WORDS BY ANDY TAYLOR
THE AUTUMN OF 1942 HOW THE BAY WAS SAVED FROM THE REICH saw dark days indeed for New Zealand. Singapore had fallen to the Japanese Army in February, Rommel’s army had launched a surprise offensive in North Africa, and in the Atlantic Uboats were sending freighters to the bottom faster than shipyards could send them down the slipways; the northern hemisphere seemed poised to fall under Axis control within months. Then, in March, word reached the New Zealand government that fascism was set to strike even closer to home. Adolf Hitler, brooding in his Berlin bunker, was casting Prime Minister Peter Fraser, a cruel and covetous eye over then destroy key infrastructure yet another jewel in the crown targets and spread mayhem until a of the stumbling British Empire: garrison force could be dispatched from the Fatherland to occupy and Ngongotaha. It had been late in that enslave Aotearoa. The country’s month that startling intelligence future hung in the balance, and just reports began reaching one man – Sydney Gordon Ross – Wellington: a commando unit of stood in the way of Ngongotaha, the Bay of Plenty, and the Wehrmacht had PRIME MINISTER all of New Zealand been landed on the PETER FRASER falling under the Nazi Bay of Plenty coast jackboot. and made their way In March 1942, to Ngongotaha – from Rotorua police popularly known to constables to the Office locals as “The Sunny of the Prime Minister, Side of the Mountain” the same question was – and established being asked: was Ross a base from which the man for the job? they planned to let loose hell. First they At first glance, would assassinate many would have
thought not. Born the son of a blacksmith in Thames in 1909, he moved to Auckland with his family at an early age. Tall and slim with a long, sharp nose, Ross drifted through a variety of jobs including electrician, baker and labourer, but his real calling seems to have been crime. By the mid1930s he had convictions for theft, burglary and false pretenses, with time spent in a borstal, but he topped this in 1939 by winding up in jail for breaking and entering in Te Puke. It was while serving this sentence of nearly four years that Ross came under the influence of one P L E N T Y. C O . N Z // A U G U S T 2 0 1 7
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