battle of the somme

Battle of the Somme

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  A truly nightmarish world greeted the New Zealand Division when it joined the Battle of the Somme in mid-September 1916. Fifteen thousand men of the Division went into action. Nearly 6000 were wounded and 2000 lost their lives. More than half the New Zealand Somme dead have no known grave.

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• Page 2 – Overview

  '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

• Page 3 – New Zealand's Somme experience

  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

• Page 4 – Men and machines

  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

• Page 5 – New Zealand artillery on the Somme

  Halfway through the Great War, the big guns roared into life along the New Zealand Division's sector on the Somme in support of a major attack on 15 September 1916.

• Page 6 – Further information

  Recommended reading for New Zealand and the Battle of the Somme

Māori units of the NZEF

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  More than 2000 Maori served in the Māori Contingent and Pioneer Battalion during the First World War

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• Page 4 - On the Western FrontThe New Zealand Pioneer Battalion arrived in France in April 1916. It was the first unit of the New Zealand Division to move onto the bloody battlefield of the

British Empire

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  Key information and statistics about countries who fought as part of the British Empire during the First World War

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• Page 6 - Dominion of NewfoundlandKey information and statistics about the Dominion of Newfoundland during the First World

Hospital ships

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  The Maheno and Marama were the poster ships of New Zealand's First World War effort. Until 1915 these steamers had carried passengers on the Tasman route. But as casualties mounted at Gallipoli, the government - helped by a massive public fundraising campaign - converted them into state-of-the-art floating hospitals.

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• Page 6 - Later service and legaciesThe Marama missed Gallipoli, reaching the Mediterranean a few weeks after the Allies abandoned the peninsula. The ships’ service pattern would now be dominated by long voyages

NZ's First World War horses

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  Between 1914 and 1916 the New Zealand government acquired more than 10,000 horses to equip the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. They served in German Samoa, Gallipoli, the Middle East and on the Western Front. Of those that survived the war, only four returned home.

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• Page 7 - Western FrontMore than 3000 horses and mules went from Egypt to France with the New Zealand Division in April 1916. Most of these horses had probably come from New Zealand