100 Kiwi Stories from WWl: Trench raids 'warfare at its most primitive'

Henry Nicholas was awarded the Victoria Cross for capturing a German stronghold in 1917, killing 12 enemy soldiers in the process. Photo / VC Collection, Canterbury Museum

No 34 - Soldiers resorted to crude clubs, daggers and knuckledusters for savage, close-quarter combat.

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It's said the greatest technological advances come in wartime. Indeed, World War I saw the invention of tanks, flamethrowers, tracer bullets, depth charges, aircraft carriers, and even sanitary napkins.

Why then were our troops reliant on knuckledusters, maces, clubs, revolvers, iron bars and daggers?

Artillery may have opened up the enemy, but trench raids required brutal hand-to-hand fighting. Historian Damien Fenton calls it "warfare at its most primitive".

Commanders encouraged their soldiers to undertake trench raids to prevent the men drifting into "live and let live mentality", Fenton writes.

"Soldiers equipped themselves with everything from privately purchased 'trench knives' to knuckledusters, pickaxe handles and crude clubs and maces."

Henry James Nicholas charged a German strongpoint on December 3, 1917, single-handedly blew up and stabbed 12 of the enemy with grenades and a bayonet, and captured the garrison. Nicholas was awarded the Victoria Cross for that bloody action.

Gallipoli was a site of trench raids, too.

Christchurch-born Cuthbert William Free used his knife skills there. He handed down to grandson Tony Forsyth a sickening tale of close-quarter fighting at Chunuk Bair in August 1915.

"He was bayoneted in the thigh but managed to grab his small dagger and stab his attacker through the heart from the back," Forsyth says. "Then he withdrew the bayonet, bandaged himself up and carried on."

Free may have used a "French nail" or "knuckle knife" -- a dagger with finger-holes. Even trench spades were sharpened on one side and used like a machete when fighting in close quarters.

April 1916's Grey River Argus heralds the "Revival of the Mace".

"Both the German and the Allied trench warriors are armed with ... short, heavy clubs covered with spikes. The bludgeons are supplied to parties which creep up on the enemy's trench under cover of darkness ... it is necessary to kill their opponents silently. The mace or spiked bludgeon makes this possible."

A war correspondent told the Clutha Leader of other savage scenes at Argonne Forest in January 1916: "The picture of a savage, torn, grimy warrior [is] reminiscent of those primeval days when men fought with cannibals and wild animals [ ... ] Steel helmets and shields have once again been introduced by French and Russians ... In these conditions sways the battle to and fro with thrusting and wrestling, throttling and biting, with knife and bayonet, rifle-butt and spade."

The Argonne savagery is better remembered as the Allies' Hundred Days Offensive.

Sergeant Henry James Nicholas' bronze memorial statue stands in Christchurch's Park of Remembrance.

100 Kiwi Stories runs every Monday and Thursday.