NEW ZEALAND DIVISION.

Taranaki Daily News, 19 June 1918, Page 5

NEW ZEALAND DIVISION.

SPLENDID WORK IN BIG PUSH. LETTER PROM GENERAL GODLEY. Major-General Sir A. Godley, writing to the Defence Minister, under date April 22, states: "Since I last wrote you will have heard that the New Zealand Division Went south, and arrived just in ,time to stem a Boche advance there. I hear very good accounts of what they did, and their first attempt since the landing at GaDipoli at what wa3 practically open warfare seems to have been on the whole quits successful. Up here we have had very strenuous times, as you will have seen from the newspapers. "Anything that we could lay our hands |on had to be pressed into the fight, among them the Second New Zealand Entrenching Battalion, made up of reinforcements and remnants of the Fourth ' Brigade. They did excellent service. They have now, I am glad to say, been pulled out again and gone back to their proper role as reinforcements to the division. I also had to form hastily a company, of all sorts of details at my corps headquarters, among them some men of the New Zealand Employment Company, and they did excellent work in filling a breach in the line. Similarly the New Zealand Cyclists of my corps of mounted troops were employed and did well. The fighting has been desperate, 'but the men have fought magnificently, and, considering the force in which we were attacked, the Germans have not made anything like the progress that tbey had hoped for. "The Germans have absolutely failed so far to get to either of the strategic points, Amiens or Hazebrooke, at which they had aimed, or to separate the Trench and British forces, or to make any appreciable advance towards the Channel ports. "The reinforcements have come up well and quickly, but the difficulty is to get time for reorganisation; and, of course, we do still awnt a tremendous number of more men." HUN WfflX FALL AT LAST FENCE. "Under date April 28," added Sir James Allen, "a very high officer writes:—l do feel, however, though the German is at present rnshing his fences with some success, that he will yet fall very heavily (before he gets to the last one.' And, referring to the New Zealand forces, he states, They, indeed, did magnificently in the fighting south of Arras, and their bag of machine-guns was rcalJv •wondeEfri.'"