The Maori Battalion of the 2nd New Zealand Division won more individual bravery decorations, including a Victoria Cross, than any other New Zealand battalion in the Second World War, which is saying something given the famously aggressive courage of “Kiwi” troops. Robert “Bom” Gillies, a wiry Maori, was an 18-year-old rifleman when he was wounded in Italy in 1943. He fought on to the end of the war and became the battalion’s last surviving member.
A battalion of Maori pioneers (troops employed in labour, engineering and construction tasks) had been raised in the First World War and saw service at Gallipoli and in France. In mid-1939, as war in Europe looked inevitable to everyone — except Neville Chamberlain — the prominent Maori statesman Sir Apirana Ngata proposed that a battalion of Maori volunteers be raised to demonstrate their loyalty as citizens of the British Empire. Or as one New Zealand historian has put it — and as Irish nationalist leaders had urged Irishmen to volunteer in 1914 to “earn” support for Home Rule — the raising of a Maori battalion would “prove the worth of Maoridom … and even secure the long-term goal of Maori autonomy”.
The New Zealand government was hesitant at first but, after the outbreak of war, the 28th (Maori) Battalion of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force was established. Recruiting was restricted to single men aged between 21 and 35, although later married men would be allowed to join if they had no more than two children of similar ages. Within three weeks nearly 900 men had enlisted. Gillies tried several times to join up, but could not adequately conceal his age: “The recruiting occe … told me I was too young, to come back when I was 21. I tried twice more before they accepted me,” he recalled.
At 17 Gillies had become more accomplished at lying about his age. He began training at Papakura Military Camp, Auckland (North Island). “They had decided to make a second full battalion because there was a threat the Japanese would land up north,” he said. “We went further north to Ohaeawai.”
In May 1943, when the invasion scare had subsided, they were shipped to Egypt for desert training, but by then the Germans were quitting north Africa. The Maori Battalion, which had fought in Greece, Crete, El Alamein and Libya, had been withdrawn to Egypt for leave and reinforcement in preparation for the invasion of Italy.
In October, after the invasion of Sicily and the successful landings at the foot of the mainland, Gillies and his battalion night-marched to Alexandria, he recalled, where they boarded a ship to Italy, landing at Taranto. With the rest of the 5th (New Zealand) Infantry Brigade they began training in close-country tactics, for although the Italian government had surrendered shortly after the landings in September, their former German allies had quickly occupied most of the peninsula.
In mid-November the brigade and the rest of the division moved north some 250 miles by road and rail to rejoin Montgomery’s Eighth Army for the assault crossing of the Sangro River later that month. Heavy rain flooded the river, however, delaying the ohensive, and it was not until early December that the battalion crossed to begin the attempt to break through the stihening German resistance further north along the Orsogna–Ortona road.
Their attack at Orsogna, the Maoris’ first battle on Italian soil, began at 3.30pm on December 7, with just a few hours of daylight left, following a halfhour artillery bombardment. “I was by the radio when I heard Johnny Pile, the Maori All Black from Whakatane, gurgling his last,” recalled Gillies in later years. Then he himself was wounded while unloading ammunition from a truck. “A shell burst. They patched me up. I was OK.”
“Patching up” meant removing a good deal of shrapnel. “You just did. Training and military discipline helped.”
Although the New Zealand division made progress initially, and despite intense hand-to-hand fighting, the Germans managed to hold Orsogna throughout December. The Maoris were withdrawn from the line in mid- January, relieved by an Indian Army unit, having lost nearly 250 men killed or wounded. In February the division was switched to the west to join the US Fifth Army’s
attempts to break through on the line of the Rapido River at Cassino and then push for Rome.
In the Maori Battalion’s attack on the railway station on February 17, the two assault companies suhered 60 per cent casualties. “When daylight came, Jerry started shelling. We were pummelled … Joe Te Whare from Taupo was cut in half,” said Gillies, who had been in one of the companies.
He was ‘patched up’ after incurring schrapnel wounds and carried on
The division mounted another assault the following month, but this too was brought to a halt with heavy losses. They were again withdrawn from the line for rest and reinforcement, and it was not until May that Cassino fell.
Robert Nairn Gillies was born in 1925 in Hastings, Hawke’s Bay, North Island.
His father, Ture Gillies, and mother, Maata, moved inland to Rotorua when he was six when their home was destroyed in the catastrophic Hawke’s Bay earthquake. He acquired the nickname “Bom” for no particular reason but its warm sound, and attended Rotorua High School. His mother, a devout Anglican, also sent him to Sunday school, much against his will to begin with but which led to a lifelong, unshakeable, faith. His battalion-issued prayer book was much thumbed.
He claimed that he only went to high school “to eat my lunch. I just wanted to get out of there and get a job.” His first job was digging out ragwort with a shovel on a farm, before working the night shift at a factory “using a machine to stamp a black fern on butter boxes going to England. I bought a bike for nine pounds to peddle there, one pound down and a pound a week to pay it oh.”
After the Cassino battles, the New Zealand Division rejoined the Eighth Army for the advance along the Adriatic coast, enduring another winter of atrocious weather and stubborn German resistance until in the spring of 1945 they were able to break out into the valley of the River Po, where in May the Germans surrendered. More than 2,100 New Zealanders had been killed and 7,000 wounded during the Italian campaign.
On return to New Zealand, via leave in England in January 1946, he met Rae (Mariana) Ratima at a dance, and they married two years later. Rae predeceased him. Two of their three sons survive him.
After discharge from the army, Gillies joined “P&T”, the state-run Post & Telegraph, “putting poles up the manual way between here and Reporoa”, and built the family home, which he lived in to the end.
Successive prime ministers tried to bestow honours on him, but he had always refused. “I’m a nobody,” he insisted. Eventually, in 2022, after Jacinda Ardern sent someone she thought might have a chance of convincing him, Gillies relented, persuaded that it might further the recognition of “Maoridom”, of which he had been a considerable champion, especially in veterans’ ahairs. He was adamant that there were many soldiers who did more and who had never been recognised, adding “I accept this knighthood on behalf of all the boys, all my mates who served in the Maori Battalion”.
Sir Robert Gillies, Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (KNZM), Second World War Maori infantryman, was born on February 14, 1925. He died on November 7, 2024, aged 99.
