Moana Beattie

Private 62645 · D Company, 28th (Māori) Battalion · Died of wounds, Libya, 14 December 1941

Early life

Te Moana Nui a Kiwa Beattie, known as Moana, was born in about 1919 and grew up at Kiwi Road, Wairoa. He was a son of Te Waaka Piripi Beattie and Heeni (Kui) Eruera, and his whānau is Ngāti Kahungunu. He came from a large family, and two of his older brothers, Whare and Brown, also went to war with the battalion. When Moana enlisted he was a single man working as a scrub cutter.

War

Moana sailed with D Company in mid-1941, on the same draft as his brother Brown. Whare had gone a year earlier with B Company. The new men joined the battalion in Egypt after it returned from Greece and Crete, in time for the Libyan campaign of November and December 1941.

On the night of 13–14 December, D Company took part in the battalion’s attack on Point 181, a strongpoint on the escarpment near Gazala. One platoon was pinned down by fire from the flank and rear until Private Charlie Shelford silenced the post, which earned him the Distinguished Conduct Medal. The battalion lost three men killed and 27 wounded or missing that night, and took 382 Italian prisoners. Moana died of wounds on 14 December 1941, aged 22, and was most likely one of the men wounded in this attack. Five days later, Padre Harawira held a memorial service for the battalion’s dead. The Gisborne Herald listed his death on 5 January 1942, naming his mother, Mrs Kui Beattie of Wairoa.

Remembered

Moana is buried in Knightsbridge War Cemetery, Acroma, Libya (grave 6.C.19). Eight months later his eldest brother, Whare, died of wounds at El Mreir in Egypt, and he has no known grave. Brown rose to staff sergeant and came home to Wairoa, where he died in 1992. Of the three Beattie brothers who went overseas, he was the only one to return.

Sources

Online Cenotaph C20696; Commonwealth War Graves Commission; J. F. Cody, 28 (Maori) Battalion (1956); Gisborne Herald, 5 January 1942.

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