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Dawn Service At The NZ Battlefield Memorial Longueval - CDF

THE DAWN SERVICE AT THE NEW ZEALAND BATTLEFIELD MEMORIAL LONGUEVAL


Thursday 15 September 2016

Address by Lieutenant General Tim Keating, Chief Of The New Zealand Defence Force


Lieutenant General Tim Keating, CDF

Many New Zealand families will tell you that when their men returned they never talked about the Battle of the Somme. They could not find the words to speak of the unspeakable.

The psychological ordeal began as soon as the soldiers arrived. Their starting positions were choked with bodies from the earlier fighting. Captain Lindsay Inglis remembered how the “dead of both sides, swelling and sodden…heaved out of the crumbling ditches that passed for trenches”.

Our generals also knew what to expect, and they built that knowledge into their planning. Each of the four set-piece attacks was fought with a single brigade, with the expectation that the brigade would be used up. A fresh brigade would then be brought up to conduct the next set-piece. It was by these means the battle was continued for 23 gruelling days. Respite for the men was brief, and always within enemy artillery range. At the end of the battle the New Zealand Division had to be completely rebuilt. Our politicians, knowing the cost of fighting on the Western Front, had already filled up our training camps in England with replacements.

Every set-piece left hundreds of men lying dead or wounded. Body parts were scattered over the fields. For many, death did not come instantly but followed a lingering agony. Private William Innes wrote home to the family of his friend, Harry Beach, who was hideously mutilated by a shell on the first day. “It was a godsend when he died,” he told Harry’s father, “as he must have suffered awful and I think you would have said the same if you had seen him”.

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The overwhelming mental and physical fatigue experienced by the soldiers is difficult to overstate. Two days into the attack, the weather broke. The soil turned into a quagmire and the trenches filled with freezing water. “For night after night”, wrote Sergeant Cecil Malthus, “we hardly slept….we became unspeakably weary… and sick of it all”. By the end, remembered Private Howard Kippenberger, “we were almost crying …worn out and cowering like children from every shell”.

Acts of self-sacrifice and compassion shone through these dark hours like lanterns in the storm. Because of these, and because of the comradeship of the men, the terrible cost was borne.

After the battle the New Zealand Division was showered with praise. No other division had fought for so long or advanced so far. But it is not for these reasons that the names “Somme, 1916” and “Flers-Courcelette” are emblazoned on the regimental colour of 3rd Auckland and Northland battalion, here beside us. These battle honours are carried so that we never forget the service and sacrifice of those who fought here.

Images by Alastair Thompson, taken at the Dawn Service.

ENDS

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