Lifelong adventure ends for ‘immense New Zealander’
Walter Babington ‘‘Sandy’’ Thomas CB DSO MC: retired Major-General: b Motueka, June 29, 1919; m Iredale Lauchlan (dec), 3d; d Beaudesert, Queensland, Australia, October 22, 2017, aged 98.
At the end of 1940, young soldier Walter Babington Thomas, from Riwaka near Motueka, and seemingly known to everyone as Sandy, wrote in his diary that ‘‘It’s been a wonderful year, with more experiences and adventure than my whole short life’’. He was only 21 then and still wide-eyed, with no sense of how many more experiences were just around the corner.
By the end of World War II, Thomas had won the Military Cross twice and the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) once, along with the US military’s Silver Star, and had commanded the 23rd Infantry Battalion in North Africa at the age of 24. But it was 1941, a harrowing year that followed the ‘‘wonderful’’ one before it, that first made Thomas’s military reputation.
His battalion was in Greece and then Crete that year as the German army pushed south. Crete was a notorious disaster for New Zealand that Thomas would go on to argue, decades later, could have been won under better leadership. He was wounded during the fierce German paratrooper invasion of Crete, captured at Galatas and shipped to a prison hospital in Greece.
He became known as an escape artist with a tenacity that was almost comical. Some reports say he finally got away after three failed attempts; others say as many as seven. One story has him attempting to escape by hiding in a coffin (he was caught). When he escaped for good, he made his way by foot from a prisoner of war camp in Thessaloniki, across the mountains of occupied Greece to the remote monasteries of Mt Athos. Eastern Orthodox monks hid him from German soldiers.
After he stole a boat and sailed over the Aegean Sea to Turkey, the Turks took him to Syria. There, near the Syrian-Turkish border, he had the astonishing good luck to encounter his old battalion again – his own brother Godfrey was on guard duty. Thomas told the full story a decade later in a bestselling book titled Dare To Be Free. There was a sense that he was luckier than most, somehow singled out.
The official citation of his first Military Cross talked of his ‘‘cheerfulness, initiative and courage’’. Those who recognised his military skill – General Sir Howard Kippenberger would call him ‘‘one of the best officers I ever served with’’ – also noticed his good humour and common sense, his friendliness and aversion to pomposity. There was ‘‘nothing grim and gruesome about him, except his determination to annihilate the Hun’’, as another former prisoner of war, RH Thomson, wrote in his own book, Captive Kiwi.
Even Noel Coward was an admirer. Coward met Thomas in Egypt and was impressed by this ’’immense New Zealander ... a lionhearted young man’’, as he put it in his wartime book, Middle East Diary. After recuperating in Egypt, Thomas fought the Germans again in North Africa and then, during the last cold and dark winter of the war, Italy. He was wounded again as the Allies took Florence but his diaries, published in 2004 in Pathways to Adventure, are full of appreciation for the ordinary people of Italy.
‘‘We have met for the first time the Italian of Shelley and Keats, the simple country peasant, generous and for the most part sincere, who has welcomed us into his home and played the courteous host,’’ he wrote, in 1944. He had the same fondness for the people of Greece and Crete. When he returned with other veterans for commemorations of wartime anniversaries, he recalled the simple bravery of the people of Crete, including girls younger than 15 who risked their lives to give injured New Zealanders blankets, milk and food.
The 70th anniversary trip to Crete in 2011 forced a U-turn from a Government that had initially been unwilling to pay for Thomas’ travel. Not one to back down from a fight he offered descriptions of sacrifices made by the people of Crete that must have been persuasive: ’’A lot of our chaps were left on the beach on Crete. The Gestapo executed hundreds of Cretan civilians for helping our chaps.’’
Thomas had reached the northern Italian port city of Trieste when victory was finally declared in Europe in 1945, but his war did not officially end until 1946, after postings in England and Japan. Returning to his quiet prewar bank job in New Zealand did not appeal so he joined the British Army.
Further military life must have seemed inevitable. ‘‘Adventure to me had always been linked to soldiering, which may well have been in my blood,’’ he wrote.
After the war, he married Iredale Lauchlan, the ‘‘widowed sister of an old Nelson chum’’. His distinguished military career took them and their daughters Gabriella, Celia and Joanna all over the world as Thomas went on to serve in Austria, Kenya, Malaya, Aden, West Germany, Northern Ireland and, finally, Singapore.
His time in Kenya in the 1950s coincided with the suppression of the Mau Mau uprising, a violent guerrilla outbreak that inspired the writing of another book, Mask of Evil and the Black Trees. His last act during his post-war and Cold War military career was to oversee the withdrawal of British forces from Singapore in 1971. In that year, he was awarded the Order of the Bath.
Iredale’s health meant that the couple retired in Australia – first to Darwin, then Queensland – rather than New Zealand. Thomas’ son-in-law Peter Brown remembers that in Queensland ‘‘he set to work with his usual enthusiasm to single-handedly plant and nurture thousands of trees and create a truly beautiful property, where he lived surrounded by friends and family until his death’’. He died peacefully at 98.
The image of Major-General Thomas the war hero never left him. On one of his many trips back to New Zealand, he remembered the welcome when he first returned to Motueka after World War II. Like his stories about the generosity of the people of Crete, these memories were steeped in gratitude and an abiding sense of his relative good fortune.
‘‘I don’t think I could ever express how I felt,’’ he said in 2013. ‘‘Every hand was out to shake mine, and a lot of the people who came out had lost a leg in the war. Men don’t cry, I know, but there was many a tear shed.’’
He is survived by three daughters, four grandchildren and five great grandchildren. The funeral will be held in Beaudesert, Queensland, on November 10 with another service to follow in Motueka.
'Adventure to me had always been linked to soldiering, which may well have been in my blood.' "Sandy" Thomas