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War Memorial
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Forgotten Victims

DECORATED SOLDIER’S SON MAKES PLEA FOR WAR’S “FORGOTTEN VICTIMS’’

More than 90 years after his father came back from World War 1 a fragile and troubled man and took his own life, Whangamata man Jack Moore has pleaded for the country to understand what war’s “forgotten victims” endured.
Mr Moore, 89, was only four when his father committed suicide in 1929 and has only vague memories of him. What he has lived with for the last nine decades is the devastation the war and his father’s premature death caused his mother and the rest of his family.
His father, also Jack Moore, arrived home in 1919, a decorated war hero but an emotionally fragile and tormented man.
Paeroa-born Jack Moore went to Australia shortly before the war began and went overseas with the Australian Imperial Forces. He landed at Gallipoli at dawn on April 25, 1915, was badly wounded when a Turkish soldier shot him in the shoulder, and sent to Malta to recover.
After several months in hospital he was sent back to the war, to the bloody and brutal trenches of the western front in France. He survived without being wounded again but four years of fighting was taking a terrible emotional and mental toll.
He returned to his home town of Paeroa on the Hauraki Plains in 1919, married and had two children.
In 1929, when Jack Moore was 40 and with a third child on the way, World War 1 war claimed another victim.
The troubled family man left a tortured and heart-rending note and killed himself, unable to cope with the ugly aftermath of the war.
“My brain is going,” he scrawled on a scrap of paper.
His death devastated his wife and family.
Young Jack Moore was too young to understand what had happened and why his father was not coming home any more.
He did not learn of his father’s suicide for nearly 50 years in 1978 when a relative told him. But he did understand the anguish the war and his father’s death caused his mother and his family and now he is determined others will understand.
Mr Moore, a retired electrical engineer who served with the RNZAF during World War II and who lives in Whangamata on the CoromandelPeninsula, wants people to know the pain war’s “forgotten victims” endured.
He said the families, relatives and friends of soldiers who were wounded, traumatised, or who died fighting for their country, went through their own hell while the men were away, fighting in another country in a war many did not understand.
At Anzac Day this year, Mr Moore went with his daughter Vicki Davey and his granddaughter, Sacha Davey to the dawn service at the Waihi RSA...
It was an emotional and proud moment for Mr Moore. On her right breast Sacha, 27, who lives in Perth, wore the Distinguished Conduct Medal his father won in France, for “conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty”.
“It was very emotional and I was as proud as I could be, just knowing that by wearing the medal Sacha was recognising what my Dad and what my family went through. I think Sacha and some of the other young people at the service began to understand what awful, awful things war can do to a man and how it can so deeply trouble those left behind, the mothers, fathers, wives, children and family.
“They are the forgotten victims of war and went through their own form of hell, not knowing if they were coming back, and wondering is the next letter a telegram with the news they all dreaded getting.” Mr Moore said he wants people to understand how hard it was for many New Zealand families to grow up without a husband, or a father.
In a book on his father, Anzac Jack, Mr Moore wrote of the five years of “tribulations and the living hell” his father endured.
“He had helped to win the Great War but he lost his own battle in the end.”
Mr Moore said his mother and his family, were “like many thousands of others” in New Zealand after the war. In those days very little, if anything, was done to help returned servicemen and their wives and families, cope with the awful trauma of war. It ripped many families apart.”
“Things have changed for returning soldiers but I still do not think enough is done for these forgotten victims.
“On Anzac Day we remember men such as my father and his mates. Many made the supreme sacrifice. Many survived. Some were wounded and suffered for years. Some, such as my father, were left with severe mental problems.
“We remember them and men and women from later wars with all the respect and dignity they have truly earned. I have nothing but respect and admiration for the men and women who went to war.
“But let us also spare a thought for their families who waited at home. Let us remember mothers such as my grandmother in Auckland. She waited four years for my father to return, dreading every day she would receive the telegram to say he had been wounded again or worse still he had been killed or was missing in action.
“She died just before he returned. Let us remember mothers such as my own who lost my father 10 years after the war.
“These mothers and many other family members in similar circumstances were torn apart by the deaths of their men or their absence at war. At the same time they supported their families, ran the farms and businesses and contributed to the country’s war effort.
“They had to pick up the pieces and they did it with dignity and devotion. They received no accolades. They received no medals. Their names are not recorded. They were the unsung heroes. “They deserve to be remembered too and I think it is time we gave them credit in some tangible form for the part they have played both during and after these horrifying conflicts that cost them so dearly.”
Mr Moore said the recognition he was suggestion would not cost anything. He just wanted people, particularly the younger generation, to understand how tough it was for his “forgotten victims” to lose someone in a war or how badly they were affected.
“I would like a greater awareness of the pain and the torment war can bring, not only to a soldier but to his family and friends. It is a different form of hell.”
Mr Moore said the sentiments were brought home to him when he read a letter from his father dated December 30, 1917, from the trenches “somewhere in France”.
“It reads, ‘All I worry about is we win this war successfully and I have the luck to get back safely to my dear old mother. She has gone through far more than I have in this war’,” Mr Moore said. “His words say it all.”

Jack Moore Whangamata 10/10/2014 Ian Stuart Auckland

A Turkish bullet fired at almost point-blank range tore through 26-year-old Jack Moore's shoulder on May 19, 1915.

It slowed the Paeroa-born soldier only a little on the Gallipoli parapet where he had climbed to get a better aim at the advancing Turkish troops.

Bleeding badly, with several bones broken by the bullet, he threw the butt of his Lee Enfield .303 rifle against his injured shoulder and shot the Turk dead.

"I got three shots into the chap who put the window into my shoulder before I dropped off the parapet," he told his mother, Mary Anne, in a letter from the hospital ship Soudan a few days later.

"He never stirred again, but the kick from the rifle did shake the broken bones up in my shoulder."

The Turks retreated, leaving 7000 dead and wounded, and only then did Jack Moore - who fought in the Australian Army - think about first-aid.


"I toddled off, after saying good luck to the boys, down to the beach about a mile from the firing line," he wrote in his letter.

"They could not spare anyone to go with me so after a few spells on the way I managed to get there all right.

"My boots were full of blood by the time I got to the bottom of the hill and I felt pretty sticky."

At the medical post at Anzac Cove, where thousands of Australian and New Zealand troops had landed three weeks earlier, Jack Moore adopted the laconic attitude that had become an indomitable part of the Anzac spirit.

"I knew I was not hurt much, for in the field we say a man's hurt when he's got a leg or two missing or the side of his head off."

His astonishing story is told in a book by his son - also Jack Moore - who turned 80 today.

Anzac Jack Moore was lucky enough to survive the war, but what he had seen haunted him and led to his early death in 1929.

His widow, Elsie, remarried and it was not until well after her death that Mr Moore learned the tragic truth about how his war-hero father had died.

His stepfather gave him a box of letters and photographs Anzac Jack had sent back from several war zones.

That started Mr Moore, now retired at Whangamata on the Coromandel Peninsula, off down the emotional road of researching and writing about a father who died when he was 4, and whom he barely remembered.

He did not know that for years his father hid the mental anguish created by World War 1's five years of living hell.

He also did not know that as New Zealand headed into a depression, the pressure finally got the better of Anzac Jack, who killed himself.

Mr Moore learned the truth from an elderly relative in 1978.

On June 29, 1929, Anzac Jack ended it all. He was 40. His young family also included Alex, who was 2, and his daughter Colleen was about to be born.

Mr Moore now believes the huge pressure of brutal war and living with the daily death of many mates finally took its terrible toll.

The signs of a troubled soul were not obvious for the decade after his father left the Army but it finally overwhelmed him.

In a book simply called Anzac Jack, Mr Moore wrote that his father was a remarkable man who had endured the "tribulations of a living hell for five years of his short life but in a moment of despair was unable to cope with the subtle pressures of post-war living".

"It was probably an action he took at a time when he couldn't think straight."

"He had helped to win the Great War but he lost his own battle in the end."

Mr Moore said in the 13 years it took to write his book and publish his father's letters, he began to understand the man.



As a 17-year-old in 1905, Anzac Jack began an engineering apprenticeship with the Waihi Gold Mining Company, completing it at the Waikino battery in 1910.

When war broke out in 1914, he was working in Australia and was one of the first in the queue to volunteer.

At 6am on April 25, 1915, he left the British battleship Prince of Wales and landed at Anzac Cove, Gallipoli, with thousands of other Australian and New Zealand soldiers.

He lasted three weeks before the shootout with the Turkish soldier ended his Gallipoli service.

After recovering in Malta and England, he went to France but only after he handed back his sergeant's stripes and reverted to a sapper (private) so that he could go back into action.

In November 1917, in France, he won his bravery award, the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM), for "conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty", but only once in the scores of letters he wrote to his family in New Zealand did he mention it.

Few details are known of the action that won him the medal.

"I have been very lucky and the DCM was an unexpected bonus," he wrote to his mother.

After the war, Anzac Jack bottled up his emotions and could not or would not discuss them with anyone.

"As a result he suffered a temporary mental collapse, during which time he took his own life."

Mr Moore wrote of his own wishes for those struggling to deal with the stress of life.

"The message I would pass on to anyone experiencing a stressful and emotional situation similar to that of our father in June 1929 would be: 'Please swallow your pride and talk about your problem with someone, be it your spouse, your partner, your doctor, a friend ... or anyone at all'.

"You will be surprised how many people really care about you and are willing to listen and to help. Usually, there are some brighter clouds just over the horizon anyway."

Nearly 76 years after his father died, Mr Moore can barely conceal his deep emotional feelings when he talks about the stress of writing his father's story, and one of the most telling and poignant scraps of paper his father left.

Anzac Jack's last written message, on the day he died, was just four words long: "My brain is going."

Mr Moore still has some anger that his father left the family in such dire financial straits, but also said his pride in the man is immense.



He believes the nickname Anzac Jack was fitting for a Kiwi serving under the Australian flag.

The name was given to him by a South African family when he stopped at Cape Town on his way back to Australia for leave.