Featherston camp

Page 1 – Introduction

Featherston camp
Featherston camp

Featherston Military Training Camp and the First World War, 1915–27

Featherston Camp was New Zealand’s largest training camp during the First World War, where around 60,000 young men trained for military service on European battlefields between 1916 and 1918.

At its peak, Featherston Camp could sleep and feed more than 9000 men, and train them to be infantrymen, artillerymen, mounted riflemen, and machine gunners. The government used the camp as a German prisoner of war camp and military hospital in 1918-19, and as a storage facility from 1919-26.

For more information, download Featherston Military Training Camp and the First World War, 1915–27 by historian Tim Shoebridge (2011):

Update 16 May 2012: A print copy of this publication is now available for $16 each, plus postage. Trade discount available. Contact: [email protected]  See related flyer (pdf).

The government demolished the camp in 1926, though the site was re-used in the Second World War as a camp for Japanese prisoners-of-war between 1942 and 1945. For more information about Second World War camp, see:

How to cite this page

'Featherston camp', URL: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/war/featherston-camp, (Ministry for Culture and Heritage), updated 19-Dec-2019

Community contributions

1 comment has been posted about Featherston camp

What do you know?

Anonymous

Posted: 06 Feb 2019

Great place to find some relics and bring history up from the ground there if you can get landowners permission. They should be excavating this site anyway.