Maori Pioneers in trench, 1918

Members of the New Zealand (Maori) Pioneer Battalion take a break from trench improvement work, near Gommecourt, France, 25 July 1918.

The New Zealand Pioneer Battalion, largely made up of Maori troops, carried out important labour and construction tasks on the Belgian battlefields. Major changes were made to the nature and form of Maori military service in late 1915 and early 1916. The Native Contingent that had fought at Gallipoli ceased to exist and was replaced by the New Zealand Pioneer Battalion, sometimes referred to now as the Pioneer Maori Battalion.

Deployed to the Western Front in April 1916, the Pioneer Battalion was originally made up of four companies, each with two Maori and two Pakeha platoons, made up of the remnants of the Otago Mounted Rifles. Maori soldiers in other battalions were encouraged to transfer to the Pioneer Battalion, but many elected to stay in the battalions in which they had enlisted. By August 1917 there were sufficient Maori reinforcements to fill all the companies. In September the Battalion became a fully Maori unit, renamed the New Zealand (Maori) Pioneer Battalion.

Following the Messines offensive in June 1917, the Pioneers were given the task of linking the newly captured Messines ridge to the front line by digging communication trenches. Subjected to heavy shelling and gassing, they suffered 155 casualties, including 17 killed. At Passchendaele the Pioneers laboured in muddy, wet conditions to construct timber roads and light railways behind the front line.

We only had four guns in action at Passchendaele at the start and then they made an effort to bring in the other two guns. Well, they put in an eight horse team instead of a six horse team to try and bring it in, but the horses just got up to their bellies in mud and they couldn’t get through. But a party of about forty Maoris arrived. See, the Maoris were a Pioneer Battalion. They didn’t fight. They were just a labouring battalion, and the party of about forty Maoris arrived and there were about twenty of these Maoris on ropes on the axles of the guns and, as Maoris do, they performed a bit of a haka or something and pulled the gun right in. We thought that was wonderful.

From interview with Bert Stokes - read and hear more