Featherston prisoner of war camp

Featherston prisoner of war camp was a camp for captured Japanese soldiers during World War II at Featherston, New Zealand, notorious for a 1943 incident in which 48 Japanese and one New Zealander were killed. The camp had been established during World War I as a military training camp.

It had also been used as an internment camp from 1918 to 1920, when 14 German internees remained there.

At the request of the United States, in September 1942 the Army camp at Featherston was re-established as a P.O.W. camp. The first commandant was Major R. H. Perrett. He was succeeded by Lieutenant Colonel D.H. Donaldson in mid December, 1942. Medical services were provided by a 40-bed hospital, which saw its first patient on 24 April 1943. About 900 prisoners from the Guadalcanal Campaign were housed at the camp, many of them conscripts. The senior Japanese officer at the Camp was Lieutenant S Kamikubo of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

The prisoners consisted of two groups; the larger group were Koreans and members of forced labour units who had been working at Henderson Field (Guadalcanal), and the smaller group consisted of about 240 officers and other ranks of the Imperial Japanese Army, Navy, and Air Force. The majority of this second group were crew from the Japanese cruiser Furutaka, which was sunk during the Battle of Cape Esperance. The 19 surviving crew of the destroyer Akatsuki were also imprisoned here.

The camp itself was divided into four compounds, with the Koreans and labourers in one, the sailors in the second, and the officers and others in the third and fourth compounds. The prisoners lived in small army huts - 8 men to one hut.

The officers were given New Zealand battledress, dyed blue to wear and a conventional hat, also dyed blue. The other ranks were given blue dyed World War One uniforms with a diamond shaped khaki patch sown on the back of the jacket and the front and back of the right thigh of the trousers. Boots were also provided.

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