KEY POINTS:
Every Anzac Day, religiously, Beres Whyte and his family pick up Gordon Brownless and drive him to the memorial services in Tauranga.
They take in the Tauranga RSA dawn parade and then the civic service at the Cenotaph in Memorial Park.
With service medals draped on their jackets, Beres, 89, and Gordon, 86, proudly stand side by side, inseparable, hardly speaking but sharing plenty of memories. World War 2 is just one of them.
Yesterday, the friends again marked Anzac Day at the Tauranga parade, remembering those who made sacrifices in war.
Beres and Gordon have been mates for 80 years, first meeting and becoming friends at Hamilton Baptist Church. Gordon was at Hamilton West School and Beres at Hamilton East primary.
Fifteen years later, they fought at the same time in Italy but strangely enough they never crossed tracks.
Beres was a divisional signalman in the 23rd Battalion that formed part of the Fifth Brigade with the 21st South Island Battalion and 28th Maori Battalion and moved from Taranto in the south to Trieste further north.
Gordon was a trooper in the Second New Zealand Cavalry regiment. "There was no horse but my feet got worn out," he said.
"Never saw him, not once," said Beres, "but there were a lot of blokes, thousands of them."
Soon after landing in Italy, Gordon was wounded - "I was shot in the bum and had a holiday in hospital at Bari." He rejoined his regiment and ended up at the Battle of Cassino.
"We weren't even sure when the show was over," said Gordon. "We were on patrol work just out of Cassino in a village called St Angelo and it was the Polish brigade that finally took the Heights of Cassino."
The Battle of Cassino was fought over the first five months of 1944 with the loss of 54,000 Allied and 20,000 German soldiers. Cassino was called the Italian Stalingrad and once it fell the Allied troops marched on and captured Rome on June 4, 1944 - the enemy's morale was dented.
Beres and Gordon's down-to-earth Kiwi approach got them through the war.
"We took things one at a time and got in to scraps. I remember being shelled to billy-o one day and I was so tired I went in to a nearby house and slept. When I think back, I say 'gosh'. The shelling didn't seem to worry us at the time," said Beres.
Gordon said: "I remember one night at Rimini and Jerry 170mm shells were coming down on us. We called them well borers because they burned in to surface and mushroomed the ground.
"We got under some armoured cars and spent a reasonably sleepless night. But we got out of it without any casualties," he said.
Beres retired to Tauranga from his Morrinsville farm in 1960 and Gordon - a retired accountant - turned up 22 years ago.
They also meet every month at a divisional cavalry gathering. "There are only eight of us from this area left," said Gordon.
Beres said it was good to get among the blokes and enjoy the comradeship. "But you know, every time I hear the Last Post ... that really gets to me," he said, as the returned serviceman yesterday trooped off Memorial Park for another year.
