Forgotten Anzacs: the campaign in Greece, 1941

FORGOTTEN ANZACS

Peter Ewer completed a first-class honours degree in politics at Macquarie University in 1983 that won a university medal, and a doctorate in technology and culture from RMIT University in 2005 that also won a university research prize. Dr Ewer is currently an official in the Victorian Department of Justice, and has published in local and international history journals.

To all those who fought Nazism in Greece, 1941

Scribe Publications

18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

First published by Scribe 2008

Paperback edition published 2009; reprinted 2011

Revised hardback edition published 2016

Copyright © Peter Ewer 2008, 2016

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Maps drawn by Bruce Godden

9781925321296 (revised hardback edition)

9781925307528 (e-book)

A CIP record for this title is available from the National Library of Australia

scribepublications.com.au

scribepublications.co.uk

Contents

Preface to the 75th anniversary edition

Prologue

1. For King and Country … and the paid adventure

2. The Tracks They Travelled

3. An American Abroad

4. Building a Balkan Front

5. Blocking a Blitzkrieg: the battle of Vevi, 10–13 April 1941

6. At the Feet of Zeus They Fought

7. Disaster Averted: the Battle of Pinios Gorge, 17–18 April 1941

8. Of Rearguards and Treachery

9. An Anzac Dunkirk

10. The Battle of Crete: 20 May–1 June 1941

11. Legacies

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

References

Notes

Preface to the 75th anniversary edition

The first edition of Forgotten Anzacs was published in 2008 — not a long time ago, so the reader is entitled to ask what would warrant a revised edition, even for a significant anniversary of the campaign. When I first wrote the book, it was the literary product of a series of interviews I had undertaken with veterans of the Greek campaign, intended for a film documentary. In the course of transcribing those interviews, the book really fell onto, and then off, the computer screen, raw but ready made, an oral history of an important moment in Australian, Greek, and New Zealand history. It was around the stories of the veterans that I then organised the dry facts of military events, and the decisions of politicians, telling only so much of these as would make the lived experience intelligible to readers more than 60 years later.

The publicity that the book attracted was interesting, especially for one element of it. In closing the first edition of Forgotten Anzacs in 2008, I made the point that the Anzac veterans had never received a campaign medal for the fighting. They had been asked to make do with the ‘North Africa Star’, a catch-all honour for anyone who had been involved in the fighting in North Africa between 1940 and 1943. The oddity is obvious, Greece being some distance away from the baking sands of Egypt and Libya. In the mid-1940s, when decisions were made about these things, Canberra and Wellington were still wedded to the British system of honours, and the fighting was too inconsequential (at least in the eyes of London) for a dedicated medal to be struck for those who served.

My critique of the official slight on the veterans over the lack of a proper campaign medal resonated with many Anzac veterans (although some are quite happy with the current arrangement, it must be said), and bewildered the Australian Greek community. They could not imagine why Australian service personnel, who had given so much to help the Greeks in 1941, were not entitled to a more appropriate medal.

Greek interest in the affair was understandable, given that Athens had issued its own campaign decoration, the Greek Medal of Honour 1940–1941, and happily bestowed it on the Anzacs in recognition of their service. Dina Gerolymou, a producer with SBS Radio, took up the issue, but from government officials and even the Returned Services League (RSL), she got the same mantra — the North Africa Star was good enough.

Officialdom has turned itself in knots justifying this position, but ultimately the rationale for it is that Australia remains beholden to the imperial system of campaign honours, regardless of whether that reflects our national experience or not. In that, the experience of the second Anzacs from 1941 merely mirrors that of their forebears, when Australians proposed to strike a ‘Gallipoli Star’ in 1917 to honour the first Anzacs. The colours suggested for the Gallipoli Star were highly symbolic: blue for the ocean, gold for Australian wattle, silver-grey for the New Zealand fern, and red to represent both the Australian gum and the New Zealand rata flower. King George V flatly refused to gazette the medal, on the grounds that the Australians and New Zealanders could not have their own decoration.

So around this issue of campaign medals, and whether they reflect ‘our’ experience, or that of the British, the Anzac tradition, in both world wars, carries with it a certain colonial tinge. Is there anything else about the Australian and New Zealand experience in Greece that might give us cause to think deeply about our place in the world?

In the first edition of Forgotten Anzacs, written around the oral histories of veterans, I did not peer far into the great issues of geo-politics that gave rise to the campaign, at least not in terms of archival research. Like many, I was already aware that governments on both sides of the Tasman had failed to properly understand the risks of the campaign before committing troops to it — notably, by failing to obtain the opinions of their military commanders on the spot, Australian Tom Blamey and Kiwi Bernard Freyberg. The two generals were sceptical about the British plan, and had their governments only asked them by for a view about it before crucial decisions were made, things might have turned out differently. If Canberra and Wellington were not getting the facts from their own military leaders, albeit because they were never asked, was London telling the Australian and New Zealand governments everything they needed to know?

With an uneasy feeling, in 2010 I ventured to the British National Archives at Kew to explore how the British military and intelligence community considered the situation in the Balkans in early 1941, with a view to comparing those assessments with what the British government told Canberra and Wellington.

The result of that research is found here, in a revised edition that I hope encourages Australian and New Zealand readers to think about how we stand in global affairs, and the nature of our relationships with the great powers. If the events of 1941 are any guide, those great powers calculate their own interests first, and ours second, and it behoves us to remember as much.

Prologue

Every school child in Australia and New Zealand is brought up on the legend of the Anzacs, but how many know the story of another Anzac force that fought not at Gallipoli, but in Greece a generation later? The term ‘Anzac’ is a much-used one on both sides of the Tasman, but it actually refers to a particular kind of military formation — an army corps of two or more divisions. Used in this way, an Anzac corps has been established only twice — at Gallipoli and, less famously, in Greece.

The Australians and New Zealanders initially went to Greece under their own national banners, and it was on the eve of battle that the second Anzac Corps was hurriedly created by the simple expedient of re-naming an Australian corps and transferring to it a New Zealand division. On 12 April 1941, General Thomas Blamey, commander of the new Anzac Corps, issued the necessary order of the day. Australian and New Zealand troops were then fighting their first actions against an invading German army, which was everywhere triumphant. With the very existence of his force in the balance, Blamey invoked the spirit of Gallipoli to inspire his troops, highlighting the footsteps in which they followed:

As from 1800 hours 12 April I Aust Corps will be designated ANZAC CORPS. In making this announcement the General Officer Commanding ANZAC CORPS desires to say that the reunion of the Australian and New Zealand Divisions gives all ranks the greatest uplift. The task ahead though difficult is not nearly so desperate as that which our fathers faced in April twenty-six years ago. We go to it together with stout hearts and certainty of success. ¹

Bernard Freyberg, commander of the New Zealand division that comprised the other half of the new formation, understood the significance of the moment, and cabled back to Blamey:

To ANZAC Corps

From NZ Div

All ranks NZ Div welcome reunion of Australian and New Zealand Divisions with greatest satisfaction. Will you please send this message to our comrades 6th Division.

Freyberg cmd NZEF 13th April ²

While the generals drew on the well of antipodean military tradition to motivate their men, those on the receiving end of Blamey’s order had more pressing concerns — like dodging the endless German air raids that blighted the Allied campaign in Greece from start to finish. Bob Slocombe of the 2/8th Battalion, who was fighting the Waffen–SS, Hitler’s dreaded Nazi elite, later remembered that, at the very moment Blamey issued his order, he was ‘too bloody busy’ to think much of the general’s call to arms. ³ With Aussie and Kiwi units taking turns to cover each other’s retreat, Bill Jenkins of the 2/3rd Battalion was also unimpressed, at least at the time — a withdrawing New Zealand unit had just gone through his lines when he heard of the order, so the fabled Anzac spirit didn’t seem to be doing his battalion ‘much good’. ⁴ One of the Kiwi soldiers was Eric Davies, who served with the 19 NZ Battalion. He was much more impressed with Blamey’s announcement — indeed, Davies remembers being overjoyed at the news, but then his enthusiasm for trans-Tasman solidarity was partly fuelled by a convivial journey he took in the back of an Australian truck during the long retreat through central Greece. The two Aussies who shared the truck with Davies and his mate had liberated a couple of whiskey bottles from a shattered stores depot, and happily shared the booty with their New Zealand cousins, ensuring the whole-hearted commitment of all on board to the spirit of Anzac. ⁵

If it was of little practical use to the front-line troops, Blamey’s use of the Gallipoli legend was at least apposite. Just as the disastrous Gallipoli landings had been inspired by the strategic enthusiasms of Winston Churchill in 1915, so the Greek campaign was a product of the British prime minister’s overly fertile military imagination. Keen to build a ‘Balkan Front’ to impress neutral American public opinion by bringing into the war Greece, Yugoslavia and, hopefully, the Turks against the Axis powers, Churchill despatched the only troops readily available — most of whom happened to be, as in 1915, the expeditionary armies of Australia and New Zealand. And just as Gallipoli provided military academies the world over with lessons in how not to conduct a complex feat of arms, Churchill’s Greek adventure was to reinforce fundamental lessons in modern warfare: heavy tanks could not be stopped by men armed with rifles, and Stuka dive-bombers would not be deflected by promises of air support from London that were never honoured.

At Gallipoli, the price for official ineptitude was paid for by the heroism and sacrifice of ordinary soldiers. So, too, in Greece, where Australian and New Zealand troops attempted to halt the progress of the mightiest military force the world had ever seen, without air cover, tanks, or effective anti-tank guns. Yet their rearguard actions on the Greek mainland were fought with grim determination and great courage, and allowed the great bulk of the Anzac force to evacuate. A good proportion of the evacuees ended up on the island of Crete. There, Hitler followed up his conquest of Greece with an invasion by paratroop forces, but the second Anzacs and the British troops inflicted such losses on the Nazis that the German dictator never again used airborne troops on a large scale.

Viewed from the first years of the twenty-first century, we can also see a wider social and cultural significance in the campaign. Many Australians and New Zealanders had their first encounters with the people of Greece in 1941, and would be forever grateful for the hospitality they were afforded. These hurried and stressful introductions were a prelude to post-war migration. Indeed, Greek emigration to Australia was on such a large scale that Melbourne was transformed into one of the largest ‘Greek’ cities in the world.

As it happened, the phenomenon of post-war migration put together, in chance and curious circumstances, people who had gone through the experience of 1941. Kevin Price, a young Victorian who fought at the first battle between the Anzacs and the Nazis at the town of Vevi on the northern border of Greece, came home and found in later years his local fish-and-chip shop being owned by a Greek immigrant from that very town, who as a child had been a witness to the fighting. And then there was Dimitris Tsiaousis, a Greek Resistance fighter, who provided food and shelter to Australians and New Zealanders left behind the German lines around his village on the slopes of Mount Olympus. He survived the guerrilla war against the Nazis, and the civil war in Greece in the late 1940s, and arrived in Australia in time to help re-build Darwin after it was destroyed by Cyclone Tracy in 1974.

Price and Tsiaousis were but some of the veterans of a neglected campaign. Hundreds of Australian and New Zealand troops died in Greece and Crete, and thousands more were taken prisoner, to spend four long years in trying conditions in the German stalags.

On the 75th anniversary of the campaign, the second, forgotten Anzacs deserve better recognition.

CHAPTER ONE

For King and Country … and the paid adventure

High in the air

a dustcloud from their scuffling rose, commands

rang back and forth — to man the cables, haul

the black ships to the salt immortal sea

The Iliad, 2.51–54

On the evening of Sunday, 3 September 1939, Frank Reid listened to the radio as prime minister Robert Menzies performed his ‘melancholy duty’, advising his people that, as a result of Britain’s declaration of war on Hitler’s Germany, Australia was likewise again at war. More than 60 years later, it occurred to Reid that Menzies might first have referred the matter to the Australian parliament, but such was the tenor of the times. ¹

In 1939, Reid was an unemployed accountant. Having lost his city job, Reid rolled his swag and headed bush, finding work first as a general hand in Bathurst for a pound a week plus his keep, and then as an overseer on a property near Brewarrina, where he listened to Menzies’ fateful speech. Like many others of his generation, Reid had spent time in the militia — the Citizens Military Force (CMF), the reservists of the day who constituted the bulk of Australia’s army. With few entertainments to call on, the militia provided young men with something to do, and the modest pay helped in the dark days of the Depression. Reid had progressed far enough to sit and pass the officers’ exam, before economic necessity forced him onto the dusty roads of outback New South Wales. On the outbreak of war, he wrote at once to the Military Board offering his services; but it would be May 1940 before he was called up, as the army expanded rapidly in the shadow of calamity in France.

Across the Tasman, 20-year-old Felix Chevalier Preston was likewise what we would now call an army reservist. Following British practice, New Zealand’s reserve force was known as the Territorial Army, and Preston had joined its Black Watch regiment after service in the school cadets. His father died at an early age and, after Preston’s mother remarried, his stepfather, a successful Christchurch barrister and solicitor, sent him to the prestigious Christ College. There he excelled in football and rowing, but did rather less well academically. Known as ‘Peter’, in deference to an uncle also named Felix who was killed in the First World War, Preston attempted to join the air force, but was rejected on account of slight colour-blindness. Preston found the army not so particular, and the outbreak of war rescued him from the drudgery of a job in the grain and seed department of Dalgety’s. Already commissioned in the Black Watch, Preston was made a lieutenant in the 26 Battalion of New Zealand’s second expeditionary force, and given command of its 15 Platoon, which drew its men from the rugged west coast of the South Island. ²

The appeal of a military pastime before the war was not confined to young men like Reid and Preston. Mollie Edwards had pursued nursing as one of five careers considered appropriate at the time for young women; the others she deemed socially acceptable were teaching, typing, shop work and, only in desperation, domestic service. The daughter of a North Sydney bank manager, Edwards trained at the Prince Alfred Hospital. Her family was fiercely patriotic: on family outings to the cinema, Edwards remembers her mother poking people in the back, forcing them to stand for ‘God Save the King’. With war looming, Edwards and many of her nursing sisters looked to register for service; but it was 1938, when she turned the requisite age of 25, before she was accepted. ³

Edwards recalls her family discussing the rise of Hitler through the late 1930s, particularly in the context of the Spanish Civil War. Half a world away, in his village near Grevena in central Greece, George Tsioukanaras looked on the events of September 1939 with deep, and perhaps more immediate, foreboding. His father had died when he was just two weeks old, and his mother then passed away in 1937, leaving George and his siblings to lodge with friends and family. Bequeathed a tiny land holding, the Tsioukanaras children scratched out a living on the back of a horse, four cows, and some goats. Eager for knowledge, but denied schooling by the grinding reality of peasant life, Tsioukanaras recalled thinking, nearly 70 years later that, on the outbreak of war, the German invasion of Poland was but a prelude to a wider conflagration. ⁴

The popular imagination has it that Britain and her empire began the fight against Nazi Germany weakened by years of military neglect, prompted by electoral distaste for all things defence-related after the horrors of the First World War. In fact, planning for the global war feared by the young George Tsioukanaras began almost as soon as the guns fell silent in 1918. Whether they were the right plans would be a question tested by events.

Between the world wars, defence policy in Australia and New Zealand was defined by the concept of ‘imperial defence’. As British ‘Dominions’, they agreed to participate in a strategy designed to defend the empire on a global scale, and not merely confine themselves to the protection of their own territory. This planning was conducted at a number of levels, at the peak of which were the ‘Imperial Conferences’, inter-governmental gatherings held routinely through the 1920s and 1930s.

These conferences were invariably portrayed as evidence of the solidarity of the imperial family. However defence policy, in both Australia and New Zealand, was a hot political topic, albeit with different points of emphasis. In Australia, the issue was whether imperial defence constituted sound strategy from a local perspective; in New Zealand, debate turned over whether enough was being done as the world drifted to war.

After the social trauma of the conscription debates in 1916 and 1917, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) maintained that its obligations to imperial defence were limited to the territorial defence of Australia. To give substance to that position, the ALP built its policies in the 1930s on a strong air force, arguing that this was the one military technology available to the country that could feasibly defeat an invading force. This posture was ridiculed by successive conservative governments, who contended that only command of the oceans could guarantee Australian security, and that, accordingly, local plans had to be integrated with those of the Royal Navy. With conservative governments dominating office between the wars, Australian defence plans were built around this ‘blue water’ strategy crafted around Britain’s navy.

Singapore was the focal point for this global naval strategy. ⁵ The construction of an ‘impregnable’ fortress there, to protect the base that gave Britain the capacity to wage war in Asia, was begun in 1923. By the 1930s, however, doubts within the Australian military about Singapore provoked dissension. When General John Lavarack became head of the Australian army in 1935, he mounted a sustained campaign to overturn the Singapore strategy, and to base Australian defence plans instead on building an army large enough to defeat an invasion. The result was a period of instability within the Australian services. At the other pole of Australian military opinion, the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) served as an operational arm of the Royal Navy, exchanging commanders and ships as an integrated force, as did the Royal New Zealand Navy. For the RAN, local defence against invasion was a logical impossibility, and Lavarack’s thinking a kind of heresy.

Unfortunately for Lavarack, his strategic acumen was matched only by his political ineptitude. In a contest over the direction of Australian defence policy, which implicitly brought with it emotional questions of attachment to the ‘Mother Country’, Lavarack needed allies, and he succeeded instead in making enemies of virtually anyone who might have joined his cause. Lavarack’s political master was defence minister Archdale Parkhill, who showed enough independence from Britain to push through plans for the local manufacture of military aircraft, against the wishes of London and a fair portion of the Australian cabinet, including future prime minister Robert Menzies. However, Lavarack failed to see a potential benefactor in Parkhill, and noisily campaigned for the reintroduction of conscription to build his anti-invasion army.

For a conservative politician of the 1930s, conscription brought with it the certainty of political oblivion, and Parkhill fought a long battle to keep a lid on Lavarack’s activities, which included some judicious leaking of information to the press and the ALP by junior officers sympathetic to their general. Just as he alienated Parkhill, so Lavarack estranged potential bureaucratic allies, in the shape of the Munitions Supply Board (MSB). Before the widespread industrialisation of the country, the MSB had been established to provide some munitions manufacturing capacity in government factories. However, in planning for war, Lavarack proposed to marginalise the MSB, drawing up grandiose plans for the mobilisation of Australian industry. Given that the country had little mass-production industry or precision engineering, there was not much to mobilise, and as such these plans were hopelessly premature. In squabbling with the MSB over them, Lavarack passed up another opportunity to build a constituency for national defence. ⁶

Indeed, Lavarack made such a nuisance of himself that he was shunted sideways, and effectively replaced by an ‘Inspector General’. Between the wars, when conservative Australian governments were faced by controversy within or around the armed services, they invariably responded by appointing a British officer to conduct a review. In the case of the army, the officer was Lieutenant General Ernest Squires, who graced Australian shores in June 1938. Surprisingly, Lavarack and Squires managed to co-operate successfully, and Squires went on to make sound recommendations on the organisation of the Australian army, although Lavarack was not to be forgiven for his indiscretions.

A similar process had less-fortunate consequences for the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). The RAAF had maintained its independence as a separate service since 1921 by carefully avoiding doctrinal conflicts with the army and the RAN, and when necessary, calling on the support of the Royal Air Force (RAF) for political backing to support its continued existence. ⁷ The head of the RAAF, Richard Williams, lost that British support through his advocacy for the Australian production of American-designed aircraft, something that infuriated the British Air Ministry, which thought of the RAAF as a market for British industry. As war approached, Williams planned to extend these moves to national self-sufficiency through the development of local designs to suit the particular requirements of Australian conditions. When a series of training accidents prompted a public debate over the efficiency of the RAAF, the government of prime minister Joseph Lyons appointed a retired British officer to conduct the now-standard review, which Williams did not survive as a military leader. To get him out of the way, the government posted Williams to Britain in January 1939.

With Lavarack neutered and Williams in exile, the scope for ‘national’ defence options in Australia was coming to an end. In early 1939, local production of aircraft was re-integrated into British plans through a program to manufacture in Australia an obsolete bomber, the Bristol Beaufort. For the RAAF, worse was to come with the outbreak of war. At the suggestion of the Australian high commissioner, Stanley Bruce Melbourne, the British put forward to the dominions a plan for an ‘empire air force’, in which recruits from around the empire were trained and used as crew by the RAF. The government, led since April 1939 by Robert Menzies, thereupon scrapped plans for an Australian air expeditionary force of six squadrons, with associated higher command structures and base units, and, along with New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa, signed up instead to the Empire Air Training Scheme (EATS). ⁸ In this way, the RAAF became principally a training arm of the Royal Air Force, with important consequences for its ability to organise large-scale air formations in support of Australian operations. ⁹ The Australian troops who eventually went to Greece in 1941 would have cause to regret the emasculation of the RAAF.

Within the Australian army, the outbreak of war saw a similar orientation toward British policy. The apostle of national defence, Lavarack, was overlooked for the plum command of the Second Australian Imperial Force (AIF), the all-volunteer army raised for overseas service. Rather than appoint him, the Menzies government opted for General Thomas Blamey. Before his entry into federal politics, prime minister Menzies had served as Victorian attorney-general, and in that role had come into personal contact with Blamey. The new commander of the AIF also had an influential ally in the minister for supply, Richard Casey, who had served under Blamey as a junior staff officer at Gallipoli and later in France. Blamey’s was an explicitly political appointment: as Lavarack lamented, the command arrangements had been settled ‘without reference to anybody’ in the military. ¹⁰ Indeed, the military chiefs advised the government not to send a full expeditionary force overseas at all, until the attitude of Japan was resolved.

Blamey had little experience as a combat commander, having spent the First World War as a staff officer, in which role he excelled under the brilliant leadership of John Monash, commander of the AIF in France in 1918. After the war, Blamey left the regular army, and was appointed chief commissioner of police in Victoria in 1925. In this capacity he was immediately swept up in a scandal of the ‘bishop and the actress’ variety, which would surely have claimed a less well-connected figure. Mabel Tracey, the apocryphal former actress, advertised herself in the mid-1920s as a teacher of elocution in inner-city Fitzroy. Tracey’s establishment actually dealt in more than good diction — it was a bordello. Unfortunately for the chief commissioner, his police badge was found on the premises during a raid. Blamey’s explanation that it had been ‘surreptitiously removed’ from his office, and later returned, was accepted by an official inquiry, but a senior police officer claimed he had seen the badge on Blamey’s desk during the time of its mysterious absence. Stanley Savige, a close friend of Blamey’s, and one of his brigadiers in the Second World War, later claimed that Blamey had lent his key ring, complete with badge, to an ex-army man, who was in search of an out-of-hours bottle of liquor. Blamey, with just such a tipple in his locker at the Naval and Military Club, lent the man his keys and badge, and the latter’s subsequent assignation at Mabel Tracey’s brothel left the chief commissioner carrying the proverbial can. Savige completed the alibi by suggesting Blamey then protected his old army chum, a family man, by declining to mention the real facts to the inquiry.

Blamey rode out the storm that swirled around the saga of the badge and the brothel, and even negotiated a period in which his political persecutors in the Labor Party held office in Victoria. Blamey exhibited his own political colours in those early Depression years, by allowing his command to serve as a training ground for a militia force, the Old Guard, which was committed to fighting not only a communist uprising, but also to deposing Labor governments if it believed the circumstances warranted such a coup.

Blamey’s hubris and flexibility with the truth would eventually be his downfall. By the mid-1930s, Blamey’s brusque manner had alienated virtually the whole of Melbourne’s press corps. The Fourth Estate took its revenge in 1936. When a leading police officer was wounded in a shoot-out with bandits, the chief commissioner issued a public statement claiming that the officer had merely been wounded cleaning his weapon. The lie was apparently designed to obscure the fact that the policeman in question had been accompanied by two unknown women. When the discrepancy between the actual events and Blamey’s media statement were exposed, the Melbourne newspapers combined as one to hound him into resignation. ¹¹

At this point, Blamey’s chances of holding public office appeared negligible, until the outbreak of war set the Menzies government in search of a politically more reliable commander than Lavarack. Blamey’s claims to command of the AIF were modest given his lack of battlefield experience. This deficiency was not one that could be levelled against Lieutenant-General Bernard Freyberg, his counterpart as commander of the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) — like the AIF, an all-volunteer force recruited for overseas service with the British. Indeed, so wide was Freyberg’s military experience, he qualified as a real-life incarnation of the swashbucklers then popular in Hollywood. By distant ancestry, Freyberg was related to Austrian mercenaries who had fought for the Russian tsar against Napoleon at the Battle of Borodino in 1812. Freyberg’s branch of the family then immigrated to England, from whence his father, an estate agent, moved to New Zealand in 1891. ¹²

A champion swimmer in his youth, Freyberg’s subsequent adventures did his Austrian forebears proud, even if his chosen profession — dentistry — seemed at first a quiet-enough vocation. He actually began his fighting career on the streets of New Zealand, participating in the violent suppression of the strikes that afflicted the country in 1913. ¹³ These strikebreaking activities included time spent working as a stoker on a ship, and in this way Freyberg made his way to the United States. (Accounts that he then decamped to Mexico, to fight in that country’s civil war, may have suited his larger-than-life personality, but they do appear to be journalistic licence.) ¹⁴ Freyberg eventually made his way to England, where he enlisted in the Royal Naval Division (RND). This curious unit was a creation of Winston Churchill, then head of the British Admiralty, who intended to give the Royal Navy its very own army so that he might prosecute the war on a larger scale than even his stewardship of that mighty service offered. As befitted Churchill’s dilettantism, the RND attracted a range of gentlemen soldiers, looking for commissions in a glamorous setting. In keeping with the image, each of the RND’s battalions was named for a hero of yore — Freyberg himself served in the Hood Battalion, titled in honour of the admiral who had served with distinction in the wars against the French in the eighteenth century. Among Freyberg’s comrades in the battalion was E. W. Nelson, a survivor of Robert Scott’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition of 1912. His friendship brought Freyberg into a glittering social circle, which included Scott’s widow, and James Barrie, the creator of ‘Peter Pan’.

Freyberg’s first contribution to the war effort was suitably heroic, and would later give Barrie material for his essay ‘Courage’, delivered to St Andrew’s University in 1922. The RND was part of the Gallipoli invasion force, but on the first disastrous morning was used as a feint to confuse the Turkish defenders. To round out the masquerade, on the eve of the landings, Freyberg swam ashore in the darkness to light fires on the Dardanelles coast, hoping to divert the Turks from the real invasion beaches. Freyberg then went on to win Britain’s highest award for valour, the Victoria Cross, at the Battle of the Somme, in November 1916. Taking command of his battalion when 13 of its 18 officers were killed or wounded, Freyberg led the unit on to take 800 prisoners, before he was wounded by shellfire. This would be among the nine occasions on which Freyberg was wounded in the First World War, not counting an elbow broken in a fall from a horse. He rose to command a brigade in 1918, and enlivened his regimental service in the British army between the wars with a number of attempts to swim the English Channel, one of which ended just 500 yards short, beaten by the tides.

Freyberg eventually retired from the military in 1937, having been denied appointments for the previous two years after being diagnosed with a heart murmur. Hoping for a career in business, he was appointed a director of the Birmingham Small Arms Company, a major munitions supplier, but that would prove his only employment before 1939. Desperate for a wartime posting, Freyberg succeeded in being medically upgraded. During his fitness check, he diverted the attention of the consulting physician and his stethoscope by talking loudly throughout the examination. ¹⁵

It fell to prime minister Michael Joseph Savage’s Labour government to bring Freyberg back into military harness. New Zealand conformed to British plans for an imperial air force in the shape of EATS, but Savage did insist that the 2nd NZEF would be organised as a national force, rather than as a sub-unit of larger formations led by Australian or British officers. ¹⁶ With Savage’s health failing, deputy prime minister Peter Fraser — whose career had included a stint in gaol for anti-conscription activities in 1917–18 — went to the United Kingdom in late 1939 to coordinate war plans, and from there cabled Wellington with a recommendation to appoint Freyberg commander of the 2nd NZEF on 15 November. The public announcement of this appointment followed on 23 November.

The Labour government came to these issues of national policy having survived a bitter political skirmish with elements of the army in 1938. The previous year, defence minister Frederick Jones had re-organised the army, and in the process had abolished brigade commands. This enraged the territorial officers affected. One of them was Neil ‘Polly’ Macky, a veteran of the Western Front in the First World War, who in the 1930s combined a legal practice with part-time soldiering and the post of commodore at the helm of the Auckland yacht club. With three colleagues, Macky launched a ‘revolt’, in which the ‘four Colonels’, still serving officers, published a manifesto critical of the government. Jones rode out the storm, assisted by the adjutant-general, Edward Puttick, who adroitly defused the issue by dismissing Macky and his co-conspirators without giving them the court-martial they coveted as a stump from which to harangue the government. ¹⁷ Puttick probably knew that he was dealing with a political problem as much as he was a policy debate — Macky was later happy to let it be known that ‘I am afraid I am too much of a Tory. To kow-tow to a bootmaker as a minister of defence [that is, Jones], was too much for me.’ To its credit, on the outbreak of war, the government rose above such pettiness. Macky was given command of 21 Battalion, and another of the rebellious colonels, H. E. Barrowclough, was favoured with the command of 6 NZ Brigade.

These appointments reflected the organisational structure of the Australian and New Zealand armies inherited from the British, the basic unit of which was a division of about 18,000 men. This was led by a lieutenant-general, and organised in three infantry brigades, each with three battalions of approximately 800 soldiers. To each brigade was attached an artillery regiment, equipped with 24 field guns. To round out the fighting element of each division were specialist units, including an anti-tank regiment with 24 specialist guns to fight armoured vehicles, field ‘companies’ of combat engineers, and a machine-gun battalion with heavy Vickers machine guns.

Both the 2nd AIF and the 2nd NZEF had such a division as their principal formations: for the AIF, the 6th Division; and for the NZEF, the New Zealand Division. A long administrative and supply ‘tail’ — including everything from post offices to hospitals — then filled out the establishment of each force. In Blamey’s case, he commanded the 2nd AIF as a whole, and General Iven Mackay held the divisional command separately. This arrangement was intended to allow for the expansion of the AIF, which duly followed in February 1940 with the decision to form a 7th Division. In Freyberg’s case, the smaller size of the likely New Zealand contingent meant he commanded both the New Zealand Division in combat, and the supply components of the 2nd NZEF as well.

To join the AIF and the NZEF, thousands of Australians and New Zealanders flocked to recruitment centres in late 1939. They did so with a certain amount of naivety. In a world not yet shrunk by jetliners, war was the only opportunity to travel that the vast majority of young men would get. Working on New Zealand’s North Island for a farmer known locally as ‘Cast Iron Smith’, Eric Davies nominated his reason for enlisting as the ‘adventure, pure and simple’. Cast Iron Smith himself was a Kiwi veteran of the First World War who was so badly wounded in the groin on the first morning at Gallipoli that he never got off the beach. Davies recalled that his employer remained a childless bachelor, leaving the local imagination to ponder the grievous nature of the old farmer’s wound. Smith refused to allow Eric to drive, on the grounds that such mobility would only encourage a harmful competition between dancing in town and hard work on the farm. On one of Davies’ few days away from the farm after the outbreak of war, Smith demanded to know whether his young worker had enlisted; when he got a reply in the affirmative, he added, ‘Just as well, or I would have sacked you, otherwise.’ ¹⁸

Australia’s young men were motivated in exactly the same way as Davies. When Jim Mooney, a farmhand from Kerang in northern Victoria, stood on the troopship that was taking him to the Middle East, watching the dolphins surf the bow of the great ship as it ploughed through the vastness of the Indian Ocean, he mused that, until then, the longest stretches of water he had seen were irrigation ditches in the outback. ¹⁹ Edwin Madigan from Newcastle, New South Wales, had at least begun his hoped-for world tour when the war broke out: he had got as far as New Zealand on a football trip, but was stumped by the prospect of raising the funds to get any further. The war looked like solving the problem until he returned home hoping to enlist, only to find that preference was being