Read through the following topics to find out more about the NZ Engineers Tunnelling Company, from its formation in September 1915 to its definitive disbandment in April 1919.
In September 1915 the Imperial Government requested the Dominions to raise special mining units. The raising of a New Zealand Tunnelling Company would assist in the matter of increasing the number of Tunnelling Companies of the Royal Engineers employed in France and Flanders...
France is on the other side of the world from New Zealand. The Tunnellers embarked on a journey that would take them half way around the world, prior to arriving at the hell that was the Western Front...
Once the war lost its movement, Armies developed possibilities of attacking from underground using the age old tactic of military mining. Under no man's land, tunnellers dug long galleries towards the enemy front line with the aim of destroying his infrastructure from deep below ground...
The town of Arras has a lot of ancient underground quarries, used during medieval times to extract limestone for building construction, and rediscovered during the war. These quarries gave safe haven to troops that would be used to break the German front line in April 1917...
The Company was not only used in the role of offensive mining. Tunnellers worked on many tasks at and behind the front creating more than 500 underground works like dugouts to accomodate soldiers, machine-gun or trench mortar nests used to defend trenches...
Towards the end of the war, movement returned to the Western Front. The NZ tunnellers found that their jobs at the front now included road repair and bridge construction. They are credited with construction of the biggest bridge ever erected during the First World War...
With the Armistice on the 11th of November 1918 many NZ Tunnellers stayed in Northern France and Belgium until the end of January 1919. Their work continued in repairing bridges and roads destroyed and damaged by the war. Return to New Zealand was still a long way off...