49 killed in Featherston POW incident

During the First World War Featherston was the site of New Zealand’s largest military training camp, housing 7500 men. It was dismantled after the war but re-established in 1942 to hold 800 Japanese prisoners of war (POWs), most captured in the South Pacific.

In early 1943, many of a new intake of Japanese prisoners refused to aid their enemies by joining work parties. When they went on a sit-down strike, a warning shot fired by a guard may have wounded Lieutenant Adachi Toshio. Fearing attack, the guards opened fire with rifles and sub-machine guns. Forty-eight POWs and one guard were killed or mortally wounded in less than a minute as bullets ricocheted around the compound. News of the tragedy was kept relatively quiet through wartime censorship and because of fears that the Japanese might retaliate against Allied POWs.

An official inquiry cleared the guards of wrongdoing, accepting that they had acted in self-defence when charged by 250 rock-throwing prisoners. It blamed the incident on cultural differences that were made worse by the language barrier, but also accused two Japanese officers of inciting their fellow prisoners. The Japanese government rejected the court’s findings. 

Four decades after the war, several Japanese survivors of the incident, including Adachi, visited the site of the camp in a gesture of reconciliation that some New Zealanders with bitter memories of the Pacific War were reluctant to accept.

Image: Featherston incident plaque