GREAT COMMANDER

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 June 1943, Page 3

GREAT COMMANDER

OF A GREAT DIVISION

GENERAL FREYBERG IN WELLINGTON

SPEECHES AT RECEPTION.

TRIBUTES TO AUSTRALIANS AND BRITISH TROOPS.

(By Telegraph—Press Association.) WELLINGTON, This Day

“We have been fortunate in obtaining a great commander of a great division,” said the Prime Minister (Mi Fraser) at the civic reception at which Lieut.-General Sir Bernard Freyberg, V.C., was given a warm and hearty reception yesterday. Mr Fraser went on to relate how, when he was commissioned by the New Zealand Government to search England and the British Army for some competent and efficient leader to whom could be entrusted the destinies and lives of New Zealand s sons, he had interviewed the then Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Ironside, he had seen Lord Gort, General Brook and General Dill, and he related what had happened when he went to the Admiralty.

“I was greeted by the man who was then the First Lord, the man who is now the greatest Prime Minister that Britain and the Empire has ever seen. As he shook my hand, he said: ‘I was coming to see you to beg, if necessary to plead, with you, to appoint Bernard Freyberg to be commander of the New Zealand Division’.”

“We know from his address to the New Zealand Division in Tripoli that Mr Churchill regarded its performances as unsurpassed,” said Mr Fraser. “Coming down in the train last night,” General Freyberg said in the course of his reply, -‘the Prime Minister asked me whether the mystery of the fall of Tobruk had ever been cleared up. I told him that when I went through Tobruk my only wonder was that they were able to hold it at all. The greatest credit belongs to General Morshead and the 9th Australian Division.”

General Freyberg spoke of an occasion when the New Zealand Division was very hard pressed at Ruweisat Ridge. Then he had seen the 9th Division coming up to their support along the coast, and everything was all right again. COMRADE REGIMENTS.

“When you have read of the New Zealand Division having captured this position or turned that position, or of its having delivered another left hook, I want you to know that half of the division in that fighting was composed of British regular regiments—the Wiltshire, Nottingham, Warwick and Derby Yeomanry, the King’s Dragoon Guards, the Third Hussars and the Royal Scots Greys. We also had with us the 111th Regiment •of Artillery and the 64th Medium Artillery Brigade. All those regiments came into our division, accepted its divisional patch markings, accepted its traditions, and were proud to be honorary New Zealanders.”

General Freyberg told how, when he went round the commanders of the regiments to say goodbye to them, the commander of the Dragoon Guards told him he was very sorry to leave the division. “When we go with you we are always led to glory,” the commander explained. General Freyberg said that when the history of the time came to be written, even if the division never fought again, it would, he felt, be referred to a hundred years hence in much the same way as Crawford’s Light Division in the Peninsula War.

“Looking back,” the General said, “it seems to me as if the division was always astride some vital place at a vital time. In Crete, which has borne so much fruit at such a cost; in the Libyan Desert; in the dash back from Syria to stop Rommel's headlong advance on Alexandria; in the grim battles for Ruweisat Ridge; at el Alamein; and in the final battle for the Mareth Line, in which the Germans were hurled back in disorder from a position which Rommel thought he would hold for a long while. All this has been achieved by the division. I feel that just as Mr Churchill’s words have inspired the United Nations, so the New Zealanders by their deeds have been his counterpart. In paying a high tribute to the work of his officers in infusing dash into the division, General Freyberg mentioned in particular from Wellington Lieuten-ant-General Puttick, Brigadier Stewart and Brigadier Gentry, also, with expressive feeling, the late Colonels S. Allen, Greville, Tui Love and John Russell.

Mr Perry had said that the division had gone a little in advance of the First New Zealand Expeditionary Force. This, the General said, he denied. But when they went forward against the Germans in Greece they had at the back of their minds the thought that the Ist N.Z.E.F. had beaten the Germans on every battlefield.