Saving the Bay - How the Nazis nearly took Ngongotaha

//// WORDS BY ANDY TAYLOR

THE AUTUMN OF 1942 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 a cruel and covetous eye over yet another jewel in the crown of the stumbling British Empire: Ngongotaha.

HOW THE BAY WAS SAVED FROM THE REICH

It had been late in that month that startling intelligence reports began reaching Wellington: a commando unit ofthe Wehrmacht had been landed on the Bay of Plenty coast and made their way to Ngongotaha – popularly known to locals as “The Sunny Side of the Mountain” – and established a base from which they planned to let loose hell. First they would assassinate Prime Minister Peter Fraser, then destroy key infrastructure targets and spread mayhem until a garrison force could be dispatched from the Fatherland to occupy and enslave Aotearoa. The country’s future hung in the balance, and just one man – Sydney Gordon Ross – stood in the way of Ngongotaha,the Bay of Plenty, and all of New Zealand falling under the Nazi jackboot.

PRIME MINISTER PETER FRASER

In March 1942, from Rotorua police constables to the Office of the Prime Minister, the same question was being asked: was Ross the man for the job?

At first glance, 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 mid- 1930s 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 Charles Alfred Remmers, an ex-London policeman who had come to New Zealand in 1912. Remmers signed up to the New Zealand police but soon wound up on the other side of the law – and in prison – after it was found that his late night patrol duties offered opportunities for burglary that he was unable to resist. Upon his release in 1915, Remmers went straight for nearly 20 years until he became involved in an ill-advised used car dealership in Wellington that saw him – in a caper straight from a B-movie - impersonating a clergyman and being convicted for forgery. By 1937 he was once again a guest of His Majesty, and it was during this period of incarceration that he met Ross, 20 years his junior, in Waikeria Prison near Te Awamutu.

Fellow inmates remember the two as firm friends who shared a disdain for authority and the love of a good yarn, but they also recalled that there was something more to both men than the average petty crim. Remmers’s dislike for the government seemed more than just bitterness, and in private Ross spoke of friends in high places, foreign connections that went to the top in Germany, and he appeared to be receiving funds from those connections while incarcerated. One man who served time with Ross says that he made it clear that once released he had plans in store and places in those plans for a chosen few colleagues from Waikeria. But what those plans were he never fully disclosed.

On 28 March 1942, Ross was finally released from prison. Instead of visiting family or friends however, he went directly and at great haste to Wellington. And well he may have hurried, because what he told Robert Semple, Minister for National Service, whom he met on the following day, was earth-shattering. Ross said he had been in contact with a German agent named Barnett who had asked him to join an established sabotage unit of Nazis and sympathetic Kiwis based in Ngongotaha. They had been landed on the Bay of Plenty coast by a long-range Uboat and were under the command of the disgruntled Remmers, who had been released from prison prior to Ross in 1941, and who had chosen that location for health reasons; it was, after all, The Sunny Side of the Mountain.

Ross said he had been approached because of his contacts and underworld connections, which the infiltrators would find good use for, and had been offered handsome remuneration for joining. He said he told Barnett that he would think it over, but instead he went straight to the authorities; despite his colourful past he was, he said, a loyal Kiwi who could not abide the thought of a Naziruled New Zealand, but was fearful that the police would not believe him, and that was why he had chosen to reach out to higher office.

They had been landed on the Bay of Plenty coast by a long-range Uboat

And he had found just the right man: in the previous weeks there had been a flurry of intelligence reports across Semple’s desk about a shadowy group across the Tasman called – appropriately – Australia First, who planned to form a spy ring and aid invaders. Arrests had already been made and the story was to break in New Zealand in the very next day’s Dominion Post. Bob Semple was a downto-earth Australian who hated red tape and liked to get things done. When Ross walked into his office it made perfect sense that if there was skullduggery going on across the ditch then why not in New Zealand, and this was Semple’s chance to stamp it out before it took hold and everything was mired in bureaucracy. But there was more: Semple’s name, in addition to that of the Prime Minister’s, was top of the list of targets. Semple’s and Fraser’s lives were in danger.

ROSS AND REMMERS

There was no time to lose, and that same day Ross and Semple met with the Prime Minister. Fraser too was horrified but perhaps not surprised – he had also seen the reports on Australia First – and he took what would be a fateful decision to summon not the NZ Police Commissioner, but the head of the Security Intelligence Bureau (SIB), Major Kenneth Folkes, and to place the entire matter in his hands.

FOLKES AND SEMPLE

Folkes was a very different man to Semple and Fraser. Newly arrived from the UK – he had only recently been promoted from Lieutenant – he came from an unremarkable background in the carpet industry, but despite this he seized the initiative and set about establishing a lavish counter-insurgency scheme that would not only knock the Nazi interlopers for six but establish the newly formed SIB as a force to be reckoned with. He immediately decided Ross would go undercover so that the full extent of the plot could be reeled in, and within days Ross had become Captain Calder of the Merchant Navy, complete with officer’s uniform, almost-new Ford V8 and all the petrol and hotel vouchers he would need to travel about while establishing contact with the Nazis. It was all strictly hush-hush, with Ross roving at will, wining and dining, and meeting clandestinely with both his Nazi(s) wranglers while at the same time feeding information back to Folkes.

Ross was a dedicated and adept double agent; huge folders of intelligence were complied by him in just a few short weeks, with Nazi sympathisers being whittled from the woodwork by the wily Ross everywhere from Te Puke to Tauranga to Wellington. SIB agents followed hotly in his tracks, adding and confirming the veracity of his reports, and the dossiers on the Nazi network grew so swiftly that Captain Meikle, SIB head in Auckland, who became Ross’s wrangler, stepped in to silence concerns by Rotorua police about the shifty movements of the known criminal Syd Ross in their city. This was not the game for the Rotorua plod, Meikle said, noting that they were a mob that could not even catch a cold.

Meanwhile, in the capital Folkes, began to prepare for the worst: Article 18(b) of the Defence Act of Great Britain passed wide constitutional powers to the SIB -with Folkes as head- in the event of a direct insurgency threat, and Folkes believed just such a threat existed. As Hugh Price writes in The Plot to Subvert Wartime New Zealand, Folkes “and a handful of senior officers thought it scandalous that the Prime Minister ‘lacked the guts’ to take the step that would smarten up New Zealand’s act ‘. . . but what can you expect from a government that is just a band of bloody wharfies.’”

With the government so badly hamstrung and the SIB the sole bastion of professionalism in a sea of bumbling yokels, Folkes, Meikle and the Bureau were flirting with extreme measures indeed. In June of 1942, the Nazis of Ngongotaha were taking New Zealand as close to a military government as it would ever come.

The Rotorua police may have been unable to catch a cold but they certainly had a better nose for bullshit than their big city colleagues. Because that was precisely what the whole story of Nazis in Ngongotaha was.

Ross was a relatively B-grade criminal but a first class actor; his entire story was a hoax, helped along by a willing audience driven by the anxiety of invasion fever and the fervid desire for certain officials to further themselves and their causes. The flimsy tidbits of intelligence on “Nazis” that Ross fed the SIB were grossly exaggerated purely to serve their own ends, and Folkes’ desire to action 18(b) has been described as bordering on a coup attempt. Remmers was certainly part of the game, but only as a talented liar and shit-stirrer rather than an actual fascist, and the main reason for his and Ross’s success was the culpability of the SIB, who, to put it kindly, lacked the talent required to see through the fog of war and their own thrusting ambition. Ross and Remmers were larrikins, two men who liked to yank the chain of those who brought them to task for their criminal past, but the real crime was that they were ever taken seriously.

The genuinely serious repercussions of the SIB’s actions however, were – luckily for all involved – neatly overshadowed by how the farce that would become known as The Folkes Affair played out.

The Rotorua police may have been unable to catch a cold but they certainly had a better nose for bullshit than their big city colleagues.

In July, with things reaching fever pitch, and Folkes rather ostentatiously demanding troops be placed under his command, Fraser finally asked the police to step in; they wasted no time in doing what should have been done weeks earlier and swooped on the Ngongotaha address listed as the Nazis’ HQ.

There they found an elderly Native Department clerk, a dry-cleaner and three nurses, none of whom showed the least signs of insurgency. It was, to put it mildly, all a bit awkward for everyone involved. How had the government, and the top intelligence unit in the land, been duped? How had no one bothered to cross-check Ross’s reports and question his motive? And why had no one knocked on that door in Ngongotaha and spoken to the clerk, the dry cleaner or one of the nurses?

The sunny side of the Mountain

Ngongotaha on the shore of Lake Rotorua. April 1951 WA-27571-F Whites Aviation Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library.

It was so awkward in fact that everyone involved – again in classic B-movie closingcredits style – agreed to smile, shake hands and forget the whole thing. Ross tried a failed closing act by disappearing into the bush and whipping himself with barbed wire to simulate Nazi torture, but by that time the game was well and truly up and no one was buying it. When he next met Meikle, the Captain gave him a wink and left the room; they would never see each other again.

The exposure of the hoax led to an inquiry by the attorney general, and Folkes bore the brunt of it. In early 1943, in a move of supreme utu, the red-faced SIB was taken over by the Commissioner of Police, and Folkes returned quietly to the UK and the carpet trade, to which he was apparently much better suited.

Ross and Remmers were never charged; they had caused the government enough embarrassment without the media circus that would no doubt have accompanied their court appearances. Charles Remmers, arguably the director of the whole thing, went on to face a higher court in September 1943 when he died of leukaemia at Otaki, aged 55. His leading man, Syd Ross, was soon back on police radar however, being convicted of assuming a name, receiving stolen property and false pretences, and this time he was imprisoned in Paparua prison, near Christchurch.

Ross, being Ross, soon managed to escape, purloining a bicycle along the way, but – perhaps lacking the directorial guidance of the mastermind Remmers – he gave himself up just six hours later. This time there was no grand scheme, no fast cars and flash uniform for Sydney Gordon Ross, and he was charged, somewhat demeaningly, with bicycle theft. He returned to prison and died in 1946, aged just 37, from tuberculosis.

His obituary of 8 November 1946 in the New Zealand Truth lists Ross as “a tall slim crook who tried to bluff his way through life, but never thoroughly succeeded.” In that he may have failed, but perhaps the life of Syd Ross still has something to teach us the dangers of blind acceptance of authority.

If you like this you'll love the other cool stuff we have in the pages of Plenty. It's all just a click away at www.plenty.co.nz