by Michael King
Three weeks later the war began in earnest for New Zealanders. The ANZACs were transported to Lemnos in the Aegean Sea, and from there to Gallipoli for a major assault on the Dardanelles, the Hellespont of the ancient world. This operation, planned by British First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, was designed to open the straits to the British and French navies to allow an attack on Constantinople and thus relieve Turkish military pressure on Russia. The area, the boundary between Europe and Asia, was renowned for heroic battles. Troy had stood on the Asian side near the entrance to the straits, and Xerxes had built his bridge of floats over the narrows in the fifth century BC to mount the Persian invasion of Greece.
From the outset, however, the ANZAC part of the Gallipoli campaign went terribly wrong. The ‘spearhead’ troops ahead of them were landed three kilometres north of the planned landing-place. When the ANZACs followed them ashore at what came to be called Anzac Cove at around 9 am on 25 April, they encountered almost sheer cliffs instead of climbable slopes, and the Turkish Army’s 19th Division commanded by Mustafa Kemal Bey, later known as Kemal Ataturk, the founder and father of the post-war Turkish republic. The combination of obstacles proved insurmountable. The Australian and New Zealand losses were high (one in five of the 3000 New Zealanders who landed that day became casualties). It was all the troops could do to dig in on the slopes and prevent themselves being driven back into the sea.
Hold the position they did, however, for what became a prolonged stalemate of equally balanced forces. Trooper Gordon Harper of Christchurch wrote to his family on 15 May:
The hillside [is] studded with dug-outs, and like an ant heap, swarming with men, and the foreshore piled up with stores and ammunition … The whole time, on the ridges on either side of us, the terrific fusillade [keeps] up without ceasing … almost impossible to hear one[self] speak … [Across] the sea is the rugged island of Imbros, and near it a huge mountain island (Samothrace) rising sheer out of the sea, behind which the sun sets … and provides us with many beautiful sights. It is a strangely peaceful setting for the horrors of war, those green hills and fields, red and yellow with poppies and wild flowers, and the blue Aegean coming right to their feet …
As the weeks went by with no essential change in positions, conditions deteriorated until they were as close to hell as men could conceive – living, as one New Zealander said, ‘like dirty rabbits’ in cramped trenches and dug-outs. ANZACs and Turks, Ian McGibbon wrote,
faced each other sometimes only metres apart, in a state of increasing discomfort. Searing heat and the swarming flies (made worse by unburied corpses in no man’s land) tormented the men, conditions exacerbated by water shortages. Disease, especially dysentery, flourished in the insanitary conditions among men already debilitated by weeks of inadequate food. These physical problems were compounded by the psychological pressures stemming from the consciousness that no place in the tiny perimeter was safe from artillery fire. With the Turks overlooking them, snipers [too] were an ever-present hazard.
The position was not a great deal more favourable for the English, French and Indian troops on other parts of the peninsula, except that they were not dug in on slopes as precipitous. Several assaults were planned in an attempt to break the deadlock. In one, in May, on flatter terrain near Cape Helles to the south, the New Zealand Brigade lost 800 men in what was described as an ‘ill-conceived attack’ across a notorious piece of ground known as the Daisy Patch.
The other major Allied offensive, in August 1915, was an attempt to push troops to the summit of the peninsula and open the way for attacks on Turkish positions on the Dardanelles side; this too was a costly failure. New Zealand troops led by Lieutenant Colonel William Malone and his Wellington Regiment captured the ridge of Chunuk Bair on 8 August – the furthest point inland reached in the whole campaign. But it was lost to a massive Turkish counter-attack on 10 August and Malone and most of his men died. One New Zealander, an Auckland bank clerk named Cyril Bassett, a signaller, won a Victoria Cross for his part in the Chunuk Bair action. According to other survivors numerous deeds of collective and individual heroism went unrewarded because the officers who could have written citations became casualties.
By December 1915 the Allied forces were no closer to clearing the Dardanelles than when they landed eight months before. If anything, they were further from that objective because of the subsequent reinforcement of Turkish positions. Worse, the Turks had brought in heavier artillery capable of demolishing even the strongest Allied positions. The extreme heat of summer had given way to punishing winter conditions, which included a massive blizzard that covered the New Zealand positions with ice and snow in late November. It was no surprise when the order to evacuate was given in mid-December. It was carried out secretly and virtually without casualties, and was the only aspect of the campaign that could be called successful.
The debacle of the campaign as a whole, however – the fault of the planners and the strategists, not the frontline troops – made it imperative that something by way of positive achievement be salvaged from the carnage. Over 400,000 British and 79,000 French troops had been committed to the assault; half of these became casualties. The cost to New Zealand was 2721 dead and 4752 wounded out of a total of 8450 men – a staggering 88 per cent casualty rate. The remains of those killed were left there; many were never found. Historian John North wrote:
It may be doubted whether in the whole history of war an army has ever been called upon to endure severer strain. They were everlastingly fighting with their backs to the sea. They were in complete isolation. No one could ever expect relief or rest. Every man [felt] condemned to stay there until death, wounds or sickness overtook them, and the world does find it difficult to remember so large a debt of suffering.
For the New Zealand and Australian public at home the experience of Gallipoli had also been traumatic. It was the first time lengthy casualty lists were published in the newspapers. On top of this was the inconceivable fact that the Allies had been defeated. The effect of this double tragedy on two countries of small populations was to make the experience sacred. Only in that way could such a vast human sacrifice be made comprehensible and acceptable. Anzac Day, 25 April, was established as an annual day of commemoration. For the next three generations it would be the focal point of national mourning for all wars, and for expressions of patriotism. The necessary myth evolved quickly in both countries that they had ‘come of age’ on the slopes of Gallipoli. Fred Waite, official historian of the New Zealand contribution, put it this way: ‘[Before] the war we were an untried and insular people; after ANZAC, we were tried and trusted.’ But at what frightful cost.
It was thought by troops at the time that nothing in warfare would equal the rigours and the horrors of Gallipoli. But that was because they did not know of the squalor that awaited them on the Western Front, in France and Belgium. And in April 1916 New Zealand soldiers were committed to that battlefield for another round of carnage, this one lasting two and a half years. In the lines of trenches that ran, in effect, from the North Sea to Switzerland, troops encountered swamp-like mud, snow and ice in winter, frightful slaughter in the course of offensives such as those at Passchendaele and the Somme, the stench of unburied men and horses, and new refinements in technological barbarity such as poison gas. Advances, on the rare occasion they occurred, were measured in hundreds of metres; in four years of Allied effort the front moved no more than 100 km.
There, as in Gallipoli, New Zealanders took a full share in the fighting – and a full share of the casualties that would so baffle and anger the post-war world. At the Somme in September 1916, 1560 New Zealanders died; at Messines in June 1917, 3700 casualties; in October 1917 at Passchendaele, in the space of a few hours, the New Zealand Division lost 640 men killed and 2100 wounded. It was slaughter on a scale unprecedented in human history and, considering the negligible result, utterly wasteful.
Other New Zealanders had returned to the Middle East after Gallipoli and they we
re part of Allied forces that pushed the Turks out of Egypt and Palestine over the next three years. They included the New Zealand Mounted Rifles, the last of the country’s troops to go to war – and fight – on horseback. They lost 500 men killed and 1200 wounded.
Back home, the prevailing jingoism and the pain experienced by bereaved families combined to generate intense hostility towards those suspected of being shirkers or disloyal. People of German descent were treated badly – butchers’ shops were wrecked, barbers forced to close their premises and, in Christchurch, the bells of the Lutheran church were smashed. Many Continental European immigrants, especially the Dalmatians from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were interned as aliens. Even the Tainui Maori leader Te Puea Herangi was ostracised because of distant German ancestry.
Treatment of conscientious objectors was also harsh. When a national register was taken in 1915, men of military age were asked to declare whether they were willing to do military service. Of the 196,000 eligible, 33,700 said they would not undertake service of any kind, and 44,300 were willing to serve only at home. While a proportion of these would have been malingerers, a large number were men of principle and integrity who could not accept the morality of war in any circumstances – especially a war fought 20,000 km away and offering no immediate threat to New Zealand’s security. Unless they belonged to a church, ‘the tenets and doctrines of which declare the bearing of arms and the performance of combatant service to be contrary to divine revelation’, they had no grounds for exemption once conscription was introduced in August 1916.
Hundreds of genuine conscientious objectors were imprisoned and subjected to physical and dietary punishments in an effort to make them relent. They were also deprived of civil rights, including the right to vote, for ten years. Half a dozen, including Archibald Baxter (who wrote a moving anti-war memoir, We Will Not Cease), were shipped to the Western Front and exposed to fire and to a series of barbaric ‘field punishments’. In Waikato, Te Puea Herangi led a campaign of passive resistance against Maori conscription, which had been imposed on Waikato–Maniapoto tribes only. Police raided her headquarters at Mercer four times and arrested nearly 200 of her followers. Maori from most other areas, apart from Taranaki, had enlisted willingly, however. They took part in combat at Gallipoli and formed a Pioneer Battalion of sappers in France.
For a country of its size – a population of less than one million in 1914 – the New Zealand contribution to World War I was massive. Nearly 20 per cent of the eligible manpower was recruited; of all the Allied countries, only Britain’s proportion was higher. The number sent overseas was over 100,000, and of these nearly 17,000 were killed and more than 41,000 wounded. In cities, towns and villages across the country war memorials went up to list those killed. Scarcely a surname was not represented, and some small communities lost their entire crop of young manhood, some families all their sons. As one historian commented, the next generation did not need to be told that the angel of death had passed over the land: they had heard the beating of its wings.
Anzac Day, marking the anniversary of that first Australian and New Zealand landing on the Gallipoli Peninsula at dawn on 25 April 1915, was the occasion that both countries chose to commemorate all their dead from the war – and, subsequently, from all wars. As Ian McGibbon has noted, the high casualty rate and eventual failure of the Dardanelles campaign served only to enhance its sanctity in the public mind. In New Zealand, after persistent lobbying by the Returned Soldiers’ Association (later the Returned Services’ Association), the day was declared a public holiday in 1920 and ‘Sundayised’ – meaning that shops and hotels would be closed – in 1922.
A ritual for the day evolved from the standard military funeral. It would begin with the Dawn Parade – a march of former servicemen in the early morning darkness to the local war memorial. Members of the wider community would join them there, but with pride of place given to the veterans. Then would follow a short service: prayers, hymns and a dedication concluding with the final verse of Laurence Binyon’s poem ‘For the Fallen’. The last post would be played, followed by a minute’s silence. For all New Zealanders who attended these ceremonies over the succeeding decades, the element that carried most reverberation was the Binyon dedication. And participants would disperse, thoughtfully, with the words of that dedication still suspended in the early morning air:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
We will remember them.
Chapter 20
Farmers in Charge
One of the first consequences of World War I came as a surprise to most New Zealanders. At the Paris peace conference in June 1919, Prime Minister William Massey signed the Treaty of Versailles as a representative of one of the Allied powers which had defeated Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This gesture was unexpected because New Zealand, as a dominion of what was still referred to as the British Empire, had automatically been in a state of conflict with the Central Powers once Britain had declared war on them. The public assumption in New Zealand had been that Britain too would make peace on the dominion’s behalf. In one sense, that of preparing the terms of the settlement with Germany, that is what occurred: Britain, France and the United States reached the agreement that Germany was forced to sign. But each dominion of the Empire signed the Versailles treaty as a separate and independent country, and this opportunity was the first of its kind ever offered to New Zealand.
At the same conference New Zealand became a founding member of the fledgling League of Nations, the international body which would advocate collective security, arbitration of international disputes, and arms limitations. William Massey was not enthusiastic about either the treaty or the league. He continued, in Barry Gustafson’s words, ‘to look to Britain and the British Empire to guarantee New Zealand’s future economic and military security’. He had not welcomed the Liberal Government’s annexation of Niue and the Cook Islands, and he was not especially pleased that the League of Nations would give his country mandate responsibility for Western Samoa, which had been liberated from German occupation by New Zealand troops in 1914.
Massey did not in any way see himself as leading his country off down a new road towards independence in foreign affairs and trade. Ironic as it may seem, he took the measures he did because the British Government wished him to do so. And in demonstrating this reluctance he was setting a precedent for a theme that would characterise New Zealand’s behaviour for another three decades: being offered increasing degrees of independence from Britain that New Zealand neither sought nor wanted.
All of this was understandable in view of the Prime Minister’s background and the nature of the interests he represented in politics. When he succeeded to the leadership of the country in 1912, ending two decades of Liberal Party rule, he had already been in Parliament for eighteen years. He had been born in Northern Ireland in 1856 and immigrated to New Zealand to join his family there when he was fourteen. He farmed successfully at Mangere and was a committed member of the Presbyterian Church and the Orange and Masonic Lodges. He had also, through his chairmanship of the Mangere Farmers Club and presidency of the Auckland Agricultural and Pastoral Association, become de facto spokesman for the farming lobby in Auckland – hence his nickname of ‘Farmer Bill’.
It may well be true that, in the words of one historian, Massey ‘never had an original idea in his life. Nor … did he ever question his belief that New Zealand should always remain a loyal, Protestant, family-centred, rural society where every man was his own landlord.’ But it was equally true that he exhibited ‘tenacity and clarity in debates and in time revealed his astuteness as a tactician and organiser’. In 1896, after only two years in Parliament, he had become Opposition whip. As the Liberal Government accumulated years in office, what conservative opposition there was in the House of Represent
atives to its state interventionism coalesced around Massey. During Seddon’s lifetime, he made little impact against a Prime Minister who had become something of a demi-god. But once Joseph Ward was in charge Massey seemed to grow in assurance and presence. By 1912 he had become a nationally known figure reminiscent of King Dick himself, inasmuch as he had a burly frame and a powerful platform manner. And, as an Ulster Protestant, he presented an inevitable contrast with the Catholic Ward. He came to power supported by a coalition of farmers, urban professionals and businessmen, and he intended to legislate in the interests of these sectors, who felt abandoned by the Liberals.
The first challenge Massey faced as Prime Minister was offered by organised labour, in the form of two major strikes which, according to Miles Fairburn, brought New Zealand ‘closer to class war than at any other time in its history’. These strikes, of goldminers at Waihi in 1912 and watersiders in Wellington in 1913, were not precipitated by the new Reform Government – and, indeed the Waihi strike was under way before Reform took office. But it is difficult to avoid the impression that Massey and his cabinet welcomed the opportunity to deal decisively to the ‘Red Fed’ unionists whom they believed were responsible for such unrest and whom they suspected of wanting to bring down the whole infrastructure of New Zealand’s capitalist society.[1]
The industrial troubles that came to the boil in 1912 and 1913 had their origins in what Erik Olssen has called ‘a complex interplay of changing work patterns, a rapidly expanding work force [and] the bankruptcy of traditional union strategies …’ Olssen also notes that the first decade of the twentieth century had seen employees in New Zealand attempt ‘the control and management of the labour force … on an unprecedented scale’ and that ‘real wages did not rise between 1900 and 1913, except for miners, while expectations did’. Another historian of the period added that by 1912 New Zealand workers had experienced, for the first time, a decade of inflation, and that this had generated a very real sense that they were losing out to other sections of the community. All these factors contributed to a cultivation of worker discontent on a scale previously unseen in New Zealand.