The Storming of Gate Pah - the defeat of the British by Maori warriors

today I want to talk to you about an interesting example of what you might call asymmetrical warfare although I'm going to be pointing out that in many ways it was surprisingly symmetrical warfare in this video which has been sponsored by the great courses plus more of them later now the war was one of the Maori Wars of the mid 19th century and Sir Duncan Cameron had been sent to deal with a marauding band of Maori warriors from several tribes that had agglomerated as part of an uprising a rebellion and in the area of the Taronga mission near the Bay of Plenty they assembled a force of 1,700 men now by world standards and historical standards he might not think that 1700 men is a particularly vast force but by the standards of mid 19th century New Zealand that was a substantial force he had a number of naval ships moored in the bay and they had supplied him with four hundred naval troops he had army troops from four different regiments and together with a detachment of Royal Artillery he had as I say 1700 men to deal with this uprising and now he had fourteen artillery pieces going from six pounder up to 40 pounder a very severe forty pound that's a big hefty gun he had eight mortars six inches and I think two of them were six inches and for the others were eight inches so these are big character things I don't think of the the World War two style thing with a narrow tube quite portable one of those these are the big hefty siege mortars that lob socking great big bits of ironmongery and explosiveness into the air and down onto the enemy so these were yeah these were the big hefty like this this sort of thing that sort of thing they were like that in the air eight of them and added to this he got another artillery piece off one of the ships this was a 110 pounder gun an absolutely colossal thing and it was at the time the biggest gun ever to have been brought to bear against watch like all them the the less civilized people of the world's natives if you like that they some people at the time might've used the word savages but I understand that that's probably not going to please everyone in my audience but you understand that the people who didn't have that tech level those older people it was the first time anything that big had been used against them so he presumably was reasonably confident of success the commander sir Duncan Cameron who was a Highlander and quite a respected leader and so far as I can tell was not blamed for anything that later came to pass it seems he done everything by the book and had done everything right now I talked about symmetrical and asymmetrical warfare you see asymmetrical warfare the two sides might have radically different ways of fighting and also radically different chances of success so you might have one side that is extremely well trained well disciplined well equipped numerous well supplied and all the rest of it and the other side that there's none of those things and you can tell which way that Wars going to go but this lot through the week a lot knowing that the Wars gonna go that way are probably going to not do the stupid thing which would be fight a big pitched battle in the open because this side is just going to win so instead you have they have to go for guerrilla tactics hit-and-run ambushes assassinations some other form of warfare other than the set piece battle which is what this side is really really good at so that'd be foolish to take them on a set piece battle and if you imagine if you imagine for instance setting a whole war game in a war game usually you want the two sides to have a decent chance of success in fact ideally you might say that both players in the game should have exactly a 50% chance of success if they are if they play equally well so if one side has got a small force of men with smart red uniforms magnificent mustaches white pith helmets and martini-henry rifles and then the other side who's playing say the Zulus has to have an awful lot of Zulus to make this a fair fight because you know the Zulus I mean fabulous warrior they were they just didn't have the mustaches so with this war though against the Maori it's all it wasn't like that because the Maori were also very well disciplined very experienced very well trained often very well led determined fighters who regard to equipment they were less well equipped overall than the British although they were and every source seems to agree on this every source that I've ever read over the years has agreed that they were second to none when it came to siege warfare they were particularly good with earthworks they were the best sappers in the world possibly they could dig trenches quickly and efficiently and then you exactly where to put them and how to make them and what to use them for and they adopted an asymmetrical form of warfare against the British and not actually just against the British this was a tactic they sometimes used against each other you would fortify an area but rather than hold it at all costs you just held it to make it such that the enemy taking it off you has to pay a very high price so you fortify this area garrison II the enemy then comes along takes it off you but you make absolutely sure he pays a very high price for doing that you then withdraw and build another fort they're only made out of Earth you just need a spade and a few and strong back and a determination and you've got another fort and then the enemy has to take that off you paying again a high price and this is what they were doing and they created got a power they didn't actually they created Gate Park I always used to think it was called got a path because I didn't realized that g80 II was actually the English word gate it was called Gate Park after just there was a gate in the area it's extremely mundane it was called Gate Park Parr is this this type of fortification it used to be felt PAH which i think is a perfectly good way of spelling it but a lot of people now are spelling it PA with an accent a long straight line suggesting along a ah but why not just PAH anyway they the Maori 's had I said Mallory's you noticed there people used to say Mary's but generally Maori is now used as the plural they had constructed a par on a saddle of land they there was a road going down to the Taronga mission and a trench had marked where the mission territory ended and they had deepened that trench and lengthened it so that it went all the way to the swamps either side of this raised bit of land the raise bit of land was about 50 feet high about 500 yards long and it was next to impossible to get troops around it so by by fortifying that point they were they were challenging the British come on then take us if you can the part itself was about 80 yards by 30 yards which isn't enormous but it was enough to contain their force how many Maori were there well we don't know one estimate is as low as 230 but others tend to be higher 400 perhaps we just don't know but it's in that sort of area so we can say that the Maori were out there but something in the region of 5 to 1 so the British had more troops they had artillery the Mary had no artillery and the Maori it looked like we're in a fairly hopeless position it was just a matter of bringing up the guns and Palamon into submission and then storming in with vastly superior numbers and smart red uniforms don't forget so that was the initial set up the Mary had dug in and they then waited so David Duncan Cameron didn't rush things he did everything right he brought his men up he fortified a camp 1200 yards away which was outside the range of any of the guns that the Mary had and he had a clear but open ground between him and a camp so there was no risk that the Mary might rush out and try to attack him so he he was playing it carefully and he brought up his artillery he got all his artillery dug in nicely all within range of the camp there was a red flag flying on a pole over the camp and so they're able to to use that to to zero in all their artillery and they managed to get one gun round the side in a min fellating position which was useful because the Mara had dug rifle pits dotted all the way down the slopes either side down to the swamp again to prevent out flanking maneuvers I say but to prevent it actually didn't work because the British were able to do a reconnaissance and they found that at low tide it was actually possible to sneak through the swamp on one side so this they did under cover of darkness and just so that they didn't get overheard and so that the Mary had something to do drafted by other troops fired at night they probably didn't hit anything usefully they just fired at the camp and they got to the the Mary to fire back it was a largely useless exchange of gunfire but it covered this this truly the troops who got round that was the 68th they got round the back of the Mary camp the part which meant that they could prevent reinforcements getting to the camp they could also trap in any people trying to flee from the camp and they were able to fire at anyone coming out of the camp to get to the stream to get water so things were looking pretty good for Duncan Cameron he had a vastly superior force with all the right kids all deployed in the right way he'd cut off the enemy's lines of retreat and supply and access to water and you'd imagine this was going to be a very one-sided fight which I'll talk about after mentioning my sponsor now the the great causes plus is has been sponsoring me for over a year now thank you to them and just in case you don't know you probably do because in case you don't know it's a very large website with thousands when I started I was saying 7,000 that up to about 8,000 lecture courses by top-notch University for impressive proof that professors from around the world largely from America it has to be said and one of these is Professor well he pronounces it liver coos but that's definitely not how it's spelled or 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give it a whirl now the set the seem as I've said earlier if you imagine is the dawn arriving like six o'clock in the morning dawn right some cockerel crowed some way you can add the sound effect thank you and that's when the British started their attack and they opened with a bombardment and they flung something like 30 tons of high explosive shells at that fort and created great breaches in it the they saw extremely brave Maori coming up in a few and under tremendous fire the risk of their house I'm not gonna start again I know I know that I just said I said but I like that which suggests that I fumble but I am going to carry on because I'm not the person who wants to start all over again and do take two on this so a great danger to themselves they were putting in repairs to their air earthworks and an interesting thing happened it's a very interesting thing and it's the sort of thing which is extremely difficult to to simulate in something like a war game they fat dude remember I said that they zeroed in their artillery on a flag that was flying over the camp yeah looking through a telescope or binoculars or whatever they had they saw this this flag and they had to the flagpole they could see a man next the flag passes review decent estimate of how tall the flagpole was they could take bearings off it and they could zero and they did they very accurately zeroed in their artillery on that flagpole having made the perhaps understandable assumption that it was in the camp it was actually the other side of the camp and for two hours the British artillery very accurately pounded the blazes out of an area of empty land the other side of the camp can you imagine that happening in a war game you you roll the dice to see if this this cannon hits and then that one of that one's that one you you spent several turns rolling for all these various things in loads of dicing and every single one is a miss you and if you announced that the player playing the British up oh sorry there's something I didn't tell you which means that all your artillery has missed but anyway they were just pounding the hell out of the land the other side of the camp some of their lungs were actually causing casualties to the 68th who are the other side of the camp and presumably word somehow got back to the artilleryman that they'd zeroed in on a rather useless thing so this happened this went on for about two hours that had spent two hours blasting a load of empty land but after a while they found the range and the 110 pounder fired a hundred shots when it ran out of ammunition at three o'clock in the afternoon so they created breaches in the defences and now it was time to get ready with the storming party they put together a storming party of six hundred men in a column four abreast it was anything that most of the column the storming party were naval personnel now I don't know why that should be and I should warn you now what I'm about to say next is pure conjecture but I do wonder if naval personnel were used for that job because they were actually considered more experienced at it better at it because the Royal Navy in this period it's fought an awful lot of actions landing troops Marines on coasts to take coastal forts so they would have had a lot of experience of taking forts plus storming into a par a earthwork fortification is not so terribly different different perhaps from storming onto another ship in a boarding action so possibly they were more experienced and more specialists trained for that sort of action conjecture but in the vanguard in the vanguard were army troops of the 43rd and how significant was that we don't know but possibly because of what happened next so in they storm they rushed up cheering and there was some fire that came out when a few men were wounded on the way in but really very few now you can imagine can't you as you're charging in for a breast into a fortified position with the enemy in there that your hearts been good we'll be pounding like crazy and you he pumped up with adrenaline and you charge in and when you come to the breach you imagine where they're bound to concentrate the fire on the breach itself so getting through the breach would be a really dicey moment but just hope that when you rush through no one happens to be shooting at that moment then you're through and then they were into the camp and then not a lot happened they are in the camp and there was a five-minute lull at this point and you can imagine that your heart can only pound at that sort of level for only so long and you can imagine that your adrenaline levels might start coming down as you look around and they found a few dead and wounded Maori but not very many and it was very difficult to find their way around because the Mary had built three tiers of trenches each overlooking that the next outward and these rulings zigzags and they'd built a lot of overhead covers a lot of the trenches were covered in stop stop upright posts and then a layer of twigs with earth piled on top with about the sixth eighth inch firing slit above the trench and unbeknownst to the the British dug into the side of a lot of these trenches were entrances to bunkers underground bunkers where an awful lot of Maori had been sitting for the last several hours now I first read of this battle in this rather magnificently bound book this is one of seven volumes battles of the 19th century Illustrated this was published between 1901 and 1910 which means that with a lot of these actions they're actually being written about by people who were there or who talked to people who were there because it was a quite recent past for them now in this book the author's didn't have the First World War to use as an analogy because they were writing before the first world war had happened so they didn't have for example the psalm to say it was a bit like the psalm where the Germans in deep bunkers were able to survive the huge amount of artillery pounding that preceded the assaults on the first day of the song so this more of a surprise it was more of a surprise to them that it was possible to live through such a storm of artillery so the men were walking around the camp and they saw these little houses and some of them were thinking well maybe I'll find some curios or maybe some valuables to loot and they started walking around having a look at some of the fallen and trying to find their way about which is not easy because of these zigzag trenches everywhere in some accounts the zigzags are suggested the suggestion is that they were dug in order to make it confusing for the attacker and for the observer when looking at the fort how he might find his way around although of course in World War one the trenches at the front they were also in zigzags and very similar patterns so that if a high-explosive shell did land directly in a trench it wouldn't blast all the way along a great long stretch of trench but that blast would be confined that little part of the zigzag so that could also have been a reason that they had these zigzags anyway so it's very difficult to find their way around and there of course there were massive craters everywhere so they're picking their way over the earth and then suddenly a volley of shots rings out and a load of their officers drop dead and so many of their officers were shot in the first volley that it seems quite certain that the the Mary had this as a pre-arranged plan when some signal is given shoot the nearest officer and the Mary were familiar enough with British uniforms and so forth they would have found it pretty easy to recognize which one of these men was an officer and of course they weren't very close quarters and it seems that suddenly though they were just blasts coming out of the ground now the the British were using rifled muskets at this point they were firing minie balls this were the they were Enfield the 1853 Patton Enfield which was a perfectly serviceable rifle but it wasn't very fast firing it was good in open battle but here the fact that the Maori had double-barreled shotguns was definitely to the advantage of the Maori double-barreled shotguns are only effective at very short range they're completely rubbish at sniping but they are effective at short range and you can reload them an awful lot faster then you can reload a muzzleloading minie ball firing rifled musket so actually at this distance the meri now had the advantage they'd managed to get the British to fight them at a range that suited them and men were then pouring out of holes in the ground too suddenly there was a puff of dust and another one and another one another one with war clubs and Spears and the men panicked I think part of the reason that they the panic up and I say the men I mean the British Army troops in the vanguard panicked I think one of the reasons they panic was that they were a little bit scattered by this point during that lull they'd spread out and they started to calm down thinking oh well the the fort's been largely abandoned so we've pretty much taken in fact one officers reported having gone back to the the co to report that the fort had been abandoned and then the fighting in earnest started now exactly what happened nobody knows almost every account written at the time since talks about how nobody knows what happened of course loads of people who are in the fight were interviewed but they all had conflicting versions of what happened it seems that one of the reasons that they panicked was that they thought that reinforcements were coming into the camp this could be because some of the 68th from the other side of the camp were coming up and they were mistaken for Mary reinforcements one version of the tale is that a load of Mary were actually trying to make their way out of the camp but then were repulsed back into the camp by the 68th station the other side and that these Mary coming back into the camp were mistaken for reinforcements but I think actually it's probably the fact that they just weren't expecting what happened and that these these warriors were popping up from all around them and they themselves and become scattered they felt safe fighting in the usual way that they they fought with a man either side of them and orders and formations and so forth and now this scattered every man for himself fight through them into a panic this was not the way they liked to fight and so they felt completely and all at sea out of there out of it out of their comfort zone or what an awful exported expression to use but you know what you know what they meant Danu that wasn't the way they were used to fighting they used to fighting their way and winning and now it seems that the the the native enemy were fighting the way that suited the native enemy anyway they did panic and and in the panic to VCS were won so there were acts of conspicuous bravery lots of men rescuing the fallen under tremendously heroic circumstances but there's no hiding the fact that the British panicked and fled captain Hamilton leading the rescue came up with the reserves and charged in and unfortunately it was immediately shot in the head and killed and I do wonder I get the impression reading the accounts that that was the moment where though the British morale broke and I I do wonder if seeing apparent salvation seeing apparent rescue seeing a properly ordered well led column of men rush in in the position to to been charged the enemy and and to save the day seeing that Hope dashed is actually probably more damaging well perhaps more damaging to morale than not seeing any any hope of rescue at all anyway the British ended up withdrawing and with their tails between their legs falling back to their camp and night fell and it was a very long and anxious night for the British during which the Maori shouted all sorts of thoughts at them in English to God have another go so the British were able to make good some gains they they fortify the line only a hundred yards from the the Maori Party are able to bring guns up in twos and slightly more threatening positions but it says a lot it says a lot for just how damaged the British morale was that on the next day the 28th they didn't attack nor on the 29th it wasn't until the 30th of April that they had another go and then when they went in again boom charge that time the camp had been abandoned the Maori had held the camp and caused casualties then slipped away through the lines of the 68th at night the 60th were too were too widely spread to stop them and had got away admittedly seven weeks later the force was caught and and beaten in another battle but this this was a very definite defeat for the British and it was seen as defeat in fact it was the biggest military disaster in New Zealand ever for the British so it was a bloody nose given by a handful of natives armed largely with clubs and spades against what at the time was supposed to be the best army in the world well I think actually it's not unreasonable to say that it was the best army in the world so it's an example of asymmetrical symmetrical warfare the two sides were using very different tactics but it was sort of actually a fair fight it could gone either way there was some bad luck with the flagpole in incidents and so forth but there was also very good sapper work and determined fighting from the maori who knew their stuff they would not pushovers and both sides I'm happy to be able to report respected the other so when the the British did go back into the camp and they found dead and dying there they found that no one had been robbed and no one had been mutilated and they buried their own dead and they also offered to bury the Maori but actually they also offered the Maori the opportunity to come and bury their own dead or which they did and according to what I've read the the lower-ranking Warriors were buried first and then the chieftains on top the lower worries acting as a sort of couch for the the more pampered dead chieftains on top when the British went into the camp they found some wounded which is a horrible thought because this was two days and three nights after the fight so lying there for three nights and two days were some hideously wounded men almost all of whom died of their wounds the ones that were in the camp the British lost something like a hundred and twelve men that's not a huge number the maori at the most lost fifty something like 23 bodies were found no 20/20 dead bodies and six wounded Maori were found in the camp one of them was a Maori chieftain who had seven bullet wounds and two broken legs and he'd been like he later died of those wounds but not before talking apparently quite happily to the the British asking amongst other things why was he not evacuated from the camp by the Maori unlike so many other of the the wounded Maori but anyway it seems that the artillery barrage had caused very few casualties maybe as many as 15 to the Maori they had dug a very effective fort so if you're interested in unusual unusual periods for military history and if you're trying to perhaps a construct an interesting war game where it's not the usual two evenly matched sides but it's an asymmetrical fight and yet it's fair without one side having to have overwhelming numbers then maybe you should look at the New Zealand Maori Wars

Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 804,414

Rating: 4.8749204 out of 5

Keywords: New Zealand, Maori, warriors, gate pah, gate pa, battle, trenches, bombardment, artillery, history, defeat, British, Victorian, army, tribesmen, natives, cannon, pdr, soldiers, sappers, earthworks

Id: s6QhW5S8Gk4

Length: 30min 4sec (1804 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 29 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/twentygreenskidoo]

And now Gate Pa is surrounded by a bowling club, a Mitre 10 Mego, and a church which holds defensive driving classes.

[u/lisiate]

Yay Lindy Beige!!

ETA: His pronunciation of Māori names is hilarious...

[u/[deleted]]

ohh this is why I've started seeing Gate Pa references in /r/historymemes

[u/jontomas]

When did it become Gate Pah?

[u/Iron_Doggo]

It's great to see that a well known youtuber has highlighted some of NZ's history. A shame none barely any of the earthworks remain in Tauranga except for Monmouth Redoubt

[u/d8sconz]

Damn that would make a great movie! It's about time we started hearing our own history, albeit from a scruffy pom, with bad hair and a blunt razor, whinging that Maori don't know how to spell their own words LOL.

[u/cptredbeard2]

This is really cool. Wish we had some big production value to show some of our history

[u/[deleted]]

We adhered strictly to the terms of the battle-covenant, and harmed not the wounded nor interfered with the bodies of the dead. The British Colonel (Booth) fell mortally wounded, just inside the gateway, and there he lay all night. In the hours of darkness his voice could be heard calling for water. One of our people went and got some and ministered to his wants. It has been said that Te Ipu gave the dying soldier water, but he was badly wounded (foot smashed) and quite incapacitated. One of the Maoris took Colonel Booth's sword. Another wounded officer left behind after his men had retreated dropped his sword a little distance away. A Maori picked it up and went to restore it to the officer. The pakeha squared himself up as well as he could to meet his deathblow, but to his surprise the Maori turned the hilt toward him (the officer) and returned his weapon.

Ah! Those were glorious days. Every fighter was a rangatira, and one was proud to meet each other in battle. Whatever the reverses were to either side no bitter feelings were engendered to form any permanent hatred. We were all friends immediately there was no fighting.

Hori Ngatai

Some "savages" right?

[u/Aeonera]

oh god, his pronunciation of "Tauranga" at 0:28....

...it hurts.