May 13th, 1943. Enfield, Tunisia. At 10 core headquarters, a senior access officer arrived to surrender. Not as a representative, not through an intermediary, in person. Marshall Giovanni Messi, commander of the first Italian army, stepped forward. Beside him was Major General Kurt von Leestein, commanding the German 164th Light Africa Division, a man who had received the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross just 3 days earlier.

These were not minor figures. They commanded what remained of the Axis military presence in North Africa. Roughly 238,000 soldiers who would lay down their arms that day. The officer who received that surrender was Lieutenant General Bernard Fryberg, acting as temporary core commander. A New Zealander, not a Britain, not an American.

A general from a country of 1.6 6 million people, fewer than the city of Hamburg, who had sent farmers, tradesmen, teachers, and shepherds across the Indian Ocean to fight in someone else’s war and had ended up standing at the close of the most significant Axis defeat since Stalenrad. 3 months earlier, in February 1943, an entire German army had surrendered at Stalenrad.

Now in Tunisia, another massive Axis force was finished. And the man formerly receiving the documents shaking hands with the beaten commanders standing in the Tunisian sun at the end of 3 years of desert war was representing a division from the South Pacific that the German military establishment had never given a second thought to when it first appeared in Egypt in early 1940.

That gap between how the second New Zealand division was regarded and what it eventually became is the story here. New Zealand in September 1939 was not a nation that invited military fear. It was a dominion of the British Empire at the far end of the world. Separated from the nearest continent by 2,000 km of ocean with an economy built on wool, meat, and dairy exports.

Its largest city, Auckland, had a population of around 200,000 people. Its standing army was negligible. It had no indigenous armor, no modern artillery to speak of, and no recent institutional memory of large-scale conventional warfare outside of the catastrophe of 1914 to 1918. A war in which New Zealand had lost 16,697 dead from a population of barely 1 million.

The highest per capita death rate of any nation involved. When Prime Minister Michael Savage declared war on Germany on September 3rd, 1939, the statement he made was frank about where New Zealand stood in the world. Where Britain goes, we go. Where she stands, we stand. There was no pretense of strategic independence, no suggestion that New Zealand had a separate calculation to make.

Britain was in danger. New Zealand would send men. The second New Zealand expeditionary force, the 2NEF, began forming almost immediately. Its commander was Major General Bernard Fryberg, a man of remarkable personal biography. Born in England, raised in New Zealand, decorated in the First World.

war with the Victoria Cross and three DSOs. A man Winston Churchill would later describe as his salamander for his habit of seeking out the hottest parts of any fire. Freyberg was technically a British army officer, but his loyalties were unambiguous. He had accepted the New Zealand command on the explicit condition that his division would answer to the New Zealand government, fight as a complete formation, and not be parcled out in brigade groups at British convenience.

That condition would matter enormously in the years ahead. The first echelon of the two NZF left New Zealand in January 1940, arriving in Egypt in February. They were followed by subsequent echelons over the coming months. These men were overwhelmingly volunteers. Conscription wasn’t introduced until June 1940.

And they came from every corner of the country. Farmers from Canterbury and Southland, freezing workers from the North Island, timber workers, bank clerks, mechanics, and Maui men from WI across both islands who would form the 28th Mari Battalion. the only unit in the British Commonwealth to be organized on ethnicity and eventually decorated more times per capita than any other New Zealand battalion in the war.

To the German military intelligence analysts watching Allied force dispositions in 1940 and 1941, the New Zealanders were a Commonwealth curiosity, one more colonial contingent among several. the British, South Africans, Australians, Indians, Canadians. The empire was large and its contributions varied.

Nothing in the two NZDF’s initial composition announced anything exceptional. They arrived without the battle reputation of the Australians who had been fighting since 1940, without the institutional sophistication of the British regular army, and without the national mythology that some other formations carried into battle.

They were simply there, and that in the minds of the men they would eventually face was about as far as the assessment went. that dismissal would not survive contact with the ground realities of the next three years. But in 1940, it was entirely reasonable. What the German analysts could not have known because it had not yet happened was that the precise qualities the New Zealand division would need to become exceptional were not ones that could be identified in a peaceime ledger.

They would be built brutally and at significant cost through a sequence of campaigns that seemed at the time to be mostly composed of retreats, disasters, and near annihilations. Greece, Cree, the Western Desert. A series of engagements in which the New Zealanders repeatedly took their objectives, repeatedly held their ground, and repeatedly found that the support they had been promised had not arrived.

Each time they absorbed the lesson, they changed the way they fought. They stopped assuming anyone else would be where they were supposed to be. and they began designing their tactics around that assumption. By the time they reached Tunisia in January 1943, they were a fundamentally different organization than the one that had disembarked in Egypt 3 years earlier.

Montgomery’s own chief of staff, Brigadier Francis Dingand, described them as the eighth army’s mobile shock troops. That description had not been available in 1940. It was earned. But there is something else that sits at the center of this story. Something that connects the Anidville surrender ceremony to the farms and towns the New Zealand soldiers came from.

By the end of the North African campaign, the cost to New Zealand would be 2,989 dead, more than 4,000 taken prisoner, and over 7,000 wounded. For a country of 1.6 6 million people. These numbers were not abstractions. They were felt in every town, in every community. Postwar calculations would show that New Zealand’s ratio of dead per million of population, 6,684, was the highest in the entire Commonwealth, higher than Britain, higher than Australia, higher than Canada.

This was not a nation of professional soldiers sending a professional army to war. It was a small country sending its people. And those people dismissed by the military establishment they had come to assist would end up at the center of some of the most consequential battles in the Western Desert campaign.

and at Enfield on May 13th, 1943, receiving the formal surrender of a beaten Axis force that once thought they were barely worth categorizing. The question is how that happened. The answer starts not in Tunisia, but in the ruins of campaigns most people have forgotten. Fought across three years in the deserts of Libya and Egypt and the mountains of Greece and Cree, where a division that nobody feared slowly learned exactly what it took to survive and then to win.

There is a statement widely attributed to Field Marshal Irwin Raml that addresses the New Zealanders directly. It is a statement that even with the historioggraphical debate around its precise sourcing captures something real about how the Axis eventually came to regard the men who had been written off as farming amateurs.

You will hear that statement by the end of this story. First, you need to understand what it costs to earn it. In April 1941, the second New Zealand division went to Greece. It came back with nothing. Not nothing in the melodramatic sense, not nothing as a figure of speech. Literally nothing. When the Royal Navy completed the evacuation from the Greek mainland in the last week of April, the New Zealanders left behind almost all of their artillery, their transport vehicles, and their heavy weapons. They had been in Greece for less than 4 weeks. The German invasion began on April 6th. The Allied line was outflanked almost immediately. What followed was not a fighting withdrawal in any organized sense. It was a controlled collapse. Units leapfrogging south through a country that provided no defensible terrain while the Luftwafa had uncontested control of the air above

them. By the time it was over, 291 New Zealanders were dead and more than 1,800 were in German captivity. Most of the men evacuated from Greece were sent directly to Cree. There was no pause, no refit, no time to process what had just happened. They arrived on the island with barely the equipment they carried on their backs and were immediately folded into the defense of a position that had received almost none of the preparation it needed.

Fryberg, placed in overall command of Allied forces on Cree, warned his superiors weeks in advance that the island could not be held without air cover. The air cover did not come. The German airborne assault began on May 20th, 1941. Hundreds of paratroopers dropped from Junker’s transport aircraft across the north of the island around Malem, Kanea, Retimo, and Heracleion.

The fighting that followed was some of the most vicious the New Zealanders had yet encountered. At Malem, a misread of the tactical situation led to a New Zealand withdrawal from positions overlooking the airfield. That withdrawal proved critical. The Germans poured reinforcements through Malem in the days that followed, and the Allied position deteriorated beyond recovery.

By June 1st, Cree was German. Of the New Zealanders who had been sent to defend it, 671 were dead and 2,180 were taken prisoner. More than 6,000 Germans were killed or wounded in the assault. Testimony to how hard the defense had been, even as it failed. The division came back to Egypt for the second time in 6 weeks, again without its heavy equipment.

Again, absorbing a defeat that had not been of its own making. This needs to be understood clearly because it is easy to look at that sequence Greece then cree then the disasters that would follow in the desert and conclude that the New Zealand division was simply a formation that kept losing. That reading misses something essential in both Greece and Cree.

The New Zealanders had fought well at the tactical level. They had held positions they were ordered to hold. They had delayed advances that more poorly trained units would have been overrun by immediately. What failed around them was the strategic framework they had been inserted into. Chut the decision to send a force to Greece that had no realistic chance of success.

The absence of air support that should never have been promised. The broader failures of allied coordination at the command level. The men who came back to Egypt understood this distinction clearly. it would matter. The first desert campaign, Operation Crusader, began in November 1941. The objective was to relieve the siege of Tobrook, where an Allied garrison had been surrounded since April.

The New Zealand division crossed the Libyan frontier on November 18th. For the first several days, things went well. The fifth brigade advanced towards Soomn and Berdia, cutting off access supply routes. The sixth brigade pushed west along the city reseggment, a low stony ridge about 40 km southeast of Tobrook, fighting their way forward in a series of night attacks against fierce resistance.

On November 27th, men from the 19th battalion linked up with the Tobrook garrison at Aduda. The siege was broken. The I New Zealand division had done what it had been sent to do. Then the tanks didn’t come. Between November 28th and December 1st, German and Italian forces counteratt attacked at Sidi Rezg and Bhammed.

The fourth and sixth brigades were hit from multiple directions by German armor. It had been planned that British armor would support the New Zealanders in holding what they had taken. The armor did not arrive. The battalions dug in on the Rocky escarment had no effective anti-tank defense. By December 1st, German tanks had overrun large sections of both brigades.

The corridors into Torbrook were severed. Thousands of New Zealanders went into captivity for the third time in a single year. When the final accounting was done, Crusader had cost the Second New Zealand Division 879 dead, 1,699 wounded, and 2,42 taken prisoner. 4,620 casualties in total. It was the most expensive campaign the division would fight in the entire war.

And the New Zealand official history noted something specific about who had paid the heaviest price. More New Zealanders were killed or taken prisoner and crusader than in any other campaign. And more New Zealanders died, were wounded, or went missing than in any other Eighth Army division involved in the same operation.

The New Zealand government insisted the division withdraw to Syria to recover. Fryberg’s men spent the first half of 1942 there rebuilding. In June 1942, the situation in the desert deteriorated sharply. Raml’s forces broke through at Gazala and Tollbrook, which had resisted siege for months in 1941, fell in a single day.

The New Zealand division was recalled urgently from Syria and rushed back into the line. They arrived at a position called Minkar Caim in Egypt and found themselves surrounded almost immediately by the 21st Panzer Division. What happened next became part of the division’s institutional memory.

Fraberg, wounded in the neck by shrapnel, led a breakout at night through the German lines at Bayonet Point. His men punched through, disengaged, and drove 160 km east to the Alamne line. The encirclement had lasted hours. The escape was total. They fell back to Elamagne and held. Through July 1942, the division fought two engagements that would come to define its relationship with British armor for the remainder of the campaign.

On the night of July 14th to 15th, the New Zealanders attacked and captured Rubyat Ridge in a night assault, advancing nearly 10 kilometers against defended positions. By dawn on the 15th, they held the ridge. British armor was supposed to move forward in support before first light. It did not.

When German tanks appeared, the New Zealanders on the ridge had no effective answer. The cost was 1,45 casualties, of whom all but 290 were killed or captured. Among the prisoners was Captain Charles Uppam, who had already won one Victoria Cross and would, while wounded and in captivity, be recommended for a second.

One week later, on the night of July the 21st to 22nd, it happened again. The sixth brigade attacked the Elmar depression southwest of Ruisat Ridge. They took their objectives in the early hours of the morning. Two British armored brigades were committed to move through the gap the infantry had created.

The mind sweepers could not clear a passage in time. When the German fifth and eighth panzer regiments counterattacked at dawn, the sixth brigade was exposed unsupported and hit by armor on open ground. Another 900 New Zealand casualties in a single morning. Brigadier General Inglas, commanding the division in Fryberg’s absence due to wounds, declared afterward that he would not consider any further operation of the same kind.

The official New Zealand history recorded that after Elmar, a sour, discontented mood settled over the division, not directed at the Germans, but at the eighth army’s methods and specifically at the British armor. That distinction matters, and it explains what happened next. The distrust that hardened in the P summer of 1942 was not bitterness or defeatism.

It was a professional recalibration. The New Zealand Division stopped assuming that any part of the battle plan, except its own peace, would be executed as ordered. It began designing its attacks around the assumption that it would have to sustain itself, to keep its flanks, to hold its objectives, to fight through whatever came after the infantry had done its job.

It became, by necessity better at all arms coordination within its own formation than any other division in the Eighth Army. This is the part that gets lost when the desert campaign is reduced to a narrative of victorious names. Elamine Tobuk Tunisia. The education that produced the division which eventually received the Axis surrender at Enidavville was built out of Sidi Regisat Elmrer. Battles that ended badly.

Battles where the New Zealanders did their job and were nonetheless consumed by failures elsewhere. Each one taught the same lesson. Depend on yourself. Know exactly where your flanks are. Don’t wait for support that may not come. By October 1942, when Montgomery launched the second battle of Elamine, and gave the second New Zealand division the task of leading operation supercharge, the breakthrough assault on the Axis line.

That education had been fully absorbed. The division that stepped off on the night of November 1st to 2nd and punched the hole through which the 8th Army poured was not the formation that had arrived in Egypt in early 1940. It had been remade at considerable cost into something that Montgomery’s own chief of staff would describe as the army’s mobile shock troops.

That description was earned engagement by engagement over three years of being let down, overrun, evacuated, and sent back. The losses from those three years, Greece, Cree, Crusader, Ruisat, Elmer, are not a record of failure. They are the cost of the education that made Tunisia possible.

The next lesson was Tbaga Gap, and that one the New Zealanders would deliver themselves. On the night of November 1st to 2nd, 1942, the Second New Zealand Division stepped off into the dark at Elamagne for the last time. What Montgomery had been building toward for weeks, the methodical attrition, the wearing down of Raml’s supply lines and armor, the careful accumulation of numerical superiority, had to end in a single decisive blow.

The opening assault of Operation Lightfoot on October 23rd had broken into the Axis defenses with the New Zealanders capturing Mitria Ridge in the initial push. But the momentum had not translated into a breakthrough. Congestion, coordination failures and hesitant armored leadership had again prevented the infantry gains from being exploited.

Montgomery needed a second punch aimed at a different point in the line. He called it Operation Supercharge and he gave it to Freyberg. The task was specific. Punch a corridor through the Axis defenses deep enough for British armor to pour through and destroy what remained of Raml’s tank. At 10:5 in the morning, the infantry At the morning, the infantry advanced.

The New Zealanders with the 28th Mory Battalion attached to the leading British brigades drove through the prepared positions and seized their objectives against fierce resistance. The ninth armored brigade assigned to exploit the breakthrough lost nearly all its tanks against the Axis anti-tank screen, but the sacrifice held the line long enough.

By November 4th, the Africa Corps was out of fuel and facing encirclement. Raml ordered a full retreat. The Axis force that had held Egypt to a standstill for 2 years was now running west and it would not stop until it ran out of continent. The pursuit that followed covered more than 2,000 km from Elmagne across the Libyan desert past Tobuk and Benghazi through Elegala and Certa and the long coastal road.

The New Zealand division was used repeatedly in flanking moves, what the official records call left hooks, designed to cut off the retreating axis columns before they could establish new defensive lines. At Eliga in December 1942 and again at Nofilia, Fryberg’s core swung out into the desert to encircle the position while other forces fixed the enemy frontally.

The moves worked, but never quickly enough to trap the mass of the retreating army. Raml understood the threat of encirclement and always disengaged in time. On January 23rd, 1943, the second New Zealand division entered Tripoli. The city that had been Raml’s principal supply base for 2 years was now in Allied hands.

3 years of fighting had finally cleared the entire North African coastline from Egypt to the Tunisian border. But the campaign was not over. Raml’s forces had fallen back behind the Marath line, a system of fortifications originally built by the French in Deceia against Italian Libya and had reinforced it considerably.

The line ran from the sea inland through the Matmata Hills. It was the last defensible position before Tunis. On March 19th, 1943, Montgomery launched the frontal assault, Operation Pugilist. The 50th Division established a bridge head across the Wadi Zigzho, a natural tank obstacle with banks up to 70 ft high, but the terrain prevented the armor and anti-tank guns from moving forward in support.

On March 22nd, the 15th Panzer Division counterattacked and recaptured most of the bridge head. The frontal assault had failed. It was the same pattern the New Zealanders had watched repeatedly from the other side. Infantry taking ground they couldn’t hold without armor. Armor unable to move forward fast enough to matter.

Montgomery needed a different option. The different option existed because of something the French military had declared impossible in 1938. In their survey of the terrain south of the Matmada hills, French engineers had concluded that the Jebel Dahar, the rough country west of the mountains, was not passable for motorized vehicles.

The Marath line southern end was therefore left unextended inland. There was no point fortifying ground that couldn’t be crossed. By 1943, motor vehicles could cross it. The long range desert group had already proven this with a patrol that penetrated through Wilders’s Gap, reached to Baga Gap on the other side of the Matmada Hills and continued north all the way to Gaffsa where it made contact with the Allied First Army advancing from the west.

The route was there. It was rough, demanding, and 200 kilometers through terrain the French had written off, but it was there. Montgomery formed the New Zealand Corps for the operation. Freyberg’s existing division of 14,500 men, including the 28th Mori Battalion, was reinforced with the British eighth armored brigade, the French force L under General and the TA administrative and fire support of Xcore headquarters under Lieutenant General Brian Horix.

The plan was a two-stage movement. A night march through Wilders’s Gap and across the Jebel Dahar, followed by an assault on the Axis positions at Tbaga Gap, a 10 km wide valley through which the road north ran between two ranges of high ground. If the New Zealand Corps could break through Tbaga Gap and reach the coast at Gabis, the entire First Italian Army defending the Marath line would be cut off.

The core arrived at Tbaga Gap on the night of March 20th. An initial attack that night seized several Italian positions, but Fryberg paused rather than pressing immediately. German and Italian reinforcements, including elements of the 164th Light Division and 21st Panzer Division, were moving to block the gap. The opportunity for a quick decision was lost.

For five days, the two sides faced each other across the valley floor while Montgomery strengthened the flanking force and finalized the plan for the main assault. Operation Supercharge 2 launched on March 26th. It began with a combined artillery barrage and a low-level air assault. Fighter bombers coming in directly over the infantry to suppress the defenses ahead of them.

Then the armor moved with infantry following in carriers and on foot. The fifth New Zealand brigade attacked on the right. The sixth New Zealand brigade attacked on the left. Behind them, the first armored division waited to push through once the gap was open. On the right flank, where the fifth brigade advanced, one of the assault objectives was.

209, a hill held by the second battalion of the 433rd Panzer Grenadier Regiment of the 164th Light Division. The 28th Maui battalion’s sea company drew the assignment. Second Lieutenant Moana Akiwangarimu was 23 years old. He had been born in Wer Ponga on the east coast educated at Tea College and had served with the battalion through Greece cree and the full length of the east desert campaign before being commissioned as a platoon commander in April 1942.

On the afternoon of March 26th, he led his platoon straight up the face of the hill under sustained mortar and machine gun fire. The official VC citation records what happened next in plain language that requires no amplification. He was first to reach the crest. He personally destroyed at least two enemy machine gun posts.

The enemy counterattacked and his much reduced platoon repelled the attack by direct engagement. He was wounded in the shoulder by rifle fire, then in the leg by shrapnel. Both his company commander and battalion commander ordered him back. He refused, saying he would stay a little while with his men.

Through the night, with the enemy holding the reverse slope of the same hill 20 yards away, the attacks came repeatedly. During one assault, the enemy used grenades to break through a section of his line. Ngarimu ran to the brereech. Those he didn’t kill, he drove back with his Tommy gun and with stones when the ammunition ran out.

By morning only Ngaramu and two unwounded men remained. Reinforcements reached them. Then the enemy came again. He was killed on his feet, firing from the hip and fell among the German dead. He was awarded the Victoria Cross postumously. It was the first VC awarded to a Maui soldier serving with New Zealand forces.

The medal was presented to his parents at a gathering of 7,000 people at Rutoriia in October 1943. The breakthrough at Tbaga Gap was complete by March 28th. Axis forces abandoned the Marath line entirely and fell back 40 m to the next defensive position at Wadi Acurate. On March 29th, New Zealand troops captured Gabes.

Montgomery sent Freyberg a personal message acknowledging the result. The left hook had worked. For the second time in five months, Freyberg’s core had been handed the most difficult operational task available and had executed it. But the Axis forces had not surrendered. They had retreated. They were now compressed into a shrinking perimeter in northern Tunisia.

Their backs to the Mediterranean, still occupying ground they intended to hold. In front of the New Zealanders now stood Tacuna, a limestone rock fortress rising out of the Tunisian plane that one British general would later call the sight of the most gallant feat of arms he had ever witnessed in the entire war.

By April 1943, the Axis position in North Africa had contracted to a bridge head roughly the size of Wales. The front ran from the Mediterranean coast south through the hills of Tunisia and along its length the defending forces. German and Italian what remained of them occupied every piece of high ground they could find.

They had been retreating for 5 months. They were short of fuel, short of ammunition, and being compressed from two directions by Allied armies closing in from east and west. But they were not yet finished and the terrain gave them options. In the hills around Enfeedville, approximately 100 kilometers south of Tunis, they had turned a series of rocky outcrops into defensive positions, the approach to which was almost entirely controlled by whoever held the high ground.

The second New Zealand division was now part of X core under Lieutenant General Brian Horox. On April 19th, Horox’s core attacked on a three divisional front. The fourth Indian division on the Aadi left, the New Zealand division in the center. The 50th North Umbrean Division engaged with fire on the right.

The New Zealand task was to clear the foothills between Enidville and Tacuna. The sixth brigade attacking on the right flank of the New Zealand sector achieved its objectives without severe difficulty. The ground was hard but navigable. The resistance serious but manageable. By the following morning, the sixth brigade’s battalions were on their objectives and consolidating.

The fifth brigade attacking on the left ran into Tacuna. The feature is visible from a considerable distance. A limestone pinnacle rising approximately 200 m from the flat Tunisian plane. It sits at the end of a ridge with sheer faces on three sides and an approach from the rear that the defenders had mined and fortified.

The top was roughly crescent-shaped divided into four distinct areas. A narrow ledge connected by steps to a pinnacle. The pinnacle itself virtually inaccessible on all four sides. a small village of stone buildings at the western end and the larger settlement of Takuna village at the base near the road. The garrison holding it consisted of one battalion of the Italian 66th Infantry Regiment from the Triesta Division, elements of two companies from the Fulgore Parachute Division and a German anti-tank platoon of 20 men. The fifth brigade’s plan assigned the Maui battalion’s B company and C company to advance through the olive groves east of the rock, skirt its base and push through toward the Envidavville Zaguan road beyond it. D Company was to follow and then wheel back to assault Tacuna from the rear. Two sections of B company

were to detach and create a diversion at the base of the cliff. The 21st and 23rd battalions had their own objectives on the flanks. The night attack of April 19th to 20th failed. The approaches to Takuna were extensively mined. The olive groves and cactus hedges between the start line and the rock had mines sewn throughout them.

Indirect fire from the heights was continuous and accurate. The defenders had pre-registered their guns on every likely axis of approach. Companies became separated in the dark. Officers fell. By the time the advanced dressing station reported back to fifth brigade headquarters, they had 11 wounded officers from the Mouy Battalion alone.

The commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Bennett, was wounded by a mine. By morning, the battalion had lost 12 officers and 104 other ranks, killed, wounded, or missing out of the 319 men who had started the night’s fighting. The CO and all but one company commander were dead or out of action.

The attack on Takuna had stalled. Brigade headquarters began planning a daylight assault. Then at approximately 5:00 in the morning, someone at brigade headquarters noticed something unexpected. Prisoners were coming down from the pinnacle. A stream of Italian soldiers, hands raised, descending from a feature that was supposed to still be held in full strength.

What had happened was this. A section of B company, 12 men, had spent the night in a watti at the bottom of Takuna’s eastern face. They were cut off from the rest of their company by the same mines and fire that had broken the main assault. Their orders had been to create a diversion. The diversion had served its purpose and then collapsed into the general chaos of the night.

They could hear what was happening to the rest of the battalion. They could hear the rock above them. Their section commander was Sergeant Han Manahi, 28 years old, of Tearawa descent from Roarooa. He had been with the battalion since the beginning. Greece, Cree, the full length of the desert. He held the rank of sergeant, leading a section of 12 men in a battle where the battalion above him had just lost nearly all of its officers.

At dawn, without orders from any superior, Manahi split his section into two parties and began to climb. The cliff face on the east, eastern side of Takuna, was not a climbing route. It was a sheer limestone wall, the kind of terrain that military planners had looked at and routed their attacks around.

Manahi’s section went straight up it in two groups using handholds in the rock. When they reached the top, they found the Fulgore paratroopers and the Italian infantry and the German anti-tank platoon occupying a position that had just spent several hours repelling a brigades-sized assault from below.

12 men cleared the summit. By 7:00 that morning, prisoners were descending the accessible routes under Maui escort, and Manahi held a position that fifth brigade headquarters had been planning to assault in daylight with a fully coordinated attack. Lieutenant Shaw of 15th platoon, 28th Battalion, followed the section up with reinforcements and took command of the position.

The prisoners continued coming down. It did not hold. The enemy counteratt attacked that evening and retook the pinnacle. What Manahi’s section had taken could not be held without support that had not yet arrived. The ledge below the pinnacle was held through the night by a mixed group, New Zealanders from several companies, but the topmost point went back to the enemy.

On April 21st, a fresh assault retook it. The fighting on and around Tacuna continued until April 23rd when the last defenders were overcome. Final count, 300 prisoners taken. New Zealand division casualties across the full battle for Tacuna and its surrounding foothills. 536, 46 killed, 404 wounded, 86 missing. The fifth brigade was relieved on April 23rd.

In the official account written afterward, the brigade was described as having produced in the capture of Tacuna a feat that had caught the attention of the whole army. Horox, Fryberg, Alexander, and Kippenburgger all four submitted recommendations to London that Sergeant Han Manahi be awarded the Victoria Cross.

The recommendation from Horox, the corpse commander, described Manahi’s action as the most gallant feat of arms he had witnessed in the course of the entire war. Four generals, one core commander, one army commander, one theater commander, and Freyerg, who had now commanded the New Zealand division through three years of campaigning from Greece to Tunisia.

London downgraded the recommendation to a distinguished conduct medal. No explanation was publicly issued. No account of why the recommendation was found insufficient was entered into the accessible record. The DCM was awarded. Manahi accepted it. The Victoria Cross recommendation and the four signatures attached to it remained in the file.

For 64 years, nothing changed. In 2007, in a ceremony at Government House in Wellington, a representative of Queen Elizabeth II presented aostumous honor to Manahi’s family. By then, Manahi had been dead for 11 years. The New Zealand government had spent years investigating the original downgrade and had been unable to find a satisfactory explanation for the decision.

Theostumous Honor acknowledged an injustice. It did not award a Victoria Cross. The facts are as stated above. The reader can draw their own conclusions. 3 weeks after Tacuna, it was over. On May 13th, 1943, 238,000 German and Italian soldiers surrendered in Tunisia. Bernard Fryberg as temporary Corbus commander accepted the surrender personally.

And somewhere in the chain of defeated men, the remnants of the Africa Corps, the men Raml had led, was the answer to the question this story started with. What exactly had they said about these New Zealanders? On the morning of May 13th, 1943, the last organized Axis resistance in North Africa ended.

Marshall Giovani Messi, commanding the remnants of the first Italian army, had formally requested armistice terms. The previous day, his German counterpart, Major General Kurt von Leestein of the 164th Light Africa Division, the same division whose Panzer Grenaders had held point 209 at Tbaga Gap 6 weeks earlier, surrendered that morning to Bernard Fryberg.

Fryberg was serving as acting core commander of Xcore in the final days of the campaign. He accepted the capitulation in person. The numbers from the Tunisian surrender have never been fully reconciled. The accepted range runs from 238,000 to 275,000 Axis prisoners. The German official count acknowledged more than 130,000 German troops alone.

For context, 3 months earlier at Stalenrad, 91,000 German soldiers had surrendered to the Soviet army. An event recorded as one of the most significant military defeats in history. In Tunisia, more Germans surrendered than at Stalenrad. The Africa Corps, which had fought across North Africa for 2 years and driven the British army back to the gates of Cairo, ceased to exist as a fighting force on a Tuesday morning in May.

The second New Zealand division had been part of the force that put it there. What that cost New Zealand requires a moment to register against the size of the country. In 1940, when the second New Zealand Expeditionary Force began embarking, New Zealand’s total population was approximately 1.6 million people. The North African campaign alone from the first deployment to Egypt through the final surrender in Tunisia cost the division 2,989 dead.

4,041 taken prisoner and more than 7,000 wounded. The per capita death rate for New Zealand across the entire Second World War was the highest in the Commonwealth, calculated at 6,684 dead per million of population. These were not conscripted men filling quotas. New Zealand had voluntary enlistment for overseas service.

The men in the desert had gone by choice. The question the title of this story poses, why Germans would have laughed at New Zealand, was never really about military competence. German military intelligence in 1939 and 1940 assessed colonial dominion contingent the way most of the world did.

as secondary formations reliable for garrison duties unlikely to perform at the level of professional standing armies with decades of institutional development behind them. The assessment was not unusual. It was simply wrong. There is a quote that circulates widely in connection with this story attributed to Raml. If I had to take hell, I would use the Australians to take it and the New Zealanders to hold it.

This quote cannot be definitively sourced to Raml’s own writings or verified correspondence. The only traceable attribution leads to a 2009 secondary history by Samuel Mitchum, not to any primary document. Raml’s own memoir, The Raml Papers, edited by Basil Little Hart and published in 1953, contains no such statement.

The quote has spread because it sounds like something Raml would say and because it flatters both nations it names. That is not the same as it being documented. What Raml actually wrote about the ANZAC forces is recorded and it is unambiguous. In letters to his wife during the Towbrook siege in 1941, he described the Australian garrison as fighting magnificently and possessing training superior to his own forces.

He acknowledged in his field diary that the Africa Corps had encountered opponents of a caliber it had not met since the opening campaigns in Poland. This is not the memorable phrasing of the disputed quote, but it is what the historical record contains. The other quote, “Give me the Mori Battalion and I will conquer the world,” follows the same pattern.

It is attributed to Raml, but the sourced version of that statement comes from Raml’s former chief of staff, General Sigfrieded Westfell. Westfell made the remark at a post-war reunion of Africa Corps veterans attended by a delegation from the Maui battalion at which point he explicitly attributed the sentiment to Raml.

Whether the attribution is accurate cannot be verified from Raml’s surviving writings. What can be said is this. Westfall who had served beside Raml through the full North African campaign said it. He said it to the men of the battalion in person. He was not speaking for publication.

The distinction matters because this story has not needed invented praise to make its case. The record contains enough documented testimony. Montgomery in his post-war assessment described Fryberg as the finest fighting divisional commander he had encountered in the war. Major General Francis Dwangand, who served as Montgomery’s chief of staff through the desert campaign, described the New Zealand Division as mobile shock troops, the formation that Eighth Army turned to when the situation required, the hardest task to be done by the most capable available force. These are primary source statements from the men who commanded the theater. They are on the record. The question of what the enemy thought is partly answerable and partly not. The partially answerable part is this. German and Italian forces who faced the New Zealand division

repeatedly over 3 years adjusted their tactical planning around it. The 164th light division which held 209 against Ngarimu’s platoon at Tbaga Gap and whose surrender Freyberg accepted at Enidavville was one of the better German formations in Africa. The Fulgore paratroopers who held Tacuna were elite troops who had fought since Elamagne and who an Italian radio broadcast afterwards described as having defended to the last with sublime courage.

They were beaten in the end by men who had come from a sheep farming country on the other side of the world and who had been doing this for 3 years without stopping. The unanswerable part is the interior record. what individual German soldiers said among themselves. What Raml wrote in the letters that did not survive.

What assessments passed between officers in the Africa Corps that were never transcribed. History keeps only what was written down and what survived. The inference is available to anyone who looks at the operational record. The second New Zealand division was used as the instrument of decision in every major engagement where the eighth army needed a breakthrough.

That is a functional assessment. It does not require a famous quote to support it. There is one loop this story opened in chapter 1 that has not yet been closed. Hane Manahi survived the war. He returned to New Zealand in June 1943 as one of approximately 180 original members of the Mari Battalion selected to go home on furlow.

He did not return to active service. He worked as a carpenter at a hospital in Rotoua and later as a traffic inspector. He received his distinguished conduct medal from the Governor General on December 18th, 1945 at a ceremony with no particular public profile. He never spoke publicly about the downgrade of his Victoria Cross recommendation.

He died in a car accident near Tapuke on March 29th, 1986. After his death, a committee was formed by his ejewei tea and his former comrades to pursue postuous recognition. The process took 20 years. The New Zealand government made informal approaches to Buckingham Palace in the early 1990s. Both were unsuccessful.

A formal bid was made in 2006 by the Minister of Defense, Phil Goff, asking directly that the Victoria Cross be awarded postumously. Queen Elizabeth II declined, citing a ruling made by her father, King George V 6th in 1949 that no further awards from the Second World War would be considered.

The Queen did agree to recognize Manahi in a different form. On March 17th, 2007 at Teapayura Marai in Ohhinamutu, Prince Andrew presented the Manahi family and Tearawa with three items on behalf of the queen, an altar cloth for St. Faith’s church near Manahi’s burial place, a personal letter from the Queen acknowledging his gallantry, and a ceremonial sword from the royal collection.

The award was structured around the line from the Mouy Battalion’s marching song, for God, for king, and for country. One item for each. The sword was subsequently presented to the chief of the New Zealand Defense Force and is passed to each new Chief of Defense as a standing reminder. The Victoria Cross was not awarded.

The record of the recommendation signed by Kippenberger, Fryberg, Montgomery, Alexander, and General Henry Maitelland Wilson, commander-in-chief of Middle East command, remains as it was in 1943. What the Germans said about the New Zealanders, verified and unverified, is finally beside the point.

The second New Zealand division mobilized from a country of 1.6 6 million farmers and trades people who had no standing army and no military tradition deployed 16,000 km from home and spent 3 years in the desert fighting some of the most capable formations the German and Italian militaries produced. They lost nearly 3,000 dead in North Africa alone.

They broke the Axis line at Lmagne, flanked the Marath line through terrain declared impassible, and scaled a 200 meter limestone cliff in the dark because the front of the hill wasn’t working. They accepted the surrender of 238,000 men. At some point in that sequence, the laughing stopped. The record does not specify exactly when.

Tobaga gap is a reasonable guess.