Enemy Camp  David Hill

 

Enemy Camp

David Hill (2016)
Novel, 260 pages, 
Paperback       
 ISBN 978 0 14 330912 3

Enemy Camp

This novel is set during a tragic and little understood event in New Zealand’s wartime history: the Featherston shooting. It is told in diary form by Ewen MacKenzie, a 12-year-old schoolboy. Ewen’s father, Jack MacKenzie, invalided back from Greece, is one of the New Zealand soldiers guarding Japanese prisoners at the nearby P.O.W. camp, “the first one for Japanese prisoners in the whole British Empire.” Since Ewen is also interested in the day-to-day events (and gossip) around him, we gain a good picture of wartime civilian New Zealand: the blackout precautions, the Home Guard exercises, conscientious objectors, the arrival of US soldiers, casualty lists, school air-raid drills and other ways that war changed people’s lives. “Dad has turned our whole front and back section into a vegetable garden, because so many things are hard to get in the shops.”

 

When his teacher makes him start his writing in October 1942, Ewen duly notes the irritations of wartime shortages; in fact, his diary is an Army notebook obtained from his father. “Mr White says we we’re living at a special time in a special place, and someday we’ll feel glad we recorded it.” We learn that Ewen’s friend Barry has a stutter and that Barry’s brother Clarry (10) is recovering from polio and needs metal leg-braces and crutches to walk. Ewen’s journal records stages in Clarry’s struggle to walk normally, Barry’s battle with his stutter and Ewen’s own changing attitude to girls in general (and Susan Procter in particular).

 

Ewen and Barry regularly cycle out to the camp, towing Clarry in an improvised trolley. At first, the Japanese prisoners, seen through the barbed wire, seem unimpressive. “The first four hundred were mainly workers who had been building airfields…Dad says there were architects and engineers and even teachers among them. They’ve been no trouble.”

 

Using his position as a guard, Jack introduces the three boys to the English-speaking Lieutenant Itoh, whose own son is the same age as Clarry. It is arranged that Itoh will give them language lessons. “Good for both sides,” says Jack. (Always a shrewd observer, Ewen notes that it is the men who have seen war service, like his father and Mr White, who are less judgemental about the enemy prisoners.)

Communication and understanding (or the lack of it) is the key theme in the story. Ewen, initially sceptical, finds himself intrigued by what he learns from the lessons with Itoh. From Mrs Procter who has lived in Japan, the boys (and the reader) learn about the Japanese military concepts which are creating disputes among the prisoners. Itoh (loosely based on the real Lieutenant Adachi) is moved by Clarry’s courage as he struggles to walk unaided.

 

Tensions rise as new prisoners arrive in the camp. “The Japs are ashamed of being prisoners and not dying in battle; the guards are feeling they’re being sneered at and ignored by people who should be obeying them,” is Ewen’s summation.

 

Finally the three boys literally walk into the final deadly confrontation, providing the reader with a vivid account of the tragedy and its effects.

 

Enemy Camp is not a re-hash of newspaper clippings; rather it is a well-constructed historical novel, recreating some of the attitudes and actions of the period, with a wide range of interesting characters, each with their own motivation. The various points-of-view are well presented, and readers will gain a good understanding of the issues involved.

 

Note: A History Study Resource based on the 1943 Featherston incident is at http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/classroom/incident-at-featherston

Another YA novel, Dreams of Warriors, by Susan Brocker (2010) also deals with this topic. The similar Cowra breakout took place in NSW over a year later in August 1944.

 

 Trevor Agnew 
19 Feb 2016

 

 DAVID HILL