Matthew Wright: A near-run affair: New Zealanders in the Battle for Crete, 1941

Reed, $29.95

Review: Gordon McLauchlan

Amost every year brings another book about Crete because the wound won't quite heal. Of all the battles Kiwis fought in two world wars it was the only one they perhaps could have won, and didn't.

And - insofar as you could bring yourself to blame under-equipped, exhausted, doggedly courageous men - it was probably because of the New Zealand command's lack of focus on Maleme airfield.

Gallipoli, and the slog back and forth across the face of France in the First World War, were unwinnable, and so were the first encounters with the Germans in the African desert and the campaign in Greece. Some say Crete was, too, given the complete air ascendancy of the Luftwaffe, but the niggle of doubt remains.

The Battle for Crete was a portentous event: the Germans lost so many men and aircraft they never again attempted an airborne invasion; and General Freyberg remained a field commander for the rest of the war, although that was to the New Zealand Division's advantage.

The general's son, Paul (who also fought on Crete), spent years researching his father's life and career with the main aim of justifying his tactics in defence on the island.

The question always asked was: how much did General Freyberg know about the impending German invasion from the detailed intelligence available to the British Government through the Ultra code-cracking machine?

And if he knew enough, was he allowed to alter the disposition of his troops? Did he put the men in the wrong places, worried by a possible assault from the sea?

Wrote Paul Freyberg in his biography, at last published in 1991: "[Lord] Wavell [the British Commander-in-Chief in Egypt] told Freyberg that there was no question of allowing any redeployment at Maleme to deal with the assault that was to be launched solely from the air."

And it was at Maleme that the battle for Crete was lost - despite the extraordinary heroism of the New Zealanders - at least partly because of bad communications and the flawed deployment of men. Did Lieutenant-Colonel Andrews pull back from Maleme too soon, and did Brigadier Hargest not counter-attack soon enough after the Maori Battalion and others had shown that the German defence was vulnerable?

During the 1980s, when Paul Freyberg was writing the book, I visited him at his home, Munstead, in Surrey, to get access to the orderly files of his father's papers.

I wanted to write a pictorial biography of the general, but Paul would allow nothing to distract him or anyone else from his obsession with righting what he saw as the unfair blame attached to his father for losing a battle that couldn't have been won anyway.

Many would agree with him. From El Alamein on, the battle-hardened Kiwis were never again put at such a disastrous disadvantage in terms of air cover and artillery support as they had been early in the desert war and in Greece and Crete.

Matthew Wright appraises the campaigns in Greece and Crete with a calm and detached historian's eye.

A number of previous accounts, starting with Dan Davin's official war history in 1953, have delivered graphic if sometimes confusing details of the few dramatic days of the battle, including the exhausting retreat over the mountains for rescue (for some) by the Royal Navy.

Wright's account is disentangled from the high emotion of those involved. It concentrates on Maleme but takes a stand-back attitude towards the arguments about Ultra and the disposition of troops.

He sums up with: "The fact that Freyberg's strategy successfully defeated the Germans at all landing areas except Maleme is a testament both to his outstanding capabilities as a military tactician, and to the quality and determination of the troops he led."

The wound won't stop suppurating for those who were alive at the time and, especially, for those who fought there and lost hundreds of mates.

Nearly 60 years on, though, this book will prove a heart-stabbing reminder of the agonies of a great soldier and his incomparably brave men, and of how they lost so narrowly a battle that would have shown for the first time in the Second World War that the superbly equipped Germans were vulnerable on the ground - just as the Battle of Britain pilots were proving they were beatable in the air.