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2nd Battalion, Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force
| Want to know more about 2nd Battalion, Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force? There are:1 items tagged 2nd Battalion, Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force available in our Library
These include information on officers, regimental histories, letters, diary entries, personal accounts and information about actions during the Great War.
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Those known to have served with2nd Battalion, Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force during the Great War 1914-1918. - Barnes Ernest Fred. L/Cpl. (d.14th Jun 1917)
- Braithwaite Cecil James. Pte. (d.29th Oct 1916)
- Braithwaite John. (d.29th Oct 1916)
- Brown VC. Donald Forrester. Sgt. (d.15th Sep 1916)
- Brown VC Donald Forrester. Sgt. (d.1st October 1916)
- Hudson Ernest. Pte.
- Kallstrom Arthur. Sgt. (d.3rd Sep1918)
- Morris MM. Herbert William Ellery. Pte.
- Savage VC, DCM, MM MID. Dickson Cornelius. Sgt. (d.25th July 1918)
- Travis VC, DCM, MM Richard Charles. Sgt (d.25 July 1918)
All names on this list have been submitted by relatives, friends, neighbours and others who wish to remember them, if you have any names to add or any recollections or photos of those listed,
please Add a Name to this List
Records of 2nd Battalion, Otago Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force from other sources.
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Sgt. Dickson Cornelius Savage VC, DCM, MM MID. 2nd Bn. Otago Regiment (d.25th July 1918)  Dick Travis was killed in action 25/07/1918 aged 34 years and buried in Row G. 5 in the Couin New British Cemetery in France.
He served as Serjeant Richard Charles Travis, and was the son of the late James and Frances Theresa Savage, of Otara, Opotiki, New Zealand. Known as "Prince of Scouts," and "King of No Man's Land." Also served in Egypt and Gallipoli. Awarded Croix de Guerre (Belgium).
The Victoria Cross was a posthumous award. An extract from the London Gazette, dated 27th Sep., 1918, records the following:- "For most conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty. During 'surprise' operations it was necessary to destroy an impassable wire block. Serjt. Travis, regardless of personal danger, volunteered for this duty. Before zero hour, in broad daylight and in close proximity to enemy posts he crawled out and successfully destroyed the block with bombs, thus enabling the attacking parties to pass through. A few minutes later a bombing party on the right of the attack was held up by two enemy machine guns, and the success of the whole operation was in danger. Perceiving this Serjt. Travis with great gallantry and utter disregard of danger, rushed the position, killed the crews and captured the guns. An enemy officer and three men immediately rushed at him from a bend in the trench and attempted to retake the guns. These four he killed single handed, thus allowing the bombing party on which much depended to advance. The success of the operation was almost entirely due to the heroic work of this gallant N.C.O. and the vigour with which he made and used opportunities for inflicting casualties on the enemy. He was killed 24 hours later when, in a most intense bombardment prior to an enemy counter-attack, he was going from post to post encouraging the men." The D.C.M. was awarded "For conspicuous gallantry in action. He went out by himself and accounted for several enemy snipers who were firing at a working party. He has on many previous occasions done very fine work."   
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Sgt. Arthur Kallstrom 2nd Bn. Otago Regiment (d.3rd Sep1918) Arthur Kallstrom was killed in action on the 3rd of September 918 and is buried in Adanac Military Cemetery in Somme, France.
He served under then name Charles Carson.
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Pte. Ernest Hudson 2nd Battalion Otago Regiment Ernest Hudson served with the 2nd Battalion, Otago Regiment, he was attached to the 3rd Canadian Tunnelling Company.
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Sgt. Donald Forrester Brown VC 2nd Bn. Otago Regiment (d.1st October 1916)  Donald Brown was killed in action on 1st of October 1916 aged 26 and is buried in the Warlencourt British Cemetery in France.
He was the son of Robert and Jessie Brown, of Wharf St., Oamaru, New Zealand. Native of Dunedin.
An extract from the London Gazette, No. 30130, dated 14th July, 1917, records the following:- "For most conspicuous bravery and determination in attack (south-east of High Wood, France, on September 15, 1916), when the company to which he belonged had suffered very heavy casualties in officers and men from machine gun fire. At great personal risk this N.C.O.advanced with a comrade and succeeded in reaching a point within 30 yds. of the enemy guns. Four of the gun crew were killed and the gun captured. The advance of the company was continued until it was again held up by machine gun fire. Again Serjt. Brown and his comrade, with great gallantry, rushed the gun and killed the crew. After this second position had been won, the company came under very heavy shell fire, and the utter contempt for danger and coolness under fire of this N.C.O. did much to keep up the spirit of his men. On a subsequent occasion in attack, Serjt. Brown showed most conspicuous gallantry. He attacked, single handed, a machine gun which was holding up the attack, killed the gun crew, and captured the gun. Later, whilst sniping the retreating enemy, this very gallant soldier was killed."
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Pte. Cecil James Braithwaite 2nd Btn. Otago Regiment (d.29th Oct 1916) Jack Braithwaite served with the Otago Regiment 2nd Battalion, part of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. He was executed for mutiny on 29th October 1916 and is buried in St Sever Cemetery Extension, Rouen, France.
Prior to the war, Brithwaite had worked as a journalist in Australia. After being incarcerated for repeatedly being AWOL, he was accused of instigating a prison riot, although he claimed that he only involved himself in an attempt to calm it.
Jack Braithwaite was a New Zealander whose plea in mitigation against his sentence stated that he was not a born soldier, just a Bohemian journalist who had answered the call to arms but 'had made a serious mess of things, and where I came to win honour and glory, I have won only shame, dishonour and everlasting disgrace...'
I decided to try to find out more about Braithwaite and contacted Elizabeth Morey, Convenor of the New Zealand branch of the WFA. She agreed to help and recently sent me his records from the NZ Army files and also notes written for the dictionary of New Zealand Biography by Ian McGibbon, Senior Military Historian at the Ministry of Culture and Heritage. What follows is entirely due to her efforts and my grateful thanks go to Elizabeth and Ian McGibbon.
Jack was certainly a complex character and his background was also extremely complex. Born in Dunedin on 4th January 1885 (the birth was not registered until 1890) and christened Cecil James, he was one of the sixteen children of a bookseller, Joseph Braithwaite, a later mayor of Dunedin. Even his name and birth date are not straightforward as in his first attestation form he gave his birth date as 3rd January 1882 but this is not possible as his brother Joseph was born on 1st July 1881.
In his second attestation in November 1915 he declared that his first name was John (and gave his birth date as 1883) but there is no record of a John Braithwaite being born or going to school at the appropriate time. As one of his younger brothers was John Rewi, born 12 years later than Jack, it is unlikely that there would have been an earlier child of this name in the family. Ian McGibbon suggests that there could be reasons for the discrepancies, possibly that there might have been a criminal conviction or a deserted wife and that he was trying to cover his trail.
For some reason, presumably at his own insistence, his name was not listed among those who had passed their medical examination in May 1915. Interestingly his younger brother, Eric, also tried to sign on under an assumed name and gave different birth dates in his two attestations.
Jack left Dunedin for Trentham Military Camp at the end of May 1915 and in February 1916 he was in Egypt, France with the 2nd Battalion, Otago Infantry Regiment, and was promoted to Lance Corporal. He arrived in April.
At the front Jack did not conduct himself well. In May 1916 he went absent without leave and this cost him his stripes; this did not seem to worry him, 'let duty and soldiering go to hell' was his alleged remark. His only service in the trenches, from 14th to 22nd May, ended when he again left his unit without permission having attempted to use a false leave pass when apprehended, and was sentenced to sixty days field punishment. He made a bad situation worse when on 7th July he escaped from confinement and was sentenced to two years imprisonment with hard labour. An indication of how little he was regarded as a soldier is shown by the fact that his uncle, Brigadier W. Braithwaite, recommended that he be committed to prison and sent back to New Zealand as a prisoner at the earliest opportunity'. But he tried to escape again while being transferred to the British Army's Blargies North military prison near Abancourt, where he was taken on 31st July; the punishment for this second offence was to be served concurrently.
At the end of August 1916 Jack was involved in an incident in which an Australian prisoner, Pte. A. Little, was resisting arrest by a military policeman. The prisoner had been on a work detail outside the compound earlier in the day and apparently a lack of hot water in what is described as the vapour bath (a shower?) had caused the trouble. A crowd of about thirty unruly Australian and New Zealand inmates joined in and Jack, who was mess orderly, tried to give the prisoner his lunch. He made a grave mistake, as the trouble developed, of leading the prisoner away to his tent, claiming that he was attempting to pacify the situation but instead it served to single him out as one of the principal offenders. There was mutual antipathy between the Australasian and the military police, the hated red caps', and it was this that almost certainly lay at the heart of the affair.
On 11th October 1916 he found himself facing his fourth court martial charged with three Australians with the crime of mutiny. He put forward a plausible defence, which was corroborated by defence witnesses but was found guilty and sentenced to death. In passing the papers to the Judge Advocate-General at GHQ on 17 October, the Inspector General of Communications, Lt. General Sir F .T. Clayton, drew attention to the fact that the evidence submitted might be considered to bear out Jack's version. Although the Australians received similar sentences they were not in danger of being shot because of their government's prohibition on executions without reference to Australia. No such reservation had been made by the New Zealand government and so Braithwaite's sentence was duly confirmed by the Commander-in-Chief, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, on 25th October.
According to the law, a soldier accused of mutiny need not have taken an active part to be guilty; if he was present and did not use his utmost endeavours to suppress the mutiny he was, in law, equally guilty with those who took an active part. Only 12 days before the incident in which Braithwaite was involved another mutiny had occurred at the prison among Scottish prisoners. Seven stood trial and six were sentenced to death but only one, Gunner W. Lewis, was eventually executed. In their defence the prisoners said that the Australians seemed to get preferential treatment, pointing out that they had been able to refuse work until their complaints had been considered. But the authorities' apparent acquiescence in the Australian behaviour was probably influenced by the realisation that they had little in the way of sanctions to apply in the absence of the death penalty.
Disciplinary problems within the prison and Jack's undoubted poor service record must have removed any inclination towards clemency. There was no requirement for the case to be reviewed by any New Zealand officer and he had no practicable avenue of appeal against conviction and sentence which he learned of on 27th or 28th October. By contrast the Australians had their sentences commuted to two years hard labour.
Jack Braithwaite was shot at 6.05 a.m. on 29th October 1916 by a firing squad at Rouen, being one of only five New Zealanders executed for military offences during World War I, and the only one not put to death by his countrymen.
Poor Jack. He seems to have been somebody who was totally unsuited to become a soldier and perhaps left to himself, and without the patriotic fervour sweeping Britain and the Empire in 1915, he would not have enlisted. He was unable to accept military discipline and acted in a foolhardy, perhaps stupid, manner and was dealt with firmly by the authorities. In his final, fatal, brush with military law he found himself cast in the role of a sacrificial victim. It would seem that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and his luck had run out. In his last hours how much he must have wished he had stayed in Dunedin as a 'Bohemian' journalist.
One day I hope to visit St. Sever cemetery because I think he deserves at least to have one small cross on his grave; after nearly a century all his wrongs can be forgiven.
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John Braithwaite 2nd Btn. Otago Regiment (d.29th Oct 1916) Prior to the war John Braithwaite had worked as a journalist in Australia. After being incarcerated for repeatedly being AWOL, he was accused of instigating a prison riot, although he claimed that he only involved himself in an attempt to calm it.
At 0605 on 29 October 1916 Braithwaite was shot by a firing squad at Rouen for mutiny.
He was posthumously pardoned on 14 September 2000, when New Zealand's Pardon for Soldiers of the Great War Act became law.
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Sgt. Donald Forrester Brown VC. 2nd Battalion Otago Infantry Regiment (d.15th Sep 1916) Donald Forrester Brown was born on 23 February 1890 in Dunedin, New Zealand. After attending schools in Dunedin and Oamaru, he took up farming. When World War One broke out, he carried on farming for a year but then sold his farm and volunteered for the New Zealand Expeditionary Force on the 19th of October 1915. He embarked for the Middle East to join the New Zealand Division, which had been formed after the Gallipoli Campaign and was in training in Egypt by the time he arrived in January 1916. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, Otago Infantry Regiment, which by May was on the Western Front in France.
Brown, by now a sergeant, earned his Victoria Cross in the Battle of Flers-Courcelette during the Somme Offensive. On the opening day of the battle, 15 September 1916, his unit was tasked with capturing a series of German held trenches from their position south-east of High Wood. While the first trench was captured with ease with the assistance of effective artillery support, his company came under heavy flanking machine gun fire while advancing to the next trench line, which inflicted heavy casualties amongst the company. Brown, together with another soldier, Corporal Jesse Rodgers, attacked one machine gun post, killing the crew and capturing the gun. This allowed the remaining soldiers to regroup and prepare for an attack on the next trench, but during a covering artillery barrage they once again came under fire from a machine gun post. Brown was amongst those who attacked this second machine gun post, swiftly dealing with the threat. Once the covering barrage lifted, the New Zealanders advanced and successfully captured their next objective, the Switch Line. Brown was key in immediately improving the existing defences in preparation against a possible counterattack. The following day, his company along with the remainder of his battalion was relieved and able to withdraw. Brown's company lost 123 men from its initial complement of 180 during the opening day of the battle.
The Otago Regiment was back in the line on 1 October for the Battle of Le Transloy. In an attack on a German strongpoint near Eaucourt L'Abbaye, Brown was again involved in the seizing of an enemy machine gun post which was holding up the advance. Moving forward on his own, and armed only with a pistol, Brown attacked the post, killing its crew and capturing the gun. This allowed his fellow troops to attack and capture the strongpoint. During this attack, Brown was shot in the head by a sniper and killed instantly.
Brown's company commander had recommended him for a Distinguished Conduct Medal for his actions on 15th September, and his battalion commander had written to Brown's father indicating that he had hoped that Brown's recommendation would be upgraded to a Victoria Cross. However, with Brown's death it was not until the officers of his battalion started agitating for a Victoria Cross nomination that any progress was made. The award of the Victoria Cross to Brown was gazetted on 15 June 1917, and it was duly presented to his father by the 2nd Earl of Liverpool, New Zealand's Governor General, on 30 August 1917.
Brown is buried at Warlencourt British Cemetery, France. His Victoria Cross is held by his family
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Pte. Herbert William Ellery Morris MM. 2nd Otago Btn. Herbert Morris was my Grandfather, he was was a company runner attached to the 2nd Otago Battalion. He was wounded in September 1918 and awarded the Military Medal for actions on the 12th of October 1918 at Passendale. Herbert survived the war and trained troops in New Zealand during the Second World War.
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Recomended Reading.Available at discounted prices.
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New Zealand and the Great War: A Photographic Record of New Zealanders at War 1914-1918 Glyn Harper
They shall not grow old...In 1914, despite being forbidden, many a Kiwi soldier's kitbag included a portable camera, known as 'The Soldiers' Kodak'. In a major research project, Glyn Harper and the Queen Elizabeth II Army Memorial Museum have combined official war photographs with more informal images to produce a moving visual history. While primarily drawn from the Museum's collection, many photographs from private sources have been included. From more than 25,000 photographs, just over 800 have been selected - most of which have never been published. Chosen to depict each theatre of the 1914-18 war, including Gallipoli, Sinai-Palestine and the Western Front, poignant images from the home front are also included, along with graphic portraits of wounded soldiers, whose treatment marked the beginnings of modern plastic surgery. Despite the First World War being described as the most important and far-reaching political and military event of the twentieth century, pivotal in forging our
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