About this feature - The Battle for Crete
About this feature
After the Second World War a multi-volume official history of New Zealand's involvement was written under the auspices of the War History Branch, based in the Department of Internal Affairs in Wellington.
The official history of the Battle for Crete, written by Dan Davin, is an excellent account. It is rather a top-down narrative, however, despite Davin's use of reports from participants. As you will see when you view the day by day account of the battle in this exhibition (based on Davin's work), it deals mainly with the decisions of commanders and makes the fighting seem rather more tidy than it was. [See digitised version of this publication on the New Zealand Electronic Text centre website.]
Related link: biographical essay about Dan Davin on the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography site.
For this reason, and because the veterans of the battle are now very old, the History Group of the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, with the active encouragement of the Prime Minister, Helen Clark, decided to record an oral history of the battle which would concentrate on the experiences of what are so toploftily called 'other ranks'. The book, 'A Unique Sort of Battle': New Zealanders Remember Crete was the result, and was launched in May 2001 in time for the 60th anniversary of the battle.
While Davin's account of the battle had to restore order to chaos in order for there to be a comprehensible narrative of the events, the oral history interviews and 'A Unique Sort of Battle' show how chaotic the fighting sometimes was, particularly for the troops who were in the thick of it. Communications were poor between brigade and battalion headquarters, and they were equally as poor between battalion and company headquarters, and company and platoon (see, for example, the accounts of Haddon Donald and Peter Wildey). Some of the men, particularly those fighting as infantry for the first time in the Composite Battalion, had little idea of where they were, what they were supposed to be doing or where they were to go. The day by day account in this exhibition tells the story of the progress of the battle in an orderly way, but the addition of excerpts from the interviews and other personal accounts allow us more of an understanding of the confusion and emotions of fighting a war.
Sources
The day by day information is mainly drawn from the official history of the New Zealand involvement in the battle: D. M. Davin, Crete, War Publications Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, Wellington, N.Z., 1953. In May 1941 Davin was a second lieutenant in 23 Battalion and was wounded on Crete and evacuated to Egypt.
Other information comes from Ian McGibbon (ed), The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Military History, OUP, Auckland, N.Z., 2000 and Megan Hutching (ed), 'A Unique Sort of Battle': New Zealanders Remember Crete, HarperCollins, Auckland, N.Z., 2001.
The photographs mostly come from the Alexander Turnbull Library's War History Collection, and can be found on their Timeframes website. The oral history extracts come from interviews recorded by Megan Hutching for 'A Unique Sort of Battle' and will be available at the Alexander Turnbull Library's Oral History Centre (contact: [email protected]).
Cover of Crete, the Official History of the battle published in 1953
