A Very Private Celebrity

by Hugh Purcell

  Never stare at individuals through binoculars. It is rude.

  Officers may wear what they like within reason, but steel helmets and decorations are not de rigeur.

  If you are invited out to dinner, take your own wireless truck and your bed-roll. Nobody will want to dig you out of a slit trench in the dark.

  When you shit, go a stone’s throw away from your nearest neighbour and take a spade. If you are in any doubt as to what is a stone’s throw, try crapping near an Australian.8

  Luke was afflicted with dysentery, so it was Captain Freeman (making his first appearance in Sisyphus and Reilly) who came to the rescue:

  On the march my truck had to drive like hell up to the front of the Column so that I could get out, squat, and squitter, while the whole battle group drove past. Sometimes they would barrack and then the lads on my truck would either shout back loyally or hide their faces in shame. Eventually, I got so bad that I was sent back to B Echelon where John Freeman (he was called ‘Red’ Freeman then – nothing to do with politics, just the colour of his hair) kindly fixed me up with a latrine of my own, made out of petrol tins, and had it placed handy to my bed so that I could stagger from one to the other and, of course, back again.9

  The Eighth Army then rallied under new command, for General Claude Auchinleck was replaced the next month by General Bernard Montgomery. On his deathbed seventy-two years later, talking to his son Tom, John Freeman recalled hearing the news, which shows what an impact it must have made: ‘General Roberts got us together and said, “I know things have been going badly, so HQ are sending out a competent shit to sort out the mess. He’s called Montgomery.”’

  On 13 August, ‘Monty’, dressed in long shorts to cover his still white knees, addressed his staff for the first time: ‘Here we will stand and fight; there will be no further withdrawal. I have ordered all plans dealing with withdrawal to be burned, at once. If we can’t stay here, then let us stay here dead.’10 To raise morale further, Monty toured the Eighth Army emplacements with Winston Churchill. Lieutenant Luke witnessed it from an embarrassing position:

  One bright morning I was sitting on the can, sweating and shivering at the same time, when a staff car drove past about 50 yards away. The occupant was a superior-looking guardee, with a look of impotent fury on his face. Then a very grand staff car with a Union Jack on its bonnet almost ran me down. In it, I had no difficulty in recognising generals Alexander and Montgomery. Between them was a rotund figure in dungarees, topped off by an old fashioned toupee. I was of course in a serious dilemma, glued like that to the can, but, on reflection, since I was not wearing a cap, I think I did the right thing; I sat stiffly to attention and gave a smart eyes-right. Winston Churchill removed the cigar from his mouth and extended it towards me between two fingers in a benign salute.11

  Soon after the Prime Minister called in on the 22nd Armoured Brigade, Luke noted in his diary (22 August): ‘Churchill came to look at our brigade. My platoon only saw his car in the distance surrounded by a fleet of staff cars.’ Luke also added a typical reference to Freeman: ‘Red Freeman came up yesterday from B Echelon; as usual, full of the latest bits of gossip about who sleeps with who from London to Cairo.’12

  In his spare moments, Lieutenant Luke would settle down to read:

  The sun rises and falls on the pages of War and Peace. The glare of the paper hurts my eyes. I lower the book and stare out across the desert where, as far as one can see, and for mile after mile beyond, are identical sand-coloured trucks in wide dispersal. Yet each truck is an island, a home, round which its occupants lead their own domestic lives; a home as recognisable to its owners as any one of a hundred identical houses in a European suburb. But here in the desert, the truck is the individual, and man only one of its working parts. How far in time and space this is from the Russian winter of 1812. Yet is it really so far?13

  A few nights after, Luke was woken by a boot in the ribs: ‘Get up. There’s a full-scale attack all along the line.’ This was Rommel’s offensive at the end of August, intended to break through the Alamein Line to Cairo. As it happened, that first night, the full force of Rommel’s depleted panzer divisions was borne by the 22nd Armoured Brigade defending the Alam Halfa Ridge. The next morning, Luke was in the general’s mess when ‘French Bob’ came in, ‘gold teeth flashing in the sunlight’: ‘“We’ve been cut to pieces,” he said happily, and it was no great exaggeration. I offered him a consoling gin. “Shin-shin, ol’ boy,” he said, raising his glass in a toast.’14

  In fact, although the 22nd Armoured bore the brunt of the enemy’s attack, it ‘reacted magnificently’: ‘The panzer columns came under a storm of fire from the tanks and supporting artillery of this all-arms brigade group’, forcing them to withdraw.15 The next day, Montgomery’s revitalised Eighth Army counter-attacked, aided substantially by Ultra intelligence intercepts and the Royal Air Force. That was the beginning of the end for Rommel’s last offensive in the Western Desert. His next battle, the far bigger El Alamein, would be what he called a ‘battle without hope’.

  All I may add is that Freeman took part in the Battle of Alam Halfa, though whether he fought at El Alamein, I do not know. After Alam Halfa, the 22nd Armoured Brigade, including the 1st Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, became a permanent part of the 7th Armoured Division; hence it lost its insignia of a rhinoceros and adopted the desert rat instead (after a sketch made of a jerboa in the Cairo zoo). The fame of the ‘Desert Rats’ preceded Freeman in Parliament in 1945.

  For episode three of Freeman’s desert war, we move forward six months to 29 March 1943, when he was promoted to DAQMG – a senior HQ staff officer – in the 22nd Armoured Brigade. From then on we know much more about his movements because he signed the weekly war diary in so far as one was written. During the preceding six months, the 22nd Armoured Brigade had been the leading formation of the Eighth Army, pursuing the remnants of the Afrika Korps and the Italian Army back west across the Western Desert.

  The journalist Alan Moorehead accompanied that advance:

  Nine-tenths of desert warfare is the battle of supply. Whoever first gets up most water, food, fuel, guns and men, wins the campaign. Now Montgomery was given the means to plan his supply ahead so that he could hold what he had already won and eventually push on to Tripoli.16

  Freeman must have been in his element. He was promoted to Staff Captain on 17 November, but then records show he was in hospital for most of December and January. By the time Freeman was out of hospital, the 1st Battalion had taken part in the victory parade through Tripoli on 31 January. ‘His return to unit is particularly requested,’ says his record. By then, the 22nd Armoured had moved out of the Middle East Theatre into Tunisia, which was classed as north Africa, and came to a halt at Medenine, near the old French Mareth Line (built before the war to keep French Tunisia from fascist Libya). It protected a bottleneck between the Matmata Hills and the coast, and the Axis forces had shored up the old defences with 100 kilometres of barbed wire, 100,000 anti-tank mines and 70,000 anti-personnel mines. Breaking through the Mareth Line at the end of March was one of Montgomery’s biggest tactical achievements. On exactly that date, Acting Major Freeman took over as DAQMG. The final task of the Eighth Army was to link up with the Allied First Army that had landed in Algeria, and together they would capture Tunis – the last German-held city in north Africa.

  The advance of the Eighth Army – from the battles around Medenine to the capture of Tunis – took six weeks. This is the period covered by Freeman’s citation for an MBE. It reads:

  Major Freeman had been the DAQMG of the 22nd Armoured Brigade during the period under review. During this time the brigade advanced from Medenine to Tunis and a heavy responsibility fell to Major Freeman.

  At no time was the brigade ever held up or delayed by shortage of supply and, in fact, everything ran with perfect efficiency and smoothness.

  For this, Major Freeman is deserving of the highest praise; indeed, his energy, devotion to duty and attention to
detail were of the first order. In particular, during the final stages of the advance to Tunis, when he accompanied the tactical brigade HQ in a tank in order to be in immediate touch with the situation.

  Although at times under considerable shellfire, he handled the situation with cool and sure judgement, so that the brigade went short of nothing, while the echelons suffered a minimum of casualties.17

  Was this the occasion that was recalled after the war by a rifleman to Paul Johnson? ‘To listen to John directing armour and artillery hour after hour on the brigade radio was a marvellous lesson in coolness under stress.’ This was not the only recollection. When Freeman was a TV celebrity around 1960, a retired general was heard to say: ‘You think he’s good on Face to Face? You’ve never heard him on the R/T [radio transmitter] with armour.’ In fact, Major Freeman was recommended for the Military Cross, but this was changed by General Brian Horrocks to an MBE (presumably because the Military Cross is usually awarded for individual feats of gallantry).

  Entering Tunis must have been Freeman’s hour of glory, though Paul Johnson’s claim that he had a girl waiting for him there seems a bit far-fetched. After the exuberant greetings with flowers, fruit, wine and kisses – from the French more than from the Arabs – there was a huge haul of spoils in compensation for the losses at Tobruk the previous June: ‘200,000 prisoners were waiting to be collected and booty exceeding anything we had seen before or would see again. Whole regiments of artillery, whole parks of vehicles, infantry brigades, workshops, stores and the administrative machinery of the German and Italian armies.’18

  Now it was time for Major Freeman to order ten days of R & R: ‘Tunis, 10 May. Every man will be in possession of one clean suit of summer clothing. The Jerboa Club is opening and baths will be arranged. Bde comd [brigade command] looks to all ranks to respect feelings and rights of the civilian population.’19

  The victory parade through Tunis on 23 May was witnessed by the future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. He was inspired, indeed overwhelmed:

  Faint, strange and magnificent over the crest of the road came the skirl of bagpipes and then, at a slow and steady pace, the massed pipers of the British armies swung tremendously past the reviewing stand, followed by 14,000 bronze and cocky British veterans of the desert war, each division led by its general. These swinging, striding, out-stepping men, with their jolly, honest, sunburned, smiling English, Scottish or Irish faces, were, on that day, masters of the world and heirs of the future.20

  Somewhere in the march was 28-year-old Major Freeman. At the expense of Rifle Brigade cool, he must have felt a deep sense of achievement for, as the Rifle Brigade History summed up:

  The 1st Battalion, in their battered vehicles, had been in contact with the enemy, except for a short rest for a week in Tripoli, since December 1941, covering an immense mileage and taking its part in every battle, every withdrawal, every advance. It had retreated from Agheila to Gazala and, by a more protracted process, from Gazala to Alamein; it had advanced from Alamein to Tunis.21

  Freeman’s north Africa war was over. Subsequently he very rarely talked about it, but reviewing The Rommel Papers in the New Statesman in 1953, he referred to the Rommel myth that had hypnotised the Desert Rats:

  Finally, for this reviewer at least, the Papers do one thing more. They end an illusion. To those who opposed him in the desert, Rommel grew into a myth, which was more than a projection of the truth; it was a distortion. The chivalrous super-man, whose high repute added lustre to the profession of arms and its German exponents, did not exist. Montgomery was not big enough to destroy the legend: Rommel does. History will not cheat him of his triumphs; but, thanks to Rommel himself, it will not conceal his fallibility of judgement, his arrogant conceit, his narrow outlook and, above all, his sheer orgiastic exultation in the brutality of war. It was from this impious joy in battle that sprang the romantic illusion, which hypnotised so many of Rommel’s opponents. He was the smiler with the knife.22

  In September, Major Freeman signed orders for the embarkation of the 22nd Armoured Brigade from Tripoli to the Gulf of Salerno, just south of Naples – the brigade’s first move in the invasion of Italy. On 18 September, the convoy of men and vehicles sailed on a glassy, calm sea and landed in the gulf four days later, without opposition. Luke was lyrical about the change:

  Nobody who has not come from the desert to the campagna of Naples in the soft sunshine of September can know what the word autumn means. Everything that is ripe and good is here for the asking. Clean water is here to bathe in, to wash in, to drink. Tomatoes are here for the picking, round red ones and little yellow pear-shaped ones, the sweetest of all. There are persimmons, large and opulently yellow; green walnuts that peel white as teeth; grapes in extravagant abundance. Only girls are not quite so easily had, although there are opportunities.23

  For the next two months, the 1st Battalion was in close contact with the German enemy (Mussolini had signed the Italian surrender in September) fighting up to the River Garigliano. It was not the sort of war Luke expected:

  Do not be deceived because death is everywhere. Death is at every bridge and every crossroads marked on a German map. Death is in every golden vineyard concealing in its bounty lethal German mines. Death is in every ochre villa set temptingly among tall cypress trees, with its lavatories booby-trapped to explode in the arse of the ignorant desert soldier.24

  It was to be good training for the invasion of north-west Europe, for which the Desert Rats were soon to be held in readiness. In November, they were billeted in Sorrento, where Freeman was already based with the HQ. In fact, according to his records, he embarked at Naples for the UK on the 19 November. A month later, Luke (and the rest of the 1st Battalion) followed him on the Cameronia. They landed in ‘blacked-out, wartime Glasgow on 5 January 1944. It was raining wet soot.’

  Between 9 March and 6 July, Major Freeman attended a war course for officers at Camberley Joint Services Command and staff college. He was impressed. He told Driberg that the seventeen-week course gave him ‘the most effective education since Westminster’. He expanded on this in an interview he gave to William Hardcastle for BBC Radio 4 in 1968:

  I’ve found that passing through staff college was one of the most valuable educational experiences I’ve had at any time. I found then and I’ve always found since that the intellectual soldier’s habit of arranging his problems in a certain sequence, and trying to appreciate them and arrive by a given methodology at a conclusion, has been terribly useful. I still use it to this day.25

  The war left him with a deep respect for the army and a pleasure in the company of intelligent soldiers. The army, in turn, gave Freeman his military bearing and aloof manner. He always presented an immaculate front to the world – the civilian equivalent of being on the parade ground. Until old age, he walked as straight as a ramrod and was well groomed. Some found this obsessive. One of his future lovers became infuriated by his habit of folding his trousers precisely before getting into bed with her.

  It was a political meeting at Camberley, however, that was to shape his future. One evening in the mess, he joined the group listening to Captain Raymond Blackburn – a peacetime solicitor with well-known left-wing views. Blackburn had already stood as a candidate for Common Wealth (a short-lived political party with views to the left of Labour on some issues) in a by-election, and now, ‘with a full head of striking white hair, a Heathcliffe-handsome face and dark eyes alight with enthusiasm’, he was haranguing his audience. Most left, fed up with his ‘bolshie’ talk, but one remained. Blackburn takes up the story:

  I met John Freeman when he was at the staff college. He was the most characteristic staff officer one could hope to meet – with perfect manners, a smart and handsome appearance, a command of army clichés and a considerable experience as DAQMG in the 7th Armoured Division in north Africa. That evening, after others had left for the bar, he remained seated and I was amazed to hear him say: ‘I hardly expect you to believe me in view of my behaviour h
ere, but I have been a convinced socialist ever since I was at Oxford and I am a more convinced socialist today than ever.’26

  A year later, Blackburn secured the nominations of both Freeman and Woodrow Wyatt as Labour candidates in the 1945 general election.

  After staff college, Freeman was sent out to liberated France, seconded from the Rifle Brigade to become Brigade Major of 131st Infantry. He took up his post on 25 July, seven weeks after D-Day. The 131st Lorried Infantry Brigade, part of the 7th Armoured Division, had fought alongside the Rifle Brigade in north Africa and Italy. Less glamorous than the Rifles, it was nevertheless a front-line Territorial Army formation, and comprised, when Freeman became brigade major, three battalions of the Queen’s Royal Regiment (the 5th, 6th and 7th).

  By mid-August, the German Army had been flushed out of the close countryside of the Norman bocage – its very high, thick hedgerows made it difficult for an attacking force to shoot and manoeuvre through – and was retreating through the Falaise Gap towards the River Seine, 75 miles away. Here the countryside was open and rolling, but rivers like the Orne, Vie and Laison were wide enough to provide good, defensive positions. For the British Army, there had been a high cost to pay for the advance from D-Day. The very high losses of men, the sheer slog of living rough, eating out of cans, sleeping in holes and every day expecting to batter away at another German defensive position was taking its toll on the front-line infantry. According to Freeman, after heavy fighting on Mount Pincon, the 131st Brigade rested 11–15 August – its first break since landing in Normandy. It was entertained by George Formby and his ukelele.