New Zealand and the Vietnam War
Vietnam was the first war New Zealand fought without Britain, and the first the public watched on television. It was also the smallest of the country's twentieth-century wars — about 3,400 military personnel served between 1964 and 1972, never more than 550 at a time — and the most divisive. No previous deployment had been opposed in the streets while it was happening; none since has left so long an argument about how its soldiers were treated when they came home.
Keith Holyoake's government committed forces reluctantly and kept them deliberately small: enough to satisfy Washington under ANZUS, "as little as we possibly could, as late as we possibly could", in the words often used to summarise the policy.
Deployment |
1964 (engineers) – 1972 (last training team); combat from July 1965 |
Main units |
161 Battery RNZA; V and W Companies RNZIR (with Australians in 1 ATF) |
Total served |
c. 3,400; peak strength 548 (1968) |
Casualties |
37 dead, 187 wounded |
Recognition |
Crown apology and Parade "Tribute 08", 2008 |
A Reluctant Commitment
New Zealand's involvement began in 1964 with a non-combat engineer detachment. Under sustained American pressure, the government announced in May 1965 the deployment of 161 Battery, Royal New Zealand Artillery — the country's first combat unit in Vietnam — which served alongside American and then Australian forces. Infantry followed in 1967: V and W Companies of the Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment, integrated with Australian battalions in the 1st Australian Task Force at Nui Dat, in Phuoc Tuy province, forming combined "Anzac" battalions.
The units' fighting record was strong — 161 Battery's guns supported the Australians at Long Tan in August 1966 with fire later credited with saving the company engaged — but the government resisted every request to enlarge the force. The commitment was alliance politics, priced accordingly.
The War at Home
Opposition began among students and churches and widened year by year: teach-ins, marches, and by the Mobilisations of 1971 crowds in the tens of thousands in the main centres — the largest protests New Zealand had seen to that point. The Labour opposition promised withdrawal, and after winning office in November 1972 Norman Kirk brought the last personnel home before the year's end.
Vietnam broke the assumption, intact since 1914, that when New Zealand sent soldiers the country stood behind them. Veterans returned without parades — some advised to travel in civilian clothes — to a public that wanted to forget the war, and to official denial of what exposure to the defoliant Agent Orange had done to their health and their children's.
The Long Road to Recognition
The veterans' grievances — health effects of Agent Orange, the absence of official welcome, the gap between service and acknowledgement — took decades to be heard. Inquiries in the 2000s accepted what earlier reviews had minimised, and in 2008 the Crown formally apologised to Vietnam veterans and their families. Wellington's "Tribute 08" weekend gave the veterans, forty years late, the parade they never had.
In the country's memory Vietnam now stands less as a military story than a civic one: the war that taught New Zealand governments to weigh alliance obligations against a public that had learned to say no — a lesson visible twenty years later, when the same generation's politics produced the nuclear-free rupture with the same ally.