The Māori Battalion is one of the country's most celebrated and decorated military units, which also saw some of the fiercest fighting and heaviest losses by New Zealanders in World War II.
The 28th Māori Battalion at a transit camp in Egypt on the morning after their evacuation from Crete, June 1941. Photo: DIA / Alexander Turnbull Library
But more than 600 of the battalion's 3000 soldiers never got their medals.
Fixing that has become a personal quest for lawyer David Stone, who has launched a major effort to track down the whānau of those soldiers.
Now, a list of those soldiers who never received their medals has been released, with the hope their whānau can be tracked down for ceremonies to be held later this year.
It is all the work of a personal inquiry Stone said spun out of control. Sitting eating lunch one day, he wondered why he never saw his great uncle's medals.
"We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into," he said.
"I wrote off to the medals department requesting not only his file, but the files for all the soldiers where he was from, Manutuke and Muriwai in Gisborne."
When those files came back, he said, there were dozens of names. That piqued his curiosity further, starting a back-and-forth that lasted nearly three years.
"So I requested the same for all my uncles from Pakipaki in Hastings, and there we found more. Then I requested files from B Company and A Company and, sure enough, every place we looked we found other soldiers."
Armed with this list, he sought out the last surviving member of the Māori Battalion, Sir Robert 'Bom' Gillies, to ask if he would attend a presentation for 134 whānau last year.
"Before I even asked him he leaned over and said to me, 'I'll be there'," Stone recalled. "Then he leaned over even further and he said to me: 'Can you do my Company next'?"
"You're not gonna say no to that," Stone chuckled.
Sir Robert Gillies is the last surviving member of the 28th Māori Battalion. Photo: RNZ / Jamie Tahana
Having now gone through every one of the Māori Battalion's companies, Stone has a list of 635 men.
The Māori Battalion had just over 3000 soldiers, so the proportion without medals is significant. Why that is is a question Stone has pondered many times.
One was the reason for his Koro: "You had to write in to request your medals and our tipuna said, 'well actually, you can present it to us face-to-face as per our tikanga, and you do it like that or don't.'
"I was told the story they felt so strongly about it that they took it to the grave."
When the knighthood for Robert Gillies was announced in December, he also made clear an institutional factor. That the Māori Battalion were not honoured in the way that they should have been.
David Stone said feels a sense of opportunity lost, that this is happening in 2022, when only one member of the Māori Battalion is still alive. Photo: RNZ / Shannon Haunui-Thompson
"A lot of our men, they never got recognised for the work they did. A lot of them did a lot of work in the war. But, you know, they just carried on, sometimes I wonder what it was all for," Tā Robert told RNZ then.
That resonated with what David Stone has heard too.
"Let's be clear about this ... if you have an idea of what 1950s New Zealand was like and attitudes towards Māori then, our Māori Battalion soldiers weren't really immune from all that sort of stuff. Koro told me he felt the racism as soon as he got off the boat."
Now, the race is on to make amends. The military has swung in behind the kaupapa, with three ceremonies planned for later this year.
"The army is supportive of this kaupapa, but they fully acknowledge that this should have been done years - decades - ago, they don't deny that," Stone said.
"They now see this process as part of making things right, they're actually calling it Project Whakatika, which means to make right."
But he cannot help but feel a sense of opportunity lost, a whakamā at what should have been, that this is happening in 2022, when there is only one living member of the Māori Battalion left.
"That's why we're pushing things through as fast as we can," Stone said. "We never know how long any of us have, but it's safe to say he doesn't have a huge number of Anzac parades left in him."
"So we're wanting to complete this kaupapa while our rangatira is the still with us, because it would not be the same without him."
Relief for veteran's family
A man whose father had unclaimed war medals is relieved the set will be complete.
Kia Houpapa (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Maru) saw the Te Mata Law list on social media this weekend, including his dad's name, Tako Houpapa, who served in North Africa and Italy.
Tako Houpapa was a member of the 28th Māori Battalion. Photo: Supplied
"It would have been nice for them to have had them while they were alive but I think my father remembered those medals with more sadness than anything, because of what it took to earn those medals. They lost a lot of people, they lost a lot of family, they lost a lot of friends."
"They went through some pretty horrendous things," he said.
"We've always been proud of dad and all of the members of the Māori Battalion."
The Houpapa whānau claimed Tako's medals after he died, and mounted them, but they knew at least one was missing and will now reapply.
A full list of the soldiers' names can be found on the link below:
A guide to how to apply is here:
