A Fascinating Letter

On 7 August 1942, somewhere in the machinery of wartime London, a letter was typed to a recently widowed farmer's wife living on a rural delivery route near Invercargill, at the southern end of New Zealand.

It began simply:

“Dear Mrs. Price,

When visiting the New Zealanders at the various airfields in England yesterday I met your son Harold…”

Walter Nash told Hannah Price that her son “looked well” and was “very keen on his job”.  He praised the work being done by New Zealanders overseas and expressed the hope that Harold would continue his good work and, “in the not too distant future”, return home to her in good health.

For the Price family, the importance of the letter was obvious. Someone had seen Buck. Not merely someone, but one of the most senior members of the New Zealand Government. Buck was alive, he was well, and somebody important enough to be listened to had taken the trouble to tell his mother so.

More than eighty years later, however, the letter is fascinating for reasons that have relatively little to do with Buck himself.

Read as a historical artifact, rather than simply as a piece of family correspondence, almost every feature of it tells a story: the man who signed it; why he happened to be in Britain; the curious stationery on which it was typed; the circumstances which generated it; its remote destination; the political purpose served by thousands of reassuring wartime letters like it; and, most tellingly, the dangerous uncertainty concealed within the apparently comforting words “he looked well.”

The man who signed the letter

The letter does not identify its author by name or title.  At the bottom is simply a large handwritten signature:

W Nash

The signature is readily identifiable as that of Walter Nash, whose authenticated signature survives in numerous other sources.  But in August 1942 the identity of the writer would scarcely have required explanation to a New Zealander.  Nash was close to the summit of New Zealand political life.  He was Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance and, earlier in 1942, had also become New Zealand's Minister to the United States.

That last position was particularly significant.  The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was only eight months in the past.  The United States had been formally at war for less than a year, and the strategic position of New Zealand had been transformed by Japan's rapid advance through the Pacific.  Britain remained New Zealand's traditional political and military partner, but American military power had suddenly become essential to New Zealand's security.

Nash was consequently operating at the intersection of New Zealand, British and American wartime policy.  He spent much of this period in Washington and represented New Zealand in discussions at the highest levels of the developing Allied war effort.  He had not traveled to Britain in the northern summer of 1942 primarily to tour airfields and shake hands with New Zealand servicemen.  His principal business was with governments.  During his visit he attended meetings of Winston Churchill's War Cabinet, discussing matters relating to New Zealand's contribution to the war and the wider Allied effort.  The distinction matters because it puts this modest letter into its proper setting.  Nash did not travel halfway around the world in order to meet Buck Price.  Buck's encounter with him occurred at the margins of a diplomatic mission concerned with matters of enormous strategic importance.

Yet, for a few minutes on 6 August 1942, the concerns of international diplomacy and those of a Southland family intersected.

The visit

Nash spent 6 August visiting New Zealand airmen at a number of RAF establishments.  His arrival at 75 (New Zealand) Squadron was sufficiently significant to be entered in the squadron's official Operations Record Book:

“Visit of Air Commodore Isitt, Wing Commander Freeman, D.S.O., D.F.C. and bar, and the New Zealand Minister in Washington, the Hon. Walter Nash. A group photograph of visitors and Squadron aircrew was taken.”

Contemporary newspaper accounts provide a more detailed picture of his day.  Nash traveled between bases housing New Zealand airmen, meeting fighter pilots, men undergoing training and, finally, members of the 75(NZ) bomber squadron.  At the bomber station he met personnel in the crew room, spoke briefly to them and then chatted informally.  He was shown photographs taken during recent raids on Duisburg, Hamburg and Düsseldorf and heard the briefing for another raid.

The newspapers reported that over the course of the day Nash: 

“shook hands with some 350 New Zealanders. He will write to their parents.”

That short sentence explains the existence of the Price letter.  Buck was one of those hundreds of New Zealanders.  

One of perhaps hundreds

The letter is dated the following day, 7 August 1942.  Its wording strongly suggests that it was a form letter.  The personalised elements are few: the recipient is Mrs Price and the serviceman is her son Harold.  The remainder consists of language that could readily have been reproduced for the parents of any of the other men Nash had met.  That does not mean that its contents were false or that Nash's interest was insincere.

The official squadron record establishes his presence. The contemporary newspapers establish the nature of his tour.  Nash really did meet hundreds of New Zealand servicemen, shake their hands and talk with them. There is no reason to doubt his statement that he met Harold Price and thought that he looked well.  But the scale of the exercise makes some administrative process inevitable.

Nash himself was hardly likely to have interrupted each conversation to take down the name and postal address of an airman's parents.  It is reasonable to imagine members of his staff accompanying the party, obtaining the necessary particulars and subsequently arranging for letters to be prepared.  The precise mechanics are not known but the newspaper reports make clear that writing home was a planned consequence of the day's visits.

Somebody therefore had a substantial amount of typing to do, and the paper they used produced one of the most intriguing features of the surviving letter.

Offices of the War Cabinet

The letter was not typed on New Zealand Government stationery.  Embossed into the top of the sheet are the words:

GREAT GEORGE STREET

S.W.1

This was not the address of the New Zealand High Commission.  It was British War Cabinet stationery, used at precisely the time that Nash was in London participating in the work of Churchill's War Cabinet.   The resulting object has a wonderful incongruity.  A letter from New Zealand's Deputy Prime Minister to a New Zealand mother has been typed on a sheet bearing the embossed heading of the British War Cabinet.

We can imagine how it happened. Nash and his party returned to London.  His staff had hundreds of names and addresses collected during the visits.  There were letters to prepare.  They worked wherever accommodation had been provided and used the stationery available to them.  Nash was presented with the resulting pile and signed them.  One small piece of the enormous bureaucratic apparatus conducting the Second World War had been temporarily diverted to the task of telling a mother in Southland that somebody had seen her son and that he appeared to be all right.

From Great George Street to Otahuti RD

The address at the bottom of the letter deserves as much attention as the heading at the top.  It reads:

Mrs. J. Price

Section 4

Otahuti RD

INVERCARGILL

New Zealand

The abbreviation “RD” does not mean “Road”. It means Rural Delivery.  Hannah Price did not live in Invercargill itself. She lived in the surrounding Southland countryside, and in August 1942 she was newly widowed.  Her husband James, a farmer and Buck's father, had died in April. 

The two addresses on the sheet could scarcely be further removed from one another.

At its head:

Offices of the War Cabinet, Great George Street, S.W.1.

At its foot:

Section 4, Otahuti RD, Invercargill, New Zealand.

They represent more than geographical distance.  At one end were Churchill, ministers, diplomats, generals and officials wrestling with questions of grand strategy in a global war.  At the other was a widow on a Southland farm waiting for news of her son.  In ordinary life there would have been almost no imaginable reason for a sheet of British War Cabinet stationery carrying the signature of New Zealand's Deputy Prime Minister to make its way to a rural delivery address near Invercargill.  The war connected those worlds. 

Why visit the men?

The immediate purpose of Nash's visit is not difficult to understand.  Morale mattered.

These were young New Zealanders thousands of miles from home, serving in a war whose duration nobody could know.  Having one of the most senior politicians in their country visit them, shake their hands, ask about their work and tell them that New Zealand was proud of them was an acknowledgement that the government which had sent them overseas had not forgotten them.  The newspaper reports capture this aspect of the exercise. Nash praised what he had seen and described the New Zealand airmen as “grand boys”.

The personal letters extended that morale exercise halfway around the world.  An airman could know that his parents were going to receive a letter from the Deputy Prime Minister saying that he had personally seen him.  For the parents, the effect must sometimes have been considerable.  In an age before instantaneous communication, families lived with long periods of uncertainty.  Ordinary letters took time.  Operational details could not necessarily be disclosed.  For the families of aircrew there was always the possibility that the next official communication would be the telegram they dreaded.

Against that background, a letter bearing Walter Nash's signature carried an extraordinarily simple piece of information: I have seen your son and he looked well.

More than morale

The letters, however, served a purpose larger than reassurance to individual families.  New Zealand was a democracy engaged in total war.  Its government could send men overseas, introduce conscription, raise taxes, ration goods, redirect production and make enormous international commitments, but ultimately a democratic government could sustain those measures only while retaining sufficient support among the people who were being asked to make the sacrifices.  By 1942 there was no expectation that the war would end through some negotiated compromise.

New Zealand had joined Britain and the other Allied governments in the Declaration of St James's Palace in June 1941.  The participating governments committed themselves to continue the struggle against the Axis powers until total victory was won.  That was an extraordinary commitment.  Nobody signing it could say how many more years the war would last, how many men would die, what resources would be consumed or what further sacrifices would be demanded.  New Zealand's government could make that commitment internationally, but its ability to honour it ultimately depended upon the willingness of New Zealanders at home to continue supporting the war.

That required morale not merely among the troops, but among the civilian population.  It required people to believe that the sacrifices being demanded of them had meaning.

It required propaganda.

Although the word has subsequently acquired an overwhelmingly sinister meaning, propaganda need not consist of lies.   Indeed, the most effective propaganda is often built around things which are demonstrably true. Nash had met these men.  They were serving their country.  Their work was dangerous.  Their families worried about them.  New Zealand was proud of them.  All of that could be entirely sincere while simultaneously serving a political purpose.

The structure of Nash's letter is revealing. It begins with the intensely personal:

“I met your son Harold…”

and:

“he looked well…”

But almost immediately the focus widens:

“One is proud to meet New Zealanders overseas these days - they are doing splendid work to help to bring to a speedy and successful conclusion the present struggle for freedom.”

Harold has become part of a larger national story.  The implicit message to Hannah Price is powerful:  Your son is well. Your son is doing worthwhile work. His country is proud of him. His service forms part of a struggle for freedom. The sacrifice being made by him—and by you—has a purpose.  When that struggle has been won, we hope to return him safely to you.

The personal and political messages are almost impossible to separate, and this letter did not operate in isolation.

From 350 men to a nation

The newspaper reports show the other half of the exercise.  Nash's encounters with New Zealand servicemen were themselves reported back home.  Readers learned about the men, their aircraft, their decorations, their achievements and their determination to continue.  They read the Deputy Prime Minister's praise of them.  Meanwhile, perhaps hundreds of individual letters began traveling towards New Zealand.  If the newspapers' figures are approximately correct, Nash shook hands with some 350 New Zealanders, but the audience for those letters was potentially much larger than 350 families.  A letter from Walter Nash was something to show a wife, grandparents, brothers and sisters, neighbours and friends. It might be mentioned around the district. Some such letters undoubtedly survived because families regarded them as important possessions.

The communication therefore spread outward: Government to politician.  Politician to serviceman.  Politician to family.  Family to community.  At the same time:  Government to politician.  Politician to press.  Press to nation.

A handshake at an English airfield could thus become part of the much larger process by which a democratic society maintained its connection with the men fighting on its behalf and sustained public commitment to the war in which they were fighting.

“He looked well”

Nash's most reassuring words were:

“he looked well and he is very keen on his job.”

They were true at a particular moment on 6 August 1942.  That is all Nash could actually certify.  The following day somebody typed the observation onto War Cabinet stationery.  Nash signed it.  The letter then began the long journey from London to New Zealand.

Buck's war did not pause while the letter traveled.  He continued flying.

That introduces a temporal distance into the document which is every bit as striking as its geographical one.  By the time Hannah received the letter, the information it contained was necessarily news from the past.  Harold was well when Walter Nash saw him.  Whether Harold was well on the day Hannah opened the envelope was another question entirely.  There was no telephone call she could make to find out.  There was no message she could send and expect an immediate reply.  Somewhere on the other side of the world her son continued climbing into a bomber and disappearing into the European night.  The reassuring letter began becoming obsolete almost as soon as it was written.

That makes the newspapers' reference to approximately 350 letters particularly sobering.  Nash had visited men performing different roles and facing very different degrees of danger, so it would be wrong to apply the casualty rates of the bomber crews to all of them.   Some, however, were operational aircrew and 75 (New Zealand) Squadron was suffering heavy casualties during this period.

That raises an uncomfortable question.

Of the hundreds of letters Nash apparently caused to be sent home, did any arrive after the man whose good health they reported had already been killed?  The question cannot be answered, but it is difficult to imagine that the possibility was merely theoretical.  A bomber airman could be alive when Nash shook his hand on Thursday, have a letter written to his mother on Friday, and be dead before that letter had traveled very far at all.  That was one of the cruelties of wartime communication.

A letter might be completely truthful when written and tragically outdated when received.  By providence this letter was not, but Hannah could not know that when she opened it.

“He will return home to you”

The final sentence is consequently the most poignant in the letter:

“I trust that your son will continue in his good work and in the not too distant future he will return home to you in good health.”

Nash chose his words carefully.  He did not promise.  “I trust…” was an expression of hope, and in Buck's case, thankfully, that hope was fulfilled.  He survived the next operation, and the one after that.  He eventually survived another 24 operations after the day he met Walter Nash.  His operational war ended before the war itself did.  In a very real sense, that was simply good luck.

This apparently unremarkable letter deserves more than a caption beneath a photograph.  It is not especially significant because Walter Nash once met Harold Price.  Buck was one of hundreds of New Zealand servicemen Nash met during his tour.  What makes the document remarkable is the amount of history contained within it.  At its head is the embossed authority of Churchill's War Cabinet.  At its foot is the signature of New Zealand's Deputy Prime Minister.  Behind its creation lies New Zealand's changing relationship with Britain and the United States, and Nash's participation in the highest levels of Allied wartime government.

Its language contains the essential themes of democratic mobilisation for total war: duty, national pride, sacrifice, freedom, victory and the hope of return.  Its immediate purpose was intensely human: to reassure a mother that somebody important had seen her son and that he appeared to be all right.  Its destination was not a ministry, embassy or military headquarters. It was a farm on a country road in Southland.

This piece of paper therefore connects worlds that could hardly appear more distant.  Great George Street and Otahuti RD.  Churchill's War Cabinet and a Southland farmhouse.  Grand strategy and a mother's anxiety.  The politicians who committed a country to war and the young men who had to fight it.  The Second World War is usually told at the first of those scales: governments, conferences, declarations, campaigns, armies and nations.  This letter allows us to see the thread running all the way down to the individual.

And then, unusually, we can follow that thread for another eighty years.  Hannah kept the letter.  Buck survived the war.  He had the life that Walter Nash could only express the hope that he would have.  The letter survived too.  Today it hangs framed above the desk of one of Buck's grandsons.  When it was written, nobody knew how that story would end.  Walter Nash didn't.  Hannah didn't.  Buck didn't.  The problems and stresses of life in the 2020s are real enough, but the letter provides a useful sense of perspective. It is a daily reminder that the modern world exists because more than eight decades ago ordinary young men were prepared to leave their families in places like Southland, travel to the other side of the world, and endure dangers far greater than most of us will ever be called upon to face.

Of all the words on the letter, the simplest remain the most affecting:

“I met your son Harold … he looked well.”

For Hannah Price, somewhere in rural Southland, that was precious news from the other side of the world.  For Walter Nash, it was true when he signed it.  For Buck, there were no guarantees beyond that day.

He was one of the fortunate ones.

He came home.