INTERVIEWED AT RANFURLY VETERANS’ HOME
MARCH 26 2010
 
I helped put planes in the air that shot a lot of people down,” says Owen Hicks, who served on the ground staff in the Royal New Zealand Air Force.
Though he never fired a rifle in anger his job was to make sure the allied planes kept flying their missions in the Pacific. In a single day in Guadalcanal the United States and New Zealand Air Forces shot down 71 planes. But when this made headlines back home, Owen says his mother was very upset.
He spent time on airbases in New Zealand as well as in the Pacific islands. The skills of the New Zealanders were put to good use when the New Zealand Air Force had to ditch six Kittyhawk planes in New Caledonia due to bad weather. They were almost ready to abandon the planes but Hicks and his comrades set to work on repairing them and had five flying again within a few weeks.
He also helped to repair and recover planes that had been damaged and shot down in air battles with the Japanese. “We just did our job. It was a job to be done at the time, and it was done.”
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