The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  On 22 October, Hitler’s armoured train, the Führersonderzug Amerika, with its pair of engines in tandem and two flak wagons, halted at the station of Montoire-sur-le-Loir. There, he met Pétain’s deputy, Pierre Laval, who tried to obtain guarantees on the status of the Vichy regime. Hitler avoided giving any, while trying to recruit Vichy to a coalition against Britain.

  The gleaming carriages of the Amerika carried on towards the Spanish frontier at Hendaye, where he met Franco the next day. The Caudillo’s train had been delayed due to the dilapidated state of the Spanish railways, and the long wait had not put Hitler in a good mood. The two dictators inspected a guard of honour from his personal escort, the Führer-Begleit-Kommando, drawn up on the platform. The black-uniformed troopers towered over the pot-bellied Spanish dictator, whose smile, both complacent and ingratiating, seldom left his face.

  When Hitler and Franco began their discussions, the Caudillo’s torrent of words prevented his visitor from speaking, a state of affairs to which the Führer was not accustomed. Franco spoke of their comradeship in arms during the Spanish Civil War and his gratitude for all that Hitler had done, and evoked the ‘alianza espiritual’ which existed between their countries. He then expressed his deep regret for not being able to enter the war immediately on Germany’s side as a result of Spain’s impoverished condition. For much of the three hours, Franco rambled on about his life and experiences, prompting Hitler to say later that he would prefer to have three or four teeth pulled than go through another conversation with the Spanish dictator.

  Hitler finally intervened to say that Germany had won the war. Britain only hung on in the hope of being saved by the Soviet Union or the United States and the Americans would need a year and a half or two years to prepare for war. The only threat from the British was that they might occupy islands in the Atlantic or, with the help of de Gaulle, stir up trouble in the French colonies. This was why he wanted a ‘broad front’ against Britain.

  Hitler wanted Gibraltar and so did Franco and his generals, but they were not happy with the idea of Germans commanding the operation. Franco also feared that the British would seize the Canary Isles as a reprisal. He had, however, been taken aback by the overbearing German demands to be given one of the Canary Islands as well as bases in Spanish Morocco. Hitler was also interested in the Portuguese Azores and Cape Verde Islands. The Azores did not just offer an Atlantic naval base for the Kriegsmarine. The OKW war diary later noted: ‘The Führer sees the value of the Azores in two ways. He wants to have them in case of America’s intervention and for after the war.’ Hitler was already dreaming of a new generation of ‘bombers with a range of 6,000 kilometres’ to attack the eastern seaboard of the United States.

  Franco’s expectation that French Morocco and Oran would be promised to him before even entering the war struck the Führer as presumptuous to say the least. Hitler is also supposed to have expostulated on another occasion that Franco’s attitude almost made him feel ‘like a Jew who wants to bargain with the most sacred possessions’. Then, in another outburst to his entourage after his return to Germany, he described Franco as a ‘Jesuit swine’. Although ideologically closer to Germany, and with a new pro-Nazi foreign minister Ramón Serrano Suñer who wanted to enter the war, Franco’s government was worried about provoking Britain. Spain’s survival depended on imports, partly from Britain, but above all on grain and oil from the United States. Spain was in a terrible state after the ravages of its civil war. It was not uncommon to see people fainting in the streets from malnutrition. The British and then the Americans applied economic leverage most skilfully, knowing that Germany was in no position to make up the difference in imports. So when it became increasingly clear that Britain had no intention of coming to terms with Germany, Franco’s government, by then critically short of foodstuffs and fuel, could do little more than profess its support for the Axis and promise to enter the war at a later, unspecified date. That still did not stop Franco from considering his own ‘parallel war’, which consisted of invading Britain’s traditional ally, Portugal. Fortunately, it was a project which never came close to fruition.

  After the meeting in Hendaye, the Sonderzug turned round and headed back towards Montoire, where Pétain himself awaited Hitler. Pétain greeted Hitler as though they were equals, which did not endear him to the Führer. The old marshal expressed the hope that relations with Berlin would be marked by cooperation, but his demand that France’s colonial possessions should be guaranteed was brusquely rejected. France had started the war against Germany, Hitler retorted, and now it would have to pay for it ‘territorially and materially’. Hitler, far less exasperated with Pétain than he had been with Franco, left things open. He still wanted Vichy to join in an anti-British alliance, but eventually came to realize that he could not count on the ‘Latin’ countries when it came to forming a continental bloc.

  Hitler had mixed feelings about a peripheral strategy of continuing the war against Britain in the Mediterranean, now that an invasion of southern England was considered unlikely to succeed. His thoughts were mostly fixed on the invasion of the Soviet Union, although he vacillated, and considered its postponement. In early November, the OKW nevertheless prepared contingency plans codenamed Operation Felix, for the seizure of Gibraltar and the Atlantic islands.

  In the autumn of 1940, Hitler had hoped to seal off Britain and drive the Royal Navy from the Mediterranean before embarking on his overriding scheme, the invasion of the Soviet Union. He then convinced himself that the easiest way to force Britain to terms was to defeat the Soviet Union. For the Kriegsmarine this was frustrating, as armament priority passed to the army and Luftwaffe.

  Hitler was certainly prepared to assist the Italians in their plan to launch an attack from their colony of Libya on British forces in Egypt and the Suez Canal, as that would tie down the British and threaten their communications with India and Australasia. The Italians, however, while happy to receive Luftwaffe support, were unwilling to have the Wehrmacht’s ground forces in their area of operations. They knew that the Germans would want to run everything.

  Hitler was particularly interested in the Balkans, since they represented the base of his southern flank for the invasion of Russia. After the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, Hitler, unwilling to disturb the Nazi–Soviet pact for the moment, had advised the Romanian government to ‘accept everything for the time being’. He decided to send a military mission and troops to Romania to secure the oilfields of Ploesti. The one thing Hitler did not want was Mussolini stirring up the Balkans with an attack on Yugoslavia or Greece from Italian-occupied Albania. Unwisely, he counted on Italian inertia.

  At first, it looked as if Mussolini would do little. The Italian navy, despite its earlier claims of aggressive action, had failed to put to sea, except to escort convoys to Libya. Not wanting to take on the Royal Navy, it left the air force to bomb Malta. And in Libya, the governor-general Marshal Italo Balbo held back, insisting that he would advance against the British in Egypt only when the Germans invaded England.

  The British in Egypt wasted little time in getting the measure of their opponent. On the evening of 11 June, just after Mussolini’s declaration of war, the 11th Hussars in their elderly Rolls-Royce armoured cars moved off towards the setting sun and crossed the Libyan frontier just after dark. They headed for Fort Maddalena and Fort Capuzzo, the two main Italian defensive positions on the border. Laying ambushes, they took seventy prisoners.

  The Italian prisoners were most upset. Nobody had bothered to tell them that their government had declared war. On 13 June, both forts were captured and destroyed. In another raid two days later on the road between Bardia and Tobruk, the 11th Hussars captured another hundred soldiers. Their haul included a fat Italian general in a Lancia staff car accompanied by a ‘lady friend’, who was heavily pregnant and not his wife. This caused a scandal in Italy. More importantly for the British, the general had with him all the plans showing the defences of Bardia.
>
  Marshal Balbo’s command in Libya was short lived. On 28 June, over-enthusiastic Italian anti-aircraft batteries in Tobruk shot down his plane by mistake. Less than a week later, his replacement Marshal Rodolfo Graziani was horrified when he received Mussolini’s order to advance into Egypt on 15 July. The Duce regarded the march on Alexandria as a ‘foregone conclusion’. Predictably, Graziani did everything he could to postpone operations, arguing first that he could not attack in high summer, and then that he lacked equipment.

  In August the Duke of Aosta, the viceroy of Italian East Africa, had achieved an easy victory by advancing from Abyssinia into British Somali-land, forcing its few defenders to withdraw across the gulf to Aden. But Aosta knew that his situation was hopeless unless Marshal Graziani conquered Egypt. Hemmed in on the western side by the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and British Kenya, and with the Royal Navy controlling the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, he could expect no supplies until Egypt was taken.

  Mussolini lost patience as Graziani continued to procrastinate. Finally on 13 September the Italians began to advance. They enjoyed a marked superiority with five divisions against three under-strength British and Commonwealth divisions. The 7th Armoured Division, the Desert Rats, had just seventy serviceable tanks.

  The Italians managed to get lost even before reaching the Egyptian frontier. As planned, British troops conducted a fighting retreat and even gave up Sidi Barrani, where Graziani halted his advance. Mussolini insisted that he should push on along the coast road to Mersa Matruh. But with the imminent Italian attack on Greece, Graziani’s forces did not receive the supplies they needed to continue.

  The Germans had warned Mussolini on several occasions against an attack on Greece. On 19 September, Mussolini had assured Ribbentrop that he would conquer Egypt before attacking Greece or Yugoslavia. The Italians appeared to agree that the British should be the first target. But then on 8 October Mussolini felt slighted when he heard that the Germans were sending troops to Romania. His foreign secretary, Count Ciano, had forgotten to tell him that Ribbentrop had mentioned it earlier. ‘Hitler keeps confronting me with faits accomplis,’ the Duce said to Ciano on 12 October. ‘This time I shall pay him back in his own coin.’

  The next day, Mussolini ordered the Comando Supremo of the armed forces to plan for the immediate invasion of Greece from Italian-occupied Albania. None of his most senior officers, particularly the commander in Albania General Sebastiano Visconti Prasca, had the courage to warn the Duce of the huge problems of transport and supply for a winter campaign in the mountains of Epirus. The preparations were chaotic. A large part of the Italian armed forces were being demobilized to rectify the collapse in industrial and agricultural production due to an excessive call-up on the outbreak of war. Units short of men had to be re-formed. The plan required twenty divisions, but three months would be needed to transport most of them across the Adriatic. Mussolini wanted to attack on 26 October, less than two weeks away.

  The Germans knew of the preparations, but they assumed that no attack on Greece would be mounted before the Italians had advanced into Egypt and captured Mersa Matruh. Hitler was in his armoured train on the way back from his meetings with Franco and Pétain when he heard that the invasion of Greece was going ahead. Instead of continuing on to Berlin, the Sonderzug was turned round. Hitler headed south to Florence where the German foreign ministry had urgently requested that Mussolini should meet the Führer.

  Early on the morning of 28 October, shortly before the meeting with Mussolini, Hitler was told that the Italian invasion of Greece had already begun. He was furious. He guessed that Mussolini was jealous of German influence in the Balkans and foresaw that the Italians might have a nasty surprise. Above all he feared that this move would draw British forces to Greece and provide them with a bombing base against the Ploesti oilfields in Romania. Mussolini’s irresponsibility might even put Operation Barbarossa at risk. But Hitler had mastered his anger by the time the Sonderzug halted alongside the platform in Florence where Mussolini awaited him. In the event, the two leaders’ discussion in the Palazzo Vecchio barely touched on the invasion of Greece, except for Hitler’s offer of an airlanding division and a parachute division to secure the island of Crete against a British occupation.

  At 03.00 hours that day, the Italian ambassador in Athens had presented an ultimatum to the Greek dictator, General Ioannis Metaxas, which was due to expire in three hours. Metaxas replied with a single ‘No’, but the Fascist regime was not interested in his refusal or compliance. The invasion, with 140,000 men, began two and a half hours later.

  Italian troops advanced in a heavy downpour. They did not get far. It had already rained solidly for two days. Torrential streams and rivers washed away bridges and the Greeks, well aware of the attack which had been an open secret in Rome, blew up others. Unpaved roads became virtually impassable in the thick mud.

  The Greeks, uncertain whether the Bulgarians would also attack in the north-east, had to leave four divisions in eastern Macedonia and Thrace. Against the Italian attack from Albania, their line of defence ran from Lake Prespa on the Yugoslav border via the Grammos Mountains and then along the fast-flowing River Thyamis to the coast opposite the southern tip of Corfu. The Greeks lacked tanks and anti-tank guns. They had few modern aircraft. But their greatest strength lay in the universal outrage of their soldiers, determined to repel this attack by the despised macaronides, as they called them. Even the Greek community in Alexandria was caught up in the patriotic fervour. Some 14,000 sailed to Greece to fight, and the funds raised there for the war effort were greater than the whole of the Egyptian defence budget.

  The Italians relaunched their offensive on 5 November, but they broke through only on the coast and north of Konitsa, where the Julia Division of the Alpini advanced over twenty kilometres. But the Julia, one of the finest Italian formations, was unsupported and soon found itself virtually surrounded. Only part of it escaped and General Prasca ordered his troops on to the defensive, along the 140-kilometre front. The Comando Supremo in Rome had to postpone the offensive in Egypt and divert troops to reinforce the army in Albania. Mussolini’s boast that he would occupy Greece in fifteen days was revealed as empty bombast, yet he still convinced himself that his forces would win. Hitler was unsurprised by this humiliation of his ally, having already predicted that the Greeks would prove better soldiers than the Italians. General Alexandros Papagos, the chief of the Greek general staff, was already bringing up his own reserves in preparation for a counter-attack.

  Another blow to Italian pride took place on the night of 11 November, when the Royal Navy attacked the naval base of Taranto with Fairey Swordfish aircraft from the carrier HMS Illustrious and a squadron of four cruisers and four destroyers. Three Italian battleships, the Littorio, the Cavour and the Duilio, were hit with torpedoes for the loss of two Swordfish. The Cavour sank. Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, the commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean, could reassure himself that he had little to fear from the Italian navy.

  On 14 November, General Papagos launched his counter-offensive, secure in the knowledge that he had numerical superiority on the Albanian front until Italian reinforcements arrived. His men, with great bravery and stamina, began to advance. By the end of the year, the Greeks had forced their attackers back into Albania between fifty and seventy kilo metres from the frontier. Italian reinforcements, which brought their army in Albania up to 490,000 strong, made little difference. By the time of Hitler’s invasion of Greece the following April, the Italians had lost nearly 40,000 dead, and 114,000 casualties from wounds, sickness and frostbite. Italian claims to great-power status had been utterly destroyed. Any idea of a ‘parallel war’ was at an end. Mussolini was no longer Hitler’s ally, but his subordinate.

  Italy’s chronic military weakness was soon evident in Egypt too. General Sir Archibald Wavell, the commander-in-chief Middle East, had a daunting array of responsibilities covering North Africa, East Africa and the Middle East as a whole. He had begun wit
h only 36,000 men in Egypt facing 215,000 Italians in their Libyan army. To his south, the Duke of Aosta commanded a quarter of a million men, of whom many were locally raised troops. But British and Commonwealth forces soon began to arrive in Egypt to reinforce Wavell’s command.

  Wavell, a taciturn and intelligent man who loved poetry, did not inspire Churchill’s confidence. The pugnacious prime minister wanted fire-eaters, especially in the Middle East where the Italians were vulnerable. Churchill was also impatient. He underestimated the ‘quartermaster’s nightmare’ of desert warfare. Wavell, who feared the prime minister’s interference in his planning, did not tell him that he was preparing a counter-attack, codenamed Operation Compass. He told Anthony Eden, then on a visit to Egypt, only when asked to send badly needed weapons to help the Greeks. Churchill, when he heard of Wavell’s plan on Eden’s return to London, claimed to have ‘purred like six cats’. He immediately urged Wavell to launch his attack as soon as possible, and certainly within the month.

  The field commander of the Western Desert Force was Lieutenant General Richard O’Connor. A wiry and decisive little man, O’Connor had the 7th Armoured Division and the 4th Indian Division, which he deployed some forty kilometres south of the main Italian position at Sidi Barrani. A smaller detachment, Selby Force, took the coast road from Mersa Matruh to advance on Sidi Barrani from the west. Ships of the Royal Navy steamed along close to the coast ready to provide gunnery support. O’Connor had already concealed forward supply dumps.