athurgood was there at Cape Helles as part of the New Zealand Brigade and “saw more dying and blood and guts than is good for a man. Years later, I saw the movie with that Mel Gibson and it captured one-tenth the horror of what I saw, but for all that it was a pretty good movie.”

Thurgood, a private, had been taken out of the Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) line with the rest of the brigade to help the stalled 29th Division on May 6, 1915. Efforts to take the strategic straits of the Dardanelles had been to no avail since the start of the campaign in February.

“‘Anzac Day,’ was a bust, all right. Everything that could go wrong did. So by the time the sixth of May come around, well my spirits were down and I was always an optimistic boy, even when they was dying of dysentery all round and the flies was so thick cause you couldn’t bury nobody. If you’d a tried, they’d shoot you.

“So, when they said we’d take the Daisy Patch, it sounded good because anything’d better than the trenches.”

It was there on the Daisy Patch, or the “Second Battle of Krithia,” that Thurgood died. “I don’t even remember it, which is to the good I guess. I just know that all of a sudden the rest of the boys were moving ahead without me. I never saw my body, or maybe I did. There were so many parts, I could have been in there. I guess a shell hit and took me and my mates.”

Thurgood wandered the battlefield and eventually made it to a troopship where he returned to New Zealand.

For more information, go to NZHistory.net.