New Zealand Goes to War: August 1914
When Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, New Zealand was at war the same instant — as a Dominion of the Empire, the decision was made in London, and few New Zealanders questioned it. Crowds cheered the announcement outside newspaper offices; the government had already cabled an offer of an expeditionary force days before the declaration.
What followed transformed the country. From a population of just over one million, around 100,000 New Zealanders would serve overseas before the armistice of 1918, and more than 18,000 would die. None of that was imaginable in the bright patriotic winter of August 1914, when the war was expected to be short and the greatest fear among volunteers was missing it.
War declared |
4 August 1914 (5 August NZ time) |
First operation |
Capture of German Samoa, 29 August 1914 — bloodless |
Main Body sails |
16 October 1914: 8,454 men, 3,815 horses in 10 transports |
Total served overseas |
c. 100,000 from a population of ~1.1 million |
Deaths, 1914–18 |
More than 18,000 |
The First Shot of Empire: Samoa
New Zealand's first act of the war came astonishingly early. At Britain's request, a hastily assembled force of some 1,400 men sailed from Wellington on 15 August 1914 — eleven days after the declaration — to seize German Samoa and its powerful wireless station. Escorted through waters where the German East Asia Squadron still prowled, the force landed at Apia on 29 August and took the colony without a shot fired.
It was the second German territory to fall in the war, and the beginning of a New Zealand entanglement with Samoa that would run for half a century — through the influenza catastrophe of 1918, the Mau independence movement and Black Saturday of 1929 — and end with a formal apology from a New Zealand prime minister in 2002.
Raising the Expeditionary Force
The New Zealand Expeditionary Force was built on the compulsory military training scheme in place since 1909, which meant the country could mobilise trained Territorials faster than almost any other Dominion. Volunteers flooded recruiting offices — town quotas filled within days — and the Main Body of 8,454 men and nearly 4,000 horses concentrated at camps around Wellington through September.
The convoy was delayed weeks by the threat of German cruisers in the Pacific; when the ten grey-painted transports finally sailed from Wellington Harbour on 16 October 1914, they were escorted by British, Australian and Japanese warships. At Albany in Western Australia they joined the Australian convoy — the first great Anzac fleet, though nobody yet used the word.
From Egypt to Gallipoli
The force expected to train in England and fight in France. Instead, with the Ottoman Empire entering the war, the convoy was diverted to Egypt, and the New Zealanders went into camp at Zeitoun near Cairo alongside the Australians. Through the early months of 1915 they trained in the desert, helped repel the Ottoman raid on the Suez Canal in February, and were formed with Australian brigades into the corps whose initials — ANZAC — would shortly acquire a meaning no one anticipated.
On 25 April 1915 they landed at Gallipoli. The war New Zealand had joined with cheering crowds became, within a year of the declaration, the costliest undertaking in its history — and 25 April became the date around which the country's remembrance still turns.