Lieutenant-General Bernard Cyril Freyberg, 1st Baron Freyberg VC, GCMG, KCB, KBE, DSO and three Bars is New Zealand’s most famous soldier and military commander. Freyberg also served as Governor-General of New Zealand.
Freyberg was born in 1889 in Richmond, London and moved to New Zealand with his parents at the age of two. His family lived in Hawker Street, Mount Victoria and he attended Wellington College from 1897 to 1904.
A strong swimmer, he won the New Zealand 100-yards championship in 1906 and again in 1910.
In 1911 he gained formal registration as a dentist and worked as a dental assistant in Morrinsville, later practising in Hamilton and Levin.
Freyberg’s first military involvement was as a junior officer in the Territorial Force. He unsuccessfully sought a commission in the New Zealand Staff Corps in 1912, and from January 1913 served as a lieutenant in a senior cadet company.
In the following year he went to the United States and then to Mexico where he may have been briefly involved in that country’s civil war. On hearing of the outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914, he immediately headed to London. He secured a commission in the newly formed Royal Naval Division’s Hood Battalion.
In 1915 Freyberg became involved in the Dardanelles campaign. During the initial landings by Allied troops following the unsuccessful attempt to force the straits by sea, Freyberg swam ashore and began lighting flares to distract the defending Turkish forces from the landings taking place at Gallipoli. It was for this action he received his first Distinguished Service Order (DSO).
In 1916 Freyberg transferred to the British Army, posted to the Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment, but remained seconded to the Royal Naval Division, with which he proceeded to France in May. During the final stages of the first battle of the Somme, he so distinguished himself in the capture of a strongly fortified village that he was awarded the Victoria Cross (VC). He was severely wounded in this action and was evacuated to Britain.
On his return to the Western Front Freyberg continued to lead by example. His leadership had a cost however; he received nine wounds during his service in France. By the end of the war Freyberg had added another two DSOs and the French Croix Militaire de Guerre to his name.
After the war he remained as a serving officer and in 1922 married Barbara McLaren, a widow with two children, at St Martha on the Hill near Guildford, Surrey. Their son Paul was born in 1923. Freyberg retired from the British Army on health grounds in 1937.
His military career was revived during the Second World War when he was appointed by the New Zealand Government as commander of the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force and of the New Zealand 2nd Division. Freyberg was an excellent trainer and moulded the New Zealand Division into a formidable fighting force.
Freyberg led the New Zealand Division in its first campaign in Greece in 1941 and performed well during the retreat and evacuation of the Allied forces. As commander of the Allied Forces in Crete he faced a very difficult task because of the inadequacy of the forces available, especially in heavy weapons and air support. Although the forces available were deficient in many areas, he enjoyed a significant advantage in the form of very detailed information of German intentions, provided through ULTRA intelligence.
Freyberg continued to command the New Zealand 2nd Division through the North African and Italian campaigns of the British Eighth Army. In early 1942 he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant general and made a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (KBE). During the desert campaign of 1941-43 Freyberg came into his own as a divisional commander. Earlier reticence among his officers dissipated, and he became an inspirational figure for the New Zealanders. He insisted that as a commander of a national contingent he had the right to refuse orders if those orders ran counter to the New Zealand national interest.
Freyberg excelled in planning set-piece attacks, such as Operation Supercharge at Alamein, Operation Supercharge II at Tebaga Gap, and in the storming of the Senio line in 1945. Throughout the war he exhibited a disdain for danger. He showed a notable concern for the welfare of his soldiers, regarding it as his duty to conserve New Zealand’s scarce manpower. Nowhere was his attitude more clearly apparent than at the Battle of Cassino during the Italian campaign, when he commanded the ad hoc New Zealand Corps during February-March 1944. He set limits to the number of casualties that would be tolerated in attempts to take this hotly contested strongpoint. He had become a very popular commander with the New Zealand soldiers by the time he left his command in 1945.
Following his retirement from the Army, Freyberg served as Governor-General of New Zealand from 1946 to 1952. In this post he played an active role, visiting all parts of New Zealand and its dependencies. In 1951 the Crown raised Freyberg to the peerage, granting him the title Baron Freyberg ‘of Wellington in New Zealand and of Munstead in the County of Surrey’. After becoming deputy constable and lieutenant governor of Windsor Castle in 1953, he took up residence in the Norman Gateway the following year.
Freyberg died at Windsor on July 4 1963 following the rupture of one of his Gallipoli wounds, and was buried in the churchyard of St Martha on the Hill in Guildford, Surrey. He was survived by his wife and son, Paul. New Zealand’s greatest soldier is commemorated in Wellington by the Freyberg Building and the Freyberg Pool, and in Palmerston North by Freyberg High School.
His son Paul, 2nd Baron Freyberg, died in 1993. Today Bernard Freyberg is survived by his grandchildren, including Lord Valerian, the 3rd Baron Freyberg.