What happened in the featherston incident of 1943?

Answer 1

Presumably you're referring to the Featherston POW camp shooting.

It's a complicated question, but the gist of it is:

The camp was built in New Zealand to hold Japanese POWs captured by US forces in the Pacific. There were problems in the camp early on because the Japanese troops felt they had violated their military code by being taken alive. They also objected to being put to work in the camp, even though the Geneva Convention allowed for this.

On February 25th, 1943, 240 of the prisoners staged a sit-in led by Lt Adachi Toshio. Lt Malcolm, the camp adjutant, led a force of guards into the compound to break it up. The exact sequence of events is uncertain, but it seems Malcolm fired a "warning shot" that wounded Adachi in the shoulder (and, according to some sources, killed another prisoner behind him). The prisoners charged the guards and threw rocks at them, and the guards opened fire. The shooting lasted 30 seconds and killed 48 prisoners, and wounded 74 others. Six guards were also wounded by "ricochets", and one died.

Lt Adachi survived the incident and later returned to Japan with the other prisoners after the war. In 1985 (I think) he came back to New Zealand for the unveiling of a memorial on the site of the shooting.