General Freyberg, v.c
by GEOFFREY COX
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IN THIS war generals have once again become figures of adventure. In pictures of the First World War, the general and his staff usually appeared photographed in the garden of some chateau headquarters, with only a staff car and a telephone to give any hint of action. These have been replaced by scenes of Montgomery in a black beret standing in the turret of a tank controlling the battle against Rommel; of Vandegrift in stained uniform working from a foxhole at Guadalcanal; of Stilwell directing on foot the rear-guard fight in Burma.
Perhaps this change has been caused by the return of open warfare. Whatever the cause, present-day photographs have brought back some of the atmosphere of the days when generals were shown on horseback on a knoll, directing the battle amid the smoke of cannon, or, sword in hand, standing beside regimental standards in the center of a square. Indeed, generalship has become not only adventurous again, but highly dangerous.
In the Middle East in the first three years of fighting, the proportion of casualties in the ranks of brigadier generals and above was higher than in any other rank. General O’Connor, one of the brains of the British in the first Libyan campaign, captured in the desert; General “Straffer” Gott shot down in a plane; General Sir Colin Campbell, killed in one of the many desert accidents; General Carton de Wiart, captured while flying to North Africa; and more than a dozen brigadiers, who have been killed, wounded, or captured — these are some of the names on this list.
Particularly the African desert, with its open spaces and its swift warfare, provided a field once again for the general with a sense of adventure, with courage, and with vigor.
Of the desert generals who have emerged, certainly one has been at home in that environment and has those qualities to an outstanding degree. He is Lieutenant General Sir Bernard Cyril Freyberg, V.C., Commander of the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force (the First Force being the New Zealand Anzacs of the last war). The New Zealand Division, which forms the main part of the present force, is now in Tunisia with the Eighth Army, after fighting its way through practically every desert campaign of importance.
Freyberg, now a man of fifty-three, has not only had a life of adventure but — what is rarer — has had a life which combined both great adventure and great responsibility. A general in the Mexican Civil War under Pancho Villa at the age of twenty-three, he has fought in three different armies — in Villa’s, in the British Army in the last war, and in the New Zealand Army in this war.
He is one of the few commanders who have had a senior front-line command both in the last war and in this. He has been wounded ten times. His troops in 1941 captured the first German general to be captured by British forces since the early days of the eighteenth century. That was General von Ravenstein, captured at Sidi Rezegh in November, 1941, when he was in command of the Twenty-first German Armored Division — the same division which made the recent thrust against the Americans in Southern Tunisia. Freyberg has fought with a small New Zealand infantry force two separate desert battles against German armored columns directed by Rommel himself. Add to these events his two attempts to swim the English Channel (both near misses) and his expert knowledge of cooking, and one has some signs that Freyberg has had a pretty full life.
General Freyberg stands well over six feet in height and has a big but athletic figure and the heavy shoulders of a swimmer. His face, under its lines of responsibility, retains something that is almost boyish in expression when he relaxes or laughs. He has a clipped mustache above a mouth that has been firmed by the strain of continual decision. Only a long scar on the back of his neck from wounds received both in this war and in the last gives any outward sign of the battles through which he has passed. His movements are quick and unhesitating, with all the decision of a man who possesses in abundance both vigor and courage.
Vigor and immense strength lie at the base of Freyberg’s career and at the base of his achievements. He certainly corresponded in this respect to what Field Marshal Wavell laid down as an essential characteristic of the good general — robustness. Wavell pointed out that just as weapons are to be selected for their toughness as well as their accuracy, so generals too had to be able to stand up to the rigors of continual decision in areas of danger. Just as mountain guns were tested in the old days by being dropped from 100-foot towers, so generals in the British Army — not necessarily required to pass that test — must still have something extra in the way of vigor. It is an interesting fact that both men who have emerged as predominant leaders in the desert on the British side, Montgomery and Freyberg, are men who believe tremendously in physical fitness.
Freyberg’s vigor is drawn, of course, from his New Zealand background. He is not a New Zealander by birth, but he is in every way a New Zealander by upbringing. He was born in England, in Richmond, Surrey, in 1890 and was brought to New Zealand by his parents at the age of two. Thereafter he grew up in Wellington, the New Zealand capital. In that windy and then very Philistine spot — his contemporary, Katherine Mansfield, fled overseas from the physical and cultural climate of the place — a boy with athletic qualities had every chance to flourish.
In Wellington Harbor, Freyberg learned to swim and became the New Zealand junior swimming champion in 1905 and senior swimming champion in 1910. In Wellington College, a normal New Zealand high school, very like any American high school, he boxed, rowed, and above all played the New Zealand national game of Rugby football. Rugby is every bit as strenuous as American football because the players wear no padding or protectors. It has had a tremendous influence on the life of New Zealand. Practically every boy and young man, at least up to the age of twenty-five, plays it week-end after week-end in the winter. The continual physical contest involved has contributed largely to the hardiness and resourcefulness of the New Zealand troops whom in this war Freyberg was to find men after his own heart.
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From school Freyberg became, of all things, a dentist. Seeing him now, his great figure standing in an armored scout car racing across the desert, with all the paraphernalia of tanks and guns that a division carries into action spread out behind him, it is impossible to envisage him in a white coat bending over a patient in a dentist’s chair. It seemed, too, that the young Freyberg soon enough thought that this dentistry spectacle was unreal. For at the age of twenty-two he suddenly left New Zealand and his dentistry and turned up as a volunteer in Mexico in Pancho Villa’s army.
He was still there, and had reached the rank of general, when he heard of the outbreak of the Great War. He at once tramped for three weeks to the coast, boarded a ship, and got to England. There is a story that he stopped Winston Churchill in Downing Street and asked an immediate chance of action, so that he should not have to go through the training schools, where the Kitchener army was drilling with broomsticks. I do not think this is true. What I do think is true is that Freyberg met Churchill — at that time First Lord of the Admiralty — and through him enlisted in the Royal Naval Division. This was the first British Commando unit. It was formed hastily in 1914 by Churchill to carry out a policy he urged — but for which the War Office and Kitchener would not give him any forces: the policy of holding Antwerp as a thorn in the side of the German armies then sweeping down into France. Churchill wanted to make Antwerp into a Tobruk or an Odessa. Freyberg went out with this expedition, but it was illequipped and arrived too late and failed.
Undaunted by failure, Freyberg then found himself embarked on a second and larger scheme, the landing on Gallipoli. He was in the Hood Battalion and sailed out on the same convoy as Rupert Brooke. At Lemnos, the Mediterranean base harbor where the landing forces assembled, Freyberg found himself side by side with his own countrymen. For gathered there was another convoy which had brought over the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, a force which only later became known by the initials on its equipment: A.N.Z.A.C.
Freyberg did not take part in the main landing. He had already volunteered for an action which demonstrated his most outstanding characteristic, his apparently effortless courage. Sir James Barrie, who was a great friend and admirer of Freyberg’s, later took him as part of his text for an address on Courage to the students at St. Andrews University in 1922.
Barrie’s words described Freyberg’s action at Gallipoli in these terms: —
He was dropped overboard to light decoys on the shore to deceive the Turks as to where the landing was to be. He pushed a raft containing these in front of him. It was a frosty night and he was naked and painted black. Firing from the ships was going on all around. It was a two-hour swim in pitch darkness. He did it, crawled through the scrub to listen to the talk of the enemy, was so close that he could have shaken hands with them, lit his decoys and swam back.
For this feat Freyberg received the first of his many decorations, the Distinguished Service Order — the highest award that can be given to a junior officer with the exception of the Victoria Cross.
When the Gallipoli campaign failed, Freyberg’s unit was transferred to France. For the rest of the war he served in the hideous battle of the trenches. His hardiness, his aggressiveness, and his courage again found a true field for their expression. His record for the three remaining years of the war reads: —
Wounded twice and mentioned in despatches 1916; captain Royal West Surrey Regiment, seconded to the Royal Naval Division as lieutenant colonel; twice wounded; promoted brigadier general at the age of twenty-seven; two bars to his D.S.O.; wounded, in all, nine times and mentioned in despatches six times; at the conclusion of war posted as lieutenant colonel to the Grenadier Guards.
Freyberg’s Victoria Cross was awarded to him for gallantry in action at Beaufort, November, 1916. Although wounded four times, he pressed on with his troops until the village was captured and over five hundred Germans were taken prisoner. He refused to go back to the dressing station until the position was secured.
In these years Freyberg had found his proper profession. He remained a soldier after the war. His only attempt to depart from that line of activity came when he stood for Parliament as a Conservative candidate in England and was defeated. He once commented wryly, “Soldiers should keep out of politics. A soldier turned politician is usually a bad politician and a bad soldier.” That and some excursions into business marked the limits of his departure from army life. He remained lieutenant colonel of the Grenadier Guards for some time in the 1920’s. He was one of the chief staff officers of the Eastern Command, the main training region in peacetime Britain. But his natural vigor was chafing continually at this restricted semi-civilian existence. The vitality that had been stored up by the years of athletic effort in New Zealand and hardened by the trench fighting was not an easy thing to curb behind a desk or within the four walls of an office, either then or now.
It was not surprising, therefore, that in 1925 (though it shocked the British Army’s susceptibilities somewhat) he made an attempt to swim the English Channel. He got within a few hundred yards of his goal but was swept out to sea by the current and had to give up. He made a second try in 1926, but that too fell short by a slight margin.
In 1937, after a period of service in the War Office following a number of other commands, he retired. One story, which certainly fits in with his character, says that he was indignant at the grounds on which he was asked to retire. They were — that he was no longer fit enough for field command! Freyberg marched into the office of the medical officer who examined him and challenged him to a climbing contest up Mount Snowden in Wales. The challenge was not accepted, but Freyberg went out and climbed Mount Snowden in any case to prove his fitness.
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Then, in 1939, came the Second World War. Freyberg was appointed to a base job as First Commander of Salisbury Plains Training Area. He was there apparently on the shelf for the duration when suddenly circumstances opened up for him the career which in many ways has outshone his career in the previous war. The New Zealand government offered him command of the expeditionary force which it intended to send overseas. Not only did Freyberg find himself back in active field command, but he also found himself at the head of troops who had shared his own upbringing and his own characteristics to a great extent and who were to turn out among the best of the Allied side in the whole war. They showed that whatever he asked they would make a great attempt to do, and usually did it. And he was a leader of sufficient stature to ask a great deal of them.
Freyberg swept into his command exuding an offensive spirit which was completely at variance with the accepted military theory of those Maginot Line days. At the first parade he held of his troops in New Zealand he told them that there was no way to win the war except to go out and kilt Germans. “The only way to beat the Hun is to go out and hit him,” he said. But it was early 1941 before the New Zealand Division was in a position to to do any such hitting. Throughout 1940, units of it were garrisoned in England and in the Egyptian desert. It was not until April of 1941 that Freyberg led the division into a battle — and that battle, the campaign in Greece, was lost before it began.
There and later on in Crete this new division and its commander shared together the experiences of some of the ugliest fighting of the war. They had no aircraft support and they had to fight rear-guard actions which appeared to be the rear-guard actions not only of the Mediterranean campaign but of the whole Allied war struggle. At that time Britain was the only country actually fighting against the Axis. The Russians appeared to be the friends of the Germans; the United States appeared largely isolationist.
Many of the British troops had lost confidence in their leaders’ methods of warfare, even though they had not lost confidence in ultimate victory. They were ill-armed, they were alone. At that stage the experience and the courage of men like Freyberg was of the greatest value. Just as in England the doggedness of Churchill was invaluable, so in the field the doggedness of men like Freyberg, who seemed almost physically unable to envisage defeat or to think of the “Hun" as anything but a man whom you always beat in the end, was also invaluable.
On Crete one night shortly after the main parachute landing, the New Zealand forces appeared to be surrounded by Germans. German Very lights were going up on all sides out of the olive groves. Their yellowish light set an eerie tone over an already eerie atmosphere. One officer who stood with Freyberg watching them said, almost nervously, “There seem to be plenty of them, sir, and they seem to be surrounding us.”Almost scornfully Freyberg replied, “Plenty of them and every damn one of them scared to death. Why do you think they are wasting all those lights? If they are not scared, why are they trying to tell each other where they are to keep their courage up?" This may not have been true, but his courage spread almost infectiously to the men around him.
His staff in Crete was once bombed and machine-gunned for nearly two hours in an unprotected gully. When the planes finally left, exhausted and strained men got up from their places of shelter and looked for the general. He stood up suddenly from the middle of a vineyard where, with practically no protection, he had been lying drafting messages. Here, as always, his courage appeared almost effortless.
4
To most of the troops Freyberg commanded he was almost a legendary figure. In their schoolbooks they had read of his famous swim at Gallipoli. Tall and impressive, he looked the general, striding to his car or standing with one foot on the edge of his foxhole with shells bursting around him. He provided as a commander that symbol of leadership which is so valuable, and his men felt that he had, to use their own word, the prime New Zealand virtue —"guts.”
Leadership sat on his shoulders easily. During the battle of Sidi Rezegh in 1941 the New Zealand force was finally surrounded by two German armored divisions. When the news came through that this had taken place, an officer walked over to Freyberg and told him, “The Germans have signaled that they will join up in the middle of the New Zealand position by midday after an attack from two sides.”
Freyberg looked for a minute at the concerned face of the staff officer and then said quietly, with a smile, “They say they will join up, do they? Well, we won’t let them — we won’t let them.'’ Once again his confidence and his courage spread itself to everyone around him. Even though the armored divisions did ultimately join up, it was not until they had been fought so hard that the resulting German victory was in the end the equivalent of a defeat.
In November, 1941, his position as leader of the New Zealand Division was expressed in one of the most extraordinary reviews that can ever have taken place. The New Zealanders were moving up through the desert in a great column of trucks, seven abreast, that stretched for nearly twenty miles. There were guns, Bren carriers, tanks, and all the other equipment, bumping along in the dust. The troops who packed the trucks were moving forward with their morale at its peak. This was the first British offensive of the war which had been undertaken in anything but a spirit of desperation. Moscow was holding, the tide seemed to be turning, the troops were fighting fit.
General Freyberg, in order to test out the desert formations and make sure the trucks were keeping apart, drove right through the column from the rear to the front, his faster staff car overtaking the trucks easily. After he had gone some distance the men recognized the car and stood up and started to cheer. Suddenly the whole column was cheering. As the General’s car sped forward the cheering sped with it. It was an astonishing sight, deep in the desert, with no one else to watch it, this division moving forward into battle, cheering as if at a football match.
Freyberg and the New Zealand Division have fought no easy war. Again and again they have felt the brunt of battle. In 1942 they were thrust suddenly into action to save Egypt.
When Rommel took Tobruk, two brigades of the New Zealand Division were put out in the desert south of Matruh to act as a rear guard until the main defensive positions at El Alamein could be established. They were attacked five times during the day of June 28 by the German Twenty-first Armored Division under Rommel’s own direction. At night again they were surrounded. Two journalists, Matt Halton of the Toronto Star and Robert Macmillan of the United Press, escaped just before the encirclement, after a talk with Freyberg.
They asked him: “We understand you have no ammunition left. What will you do?”
Freyberg replied, “We will break out.”
The journalists asked, “But how can you if you have nothing left to shoot with?”
Freyberg said grimly, “I have 10,000 perfectly good bayonets!”
Using these bayonets, the New Zealand Division broke out and got back with a minimum of loss. Freyberg himself had been wounded just before the break-through and was out of action for nearly a month. He then returned and took part in the later battles at El Alamein and in the great offensive of last October— November when the New Zealand Division, grouped with two British armored divisions, formed what Winston Churchill described as “this thunderbolt” which smashed Rommel.
Strange thoughts and feelings must have passed through the minds of these two men, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Lieutenant General Sir Bernard Freyberg (Freyberg was knighted in 1941) when they stood side by side reviewing the New Zealand Division on the outskirts of Tripoli a few days after the Casablanca conference. They are both men of the same type. Churchill, the halfAmerican, a good soldier, but a man whose fighting has primarily had to be in the conference room and in the House of Commons — and Freyberg, the semi-New Zealander, semiEnglishman, who has carried out in the field so many of the adventures that Churchill’s daring mind has conceived.
Freyberg had been the boy who fought in the Antwerp campaign and in the Gallipoli campaign devised by Churchill. He was the man who had tried to implement Churchill’s command, “Crete must be held.” In November, 1941, largely by his doggedness in pushing on to Sidi Rezegh, he had prevented a general collapse of the British offensive. His troops had secured south of Matruh the essential forty-eight hours’ delay necessary to break the impetus of Rommel’s push in 1942. And now, at long last, he stood with Churchill in conquered Tripoli. But had any man asked his thoughts at that time as his troops passed, he would almost certainly have turned towards his men and said, “The victories were theirs.” For he knew that the troops under his command were of a caliber rare indeed.