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Ngā Tohuwhenua Mai Te Rangi: A New Zealand Archeology in Aerial Photographs

[introduction]

In the earliest periods of the New Zealand Wars (1840s, 1850s), the troops used were the regular British soldiery, 'Imperial' forces. Later in the wars (mid 1860s), as the costs increased, the supply of soldiery was made the responsibility of the New Zealand government, the 'Colonial' forces. Eventually, in the late 1860s and 1870s, the military activity came to be more of a policing role, with the creation of the Armed Constabulary. The majority of the surviving European fortifications belong to the latter, Colonial, period from about 1865 to 1880; fortifications were maintained for use up until the 1880s. Māori supporters of the government of the day were not uncommon. Up to the mid-1860s, loyalist 'Queenite' forces were in action and, later, paid kūpapa were used with the Armed Constabulary.

It has been stated by James Belich, amongst others, that nineteenth-century Māori fortifications, and the tactics based on them, were in some ways superior to the European forces' use of such techniques. Belich argues that the adaptation of the unique pre-European style of fortification to gun-fighting was an outstanding piece of innovation; and that the underestimation of this phenomenon led to many European losses. In his view, the British military engineers were so impressed by these fortifications—'the modern pā'—that they drew them meticulously and that they were used subsequently as models for First World War trench fortifications. He also argues that Māori made potent use of fortifications in drawing forward British troops into positions of relative weakness, where the British would lose materiel and men, and the will to fight. 1

Belich's overall thesis is revisionist; he makes selective use of sources deriding the British effort, e.g., the views of the colonists at New Plymouth on the use of saps at Pukerangiora in 1861. 2 The tactics at Pukerangiora were the result of the offensive failures in the Bay of Islands in 1845, more than a decade earlier. Then, both troops and Māori were equipped with muskets. Infantry practice was in the same form as that of the land wars of eighteenth-century Europe. Substantial formed bodies of troops, artillery and cavalry were usually placed on the field in a complex composition, with different types of forces and flanking arrangements used in succession. The forces faced each other across relatively open ground, although tactical advantage might have been sought in cover or high ground on any particular field. The attacker's object was to break or outflank the defensive line. Such a formed body of troops was deployed at Ohaeawai in 1845, and is illustrated in page 84 its battlefield setting in chapter 7.

The fear of loss of foot soldiers was a strong consideration in the minds of British commanding officers, contrary to popular stereotype. They refused to assault fortifications where a flanking movement (around the fortification) would serve to attain the ultimate territorial goal. However, in the early engagements in the Bay of Islands, with significant weaknesses in artillery and a degree of tactical confusion, direct assaults did take place with disastrous consequences for the British at Puketutu and Ohaeawai. Assaults on the earthwork fortifications or heavy wooden stockades in New Zealand were in most cases disastrous. British army practice did not change fast enough, at least not in Northland in the 1840s. After the northern wars of 1845, the British army in England conducted experiments on how to demolish such stockades. They found that charges placed underground at the foot of the stockade, concentrating the destructive effect, were the best. The logical way to emplace such charges was by sapping, digging a trench towards the fortification, and not mounting an assault by troops until the palisade was demolished.

Of more long-term consequence as the New Zealand Wars unfolded was the change in small-arms manufacturing, away from muskets to breach-loading, mass-produced rifles of far superior accuracy, range and rate of fire. In the British army, muskets began to be replaced by rifles in the course of the Crimean War (commenced 1854). 3 By the mid-1860s the United States Civil War had also offered the European armies telling lessons in the defensive strength of rifle trenches, a development which meant the end of relatively formal advances of infantry across open ground. The advantage now lay too much with an entrenched defender, as the appalling casualties of the Civil War were making plain. 4 Attacking forces advanced in loose screens, taking advantage of natural hollows for protection, and in close work against single positions the use of offensive earthworks such as saps was common. By the 1860s, then, many lessons had been learnt from the earlier Northland experience, and more importantly the subsequent development in the use of ground troops of the Crimean and Civil Wars.

The New Zealand Colonial or British Imperial forces were on the whole on the offensive, and their losses were of tactical significance only. They could hardly be expected to manifest much earthworks innovation in the offensive role. Fortifications were designed to protect supply lines and bases or otherwise to protect property page 85 and citizens against attacks from behind the forward European fighting line. In the later phases, fortifications were used as a screen at the loosely defined frontier of European settlement, central defended places in military farm settlements. Moreover, European defensive positions in New Zealand were not expected to be subject to shelling or mortar attack. This form of attack was almost exclusively the preserve of Imperial forces, and one with which Māori defenders rapidly became familiar from the earliest engagements in the Bay of Islands. Their tactical response within fortifications was the obvious one of digging down.

Māori gained no strategic advantage from a defensive system argued by Belich to be superior to European knowledge of the time. Setting this puzzle aside, it has to be recognised that British and Colonial troOps did not lack the drive to push an engagement forward. In the final analysis, the British and colonial forces were better organised and better supplied, which as Belich recognises is the ultimate factor in the strategic view of the New Zealand Wars. To argue otherwise is to drive oneself into a nest of paradoxes where all the battles are won by Māori, and yet the war is lost.