The personal stories of Kiwi soldiers who served overseas for the Allied war effort are set to go on public display in a central London museum.
Their untold stories join the 3,500 objects on display at the Imperial War Museum’s new permanent exhibition - Second World War and Holocaust Galleries, the first museum in the world to house the galleries under the same roof.
"The Second World War and the Holocaust will soon pass out of living memory, leaving us without the first-hand testimony of veterans, eyewitnesses and survivors," Diane Lees, Director General of Imperial War Museums said.
"IWM’s new galleries will preserve their stories and ensure that the world never forgets what they had experienced."
Six years in the making, the $60m exhibition spans two floors with personal stories from over 80 countries including New Zealand. There are also interactive displays to shine a light on one of the darkest periods of human history.
"These galleries tell a global story, we’ve used our own collection but we’ve also had to add to what we have, so we went out and found new content," Kate Clements, curator of the galleries told 1News.
"So that entails sometimes purchasing when things came up for auction, sometimes acquiring objects from donors or sometimes acquiring items on loan."
One item includes the machine gun New Zealander Edgar ‘Cobber’ Kain, a Hurricane fighter, took as a trophy of his first kill, a German Dornier 17 bomber.
The 21-year-old became the British Empire’s first ‘air ace’ – an airman who shot down five of more enemy aircraft. Edgar became a household name. He shot down 16 enemy aircraft before dying in a flying accident in June 1940.
On display and on loan from Auckland War Memorial are the brass and cloth shoulder titles worn by Ken Porter, a Kiwi soldier who arrived in Italy in late 1943 and fought as part of the Allied forces at Monte Cassino. He was wounded a year later, recovered, met and married an Italian woman and kept all his experiences and photographs in a scrapbook.
On 3 September, 1939, New Zealand formally declared war on Germany and was one of the first countries to become involved in the conflict. Approximately 140,000 Kiwi men and women served during the Second World War. Fatalities numbered 11,928 according to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission with nearly 16,000 wounded.
The free exhibition opens to the public next week.
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