Looting ‘Exaggerated’

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31611, 23 February 1968, Page 20

Looting ‘Exaggerated’

(N.Z. Press Association)

DUNEDIN, Feb. 22. A “living off the land” policy involving the capture of pigs and poultry to supplement Army food rations was about the only looting he knew of, Professor Angus Ross, head of the history department at Otago University, said today.

Professor Ross, an honorary colonel of the 4th Battailion, Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment, was commenting on statements made in the second volume of the official history of the Italian campaign, “From Cassino to Trieste,” by Robin Kay. Professor Ross is the author of the official history of the 23rd Battalion.

“I personally regret that attention is being concentrated on what is a small part of Robin Kay’s book, and on what was a minor aspect of the life of the New Zealand division in Italy,” he said. This was not fair to the reputation of a fighting force which never became undisciplined, never condoned looting officially, and whose members never made looting a top priority enterprise. “Nevertheless, if you ask me if there was looting, I must certainly reply in the affirmative,” Professor Ross said. It would have been a miracle or a consequence of terrifically severe discipline if there had been no looting. Not all soldiers were heroes. Neither were they saints, he said. They were just ordinary human beings who succumbed to temptations that came their way.

Emphasising that he knew nothing about the looting of art treasures. Professor Ross said he had heard of only one officer who possessed a painting claimed to have come from the home of a prominent fascist.

Looting of a kind did exist in North Africa, but it was usually of captured enemy

equipment or personal effects of prisoners of war. PROFITEERING Much worse than looting, he thought, were the rackets. He knew of one case which had involved a high-ranking officer who had used his staff car to run bags of sugar to a centre where high prices had been paid, much to his personal profit. “The peak of the looting was probably reached during the terrible days between Cassino and Rimini, especially on the advance to Florence.

“Thereafter, as a consequence of a firm directive given by General Freyberg and implemented by all commanding officers of units, looting was considerably reduced,” he said. “It was probably never stamped out, but it was brought under control.” Mr J. C. Hepburn, who served with the division as a major during the campaign,

said in Hamilton today that the reports in the official history were exaggerated. A certain amount of petty thieving had been done by New Zealand troops, but it had been mainly associated with drink, he said.

Troops from all the Allied countries were in Southern Italy at the time and he was convinced that the New Zealand division was probably less deserving of adverse criticism than any. "I don’t think the New Zealanders were in the class of the Australians and their ‘forty thousand thieves’,” Mr Hepburn said. In the last two decades he had had contact with many New Zealand returned servicemen and had visited hundreds of homes, but he could not remember having seen any object that might have been “looted” during the Italian campaign.

He said senior officers of the division should try to have the exaggerated account of the campaign amended.