KEY POINTS:
The war stories of soldiers who weren't meant to be fighting, but whom the fighting men could not do without, were yesterday preserved for future generations.
In World War II, army engineers laid and cleared minefields, built and destroyed roads and bridges, and ensured their colleagues in the
2nd New Zealand Division could either march to or retreat from the enemy.
In North Africa and Italy, the engineers worked in the gunsights of the enemy to complete their dangerous work - more than 250 were killed in action or died from battle wounds.
While highly regarded by New Zealand commanding officer Bernard Freyberg - who said his troop's successes largely depended on the engineers - the sappers' stories have not attracted the same attention as those of the combat troops.
Yesterday, oral historian Lizzie Catherall presented the Alexander Turnbull Library with the fruits of a project designed to rectify that neglect. Having been inspired by her engineer father's reluctance to tell his war stories, Ms Catherall collected the reminiscences of 11 of his fellow engineers - four of whom attended yesterday's ceremony.
Wellingtonian Colin McLeod, who served in Italy in 1944 and 45, said he understood the reluctance of old soldiers to tell their stories.
"When we came back no one wanted to talk about the war anyway: they had had enough, and it was the whole country. The first big job I had was building dams on the Waikato and two-thirds of the men were returned servicemen. All of New Zealand had taken part in the war effort in some way or another, and people wanted to get away from it, so most men didn't talk about it.
"It wasn't long after that that we got involved in a different sort of war and most of the young people were anti-war so you couldn't talk about it ... you then begin to wonder whether detailed personal history has a value.
"One part of you knows that you have to save it all up because some time or other someone will want to get at it. But you also wonder how many people are interested in it."
An engineering student at university when war broke out, Mr McLeod worked on building coastal defence emplacements around New Zealand, before shipping out to join 2nd NZ Division in 1944. He eventually became adjutant to its commanding officer, Fred Hanson.
Mr McLeod was lucky with the timing of when he joined the division: the sappers lost many more men before he joined the division than after.
Earlier in 1945, McLeod was in charge of a party sent to repair a road near the Senio River, in Lombardy.
"There was a German patrol with a Schmeisser machine gun that came around firing this thing dangerously close. We had already been shelled with mortar bombs and that sort of thing so I'd already been face down in the slushy mud. We got driven off, we couldn't do the job and pulled out."
