Dance of the Peacocks by James Mcneish

Author:James Mcneish [James McNeish]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781869796624
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Much has been written about the New Zealand Division’s role as the spearhead of the British army, but little has been said of its Intelligence war. Oliver Leese, who succeeded Montgomery in command of Eighth Army in Italy, claimed that if it had not been for Freyberg and his division “the whole advance would have had to be halted”. Just how much Freyberg owed to the Intelligence he received from a litter of scholars in a clapped-out canvas-sided truck is hard to say. Colonel Queree’s claim that Freyberg had the best Intelligence staff in the British army, Cox would today consider exaggerated (both Cox and Davin had sat at the feet of the master, Montgomery’s chief of Intelligence, the Englishman Bill Williams). Kippenberger’s statement about Cox, Davin and Costello — “the best Intelligence staff anywhere at Divisional level” — is probably nearer the mark.

It was partly due to their Oxford and Cambridge training — the scholar’s skill at evaluating and projecting information in terms that field commanders could grasp and translate into action. “They didn’t want screeds of evaluation,” Cox says, “but something to act on. They wanted to know, ‘Where are the Tiger tanks?’”

It was partly the pressure put upon them by Freyberg’s senior officers, a virile and formidable bunch, outspoken and critical, who demanded nightly conferences during battle, and sometimes during the day as well. In Italy, they got the trim, sparrow-sized Geoffrey Cox at his best. Less discursive than Davin, more punctual than Costello, he could make them laugh. “The front”, Cox declared to a gathering of battalion commanders, approaching Ferrara on the Adriatic, “is as quiet as Dee Street, Invercargill, on a rainy Saturday night.”

But it was also due to Freyberg himself. What was Freyberg’s contribution to the war? In an essay published in 1975, Davin puts the question to himself, then answers it, saying: “In the first place, the New Zealand Division, as he shaped and led it. True, the human material was excellent. But it was Freyberg who made of that material such a superb instrument of war.” This applied to his Intelligence trio. Freyberg gave much rope to his “university boys”, but he also set standards below which they were ashamed to fall.

Freyberg’s gradual relaxation of the outward forms of discipline — men and officers would call one another by first names — meant a growing trust in one another, and in the inhabitants of the “I” truck. This is the same truck, its canvas sides now ventilated by bullet holes, that Cox petitioned for and was awarded in Libya in 1941. Senior staff officers like R.C. Queree and Leonard Thornton, while censoring its scrofulous splendour, nevertheless came to have confidence in the inmates and to rely on their pronouncements.

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