Pages tagged with: artillery

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.

Winching a gun into a new position on the Sangro River front

New Zealand gun crew in action in Korea

Soldiers fire a camouflaged 18-pound field gun at Gallipoli

Film showing New Zealand artillery firing during the North African campaign, 1942

New Zealand machine gun post on the Somme in 1918

New Zealand troops and the tank 'Jumping Jennie' in a trench at Gommecourt Wood, France during the First World war

A New Zealand 18 pounder gun in action at Beaussart, France during the First World War

Ottoman light artillery in action at Harcira in Palestine, 1917.

A German 17cm SLK L/40 railway gun firing near Marne, July 1917.

French soldiers handling the new 145mm naval gun at Ravin d'Hardecourt aux Bois on the Somme, 1916.

Austro-Hungarian Skoda 305mm howitzer and crew in action against the Russian Imperial Army in the Carpathian Mountains in 1914.

British 18 pounder Mark II field guns fire on Turkish redoubts during the Battle of Rafa, December 1916.

Guns and men of the Hong Kong and Singapore (Mountain) Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery, ready to open fire.

Artillery support for the Imperial Camel Corps Brigade was provided by the Hong Kong and Singapore (Mountain) Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery. The Battery was equipped with six mountain guns, each of which was designed to be broken down into its separate parts and loaded on to six camels for transportation.