By PSS | Posted: Friday June 8, 2018
After two years and 245 days away from New Zealand, Alex McBurney returned from WWII not much older than 23, but having seen things most wouldn’t in an entire lifetime.
“I was conscripted when I was 19 years old. A boy who hadn’t been past Gore in his lifetime.” Two months after his 21st birthday he was serving in Monte Cassino. McBurney was a truck driver. “Our job was to take the ammunition into the guns. At Cassino, we were working night and day. The shells were heavy. It took two of us to lift a box onto the back of the truck,” he says. “I didn’t have a driver’s licence. I was just a boy.”
The Battles of Cassino were among the most savage of WWII. It took four assaults to capture Monte Cassino, and drive back German troops. When Cassino finally fell in May 1944 the losses were severe with over 55,000 Allied casualties. A total of 343 New Zealanders were killed.
The soldiers always slept on the ground, “If we could get a stone wall on one side and a truck wheel on the other, we were reasonably safe.”
Away from the front line, the soldiers faced different day-to-day struggles. “We ate Bully Beef every day. Fried, stewed.” Alex explains. “I was only seven stone when I came home.”
Alex was engaged to Elma in 1942 while on his final leave. “The next day I left her and I didn’t see her for three and a half years.” The two kept in touch over a series of letters, Alex writing when he could, Elma sending often and as much as she could. “They were books,” chuckles Alex.
Alex arrived home on January 3rd. “We must have been about ten miles out, we could see the land. But boy, we could smell it. Home.”
Anzac Day pays tribute to the Kiwi and Australian soldiers who fought in the great wars and honours the fallen. It’s a day of remembrance. Alex McBurney, a resident now of Frankton Court, is 98 years young, and plays golf four times a week. “If you asked any returned service man, they’d say yes, have a day of remembrance. But whatever you want to do, go and do it.”