New Zealand's last Anzac: 'I lived through it, somehow'

Eddie Dibley (left) and son, Mark, holding a picture of Doug Dibley, the last surviving Galliopli veteran to die in NZ. Eddie is Doug's. Photo / Alan Gibson

In 1915, New Zealand sent almost 14,000 troops to Gallipoli. One of those soldiers was Alfred Douglas Dibley, a teenager from Wellington. Unlike 2779 of his Kiwi comrades, Private Dibley returned. He became a farmer, married and had 11 children. His death 82 years later in 1997, aged 101, ended our last living link to the Anzacs.

The story goes that, in mid-1915, office clerk Doug Dibley was reading a newspaper at the oil company where he worked when an advertisement piqued his interest. "A call for local men," it screamed from the page. "Eighty men are wanted immediately at Trentham Camp ... 26 medical orderlies for military hospitals."

The hospital at Trentham, the camp where Wellington soldiers trained before sailing to overseas deployments, had been hit by an outbreak of respiratory diseases, measles and cerebrospinal meningitis.

Doug, 19, and his mate decided to answer that ad. News of the failed Anzac landing and the misery of the Gallipoli campaign had reached home and the boys, although not old enough to enlist, wanted to do their bit for King and comrade. In New Zealand men had to be 20. They still wanted to help.

They answered the ad - but they never made it to Trentham. "A cobber and myself, we were just under age, we said, how about going and helping them," he said in an interview in 1997, shortly before his death.

"We went in there, we got into uniform, we got everything but we never went near that blooming -hospital. And the next thing we knew they packed us off to Gallipoli. We were stretcher bearers going out and picking men up."

Young Doug Dibley became Private Dibley, 7th Reinforcements, Medical Corps of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force.

He and 23 others left New Zealand on October 19, 1915, travelling via the Suez Canal to Egypt, retracing the journey of thousands of Anzacs before them.

The squad spent time in Cairo and Heliopolis before they were sent to Gallipoli.

Doug was a stretcher bearer and had the miserable and relentless job of retrieving wounded comrades from the battlefield. Doug would have lifted hundreds of maimed and traumatised troops on to stretchers and carried them - likely through gunfire - to aid posts for medical treatment.

Doug's days on the bloody battlefields of that peninsula stayed with him. "Good Lord, if you're in a place with shells going round and seeing your cobbers killed, do you think you'd forget that?" he recounted.

"The big battles were over when I arrived but I was on Walker's Ridge and the bullets were still flying around. My short time there was quite long enough for me."

Doug Dibley, aged 21 years in this picture, was the last surviving Galliopli veteran to die in NZ. Photo / Alan Gibson

On November 22, not long after Doug's arrival at Gallipoli, deteriorating conditions and the growing strength of the enemy finally forced the British to order the evacuation of their troops - including the Anzacs.

Doug was evacuated on the last day of the exit operation but he did not return home for some time.

He ended up in Palestine as part of the Australian and New Zealand mounted troops, then transferred to a field ambulance unit and was sent to France where he contracted spinal meningitis.

According to military records he was "dangerously ill". He survived but had several relapses that kept him in hospital until August 1917 when he was cleared for transfer to convalesce in Essex, England.

The meningitis meant Doug was no longer fit for active service. He was sent home at the start of 1918 and wasted no time getting on with life.

After the wide open space of the battlefield, Doug couldn't stand to be in the city so he bought a farm. In 1925 he married a Rotorua farmer's daughter, Susannah Karl. They had 11 children - Alice, Edmund, Joan, Leo, Moana, Thea, Alan, Eve, Karl, Mary and Ray - and a busy family life followed.

The family moved to Susannah's family farm and the sprawling, lush land at Ngongotaha has remained a Dibley stronghold ever since.

The farm is now run by Doug's grandson Mark and wife, Sophie. Coincidentally, Sophie's grandfather Donald Smith also served at Gallipoli as a rifleman in the New Zealand Machine Gun Corps. He, too, returned from war, making the Dibleys a rare family - not many can boast two Gallipoli survivors.

Doug, according to his son Edmund, who still lives a stone's throw from the farm, didn't speak much about Gallipoli. But he shared enough to give his family a sense of the horrors he had seen.

"He said he wished he hadn't gone. They all thought it was going to be a bit of a holiday. He said to see the way the people were shot - he couldn't believe it," Edmund told the Herald on Sunday.

"You had a job getting anything out of him. As he got older, he started talking a bit but he was very emotional and he didn't like talking about it. He saw his cobbers get killed.

"He said it was shocking.

"After the battles, they had to collect all the fellows with their legs blown off or their heads blown off. He said that was horrible, to see the way these fellows were blown to bits - but that was his job and he had to do it. He never forgot it."

As the years passed and the number of Anzacs began to dwindle, Doug carried on farming. He welcomed more than 50 grandchildren, at least 90 great grandchildren and a great great grandchild before he died.

Weeks before his death he told a friend at the RSA he'd had a "great life, a lovely family" and when he was called, he'd be ready to go.

When he died of natural causes on December 18, 1997, his family were suddenly confronted with how important Doug was to New Zealand. He was our last surviving Anzac - the last of his brave kind to fall.

Seeing how the country reacted to his death, fully realising his legacy and the impact it had on people outside their tight-knit family was almost overwhelming for a time.

Doug was humble and unassuming, a hard-working farmer, a loving father and grandfather who used to be a soldier, not some grand war hero.

But he was. His sacrifice for his country made him so - and the full military funeral held for him was -testament to that.

Grandson Mark recalls the day, and the feeling of pride. "When we had the funeral we came out of the church and there was all the regalia and a bugler. It was very touching. I thought it really made it," he said.

"None of us knew that was going to happen. Then there was a 21-gun salute at the cemetery."

Doug's great grandson and namesake adds: "There was a huge amount of pride knowing that great granddad went there and he was one of the last to survive. To us, he was just great granddad, but on that day we certainly realised how much more he was.

"It's so hard to comprehend what they went through, given how wars are fought and won now. Compare it to back then - there's no way we would ever line up men in trenches now. There is no way you can comprehend how it was for them."

For the Dibleys, Anzac Day was never a big event - even with a veteran in their midst. Milking schedules clash with the Dawn Service and their Anzac patriarch was never keen on making a fuss.

Doug shied away from commemorative services for many years, only "getting into it" towards the end of his life.

Edmund said his father always maintained he'd "seen enough of it".

"He said he wanted to get away from it completely. He wanted to forget about the fighting and killing," he recalled.

But eventually Doug wavered and began to attend. He was guest of honour at the Rotorua service in the years before his death.

It was then his family began to realise how significant his role was.

It's not that they didn't appreciate it or were ignorant of his role at Gallipoli - more that they followed his lead and downplayed the day as he had for so long.

This year, they will remember Doug - and his fallen cobbers and comrades - with pride.
And they will remember one of the last things Doug said publicly about war. "No one wins in the end. The Great War took the best of our young men, and look how many came back maimed and broken.

"Many suffered dreadfully for the rest of their lives. Anzac Day is important. Those men should never be forgotten."

Australia's final farewell

Aussie Alec Campbell was the last Aussie Anzac and died five years after Doug.

Before his death in December 1997, Doug Dibley was one of only two surviving Anzacs.

Australian Alexander William Campbell, known as Alec, was the last Aussie Anzac and died five years after Doug.

His death marked the end of any living links with the Gallipoli campaign.

Alec was born in 1899 at Launceston in Tasmania. He was 103 when he died in May 2002.

Like Doug, Alec was too young to enlist for the army when World War I broke out. He was just 16, but lied about his age and claimed to be two years older so he could join the army without his father's permission in July 1915.

His age earned him the nickname The Kid.

Alec, who had already lost a cousin at Gallipoli, left Melbourne on August 21, 1915, and landed at Anzac Cove in November.

A private in an infantry brigade, meaning he fought on foot, his role was to help carry ammunition, water and supplies to his comrades in the trenches.

He was also evacuated and because of a fever that caused partial facial paralysis, was deemed unfit for service and discharged. The Kid was a Gallipoli veteran at just 17.

In an interview with a Sydney historian, Alec summed up his experience.

"I joined for adventure," he said. "There was not a great feeling of defending the Empire. I lived through it, somehow. I enjoyed some of it. I am not a philosopher. Gallipoli was Gallipoli."