PHOTO
As we mark the 105th Armistice Day, World War 1 slips further into history, yet new research continues to reveal unknown aspects of this conflict.
Last month the New Zealand Medical Journal featured an insightful study led by Prof Nick Wilson, of the Otago University Department of Public Health, on sickness and injury among New Zealand World War 1 soldiers (ODT 20.10.23).
This tested the accuracy of the official injury/illness statistic, of 39% of the fighting force. Data from the personal files of 200 randomly selected soldiers was analysed, finding a percentage far higher than that.
A soldier’s personal service file recorded enlistment, unit, locations, background, physical condition, illness, conduct, leave, if and how wounded and treatment, discharged or killed. The new study notes it is the first known to publish on sickness/wounded statistics using these files.
It is not the first, but it does corroborate my earlier work. In 2009, before they were digitised and accessible online, I published Before Anzac, Beyond Armistice, the first history to use the personal files as major source material.
The aim was to tell a collective story of soldiers from one community, in this case 440 from Otago’s Maniototo district.
My book is a wide narrative of the soldiers’ experiences and how they, and their community at home, reacted to and coped with, war.
But specifically on illness and injury, like the recent study, it produced new, harrowing figures.
Initially, I analysed 55 files of the first volunteers. There were surprises.
Officially only men between 5ft 6in and 6ft tall (167cm and 182cm) were accepted. Of the 55, 10 were less than 5ft 6in. A suspicious number, 12, had a recorded height of exactly 5ft 6in and 39 were 5ft 8in or shorter. There were only two six-footers.
Neither was their chest measurement large. Fully expanded, chest measurement was mostly 35-37 inches. These lads were not the big "colonial boys" (none identified as Māori) of legend, even though, when they compared themselves to the Australians, they thought they were.
All passed "class A" fit apart from three with varicose veins, only one seriously enough to be rejected.
New Zealanders at this time had poor dental health, and dentists were kept busy in the training camps. Somewhat surprisingly, only two out of the 55 had bad teeth.
One of those did not let this stop him, as the Mount Ida Chronicle reported.
"Ted Griffiths of Patearoa enlisted. His teeth however were not satisfactory, and, as Ted is not the sort of man to allow a little thing like that come between his bayonet and the bosches he marched off to a dentist and had the lot yanked out."
The medical examinations in the files of the 90 known Maniototo soldiers who fought at Gallipoli show they were a healthy lot, on enlisting.
By the time the peninsula was evacuated in December 1915, it was a very different picture. Over 50% got sick, at Gallipoli or in Egypt. Many were ill twice or suffered from multiple illnesses simultaneously.
All of the Gallipoli sick were evacuated, only four returned. Four died.
The following figures factor in a soldier only once. If he was killed or died of illness, prior instances of his being sick or wounded have been disregarded: killed or died of wounds 18, died of sickness four, wounded 18, wounded and sick four, sick 37, no death, wounds or sickness recorded on their file nine.
The non-fatal illness/injury toll is 65%. Only 10% came through apparently physically unscathed.
But that is not the full story. The 6th Reinforcements arrived only at the very end and I suspect that many of these only got as far as Mudros in Greece.
Of the nine who came through, as the men themselves would have said, "alright", seven were in the 6th Reinforcements. Considering that, the price paid in the attempt to take Gallipoli was virtually 100%.
This is not what the government statistics say.
There are 29 files existing of the 32 known local soldiers who served in Palestine. Three were killed. All of the others except one fell ill, mostly with malaria and associated conditions. Thirteen were invalided home and the others sent to recuperate in Egypt. Again, almost 100%.
There are 290 surviving files of known Maniototo men who served on the Western Front. Unless medical reports are attached, the files are brief on sickness diagnoses, but they include abscesses, scabies, dysentery, pulmonary, bronchial, flu, trench fever, enteric, anaemia, rheumatism, typhoid — the list goes on.
Five died but more would have died prematurely after the war from illness contracted on active service.
There were 24 cases of venereal disease, probably under-reported, but as this isn’t combat-related, I did not include it in my figure of 172 out of 290 falling ill in France or Belgium (59.3%). One hundred and sixteen were wounded once or multiple times (40%).
When researching I failed to factor in those both wounded and sick, so some soldiers I would have counted twice. Allowing for that, the Western Front sick and wounded percentage must still have been about 70%, if not higher.
One other statistic is absent, but for a different reason. It was elusive.
Only one file contained a diagnosis of mental illness, described as neurasthenia after shell shock. Neurasthenia (anxiety and depression) was commonly called "soldiers’ heart".
The soldier was Ted Griffiths, the young man who had all his teeth out. As far as the service files are concerned, mental illness did not publicly exist.
But it did, in huge numbers. We know that because the soldiers themselves recorded it privately in their diaries.
When Frank Pyle, from St Bathans, left Gallipoli he wrote "All sorts of cases on board, men minus hands, legs, arms and others blind. One or two deaf or dumb, the result of a bomb explosion. Several on board who have gone out of their minds."
In total I compiled fatality/wounded/illness data from 409 files of Maniototo soldiers who saw active service in all theatres of the war.
The files can be misleading. I may not have always interpreted them correctly, but I hope I got near the truth.
Officially, 20% of NZ soldiers were killed. That is on a par with my local statistics — killed/died of wounds or illness: 23.5%.
The official statistic for New Zealand soldiers sick or wounded in World War 1 is 39% of the total force.
My figure is bleaker by far: 69.9%. It is probably higher because just 6.8% have no mention of being wounded or sick on their file.
Early in the war Naseby poet James Smith wrote, "Young, full of hope they went away. The joy, the pride of all".
In December 1915, The Otago Witness published a letter written on the hospital ship Maheno. Its words encapsulate, by the time the guns fell silent on November 11 1918: "what had happened to all that youth, hope, joy and pride. The poor broken boys ... never will I forget."
Neither should we.
The history books don’t need to be rewritten, but if future research turns up findings similar to mine and that of Prof Wilson’s team, the official line that has stood for over 100 years has to change.
Surely, we owe the broken boys that much at least.
■Keith Scott (BA Hons) is a Dunedin historian. As well as Before Anzac, Beyond Armistice he has published Dear Dot, I Must Tell You, a personal history of young New Zealanders based on the Otago Witness youth correspondence column 1876-1932.