I replied ‘yes I am ready to die.’

Surviving a World War Two Pacific massacre

I went to Tarawa looking for the bodies of a group of men from Aotearoa New Zealand who had been executed by the Imperial Japanese. Instead an 83-year-old man told me of his survival. It was 1999 when I flew in the 2200 kilometres from Fiji to Kiribati, one of the world’s vastest ocean nations, astride the Equator and the International Dateline. Tarawa …