Viti, for the atolls.
Mr Owen, soldier Leslie Speedy, and radio operator Arthur Heenan, of Hastings, were put on Maiana Island.
Mr Heenan wrote that the locals were friendly and he had a lazy time eating and sleeping. None of the coastwatchers ever saw a German.
But within a week of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941; Mr Jones and others were prisoners of the Japanese. The other coastwatchers were left exposed, unarmed and beyond protection.
But the Japanese did nothing about the coastwatchers till a US assault on Butaritari (then Makin) led by Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson left 83 Japanese dead.
Then the Japanese began rounding up the men, some of whom had been living with local women. The 17 radio operators and soldiers, missionary Tony Sadd and New Zealand trader AM McArthur were taken to Tarawa to join three prisoners from Tarawa: Australian teacher turned radio operator Reg Morgan; and two other white men, Basil Cleary and Issac Handley.
After three days tied to coconut trees, they were moved to Tarawa Central Hospital, which had an enclosure for "native lunatics".
It is there that the Tarawa massacre took place, on October 15, 1942. The widely accepted account is that it was retaliation against an American attack, but no American ships or planes were in range that month. What may have happened, rather, is that one of the prisoners had tried to escape.
At 5pm, Catholic Bishop Octave Terriene's cook, Mikaere, looked across from 40 metres away to see the white men sitting in a line in the lunatic enclosure. A lot of Japanese were inside the enclosure. "One Japanese stepped forward to the first European in the line and cut his head off. Then I saw a second European have his head cut off and I could not see the third one because I fainted."
When he came to, he saw the Japanese carrying the bodies to two pits at the side of the enclosure. Twenty-two men were beheaded.
Continued 1942 Tarawa Massacre Page 2
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