Spending Saturday afternoon at the museum on Paekakariki railway station is a joy. Sitting at the desk after being asked by my wife to take charge of the afternoon visiting time adds to the occasion.
The museum is a storehouse of knowledge, a place of inspiration for writers. He Pataka Taonga.
Visitors pass through. A few are intending rail passengers who see the open door and drawn by the banners fluttering outside, succumb to curiosity. Others want the bathroom and rush in and out. Some, however, arrive on a mission.
A young man with a North American accent is talking with another visitor about the US Marine display. He casually remarks that his grandfather was stationed here during WW2.
Christopher Masson introduced himself. He is from California. His grandfather was Lt. Colonel Norman C Bayley of the US Marine Corps, who was stationed at Paekakariki in the first deployment of Marines to New Zealand in 1942. Chris is here to visit the country, connect dots, and follow the tracks left by a first hand personal account of the war in the Pacific written by his grandfather. Chris refers to the account as a book. The book is 380 pages of transcribed text and sits in a file on his laptop. The document is named COMARDET – an acronym for Commanding Officer Marine Detachment.
Chris said his grandfather would not talk about the war for decades, but one day, when he was in his seventies, he wrote a personal account about what happened to him during the war and gave a copy to each of his children.
Lt. Bayley died in 2016, aged 99. A few years before his death, Chris’s brother, Patrick, produced a documentary that follows his grandfather’s wartime experiences based on the written account. It is called ‘My Grandfather is a Superhero’, and streams through IMDb.
Chris’s visit has no particular plan as he later explains. It appears to be a fluid journey intersected with unexpected and coincidental meetings. Chris is adamant he needs to be in Paekakariki. He said that after gathering information from other sources about the Marines during WW2, while visiting Finns’ Bar a staff member pointed out local author and poet, Michael O’Leary, standing outside on the footpath. As a result of this meeting, Chris visited the museum the following Saturday and met up with me.
Chris and I carry on talking in between interested visitors joining the conversation. A few stop just to listen, one mentions she had grandparents living in Paekakariki during WW2.
Chris thought the account could be of interest to the museum and he was open to future discussion. In the meantime, I asked to see the document and he sent the file to my Ipad. Later, on returning home, I opened the document and began to write.
While reading COMARDET, I notice that Bayley has given himself a persona – he refers to himself as McCallum. I ask Chris in a later interview if they are the same person. McCallum and Bayley were the same, said Chris and and added that in his opinion, his grandfather did not want to be the centre of attention. “ It just goes along with his personality. Going back to ‘I’m just doing my job.’ He didn’t want any glory from any of this,” said Chris.
When the US Marines were sent to the Pacific their destination was not revealed to them until the ship, the USS Wakefield, a refurbished luxury liner had crossed a particular parallel. The general consensus among the men was that the ship would land at a safe port. It finally docked at Wellington. Without fanfare, Bayley noted.
The people of Paekakariki and Wellington welcomed the Marines, as history has recorded.
Lt. Bayley wrote, “a marine couldn’t walk down the streets without being invited home for tea.” Such was the extent of New Zealand hospitality.
Notwithstanding the goodwill, Lt. Bayley expressed concerns. In his view, the troops were losing focus. He wrote, “They were too relaxed. Hand and arm signals were missed because they were either playing grab-ass or talking about their great liberties {leave}. Field problems were simply boring interludes between fun and girls.” All that was soon to change, and in the most traumatic way.
Trained as well as possible, the Marines moved from Paekakariki to engage the Japanese forces head on in the Solomon Islands at Guadalcanal.
The fighting in Guadalcanal was horrific. The Solomon Islands was an unforgiving battleground, worsened by diseases such as malaria and typhoid. Intense, desperate, hand-to-hand fighting where no quarter was given was commonplace and acts of violent brutality occurred on both sides. These were moments when humanity was pushed to its outer extremes. Bayley recorded these moments in graphic detail.
He wrote of finding a comrade tied to a tree.“The huge American flag that had been tattooed on his middle had been sliced off,” he wrote. Later, in the same day, he saw a Japanese soldier in a similar condition.
Of clearing the Japanese defensive tunnels, Bayley wrote, “Some [Japanese] who were in the caves came out to find out what was going on. One of these curious men was hit full in the face by an arching ball of flame from a flamethrower. He became an instant charcoal skeleton with gaping mouth and empty eye sockets.”
The hand-to-hand fighting was intense. He was fighting for his own life when he saw a comrade decapitated by a samurai sword. He wrote, “And with great deliberation, he [the Japanese officer] swung the blade once more.”
The fight then turned to Bayley who had dropped his rifle. He records pulling out his handgun and fired three shots, “The third shot knocked him to the ground.” He then picked up the officer’s sword and and finished him off.
Later in the war, Bayley makes the following comment about the above event, but this time in reference to the atomic bombs dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “I drove that sword right through his middle. He was dying but something died in me too. Why that last unnecessary thrust? That wasn’t war. That was anger, revenge and uncalled for.”
In Guadalcanal, Bayley contracted malaria and was shipped back to New Zealand. Firstly to a military hospital at Silverstream in the Hutt Valley. From there to he was sent to a makeshift ward for the terminally ill. He wrote, “These cases were sent to Trentham Racetrack where an impromptu way station had been set up underneath the stands. Rows of stretchers were laid out with isles in between and volunteer ladies in white attended the patients until their bodies were carted off to be boxed up and shifted home.”
For three days Bayley’s life hung in the balance while he was at Trentham, waiting to die. Fate, perhaps faith, intervened. He wrote of waking to the sight of a woman in a white, nurse’s uniform sitting beside him. He heard a voice with an exhausted whisper say, “I promised myself, I wasn’t going to let this one die.”
I ask Chris Masson about this part of the document. He does not know who the woman was or why she chose his grandfather. “It’s baffling, why did it happen, but it did. If it didn’t happen then my mother would not be alive and I would not be alive. Why did she take him out of the hospital, nurse him and bring him back?” he asked.
Unexpected happenings have also played a huge part in Chris’s journey to Aotearoa. He mentions our first meeting. “Time and time again some of these weird coincidences show up and literally fall into your lap,” Chris said.
Lt. Bayley was educated at Santa Clara University, a Jesuit run establishment. There was much discussion at that time about the causes of WW1 and speculation about a possible war in Europe. He quotes the words of a former teacher in one of his lessons about global conflict. “Puffed up pride – that’s what wars are all about. Greed and power driven by pride; pride won’t listen to reason – pride is humourless, without sense of proportion – pride distorts reality.”
Lt. Bayley played a significant part in WW2, being a trusted officer during the peace process in Japan. “He had signed up to do a job and he was committed to getting it done,” Chris said.
Bayley was asked by navy officials to assess the damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused by the atom bombs. This was within days of the blasts. His account contains moving and graphic descriptions of the nuclear damage – the unbelievable destruction of buildings and bodies.
He was also part of the occupation force and attached to the Battleship USS Boston when the peace agreement was signed. Detailed descriptions of those events are contained in Lt. Bayley’s book and make compelling reading.
Chris said that he may look at a feature film, but for the present he is making cheese. He is Italian on his father’s side and that part of the family has a history of cheesemaking. His mother, Lt. Bayley’s daughter, is of Irish descent. If you Google Chris Masson’s name, a cheese website will appear. I ask if his name is French? He replies, “no it’s Italian – Messana to be correct. It was changed at a time when having an Italian name wasn’t popular.” I nod, “I know that story too.”
