Gerald McNaughton Chong

http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/features/2362813/Siblings-recall-fathers-untiring-efforts#share

When dawn breaks on Anzac Day, Taranaki resident Brian Chong will remember his father's medal-winning World War I service as a stretcher-bearer.

Brian's father Gerald McNaughton Chong was one of only a handful of Kiwis of Chinese descent to serve in the war - a source of immense pride for his family.

His bravery under intense German shelling saw him awarded the Military Medal for "conspicuous bravery" but Brian says his father was "just an ordinary man who did his bit for his country".

"My brother and I would visit our father's grave after the parade, to put a poppy on it," he says.

"We used to compete to see who would get there first and my brother would beat me to it."

But his father was one of the many men who returned from the war and preferred to leave it behind, refusing to talk about his experiences, not wanting to be reminded of the horrors he had seen.

"He would say, though, that on Christmas Day they would yell out season's greetings to the Germans - because their lines were very close," he says.

"He said they would throw tins of jam to each other."

Many Chinese-New Zealanders declined to serve in the war because of their marginalised status. But Gerald McNaughton Chong volunteered to join the Medical Corp.

The youngest son of Chew Chong, a prominent member of the community who pioneered selling and manufacturing the pound of butter and built one of the first butter factories in 1885, and Taranaki local Elizabeth Whatton, the daughter of a settler involved in ironsand smelting, was a chemist's assistant.

He enlisted and joined the New Zealand Medical Corp as a stretcher-bearer, being attached to work with the No 1 Field Ambulance.

Initially an officers corp, an amendment in 1908 defence regulations saw "all officers, non-commissioned officers and men connected with the medical service of the permanent force, militia and volunteer, formed into the New Zealand Medical Corps".

General Sir Ian Hamilton ordered the corp organise field ambulances and "make every use of men whose civilian training fitted them to the work".

With his training as a chemist's assistant, Gerald Chong was quickly admitted and in May 1916 sailed for Plymouth on the Willochra, reaching England two months later.

He was sent to Bapaume in France, where www.britainatwar.org.uk records: "The ground shook and tolled humanity by the second."

Being a stretcher-bearer was exhausting work.

Chong carried wounded men to aid posts to receive treatment and later to dressing stations where they would have their bleeding stopped, splints applied, or have their wounds stitched.

In his book The New Zealanders at Gallipoli Fred Waite wrote: "A man without a load can dash from cover to cover, but the stretcher-bearers, with their limp and white-faced burdens, must walk steadily on, ignoring sniper and hostile gunners. Hour after hour the work went on, until after 20 hours' stretcher-bearing these unheeded heroes fell in their tracks from sheer exhaustion".

Chong's life was constantly at risk from bullets, shells and gas as he waded through mud and shell craters to remove the wounded from the battlefield.

One corp sergeant said he would never forget the experience: "A 12-stone weight on the stretcher, a dark night, a little drizzling rain, groping our way down the steep incline through prickly scrub, our wounded man crying with pain and begging for a drink every few yards, incessant rifle fire and bullets whizzing all around us."

In 1918 Bapaume came under intense enemy bombardment on August 25. The New Zealand Division suffered heavy losses and more than 300 were wounded. Heavy overnight rain meant heavy mud made the conditions for the stretcher- bearers almost impossible.

Chong was on duty at one of the bearer-posts and worked continuously for 36 hours carrying the wounded despite the weather and heavy shelling, winning his medal.

It is not possible to determine how many Chinese-New Zealand men served in World War I, a time of intense and open racism against the Chinese.

But like Chong, that did not deter Arnold Wong Lee, who also had a European mother, from "answering his country's call", as the inscription on his parents' headstone in Hastings reads: "He was killed in action on November 24, 1917 at the age of 19."

Another soldier of Chinese ethnicity was Clarence Eric Kee, who stayed in France with the Canterbury Infantry Regiment from 1917 until the end of the war, despite being wounded during his service.

In 1920 his father, Frank Kow Kee, was granted naturalisation because of his son's service, making him one of only four Chinese naturalised between 1908 and 1952 - years when Chinese were not allowed to become permanent citizens.

Michele Ong is a Fairfax intern student at AUT