"Two young guys on a camp from Tauranga Boy's College ... they're only 16 and they ran straight up behind me and they helped assist him.
"It was pretty scary - he had burns to (much) of his body. For them it would have been quite rough.''
Between the four of them they picked him up, got him down some outside stairs and on to the grass.
A local midwife took over, putting him on oxygen, while other neighbours put wet towels around him as windows exploded above them.
Mr Judd said the man had been cooking his dinner when the fire started about 4.30pm.
"He's 94 so he doesn't move real fast.
"He tried to make it out of the house and just about got the door open but collapsed backwards.''
The man was treated locally before being flown to Auckland's Middlemore Hospital.
Mr Judd said he had known him all his life; as a cheeky teen Judd used to "give him the bird and fly off'' on his motorbike when the man complained he and his friends were going too fast. As an adult, he grew to respect a man who had lived an interesting life.
"We've built two houses right next door to him and we've got to know him ever since we were kids - we've given him grief or he's given us grief from when we were young. It wasn't until we were a bit older that we started getting along.
"He was quite a neat old chap.''
The man was a translator in the Maori Battalion, speaking both Maori and Italian. He brought his Italian wife home with him after the war and they moved to Whangamata in the late 1960s.
She died about seven years ago and, in recent times, the man had taken to joining Mr Judd and his colleagues as they built houses nearby, telling them of his experiences.
"The last few years he was awesome,'' he said.
