Bob Needs, a World War I veteran, recalls fighting on the Western Front in 1916. He is interviewed by Steve Challis of Radio Waitaki.
[He gives the date as 16 June, 1916 although the first use of tanks was at the Battle of Flers, 15 September 1916.]
"We went into action Thursday morning, June 16, 1916. [sic.]
We went to action with the first tanks that ever went into action in war. Ten o'clock that night half of them were dead or wounded. I was lucky I was blown up in the Somme. We're going in one night. We used to go in, in single file. You had to keep your eye on the bloke in front of you. You went into the trenches to relieve them, you know, you only had the lights of the flares and … the, the stretcher bearers and machine gunners, they gathered. I was at the end of the line. I got a hold of a bag of rations and my cobber was the last man in the 10th Company, and I stepped out of line to go back with him. We wanted to have feed when we got to the trenches you see. The stretcher bearers and the machine gunners stopped in a group there, and while we were standing there, he put a bloody shell clean in the middle of them. Well, there was one fellow standing, half covered me and I felt the heat of the blast on my face and I think that poor devil got everything that was coming my way but she just lifted me off my feet and put me … on the broad of my back but I never got a mark and I never got any concussion because I was in the open.
We dug the trench and I tell you there was no nonsense like you have with the trade unions today, no bans or strikes, or anything like it, by Christ you dug, I tell you, you worked and you worked until you had enough depth that you could lie down in it, out of sight. Well anyhow, we dug that, and that night he started onto us with a trench mortar, the German did, what we call a pineapple, a bloody bomb the size of a pineapple, full of high explosives. We could hear - we had a bloke on the lookout, you see - thud, you’d hear the thud of his gun, here she comes boys. You’d see this thing coming – the sparks out of the fuse. He put them over, he put them under, he put them over, he put them under but we knew by God that he’ll put one that’ll kill the lot of us. Well he didn’t, he put one in the back of the trench. Well that hit me - I got concussion there. It blew the glass out of my wristwatch -one thing sure, know how good it was. That hit me, the concussion like, I was just blacking out [gasping sound] I’m only getting a breath like that. My God it was close.
There are times when we pause and look back and relive the past and there flashes before our vision the question of how much the world has prospered from the sacrifices and the suffering of those days. I think when that question is reviewed, viewed against the background of the colossal expenditure that is taking place in the world today for the sole purpose of further destruction of human life and property, the answer of course is nothing. There is no end to, we’ll all wish, I’m sure and ask ourselves the question when will they ever learn?"
Transcript by Sound Archives/Ngā Taonga Kōrero