Japanese war memories revisited
- Marlene Ditchfield - Wairarapa Times Age
- Apr 9, 2006
- 2 min read
It was a returned favour Masterton man Grant McLachlan happily gave last week when he took two Japanese visitors to the site of the former Featherston prisoner of war camp.
The Featherston camp was the scene of the 1943 massacre of 48 Japanese prisoners of war incarcerated during World War II. Professor Aiko Utsumi and Yoshiyuki Onogi are members of the POW Research Network of Japan.
Professor Utsumi is an authority on POWs and has published many books on the subject. Her colleague Mr Onogi has led a group known as "Peace Cycle" in Japan aimed at tracing the Burma-Thai railway. Recently, he has been lauded for discovering the foundation stones of the original bridge of the River Kwai.
Mr McLachlan was a guest speaker at a conference in Canberra studying research done on POWs in Asia, Australia and New Zealand and he met the Japanese pair, who expressed a desire to visit the Featherston camp and meet Mr McLachlan's grandfather, Charlie McLachlan, 96, who lives in Hastings with his son Bob.
Grant McLachlan had called on the expertise of the Japanese pair on numerous occasions when in Japan researching the fate of his grandfather's unit, Sparrow Force, which was held in two camps in Japan for 3? years during the war.
Grant was born on the 30th anniversary of his grandfather's liberation in September 1945 and nearly 30 years after that, Charlie McLachlan handed his grandson a POW compensation cheque from the British government and asked him to discover who was still alive from his unit.
"In 2002, my grandfather had not talked about the war. I was not allowed to discuss his experiences with him. It was only after the death of another grandparent that I felt it was time to ask him. When we got talking I eventually asked him why he had not spoken up before. 'Nobody had asked me'," he said.
Grant McLachlan spent three years interviewing over 100 veterans of Sparrow Force and the Mitsushima camp throughout Britain, Canada, the United States and Australia, all up doing two laps of the world.
Of Charlie McLachlan's unit of 189, there are just six still alive, all in Britain except for Charlie.
Grant is a lawyer*, who came to Wairarapa early this year to work in environmental planning for Masterton firm, Tomlinson and Carruthers.
The material he has unearthed around his grandfather's war experience has been written into a 10-part mini series, which a New Zealand television company is currently considering putting into production.
*Grant McLachlan holds a law degree and was admitted as a barrister and solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand. He does not hold a current practising certificate and does not provide legal services or legal advice. Where columns republished on this site incorrectly refer to him as a lawyer, this reflects the original publication's wording and not a description he uses of himself. Nothing on this site constitutes legal advice.
