Reflections on Anzac Day

Russell Walford was 29 when he died at the Battle of Sangro River in Italy. It was World War II and one week before Christmas.

It’s a Katikati tradition for the college head boy and girl to offer insights at the Anzac Day service. The clock tower in Katikati’s Memorial Square was put up by his family to remember him. Walford also has a street named after him. “This one will be very different for me,” ponders Katikati College’s head boy, Hamish Tanner. “Because many of the local men who went and fought would have gone to Katikati College. And I will be standing here on Anzac morning representing them, including Lt Russell Freeland Walford.”

This year, four Katikati College students met at the crossroads of Walford and Work Rds, down Apata Way. They had Walford’s diary sent home from Italy.

Leilani Rooks, head girl at Katikati College tried to put herself in Russell’s military boots.

“Imagine — in just a matter of days all the male figures in my life going off to war, and me going as a nurse. I can’t get my head around that.” The diary: Tuesday, March 12, 1940: “Chap Hughes suffering concussion takes violent fits and it needs four or five men to hold him down,” said an observation from a military hospital bed in Italy 84 years ago.

Tuesday, March 19, 1940: “Rained very heavily today.” But a weather report set against the backdrop of enemy tank and artillery shells raining down.

Tanner says of Walford: “I am not sure they truly understood they might die . . . “But had they understood I don’t think it would have changed anything. We are just proud . . . and, yes, very, very grateful to them.—