WW1: 13 Bty, NZFA

Kerry Lee responds to Jan Scanlan's request for help

I am a retired gunner with ancestors in the WW1 Field Artillery and read your note in our muzzle flashes with much interest. The following may help:

There is a very good reference called NZ Artillery in the Field by Lt J R Byrne NZFA. Published by Whitcombe and Tombs in1922 it has a lot of detail about what units were doing and where. Try for a library reference because my copy cost over $110 some years ago. It is still in some old books shops but rather rare.

13 Bty is listed in page 101 as one of the Batteries of 2nd Brigade .

From pp 304 on it is clear that all NZ artillery units were together in October and November 1918, so 13 Bty would have been on the march to Cologne to occupy that sector of Germany

From your notes [I take that to be a transcript of the microfiche] Cps RC would have been Corps Reserve Group. That was the training depot used by all NZA gunners before posting to [or back to] units in France. Cps RG was part of Sling Camp on the north edge of Salisbury Plain. It is still there and in use by British Army units today. The Kiwi soldiers carved a huge KIWI in the chalk hillside and the Brits have kept it tidy ever since. In late 1918 NZA gunners en route to units of the Divisional Artillery were posted through a base depot at Quievy in France. It is about 10km East of Cambrai.

As we say in the artillery

Ubique [we are everywhere]