The Maori Battalion

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 345, 1 February 1946, Page 5

The Maori Battalion

S we write this article the members of the Maori Battalion are being honoured by the people of Wellington on behalf of the people of the whole Dominion. When they went away no one doubted that the Maoris would fight well-very well if conditions were favourable. But no one supposed that they would become one of the most famous fighting battalions of the war. Yet that has been their achievement. It is the opinion of some of the best judges — Major-General Kippenberger, for example, whose considered estimate was printed in our own columns-that with equality in equipment and position the Maori Battalion would have overwhelmed any other battalion on any of the Mediterranean fronts. But New Zealand is acknowledging more to-day than Maori prowess in battle. It is honouring that first, since the first duty of a soldier is to fight. But it is acknowledging at the same time that

all New Zealanders are one, that the last line separating Maori and Pakeha has been obliterated, and that the Maoris in a single century have travelled all the way from the stone age to the age of the atomic bomb. Necessarily they have suffered some loss and show some signs to-day of weariness and maladjustment. It would be blindness not to see what the social cost has been of having to crowd a thousand political centuries into one. Supports have been knocked away in a generation or two that took hundreds of years to build, but while it is proper to acknowledge such things it is not for any Pakeha to dwell on them. It might be permissible to say more about them if we had done everything that we ought to have done our-selves--even in social and economic \ matters, where the Maori is most vulnerable. It will be time to complain of the Maori’s reluctance to make a_ good economic machine of himself when the Pakeha has abolished slums and shown that the machine is safe.