Bernard Cadogan on Crete 1941
Channel: Tuwhiri
Date: 16/09/2021

In his poem, Crete 1941, Bernard Cadogan tells the story of what small nations such as Greece and Aotearoa New Zealand have had to do to uphold international law, and of the extraordinary extent which indigenous citizenship, such as Māori possess, contributes to the international personality of a country.
 
The defence of the island of Crete in the second world war was a mission which Allied forces could have won. The failure to repel the German landings embroiled Cretans in more than three years of bitter occupation.

It is astonishing, in retrospect, that New Zealanders led the defence of the island against a great power such as Germany. Crete is where the famed 28th Māori Battalion found its feet in battle. Sfakia on Crete is where the revolutionaries began the struggle for a Hellenic republic in 1821, while in 1941, it was where Allied troops were evacuated from; New Zealand’s Dunkirk.
 
This poem presents a story which both Greeks and New Zealanders need to recover for themselves from the myths that the British created around the Battle of Crete.

On the poem ‘Crete 1941’, Bernard Cadogan writes:

This is a radical poem, not a fuddy-duddy poem. It is composed in Spenserian stanzas, not as a conservative nostalgia trip or whimsy, but as a deliberate act of decolonisation and reparation for Edmund Spenser and our own premier Alfred Domett’s dreadfully racist ‘Ranolf and Amohia’.
 
‘Crete 1941’ does this in the spirit of Wu Ming’s New Italian Epic, inverting Ferrara, Cork, colonial Wellington …… Someone has said ‘Crete 1941’ has put intellect and heart back into New Zealand verse; in a way this is true.



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