Matthew Wright: Freyberg's War

Crete. Even more than 60 years after this World War II defeat, the name still evokes a confusion of perplexing, complex argument.

Was it a battle that, despite the gritty, valiant efforts of New Zealand troops, could never have been won, with too few numbers and too little air cover?

Or was it the one that got away? Was it a failure because the New Zealand Battalion's commander, Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Freyberg, failed to draw his focus away from a predicted coastal attack and quickly concentrate his efforts on the Maleme airfield, the eventual key to the German paratroops' victory on the island?

Hard questions. No easy answers. So the debate smouldered in the post-war years before becoming a fire after it was revealed in the mid-70s that Freyberg had access to Ultra intelligence — information from decoded German Enigma messages.

In his 1991 Bernard Freyberg, VC, Paul Freyberg issued a stout defence of his father's tactics on the island. The following year, in his book Crete — The Battle And The Resistance, English historian Anthony Beever more or less laid the blame on Freyberg.

Now Wright, a local historian who has previously published a book on the Crete campaign, wades in with a thorough, convincing defence of Freyberg's actions on Crete.

As Wright says, his book does not offer a blow-by-blow technical analysis of Freyberg's field tactics. It looks at the wider picture. More specifically, it interests itself in just what was going on in Freyberg's mind and what political and other pressures he was confronted with during key battles such as Crete.

And he finds sound evidence — by closely mapping Freyberg's modus operandi, thinking and broader concerns against what happened in the field and the demands of his superiors — to reconsider the view of some that Crete was Freyberg's failure alone.

Unfortunately for Wright's book — a biography, but with its focus firmly on Freyberg's six years' leading New Zealand troops in the Mediterranean — it reads as one long defence of each vital decision Freyberg took in his major battles, notably Crete, Tebaga Gap during the North African campaign, and at Cassino in Italy — Freyberg was for a long time blamed for the decision to bomb the famous Benedictine monastery.

To his credit, Wright succeeds in an unemotional analysis of the evidence and it is a methodical piece of work.

It's a painstaking and complete war biography of New Zealand's most famous soldier, but its apparent fixation with being Freyberg's final vindication makes it more of an historian's dissertation than a general reader's ripping yarn.

* Greg Dixon is an Auckland freelance writer.
* Penguin, $35