I have been impressed with the leadership style of Tiny Freyberg, a World War II General from New Zealand. As you read the following story, I encourage you to extrapolate the underlying values and principles that fueled Freyberg's leadership style and success:

As two Generals stood talking in the North African sun shortly before the fateful battle of El Alamein in 1942,  several New Zealand soldiers strolled past without giving any sign of recognition toward the Generals. "Don't you chaps salute anymore?" inquired Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery, commander of the British Eighth Army.

"Oh, they're all right," replied Lieutenant General Sir Bernard Freyberg, commander of the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force, grinning. "If you just wave to them, they'll wave right back."

That was typical of "Tiny" Freyberg, one of the greatest fighting Generals of WWII. Six feet two inches tall, with broad shoulders and a rough-hewn face, he was a big man in every way-too big to let rank come between him and his troops. When the Kiwi soldiers called out warmly, "Hi ya Tiny!" Freyberg always beamed and shouted back a hearty "Hello boys."

Tiny Freyberg was a soldier's General, a born leader who won the respect and devotion of his men through feats of cold courage and acts of warm compassion. Rather than commanding from the rear, he was always near the front, usually sitting cross-legged on top of a tank. Churchill dubbed him the Salamander because despite being wounded in action nine times, he seemed to thrive under fire, playing a major role in battles such as Alamein, Tripoli and Trieste. Beneath Freyberg's rugged exterior was a kind, sensitive man who worried constantly about his troops. Except in combat, when necessity made him belligerent, he was genial, generous and engagingly modest. He had such boyish charm that his friend Sir James Barrie once described him as "Peter Pan grown up."

When World War I broke out, Freyberg had quickly signed up as a deckhand on a freighter bound for England. He managed an introduction to Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, and got a sub-lieutenant's commission in the amphibiousRoyal Naval Division.

 

In 1916 as a colonel in France, Freyberg won Britain's highest award for valor, the Victoria Cross. When his battalion suffered heavy losses in an attack at the Somme, he left his headquarters and raced forward through a barrage that killed both his adjutant and his signals officer. Rallying his own troops and strays from other units, Freyberg led a fresh sortie through the German lines and took six hundred prisoners. Twice wounded, he held his ground for twenty-four hours under steady fire, then drove into a heavily fortified village, which was the objective of his whole division, and captured it. Though hit two more times, he refused to be carried away until he had given instructions for defending the new position.

Freyberg ended the war as one of Britain's most decorated heroes as well as the youngest brigadier in the British Army. The doors of London society opened wide to him. One of his good friends, Winston Churchill, was so fascinated by the reports of Freyberg's many war wounds that he once asked to see them. "He stripped," Churchill wrote later, "and I counted twenty-seven separate scars and gashes."

As an officer of the famed Grenadie Guards, Freyberg rose steadily in the British regular army. Though he had reverted to the peacetime rank of captain, by 1934 he was a major general. Three years later, when he was forty-eight, there was a reduction in forces and a medical board declared him physically unfit for further duty: he suffered from "athlete's heart" brought on by "overexertion." Furious, Freyberg challenged the doctors to climb a mountain with him. When they refused, he scaled it alone to prove his point. Only in 1939, however, as war again drew near, was he recalled to lead New Zealand's forces.

Defeat, as much as victory, brought out Freyberg's qualities as a leader. When the Germans were driving the Allies out of Greece in 1941, he was ordered to escape to Egypt with his staff. He flatly refused, staying with the rear guard until all his troops could be evacuated.  Tiny Freyberg was almost the last man into the boats.

His senior staff officer for two years in North Africa and Italy, who worked, ate and lived with Tiny Freyberg, learned firsthand why the thirty thousand men in his command worshipped him. "You can't treat a man like a butler," Freyberg used to say, "and expect him to fight like a gladiator." When they were posted to the Middle East, one of his first acts was to set up a New Zealand Club in Cairo, where all ranks on leave could enjoy comfortable surroundings. rations, mail deliveries, sports, and concerts - no detail affecting his troops was too minor for Freyberg's attention. It was his idea to equip his division with the only mobile bakery in the Eighth Army. When even Montgomery had to make do with bully beef and hardtack, Freyberg'smen enjoyed the luxury of fresh bread. One of his familiar expressions was: "Morale is a lot of little things."

Not least of the things that raised morale among the Kiwis was simply Freyberg's presence at the front. He was utterly composed under the worst of conditions, exuding an air of confidence that was contagious. As Churchill said of Freyberg: "He imparts his own invincible firmness of mind to all around him."

Although Freyberg disliked red tape and regimentation, he was a strict disciplinarian in essential matters. To prepare his men for combat, he put them through the most rigorous training, with grueling pack marches and live-ammunition exercises. As a result, his Kiwi sheep drovers, clerks and laborers became a highly efficient fighting machine.

When Rommel's Afrika Corps took Tobruk in June 1942, Freyberg led a stubborn rearguard fight at Minqar Qaim, buying time while the greater part of the Eighth Army was digging in for a last-ditch stand at El Alamein. Five times in one day, two brigades of New Zealanders repulsed the Twenty-first Panzer Division. Finally, the Kiwis were cut off and almost out of ammunition. Annihilation seemed almost certain - but when a war correspondent pointed out the ammo shortage, Freyberg replied firmly, "We still have ten thousand bayonets." That night, in one of the more incredible episodes of the desert war, the Kiwis stabbed a gaping hole in the German lines and got away, with very few casualties.

For all his own toughness, Freyberg was extremely sensitive to the feelings of others. When he went on leave he devoted much of his time to visiting hospitals. Once in a crowded ward a young soldier told him he'd been hit in the side. "So was I!" said Freyberg. With that, he pulled up his shirt to display the old scar. The next man had a knee wound; up went the General's trouser leg. But when he came to a man who was badly hurt, he sat talking quietly by his bed with a look of genuine anguish on his face. One day a Kiwi soldier woke up on an operating table to find the General himself gripping his hand and murmuring, "You're going to be all right, lad."

After the war, King George VI made Tiny Governor-General of New Zealand, the crowning honor of his life. Raised to the peerage in 1951, Lord Freyberg later returned to England and became Deputy Constable and Lieutenant Governor of Windsor Castle, one of the Queen's principal residences. As always, he took his responsibilities seriously, but not himself. In a House of Lords debate, on one of the few occasions he ever spoke publicly about his distinguished war record, Fretberg poked fun at it. "On the evacuation of Greece," he said, recalling some of the retreats he'd gone through in both wars, "the British army had in me the most experienced man in running away that they ever had."

When he died on July 4, 1963, an impressive funeral service was held at Windsor Castle. His family and a few close friends then took his body to a small country church beside the Pilgrim's Way in Surrey. There he was buried on a hill, without pomp or ceremony, just the way Tiny Freyberg had lived.