KEY POINTS:
Anzac Day is not about dawn services for 91-year-old war veteran Harry Grey. He has been to only a couple.
But for him, like other New Zealanders, it remains a special day for remembrance.
"I think there is now a greater appreciation of what a major sacrifice we made for the younger generation to be free, and that they can go anywhere in the world and be respected as New Zealanders," Mr Grey says.
For a long time civilians did not understand what the war had been like for the armed services, he says.
"We, the returned soldiers, kept all our feelings to ourselves. People really didn't want to know and we didn't tell them because it felt like imposing something on them and they wouldn't understand. Some thought we were making up lies," Mr Grey says from his unit in a Manurewa retirement village.
Mr Grey started talking when his grandchildren began asking questions, usually prompted by school projects.
He suspects there are many who remain uninterested, but today at least is a day for others to remember.
Mr Grey has rekindled his memories, some painful, with three trips back to battle zones - for the Crete and El Alamein 60th anniversaries and also when he, a Pakeha, had the opportunity to accompany a Maori Battalion trip in 2004.
Anzac Day brings one war memory into particularly sharp focus.
Today is 65 years to the day since Mr Grey, then 26, was evacuated from Porto Rafti on mainland Greece on the Royal Navy ship HMS Calcutta.
In the early hours of April 25 his division was shipped to Suda Bay on Crete's northern coast and less than a month later they would be caught up in the 1941 Battle of Crete, where they endured days of aerial bombardment.
Mr Grey was in the maintenance division of the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force.
He was a fourth reinforcement who volunteered for Army service as a motorcycle dispatch rider on June 18, 1940, before compulsory military service came in on July 22 that year.
"I am proud of being a volunteer."
Starting in late 1940, he served his country overseas for three years and 275 days.
Because of his experience in New Zealand with Norton motorcycles, which he used to race around Waiheke Island, Mr Grey was put into the maintenance section to look after motorcycles, trucks and charging engines.
Even by the time he landed on Crete, Mr Grey reckons he had already cheated death twice.
The first time was at Katerini, in northern Greece, when "I could have been wearing a concrete overcoat".
Mr Grey relates how a New Zealand soldier stationed with his unit up in the hills wanted to visit the "ladies of the night" for some home comforts.
"He held a loaded and cocked revolver with the hammer back against my stomach. I was able to tell him where to go and talked him out of ending my war before it had even started."
Then on his division's retreat back through Greece at a place called Freyberg's Folly, just out of Larissa, a German dive bomber attacked.
"Imagine two soldiers lying on the grass by the corner of this road jammed up with Army transport and artillery and a German Stuka just diving down on this target. [Me and] my mate were spaced two arms' distance from each other, firing our rifles at this plane."
Mr Grey says a 500lb bomb was dropped and a piece of its casing sliced off Dredger Martin's left shoulder on April 18, 1941.
"I did not know until 40 years later that he died in a German field hospital four days later."
At Suda Bay, the main port of Crete, the question was asked: who was going to stay on Crete to service the dispatch riders' motorcycles.
"There was a deathly silence for some time. I spoke up, saying I had volunteered to come to this bloody war, I would volunteer to stay on Crete. I didn't know what I was in for but hoped for the best."
When the battle began on May 20 Mr Grey recalls the chaos of trying to fight off the German paratroopers armed with machine guns.
"People should remember we were overloaded with five times the personnel, not all soldiers, for the equipment that we had. We were like Kiwis with number eight wire, we did the best we could."
Mr Grey says Lieutenant-General Freyberg looked after his New Zealand troops and pulled them out when the casualties got beyond reason.
"We respected him and always remember the New Zealand Second Expeditionary Division was worth two of any country's one division in the Second World War."
Mr Grey was lucky to have a spare Norton to ride over the White Mountains from Chania on the north of Crete to Sfakia on the south.
The loose rock roads cut his new pair of Army boots to ribbons in the first 30km. The tortuous road ended at a concrete escarpment above the valley and the caves at Sfakia, where he sheltered.
"I found my signals unit and had I been two hours later I would have had to stay on Crete as a prisoner of war."
Mr Grey says the soldiers were taken off Crete and when they docked at Alexandria on May 31 New Zealand Prime Minister Peter Fraser was there to greet them.
He recalls Mr Fraser saying: "You will want for nothing when you get back to New Zealand."
"That is exactly what I got in 1945 - nothing," says Mr Grey.
He spent time training in Egypt and Syria and went back to Egypt in 1942, where he was to be mentioned in dispatches after a German bombing raid, but the truck with the records was destroyed.
"I like to think of what I nearly got awarded."
Mr Grey also served in the Battle of El Alamein, which began in October 1942.
About a month earlier, on September 3, his mate Don McKenzie was killed there in a bombing raid.
"We sewed Don up in an Army blanket, dug a shallow grave with his bayoneted rifle stuck in the ground with a wooden cross, his name and meat tickets [identity discs] to identify the grave and four of us had a burial service there."
Later he was transferred to the El Alamein Cemetery with the other fallen soldiers.
"He was 40 years of age, I was 27.
"And if I had known in 1945 what I learned from the war graves register in 2002, 60 years later, I would only have had to go to Sandringham from my home in Mt Roskill to find his family.
"I would still like to be able to help them with a photo of his last resting place."
In 2002, Mr Grey's first visit back to El Alamein in 60 years, he recalls telling a reporter how he had the "strangest feeling of tension going out of my shoulders and out of my head".
"I really felt I could finally let it free."
In a visit to Crete in 2004 he thought he saw two of the Nortons he maintained in private war collections.
"The Norton motorcycles look their age after 60 years."
* On the web:
Online link: The Auckland War Memorial Museum has a Book of Remembrance on its website for people to post messages on to remember those who served and died in war.
