Following Driver Frazer to Flanders and the Somme

My father, John George Hepburn Frazer, having put up his age enlist in July 1915 in Gisborne, rode out of the Waioeka Gorge in late 1915 at the age of barely 20 to join the New Zealand forces. He trained at Tauherenikau Camp, and with the 9th Reinforcements marched over the Rimutakas to depart on January 8th 1916 from Wellington. He arrived in Egypt a few weeks too late to go to Gallipolli where three out of four of his wider family who served there had been killed. He sailed with the New Zealand Division to France in early April and served throughout the entire campaign to the end of the war in 1918.

Having left New Zealand as a member of the Wellington East Coast Rifles he found himself put into the artillery ammunition column. His job was to deliver 18 pounder shells to the gunlines with his mules and GS (General Service) wagon. This was a difficult task as the 18 pounders were forced to locate just behind the trenches, often in full view of the enemy, who endeavored to stop him with shell fire and bombs. When the mud grew too deep the wagons were left at the depot and the mules were laden with eight shells, later reduced to four when the conditions became virtually impossible. This highly dangerous and exhausting task left him in poor health for the rest of his life as a sheep station manager and farmer.

Thirty two years after I found myself, like Dad, simply directed into the artillery and trained for the Korean War, which fortunately reached a stalemate which meant that the CMT gunners were not called upon to serve. My experience with the 25 pounders which were the direct, and greatly improved, descendants of the 18 pounders which Dad supplied with ammunition served greatly to increase my appreciation of the life of a gunner.

This blog is my attempt to follow his diary around the battlefields in an attempt to understand something of the horrors of his life and of the New Zealanders who fought there.