Roi (Roy) Te Punga (Te Atiawa descent) was born in a house at White’s Line in Waiwhetu, Wellington, the third of six children, in 1919; and was raised in Halcombe, a railway town near Feilding in the Manawatu. His father, Hamuera Te Punga, was a Lutheran minister at the St John’s Lutheran Church in Kimber St, Halcombe. He had met his wife, a Chicago school teacher while studying at a Lutheran institution in Illinois in the early 1900s.

Haddon was born in the Wairarapa on March 20 1917 and did his high-schooling at Nelson College.
By 1937 Haddon figured the war’s coming was ‘obvious to everyone but our government’, so he joined the local territorials as much on the rationale that he better be as ‘trained and prepared as possible to survive’ as patriotism and a desire to stand up to Hitler.

Arthur was born near Swansea in Wales on the 7th of December 1918, moving to New Zealand as a very young boy with his parents.

Frank was born on the 6th of December 1916 in New Plymouth, living there until he transferred to Hawera, Taranaki in 1937, to work with Hannahs Shoe Company. He attended Central Primary School then New Plymouth Boys High School. Like many of Frank’s generation, he remembers the struggles for families growing-up in Depression years, and how many missed-out on high schooling because their parents couldn’t afford to send them. 

Vic Henderson was born in Featherston in 1919, and grew-up in Wairaparapa on a little farm.
Vic was assigned to 25th Battalion at Maadi Camp, just outside Cairo, which was the home of the NZ Division in the Middle East. After a period of acclimatising and training, Vic’s unit went ‘up the blue’ – the desert.