The Imperial Camel Corps, which included two New Zealand companies,
played a vital role in the Sinai and Palestine campaigns during the First World War. Between 400
and 450 New Zealanders fought in the Corps, and 41 died
before the two New Zealand companies were disbanded in mid-1918.
When
war broke out in Europe in August 1914, Britain
asked New Zealand
to seize German Samoa as a ‘great and urgent Imperial service’. Although the tiny German garrison offered no opposition, at the time
it was regarded as a potentially risky action.
After four terrible years the First World War finally came to a close with the signing of the Armistice on 11 November 1918. Parades were held throughout the country, though the spread of the influenza pandemic and a general war weariness dampened celebrations at home and abroad
During the First World War the men of the New Zealand Tunnelling Company, many of them hardbitten
West Coast miners, helped create a vast network of military tunnels
under the French town of Arras.
Ever since 1917 Passchendaele has been a byword for the horror of the First World War. The assault on this tiny Belgian village cost the lives of thousands of New Zealand soldiers. But its impact reached far beyond the battlefield, leaving deep scars on many New Zealand communities and families.
The Gallipoli campaign of 1915 remains a landmark event in New Zealand history. Although it was a grievous failure for the Allies and did not have a significant impact on the war's outcome, the campaign fostered an emerging New Zealand identity, and its effects continue to resonate.
There are always supporters and opponents of a country fighting a war. Over 2500 conscientious objectors lost their civil rights in New Zealand for refusing to serve in the First World War.
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.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife Sophie were assassinated in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo. This was a key event in sparking the Great War of 1914–18.
It was the New Zealand Division's final action of the First World War. On 4 November 1918, just a week before the Armistice was signed, New Zealand troops stormed the walled French town of Le Quesnoy. The 90 men killed were among the last of the 12,483 who fell on the Western Front.
As part of the British Empire, New Zealand was formally involved in the First World War (often referred to as the Great War) by the declaration of war on Germany by King George V on 4 August 1914.
The Military Service Act 1916 allowed limited exemption from service. Men who were exempted had to be prepared to provide alternative non-combatant service in New Zealand or overseas.
'Somme. The whole history of the world cannot contain a more gruesome word.' This is how one German officer described the Battle of the Somme in 1916. It was here that, day after day, lines of advancing soldiers were cut down by machine-gun fire; here that the shriek and thud of hundreds of thousands of artillery shells shattered the air.
Things had reached a stalemate on the Western Front by the end of 1914. An assault on the Dardanelles by the British and its allies would, it was believed, knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war.
The capture of the French town of Le Quesnoy by the New Zealand Division on 4 November 1918 has special significance in New Zealand's military history. This is not merely because it was the last major action by the New Zealanders in the Great War - the armistice followed a week later - but also because it was captured in a particular way.
Many socialist and labour leaders criticised the First World War as an imperialist war and strongly opposed conscription. New Zealand workers, they argued, had no quarrel with German workers.
News of the outbreak of war was received in Wellington at 1 p.m. on 5 August 1914. It was announced by the governor, Lord Liverpool, on the steps of Parliament to a crowd of 15,000 people. There was popular enthusiasm for the war in Europe, and New Zealanders caught the mood.
It was on the Somme that the majority of New Zealanders were killed or wounded during the First World War, and it was here that New Zealand experienced its worst days in military history in terms of loss of life.
Just 4 kilometres east of Beaudignies in northern France is Le Quesnoy. This town was in German hands for almost all of the First World War, from August 1914, until the New Zealanders liberated it on 4 November 1918.
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.
Leslie Cecil Lloyd Averill was born on 25 March 1897. He volunteered for the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in 1916 and left New Zealand with the 34th Reinforcements two years later.
With both the Allies and the Germans trying to tunnel under each other’s lines to lay mines, the New Zealand Tunnelling Company's experience was invaluable.
In his recruitment waiata, 'Te ope tuatahi', Ngata made it clear that the replacement recruits that he and his colleagues had raised all came from the East Coast tribes of Mahaki, Hauiti, Ngati Porou, Te Arawa and Kahungunu.
New Zealand played a small but useful part in the British Empire's war effort, and its essential war aim was achieved with the defeat of Germany and its allies in late 1918. New Zealand's security, both physical and economic, was ensured by the victory.
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.
Captain James Matheson Nimmo was born on 22 September 1897. When he enlisted in 1917, he omitted his first Christian name for obvious reasons. He left New Zealand with the 37th Reinforcements in May 1918 and, after further training in England, joined 3rd Battalion, 3rd New Zealand (Rifle) Brigade on 27 September 1918.
With
hindsight, New Zealand's
capture of German Samoa on 29 August 1914 was an easy affair. But at the time
it was regarded as a potentially risky action with uncertain outcomes.
The ANZACs began digging in to their positions on the Gallipoli Peninsula on the evening of 25 April 1915. Short battles that were often costly, for both sides became the pattern of events for several weeks.
The New Zealand Pioneer Battalion arrived in France in April 1916. It was the first unit of the New Zealand Division to move on to the bloody battlefield of the Somme.
The assault on Passchendaele was part of a vast Allied offensive launched in mid-1917, which, for New Zealanders, started with the Battle for Messines.
This is the ideal trench, as depicted in a British training manual. The real thing, created by men digging desperately in the dark, was much less tidy.
One in four New Zealand men aged 20–45 was either killed or wounded in the First World War, but the impact of the war reached far beyond these individuals and directly affected most New Zealand families, communities, workplaces, schools and clubs.
More than 14,000 New Zealanders were wounded between June and December 1917 in Belgium, and medical staff, orderlies, chaplains and stretcher-bearers worked round the clock to tend them.
Thousands of women across New Zealand supported the war effort in more than 900 patriotic and fund-raising organisations, which raised nearly £5 million for Belgian and French relief funds.
Soldiers, probably of the Wellington Mounted Rifles, 1 New Zealand Expeditionary Force, occupy a trench on Table Top, Gallipoli during the night of 6 August 1915 in preparation for the attack on Chunuk Bair.
Most of West Coast's war memorials can be found on our online register. Find out more about the memorials and the people listed on them via our interactive map, or help us find out about the ones we've missed.
Charles Begg was New Zealand's most decorated member of the Medical Corps during the First World War. He played a major role in the treatment of troops during the 1915 Gallipoli campaign.
A First World War hero and commander of the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force, Bernard Freyberg was British-born but New Zealand-raised. He proved to be a charismatic and popular military leader who would later serve a term as Governor-General.
New Zealand women had always knitted, but this reached new heights during the war when hand-made knitted socks, balaclavas, scarves and gloves were in parcels sent to the troops.
Most memorials to New zealand's war dead were ornamental, but in the 1920s utilitarian memorials, such as community halls, libraries and bridges were built.
Thirteen former All Black rugby players were killed in the First World War. The most famous of these was Sergeant Dave Gallaher who captained the All Black Originals.
The Dawn service at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, 25 April 1986 (Anzac Day). The Dawn Service was introduced to New Zealand in 1939 by Australian veterans who had attended a similar service in Sydney the previous year.
