Walter Babington Thomas: Dare to be Free

By T.P McCLEAN*

It is exceptional for a book which passed through several editions after its publication half a century ago to be offered again. Yet next Tuesday in Christchurch marks the relaunch of an extraordinary tale of escape from a German prisoner-of-war camp, Dare to be Free, first published in 1951.

Old comrades of the 23rd South Island Infantry Battalion who soldiered through Greece, Crete, the Western Desert, Tunisia and Italy between 1940 and 1945 will remember the author, New Zealander Major-General Walter Babington Thomas - "Sandy" by nickname - as some soldier.

His service during the war and later in Kenya during the furious fighting with the Mau Mau, and in Aden, has led to many awards: CB, DSO, MC and Bar, m.i.d. and Silver Star (US). But it was his escape from a prisoner-of-war camp in Greece, where he had been taken after capture by the Germans on Crete, to Turkey and then over the border to Syria that he will be most remembered for, thanks to Dare to be Free.

It so happens that I played a tiny part in Dare to be Free. After the war's end in May of 1945 I was the only officer from the 22nd Battalion to volunteer to serve with the unit in the 9th Infantry Brigade, which had been marked for service in Japan.

In due time a big, cheery chap - he stands at 1.9m and weighs at least 100kg - told me he had been appointed to command the battalion. This was Sandy, and from the start our relationship was cordial.

Our ship's voyage from Naples to Kure in Japan took 26 days. Sandy had a large cabin with a hot-water bath. The hour he spent in this late each afternoon permitted him to muse on aspects of his own history and, even more importantly, to obtain some relief from the tinea which was eating into the vast, dinner-plate-sized bullet wound on his thigh, a souvenir of the German invasion of Crete.

As time passed he told me bits and pieces of his story, not least those parts which concerned his escape to Syria and into the arms of members of the 23rd.

The denouement was staggering. At a whistle, around a bluff in a remote part of Syria came Godfrey Thomas, Sandy's older brother, all the way from remote Riwaka, near Motueka.

"I keep thinking," Sandy said to me, "that when all this business is finished, I might go to a university to take a course in writing. Never know. Might be worth a shot."

Having served for about 10 years before the war with various newspapers and magazines, I at least knew what it was like to sit at a typewriter with writing paper on the reel.

"Sir," I said, "I concur with the many authorities who have said that the art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. Get cracking."

By late 1950 his handwritten tale was ready for publishing. Certainly, by New Zealand standards, the 500,000 copies sold in Pan paperback makes it an enormously successful project.

Then, recently, Kate Foster, of Dryden Press, began badgering Sandy, who has now retired to a small farm south-west of Brisbane, to take another look at his story.

While the original book finished with the simple statement, "At last we were free", Foster was disappointed Sandy had omitted the even more dramatic moment when the brothers Thomas, on that distant shore, instinctively clasped each other in joy. "Why not that?" Foster asked. "Why not illustrations? Dammit, Sandy, the story isn't dead!"

Hence the relaunch of a masterful, engrossing story of a great soldier's determination to return to battle.

Dryden Press

$39.95

* Sir Terry McLean is a former Herald sports editor.