who never received medals
But more than 600 of the battalion's 3000 soldiers never got their medals.
Fixing that has become a personal quest for lawyer David Stone, who has launched a major effort to track down the whānau of those soldiers.
Now, a list of those soldiers who never received their medals has been released, with the hope their whānau can be tracked down for ceremonies to be held later this year.
It is all the work of a personal inquiry Stone said spun out of control. Sitting eating lunch one day, he wondered why he never saw his great uncle's medals.
"We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into," he said.
"I wrote off to the medals department requesting not only his file, but the files for all the soldiers where he was from, Manutuke and Muriwai in Gisborne."
When those files came back, he said, there were dozens of names. That piqued his curiosity further, starting a back-and-forth that lasted nearly three years.
Link to article: Search for whānau of Māori Battalion soldiers who never received medals | RNZ News
