It was a truly nightmarish world that greeted the New Zealand Division when it joined the Battle of the Somme in mid September 1916. Fifteen thousand members of the Division went into action. Nearly 6000 were wounded and 2000 lost their lives. Over half the New Zealand Somme dead have no known grave.
By the time of the Somme offensive of 1916, the Great War had become shaped by artillery. Villages, woods and fields were reduced to drab wilderness by relentless shellfire and blighted by the squalid apparatus needed to support hordes of soldiers.
The Great War was halfway through when the big guns roared into life along the New Zealand Division's sector around the Somme to support a major attack on 15 September 1916.
