It is eighty years today since New Zealand declared war on Germany, joining the United Kingdom in responding to the unprovoked aggression of the German invasion of Poland. Until just now, glancing at one of the government historical websites, this statistic hadn’t occurred to me
New Zealand was involved for all but three of the 2179 days of the war — a commitment on a par only with Britain and Australia.
It is estimated that 11928 New Zealanders died in the course of that conflict, a death rate (per million population) higher than in any other Commonwealth country. Dreadful as the war was, it still strikes me as something closer to a just war (for our side) than most other conflicts in modern history – although, of course, the counterfactual is unknowable.
Back in the very early days of this blog, I wrote a short post on some aspects…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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