Anzac Day this year marked 106 years to the day that New Zealand invaded Turkey side by side with several other nations including Britain, France and Australia.
Turkey's military did what all militaries do, and defended its homeland from the invaders from across the seas.
The Gallipoli campaign wasan effort to take Turkey out of World War I, with the target of reaching Constantinople (Istanbul).
The Allies did not take into account the ferocity and ability of the Turkish forces. By the end of the six-month campaign the Allies were still stuck on the beaches where they had landed, with little ground gained, and it was decided that retreat was in order.
As the surviving soldiers retreated they would have been saddened to know that of the approximately 10,000 New Zealand soldiers who initially landed, together with later reinforcements, the nation's casualties totalled 7991 - of whom 2779 died.
Of the survivors, many lives were shortened by their wounds and by the illnesses they suffered.
The Allied casualties totalled 141,547, of whom 44,150 died. The Turkish casualties suffered protecting their country and people from the invaders totalled 251,309, mostly young men of whom 86,692 died.
This carnage occurred in one single campaign of nearly six month's duration, not a total war.
That war was sadly still to come for the New Zealand Division after it had retreated and re-built its forces.
It was then sent to the Western Front in Northern France near the border with Belgium, where the division suffered its worst casualties of the war.
New Zealand was to lose 12,483 men and women in the battles of the Western Front from 1916 to 1918, a 30-month campaign of industrial-scale death.
This remains New Zealand's largest and most costly war loss.
Many of the wounded and ill later died early of their wounds and sickness back in New Zealand.
Go to the Karori Soldier Cemetery in Wellington and look at the headstones.
Literally hundreds of young men in their mid-twenties to early thirties returned broken in health from that war, dying in their droves after the war and on into the 1930s.
Rob Rattenbury
New Zealand lost 5 per cent of its military-aged men during those war years, the highest percentage of any Allied nation.
The total number of New Zealanders, men and women, to die overseas on active duty during World War I was 18,166, with 41,000 wounded or taken ill.
New Zealand's population at the time was hovering around the one million mark.
These casualties broke many communities - the best, fittest and brightest young people taken.
Families left without sons, husbands, fathers, brothers and uncles.
My generation grew up after World War II knowing that we had very few great uncles, most died overseas or died young upon returning home.
It was not uncommon for widowed or betrothed women to marry their loved one's brother in an effort to keep some form of family unit viable.
Many marriages failed due to men coming home broken in spirit, alcoholic, sick and just worn out.
Humanity did not learn from this disaster of epic proportions, we all did it again 21 years later to stop the lunacy of Hitler and the imperial expansion of Japan.
Once again, New Zealand's death toll was significant for such a small nation and in comparison to other Allied nations.
New Zealand's 2nd Division was regarded as, if not the best, one of the best fighting divisions in the British Eighth Army made up of soldiers from Britain, India, South Africa and Australia together with forces from the Free French and other nations such as Poland with, eventually, America joining near the end of the North Africa Campaign.
New Zealand's contribution to the allied war effort was 105,000 men and women. 11,000 died and nearly 16,000 were wounded.
Again broken men and women returned to New Zealand, the sons and daughters of those original Anzacs, to try to make a life for themselves, again with lives blighted by wounds and illness, both physical and psychological, many lives cut short.
My father, a Returned Man, seemed to go to funerals weekly when I was a child and he a man only in his thirties. He was burying his young comrades.
Why did these men and women go to war? Most were young and many just wanted adventure. Many believed that the enemy was a direct threat to our way of life and were willing to fight for us and to protect us.
Some wanted to just get away from bad relationships, many were the reasons.
But fight they all did, dying in their thousands at war or later at home, to give us the life and the freedoms we enjoy today. Our lives could have been so very different if not for them.
At the going down of the sun we will remember them.
