Book Review - Anzac Fury: The Bloody Battle of Crete 1941
Anzac Fury: The Bloody Battle of Crete 1941,
Written by: Peter Thompson,
William Heinemann, Sydney, 2010,
ISBN 9781741669206, 506 pp
Reviewed by: Eleanor Hancock, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales@ADFA
The battle of Crete remains contested in historical studies of the Second World War. Was the German decision to wrest the island off the Allies a mistake? Was the German victory a pyrrhic victory as many have claimed? Did mistakes by the Allied defenders lose the battle? Crete is the subject of this new popular history. Recent years have seen an expansion of academic and popular history on Australians at war which responds to, and in turn feeds, the growing public appetite for such histories. Popular history can simply reinforce existing stereotypes and preconceptions or it can at times successfully convey academic interpretations accessibly to a wider audience, and can be of value for this popularisation.
Anzac Fury belongs to the first category of popular military history. It retells the story of Australian forces in the 1941 campaigns in Middle East, Greece and Crete during the Second World War in a general narrative account which is interwoven with the personal experiences of three men and one nurse in these campaigns. The book is easy to read, dramatic and vivid. It draws on survivors’ diaries and memoirs as well as interviews with some veterans of the campaign and some recent secondary studies.
It presents, however, a ‘Boy’s Own Paper’ view of Australian participation in the Second World War, full of the usual clichés of Anzac heroism, dishonest British political manoeuvring at the expense of Australia and New Zealand, mistakes by senior British officers, Italian blunders and German ruthlessness. It perpetuates the ‘myth’ of Anzac. In an interview given after the publication of the book, Thompson emphasised the Gallipoli parallel, arguing that the decision to fight in Greece was a mistake. He described the Greek campaign as ‘a total disaster, we lost good men, and we fought brilliantly alongside with the Greek partisans and some of the army, but you need to ask the question, “Why were we there?”’
The book does not take all recent research on the war in the Western desert or the Mediterranean into consideration. For example, it includes an account of the battle of Bardia without using the recent definitive account by Stockings.
As a result, it casts no new light whatsoever on any of the controversies or still unanswered questions about the Allied involvement in Greece or the fighting in Crete. It is also monolingual in its research, relying on translated Greek and German works. It cannot therefore clarify any of the remaining debates and differences of interpretation nor does it contain an original contribution to our understanding of the course or outcome of the fighting.
