Originally Posted by
Damien Evans
Which one? There were 21, and the British had been digging in the area before we even got to the salient.
Most of them. A lot of our pioneers were put in British units because no one else had experience mining that sort of terrain. In the Ypres Salient, virtually any time any sort of mining is mentioned, regardless of which troops are "on paper" doing it, they were almost all New Zealand gum diggers. In the late 19th Century/Early 20th Century kauri gum was New Zealand's single biggest export, and 20,000 people were employed in the activity.
New Zealanders in the infantry or other units, who were found to have gum digger experience, were immediately moved into the pioneers.