From dentist to Governor General
John Jolliffe
BERNARD FREYBERG V.C. SOLDIER OF TWO NATIONS by Paul Freyberg Hodder & Stoughton, £30, pp. 579 Bernard Freyberg must be the last great British commander of World War II to have his life written. This story of almost superhuman courage and endurance is by his son, also a professional soldier, who rose to the rank of Brigadier.
Freyberg was a New Zealander by upbringing rather than birth, having emi- grated with his family from Surrey at the age of two. (The family had its origins in the Freiburg Mountains in Switzerland, and only came to England in 1814. The general's grandfather had served in the Astrakhan Grenadiers against Napoleon at Borodino.) His early life was dominated by a concern with physical stamina, for which obsession hardly seems too strong a word. He won 17 of the gold and silver medals offered by the New Zealand Amateur Swimming Association between 1904 and 1911, and after the war twice narrowly failed to swim the English Channel. He won the first of his DSOs by swimming two miles each way in the freezing sea of Gallipoli to light flares on the shore, and mislead the Turks ahead of the allied land- ing. He had already succeeded in making his way round the world and joining the Royal Naval Division by accosting Churchill on Horse Guards Parade. But his father's apparent lack of savoir faire meant that there was no money for Bernard to study medicine, which was his ambition. The nearest alternative was dentistry, which needed less training, if any; and so, from 1908 to 1914, he became a dentist.
His sheer courage was such that he need- ed phenomenal luck to survive the battles of the Somme and the Ancre, and he won the VC after being wounded four times at • Beaucourt in November 1916, having already been hit twice at Gallipoli. Back in France after convalescing, he handed over the Hood Battalion to his great friend Oc Asquith in March 1917 and took command of a previously mishandled territorial brigade. He was then very badly wounded in five places at Passchendaele, and his next command was of another infantry brigade which was to bear the brunt of the supreme German attack in March and April 1918. In June he was severely wound- ed for the ninth time, winning a second DSO, followed by a third, when he led a ten-mile cavalry dash to save the vital bridges at Lessines from being blown up by the Germans.
In 1919 he transferred into the Grenadiers. For a hero, soldiering after the war was tame and disheartening stuff. Soldiers' pay was reduced, and disarma- ment was all the rage. Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between Freyberg's record in France and those of the generals who fought their battles from chateaux 20 miles behind the lines. For the next 15 years his chief concern was for the welfare of the soldiers at a time when their morale was constantly being eroded. In 1935 he was offered the post of GOC of a district in India, but as a result of his vio- lent exertions in the gymnasium and swimming pool at the Bath Club in London, he was discovered to have a mur- mur of the heart. No desk job of appropri- ate seniority being available, he was retired: he joined the board of BSA, and was adopted for a safe Conservative seat, though most of his close friends, such as Reginald McKenna — their wives were sis- ters — and the Asquith family were Liberals. When war came he managed to pass a medical by talking all the time the doctor was trying to listen to his chest through a stethoscope. Absurdly, this quali- fied him only for service in 'temperate zones', which for the next gruelling years turned out to be the blazing heat of Greece and the North African desert.
He was given the command of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, a task that was made harder by the fact that the Prime Minister of New Zealand also had some say in its activities. But in spite of his severe, sometimes grim, expression, born out in some of the photographs in this book, his subordinate General Stevens described him as
kind, compassionate, always ready to listen... never peremptory or dictatorial... simpleness and gentleness personified.
He never forgot that he was now dealing with raw recruits, from a classless society that was a far cry from the officers and men of the British Army. He regarded the decision to break off the pursuit of the retreating Italian Army in North Africa in 1941, and to send troops to Greece, as one of the biggest mistakes of the war:
The Greek campaign [he wrote] was muddled into for political, not military, rea- sons, and came near to losing us the Middle East.
Certainly 14,000 out of 62,000 allied forces landed in Greece were captured, and 1,000 killed. The rest were taken off to an 'unprepared and unequipped' Crete, where Freyberg was put in charge by Wavell, the GOC in Cairo, at a time when decoded messages from Ultra were begin-
ning to provide priceless information about the German plans. But Wavell ordered Freyberg never to act on information received exclusively from Ultra, or the Germans might realise what was going on. He expressly told Freyberg that 'the authorities in London would rather lose Crete than jeopardise Ultra'.
Freyberg may well have misinterpreted one ill-expressed signal, and Ultra or no Ultra, he may have been excessively con- cerned with the danger of German attack by sea rather than by air. But he is absolved (as Churchill absolved him some months later) from much of the criticism made in all the accounts of Crete written before Ultra was declassified. Nor is it likely that Montgomery, when he came to command the Eighth Army, would have approved of him so wholeheartedly had he been mainly responsible for the shambles in Crete. Although they never got on well personally, Wavell commented that Freyberg had pro- duced 'one of the best trained, fitted and disciplined divisions I have ever seen', but that he had been worn out in Crete through his 'passion for detail, and a desire to do everything himself instead of letting his staff work'. Yet the Germans lost 7,000 killed in Crete, as opposed to 3,700 allies, a figure which includes 2,000 men on troop- ships. The Germans never undertook air- borne parachute operations again, and never tried to take Cyprus or Malta. When the official report on Crete, which was demanded by Churchill and conducted by Col. Salisbury-Jones, was made public in 1972, its most scathing passages were on the decisions made at GHQ, and not in the field.
Freyberg was wounded yet again in action, and was also injured in a car acci- dent and later in a light aeroplane; but his final triumph, which won him his fourth DSO, was his dash for Trieste which fore- stalled Tito's partisans, who would other- wise have got there first and would have been very hard to dislodge. This lightning move was in glorious contrast to the hand- ing over of the refugees to be slaughtered by Tito's thugs, which was going on at almost the same time.
After the war, Freyberg was a virtually automatic choice as Governor General of New Zealand, where his psychological understanding of people and events was unprecedented. His last ten years were spent peacefully as Deputy Constable of Windsor Castle.
Argument will no doubt continue, of a rather unprofitable kind, over the insoluble problems in Crete; but it is not necessary to share the author's exact point of view on every page in order to recognise that his biography is much more than a mere monument of filial piety, and that it is most unlikely to be superseded. The sources are admirably set out and the maps, which make the action very much easier for the uninitiated to grasp, deserve special praise.
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