Old soldiers will retrace steps of war

Press, 30 July 1986, Page 1

Old soldiers will retrace steps of war

Trooping round old World War II battlefields is not a standard sort of holiday, but some former New Zealand servicemen intend to spend the next seven weeks revisiting their old campaign areas in Europe. The trip has been organised by Mr Dave Hughey, of Christchurch. Forty-seven former servicemen and their wives from throughout New Zealand will leave on Friday.

They would spend most of their time in Italy, retracing the paths New Zealand soldiers took between 1943 and 1945, Mr Hughey said. They would also visit London, Paris, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, East and West Germany, the United States, and Singapore.

Few of the men would have been to these countries since the end of the war, and so they would notice differences, he said. The idea for the tour came from a similar trip that Mr Hughey and his wife, Mary, made in 1981. This was not an organised tour. The couple “followed their noses” through Africa and Italy. "We got such a tre-

mendous reception in Italy that we wanted to go back,” he said. “One lady in a wee shop in Italy told us her sister had fallen in love with a New Zealander during the war; in about half a minute the shop was full of people reminiscing.”

Not all memories would be happy ones, Mr Hughey said.

“Over 2000 New Zealanders died in Italy, so visits to cemeteries will be part of the trip.”

The tour would also visit Dresden in East Germany, which was badly damaged by Allied bombing at the end of the war, and Arnhem, of “A Bridge Too Far” fame.

Mr Hughey, who was a signals sergeant during the war, spent two years in Italy and got to know a lot of it “intimately.” “When the shelling was heavy you might have to crawl over areas replacing wire six or seven times a day,” he said. “You got to know the terrain.”

He found the country had not changed much when he returned in 1981. “The new autostradas confused things, but once we found the old roads I knew where I was.”