2nd NZEF Gunner WW2 – Sergeant.

Matt Maynard has recently share some information on his grandfather – Richard “Dick” Maynard – the grandson of Richard (Tika Minarappa) Maynard. (All details are courtesy of the Maynard Family Collection).

Richard C Maynard served in WWII and fought in Cassino. This reminded me of another Stanaway who fought in the same battle – Vincent Stanaway (refer my post in March 2017). What are the chances? Perhaps they met.

Richard returned on the 70th anniversary commemoration of the battles of Monte Cassino.

The Rodney Times May 29, 2014 ran an article which read …….. He and his comrades were bogged down for months sheltering in a pig sty dug out in a bank near the Po River.

“We couldn’t move the guns and had to wait for the thaw.”

He says the river was full of dead stock, while bodies of mainly German dead were stacked “several feet high” along its banks.

Dick also had a close brush with death when a truck he was in plunged through a makeshift crossing into a ravine. He suffered a displaced hip and internal injuries but was rescued by the same French forces New Zealanders had been sent to relieve. Two other on board were also seriously injured and sent home.

Dick was supposed to be convalescing when he boarded a truck bound for the front line without telling his superiors. “I was posted as a deserter and while the colonel got stuck into me he said t had headed in the right direction – the sharp end, rather than running away”.

The Battle of Monte Cassino included four major attacks by the allies over four months from February 1944.

Dick’s first war action was at the rear of the 1400-yearold Benedictine monastery on top of a strategic rocky outcrop. It was one of the bloodiest battles of the war in which 343 New Zealanders died and more than 600 were wounded.

Dick was raised in Mt Eden, Grey Lynn and then on a Hokianga farm. He worked as a mechanic at WS Miller, a garage in Auckland before joining the army. He started Maynard Motors after the war and married Noeline. He lived in Glen Eden and later in Snells Beach. He was a member of the Warkworth RSA for over 30 years. He lived to 97.

Lest we forget.