SADDLED UP DIGGING FOR VICTORY

WORDS: MATT PHILP • PHOTOGRAPHY: NATIONAL ARMY MUSEUM, NEW ZEALAND

War is hell, but it also makes room for the strange and the improbable. New Zealand’s war effort included a trio of unlikely and little-reported fighting forces whose stories never quite fitted the conventional narrative of the Great War. The New Zealand Cyclist Corps, the New Zealand Camel Corps and the New Zealand Engineers Tunnelling

Company operated on the margins of history, but their exploits were as vital as any to securing victory.

The cyclists

When the New Zealand Cyclist Company was formed in March 1916, its personnel were volunteers from among the Mounted Rifles Brigade reinforcements training at

Featherston Military Camp. They signed up as horsemen but rode to war on bicycles under a badge of a winged front wheel and handlebars.

After a brief foray into Egypt, the company arrived in Marseille, where it was reconstituted as the 2nd Anzac Cyclist Battalion, made up of two-thirds New Zealanders and one-third Australians.

Their duties for the next two years were varied. They laid a lot of cable – 90 kilometres of trenching, in fact, excavated to a depth of at least two metres. As the official regimental history notes, with the average number of wires laid being 50 pairs, the total length of wire works out at about 9012 kilometres. They handled traffic control, felled trees and repaired trenches. And, when required, they held the front line.

Cycling in the dead of night to White Gates, they had to don masks after encountering enemy gas. “On reaching our rendezvous everything was dead still, not a gun had been heard for an hour or so, when suddenly a huge 12in gun in the rear was fired, at which signal 19 mines along the whole army front were exploded; thus at 3.10, zero hour, the Battle of Messines was heralded.”

Messines in June 1917 was a key moment in the cyclists’ war. Working under intense shelling, they prepared an 1800-metre track from the reserve line through

Three unlikely and little-known fighting forces contributed their special skills to the war

No Man’s Land and abandoned German trenches for the mounted troops to follow. Several died and many more were injured; seven members of the battalion received decorations. At other battles they participated in offensives or filled the gaps defending the line.

In the regimental history’s account of Messines there is a line that sums up the cyclists’ war: “Our part, though not spectacular, was important, in fact just as important as any other”.

The New Zealand camel companies

It’s hard to envisage a lesspredictable wartime scenario for a New Zealand lad than riding a camel in the Egyptian desert. But such was the fate of about 400 Kiwis who signed up as reinforcements for the Mounted Rifles Brigade, only to find themselves part of the Imperial Camel Corps Brigade at the El Mazaar oasis in the Sinai in late 1916.

Mostly these cameliers were used for long-range desert patrol work and protecting the railway, pipelines and other strategic assets that sustained the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. Their first taste of action at the Battle of Magdhaba in December 1916 came soon after arrival in Egypt.

When the Palestine Campaign escalated, so too did the cameliers’ role in the fighting. A New Zealand company fought alongside the Auckland and Canterbury Mounted Rifles Regiments at the battle for Hill 3039, a strategic landmark overlooking the city of Amman where British forces were attempting to breach the Turkish defences. After capturing and then bravely defending the heights they were forced to retreat, losing three of six officers in battle.

Photographs held by the Alexander Turnbull Library show camels of the two New Zealand companies equipped with stretchers known as cacolets, described as “a contrivance lashed to a camel’s back which carried a man on each side; the rolling motion… exacts the full penalty of pain from the unfortunate occupant”. Another shot shows men from the No, 15 New Zealand Company wandering among corpses of camels killed by a Turkish air raid at Sheikh Nuran.

“Although we often cursed them, when they were to be taken away from us we found we had become attached to our ugly, ungainly mounts,” wrote an Imperial Camel Corps trooper. Even so, when in June 1918 the Kiwi cameliers were redeployed as mounted rifles, you imagine they must have been grateful to be back on horses.

The tunnellers

They waged war from beneath the trenches, using picks and shovels rather than rifles. The tunnellers of the New Zealand Engineers Tunnelling Company numbered fewer than 1000, arriving at the Western Front between 1916 and 1917. Many had some background in mining but the unit included others such as bushmen, labourers, quarry workers and engineers with tunnelling know-how and applicable practical skills.

Training consisted of basic infantry drills, learning how to fire a rifle and use a bayonet, but these men were in Europe to dig, not to shoot, and their mission was by its nature about keeping out of sight.

In his history of the New Zealand Engineers Tunnelling Company, Anthony Byledbal of the University of Artois in Arras describes the underground war as a fight where guile was the main asset. “The enemies had to play a mortal chess game. They tried to be more clever, forseeing the movements and attacks of the opponent with a bugging device: the geophone. The work of the tunneller demanded calmness, efficiency and silence.”

It began for the New Zealanders in trenches near Arras, where they were assigned an area known as J Sector. Working day and night in eight-hour shifts, they attacked the chalk layer typical of the region. Later they were tasked by British High Command with finding old quarries under Arras, a prelude to the innovative Arras offensive in which the Allies attempted to break through German lines by launching part of their offensive from underground. By the time of the attack, the network of tunnels had grown large enough to conceal 24,000 troops and the bulk of the digging was done by the New Zealanders.

1 The 15th Company Imperial Camel Corps was made up entirely of New Zealand troopers.

2 Constant digging was required. Tunnellers of the New Zealand Engineers Tunnelling Company built strong defensive positions on the battlefield.

3 In 1916 and 1918 Prime Minister William Massey and his coalition deputy Sir Joseph Ward made extended visits to the Western Front. Here they inspect the New Zealand Cyclist Battalion.