NEW ZEALAND AND CRETE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 246, 10 March 1944, Page 20

NEW ZEALAND AND CRETE

BATTLE FOR CRETE: Conhpited in the Oftice of the Official Archivist. Army Board, Wellington.

Mest of us think we know the story of Crete; and a few of us do. We know as much, we mean, as any other civilian knows, and as much as anyone is likely to know until the documents are released after the war. Even soldiers don’t know more than that unless they are staff-officers, students, or archivists. Well, this little book is not all the archivists. know, but it is all they know and are free to tell. It is the story of the battle as New Zealanders saw it and as New Zealand troops fought it, with as much of the part played by Australian and British units as could be understood from New Zealand Headquarters. It was a losing battle all the way, of course, and in the end a complete rout: a battle that made history because there had never been anything like it before; that was confused and confusing till the last shot was fired; that gave Britain’s prestige as severe a blow as anything suffered up to Singapore; and yet something of which the New Zealand Division had no reason at all to be ashamed. History, as General Freyberg says in his foreword, will settle the importance of the battle, but those New Zealanders who died there died in the great tradition. That is enough for us in the meantime. — The battle began on the morning of May 20, and on the night of May 31 our men still "lay with their backs to Ww sea ready to fight." But it was over. We had been overwhelmed and chased right across the island and these pages show why, if not always how. It is a pity that so much space (relatively) is devoted to what happened before the attack (four chapters out of ten), and that the dust and smoke of battle are once or twice as thick on the printed page as they were over the roads and villages. The illustrations are admirable, but the nartative loses itself at intervals in picturesque writing and forgets the diagrams and maps, On the whole, however, the survey rises to the theme, and associates New Zealand forever with one of the storied islands of history.