[[]]Now just shy of his 90th birthday, Mosgiel resident Jack Irvine well remembers the day he found out he was supposedly dead and buried.
The World War 2 veteran was declared killed in action at Monte Cassino, Italy, in early 1944 - but in reality was a prisoner of war captured by German forces.
Mr Irvine, then of Craigellachie, even had a Monte Cassino burial site with his name on it after fellow Allied soldiers buried what they thought was his mangled body.
"They were burying bits and pieces. That's how it was."
Mr Irvine was transported by German forces out of Italy and into Austria by train and was unaware his family had been told he had died at Monte Cassino.
Mr Irvine, who was educated in Beaumont and worked at the Hudson's biscuit factory in Dunedin, left New Zealand as a 21-year-old on a ship bound for Egypt in 1943 after being conscripted into the army.
He arrived when the war had moved from Egypt into Italy and spent three months from late December fighting at Monte Cassino as part of the 23rd Battalion.
On the battlefield, he was hit in the upper right leg by what he thinks was shrapnel from a hand grenade. Mr Irvine was thrown into the bomb crater out of which he had just climbed. He tried to use his rifle as a crutch to walk out.
"That's when I looked down the barrel of a [German] pistol and that was the end of me," he said.
Mr Irvine was slung over the German soldier's shoulder and carried off the battlefield, through "bombed-out streets".
As a prisoner of war, he was carted around various German hospitals throughout Italy before being put on a train to Austria.
About 12 months after being captured, Mr Irvine was "exchanged" by Swiss doctors when they visited his prison hospital hoping to make room for injured Germans.
"I was one of the lucky ones that got to go. They rounded us up on the Swiss border and counted us like a flock of sheep, and the Germans got off one train and into another and we did the same."
Mr Irvine made his way back to Egypt where by chance he sat behind one of his former platoon mates in a cinema.
"I tapped him on the shoulder and when he turned around and saw me he said 'what the hell are you doing here!' He showed me a photograph of my grave and that was the first time I knew of all the havoc I had caused," he said.
Mr Irvine got word to his family, who chased official confirmation of his whereabouts through the Red Cross and the defence department in New Zealand.
His family eventually received a telegram dated September 6, 1944, which stated: "Private J C Irvine may not have been killed in action as originally reported."
Mr Irvine was reunited with his family after returning to Invercargill on a convoy ship just before war's end.
He spent time in hospital convalescing after the war.
After recovering, he worked on the family farm at Craigellachie and, later, as a shearer and orchard worker around Otago, until aged in his 70s.
He met wife-to-be Margaret (nee Young) at a district dance in the early 1950s, and, after a long courtship, the couple married in 1959 and had two sons.
