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.
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.
'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.
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. T
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.
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.
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.
Tanks were used in battle for the first time, by the British, on 15 September. Still mechanically unreliable, the tanks were rushed into action in small groups. Many broke down, and the Germans soon devised ways to stop them.
