KEY INSIGHTS
Based on research estimates from the Ministry for Culture & Heritage, in overseas wars from 1899-2017:
- 30,170 New Zealanders lost their lives
- 60% in WWI
- 69% on the Western Front
- 15% in Gallipoli
- 39% in WWII
- 99% for WWI and WWII combined
- 1% in other conflicts
- 60% in WWI
- >96,000 casualties in total (death, injury, illness, capture)
- Approximately 2 additional casualties for every 1 death in each conflict (or 3x as many casualties as deaths)
- ~60% of the 100,000 who served in WWI became casualties
- ~25% of the 140,000 who served in WWII became casualties
- >270,000 New Zealanders have served in conflicts abroad
KEY QUESTION
Do we truly understand what these New Zealanders have sacrificed for us?
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Full data analysis
Please contact us if you would like the complete research.
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Ministry for Culture & Heritage notes:
- “Casualties are service personnel who become ‘ineffective’ because of death, injury, illness or capture by the enemy. Deaths include deaths from all causes while overseas.”
- “J-Force was the New Zealand contribution to the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan.”
- “The official history of New Zealand’s military involvement in the Malayan Emergency and Confrontation with Indonesia does not record the total number of personnel sent there.”
- “Peacekeeping [includes] 5 deaths in Timor Leste 1999-2002”
- “Establishing the total number of personnel deployed by New Zealand on peacekeeping missions since the 1950s was beyond the scope of this exercise.”
- “The data for individual campaigns and services in the two World Wars are guesstimates. They do not add up to the official totals for deaths and total casualties in the wars, which were compiled some years later.”
- “About 60% of New Zealanders who served in the First World War became casualties (i.e., were unable to fight, temporarily or permanently), compared to about 25% of those who served in the Second World War”
- “Though Gallipoli came to be more prominent in popular memory, the bulk of New Zealand First World War casualties were incurred on the Western Front; 1917 and 1918 saw the highest annual numbers of New Zealand deaths”
- “In the Second World War airmen, followed by seamen, were the personnel most likely to die if they became casualties – when in action they were more vulnerable than most soldiers, most of the time”
- “About 500 New Zealanders became prisoners of war during the First World War, compared to more than 9000 during the Second World War. The contrast reflects the static nature of the trench warfare of 1915–18 and the mobility of much of the fighting during the Second World War, especially in Greece and North Africa (1941–43)”
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Other notes:
- All available death information has been published. If you wish to see the breakdown of the numbers who served and were casualties, please visit the source data.
- We could not find data beyond 2017. Please let us know if you have a better source.
- We asked the New Zealand Defence Force for all deaths by year but did not receive any data before ANZAC Day. If we get new information, we will share it.
- If you wish to learn more, these links might be helpful:
- For the colours used in the graph, we chose shades of black, grey, and white to represent New Zealand’s colours.
- For the background, we chose a poppy image since that is so strongly associated with the remembrance of military losses and service in New Zealand.
- All numbers are provisional and subject to revision.
Thank you to the Ministry for Culture & Heritage for providing this information, the Factors who helped pull this together, and the beneFactors who make this work possible.
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SOURCE:
Data published by the Ministry for Culture & Heritage
(c) Crown Copyright
Licensed for use under the creative commons attribution licence (BY) 4.0
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