The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  Since the Italians were known to have many agents in Cairo, including in King Farouk’s entourage, secrecy was hard to maintain. So, to give the impression of having nothing on his mind, General Wavell, accompanied by his wife and daughters, went to the races at Gezira just before the battle. That evening he gave a party at the Turf Club.

  When Operation Compass began early on 9 December, the British found that they had achieved complete surprise. The Indian Division, spearheaded by the Matilda tanks of the 7th Royal Tank Regiment, took the main Italian positions right up to the edge of Sidi Barrani in less than thirty-six hours. A detachment from the 7th Armoured Division, striking north-west, cut the coast road between Sidi Barrani and Buqbuq, while its main force attacked the Catanzaro Division in front of Buqbuq. The 4th Indian Division took Sidi Barrani by the end of 10 December, and four divisions of Italians in the area surrendered the next day. Buqbuq was also captured and the Catanzaro Division destroyed. Only the Cirene Division, forty kilometres to the south, managed to escape by pulling back rapidly towards the Halfaya Pass.

  O’Connor’s troops had won a stunning victory. At a cost of 624 casualties, they had captured 38,300 prisoners, 237 guns and seventy-three tanks. O’Connor wanted to push on with the next phase, but he had to wait. Most of the 4th Indian Division was transferred to the Sudan to face the Duke of Aosta’s forces in Abyssinia. As a replacement, he received the 16th Australian Infantry Brigade, the advance formation of the 6th Australian Division.

  Bardia, a port just inside Libya, was the main objective. On Mussolini’s orders, Marshal Graziani concentrated six divisions around it. O’Connor’s infantry attacked on 3 January 1941, supported by their remaining Matildas. After three days, the Italians surrendered to the Australian 6th Division, and 45,000 men, 462 field guns and 129 tanks were captured. Their commander General Annibale Bergonzoli, known as ‘Electric Whiskers’ because of his startling facial hair, managed to escape westwards. The attackers had lost only 130 dead and 326 wounded.

  Meanwhile the 7th Armoured Division had charged ahead to cut off Tobruk. Two Australian brigades hurried on from Bardia to complete the siege. Tobruk also surrendered, offering up another 25,000 prisoners, 208 guns, eighty-seven armoured vehicles and fourteen Italian army prostitutes who were sent back to a convent in Alexandria where they languished miserably for the rest of the war. O’Connor was horrified to hear that Churchill’s offer to Greece of ground forces as well as aircraft put the rest of his offensive at risk. Fortunately, Metaxas refused. He felt that anything less than nine divisions risked provoking the Germans without offering any hope of holding them off.

  The collapse of the Italian Empire meanwhile continued in East Africa. On 19 January, with the 4th Indian Division ready in the Sudan, Major General William Platt’s force advanced against the isolated and unwieldy army of the Duke of Aosta in Abyssinia. Two days later the Emperor Haile Selassie returned to join in the liberation of his country, accompanied by Major Orde Wingate. And in the south, a force under Major General Alan Cunningham, the younger brother of the admiral, attacked from Kenya. Aosta’s army, crippled by a lack of supplies, could not resist for very long.

  In Libya, O’Connor decided to go all out to trap the bulk of the Italian armies in the coastal bulge of Cyrenaica by sending the 7th Armoured Division straight across it to the Gulf of Sirte south of Benghazi. But many of its tanks were unserviceable, and the supply situation was desperate, with lines of communication stretching over 1,300 kilometres back to Cairo. O’Connor ordered the division to halt for the moment in front of a strong Italian position at Mechili, south of the Jebel Akhdar massif. But then armoured car patrols and RAF aircraft spotted signs of a major retreat. Marshal Graziani was starting to evacuate the whole of Cyrenaica.

  On 4 February, the race which cavalry regiments called the ‘Benghazi Handicap’ began in earnest. Led by the 11th Hussars, the 7th Armoured Division pushed across the inhospitable terrain to cut off the remains of the Italian Tenth Army before they could escape. The 6th Australian Division pursued the retreating forces round the coast, and entered Benghazi on 6 February.

  On hearing that the Italians were evacuating Benghazi, Major General Michael Creagh of the 7th Armoured Division sent a flying column on ahead to cut them off at Beda Fomm. This force, the 11th Hussars, 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade and three batteries of the Royal Horse Artillery, reached the road just in time. Facing 20,000 Italians desperate to escape, they feared that they would be overwhelmed by weight of numbers. But just as it looked as if they would be engulfed on the landward side, the light tanks of the 7th Hussars appeared. They charged the left flank of the Italian mass in line abreast, causing alarm and confusion. Fighting died down only as the sun set.

  The battle recommenced after dawn as more Italian tanks arrived. But the British flying column also began to receive support as more squadrons caught up from the 7th Armoured Division. Over eighty Italian tanks were destroyed as they tried to break through. Meanwhile, the Australians advancing from Benghazi increased the pressure from behind. After a last attempt to escape had failed on the morning of 7 February, General Bergonzoli surrendered to Lieutenant Colonel John Combe of the 11th Hussars. ‘Electric Whiskers’ was the surviving senior officer of the Tenth Army.

  Exhausted and miserable Italian soldiers sat en masse, huddled under the rain, as far as the eye could see. One of Combe’s subalterns, when asked over the radio how many prisoners the 11th Hussars had taken, is reputed to have answered with true cavalry insouciance: ‘Oh, several acres, I would think.’ Five days later, Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel landed in Tripoli, followed by the advance elements of what was to be known as the Afrika Korps.

  10

  Hitler’s Balkan War

  MARCH–MAY 1941

  Once Hitler saw that his attempts to defeat Britain had failed, he concentrated on the main objective of his lifetime. But before invading the Soviet Union he was determined to secure both his flanks. He began negotiations with Finland, but the Balkans in the south were more important. The oilfields of Ploesti would provide the fuel for his panzer divisions, while the Romanian army of Marshal Ion Antonescu would be a source of manpower. Since the Soviet Union also regarded south-eastern Europe as belonging to its sphere of influence, Hitler knew that he needed to act carefully to avoid provoking Stalin before he was ready.

  Mussolini’s disastrous attack on Greece had achieved precisely what Hitler feared, a British military presence in south-eastern Europe. In April 1939, Britain had given Greece a guarantee of support, and General Metaxas had called for help accordingly. The British offered fighters–the first squadrons of the Royal Air Force crossed to Greece in the second week of November 1940–and British troops landed on Crete to free the Greek troops there for service on the Albanian front. Hitler, increasingly afraid that the British would use Greek airfields to attack the Ploesti oilfields, asked the Bulgarian government to set up early-warning observation posts along their border. But Metaxas insisted that the British should not attack the Ploesti oilwells, which would provoke Nazi Germany. His country could deal with the Italians, but not with the Wehrmacht.

  Hitler, however, had now begun to consider his own invasion of Greece, partly to end the Italian humiliation, which reflected badly on the Axis as a whole, but above all to protect Romania. On 12 November, he ordered the OKW to plan for an invasion through Bulgaria to secure the northern Aegean coastline. This was given the codename Operation Marita. The Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine soon persuaded him to include the whole of mainland Greece in the plan.

  Marita would follow the completion of Operation Felix, the attack on Gibraltar in the spring of 1941, and the occupation of north-west Africa with two divisions. Fearing that the French colonies might defect from Vichy, Hitler ordered contingency planning for Operation Attila, the seizure of French possessions and the French fleet. These actions were to be carried out with great ruthlessness if opposed.

  With Gibraltar as the key to the British presence in t
he Mediterranean, Hitler decided that he would send Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, to see Franco. He was to obtain agreement for the transit of German troops down Spain’s Mediterranean coastal road in February. But Hitler’s confidence that Franco would finally agree to enter the war on the Axis side proved over-optimistic. The Caudillo made it ‘clearly understood that he could enter the war only when Britain was facing immediate collapse’. Hitler was determined not to give up on this project, but, temporarily thwarted in the western Mediterranean, he focused his attention on Barbarossa’s southern flank.

  On 5 December 1940, Hitler asserted that he intended to send only two Luftwaffe Gruppen to Sicily and southern Italy to attack British naval forces in the eastern Mediterranean. At that stage, he was against the idea of sending ground troops to support the Italians in Libya. But in the second week of January 1941 the devastating success of O’Connor’s advance prompted second thoughts. He cared little for Libya, but if Mussolini were overthrown as a consequence, it would represent a major blow to the Axis and give heart to his enemies.

  The Luftwaffe’s presence in Sicily was increased to include the whole of X Fliegerkorps, and the 5th Light Division was ordered to prepare for North Africa. But by 3 February it became clear with O’Connor’s dramatic victory that Tripolitania was also at risk. Hitler ordered the despatch of a corps to be commanded by Generalleutnant Rommel, whom he knew well from the Poland campaign and France. The force was to be called the Deutsches Afrika Korps and the project given the codename Operation Sunflower.

  Mussolini had no choice but to agree to Rommel being given effective command over Italian forces. After meetings in Rome on 10 February, Rommel flew to Tripoli two days later. He wasted no time in tearing up Italian plans for the defence of the city. The front would be held much further forward at Sirte until his troops had unloaded, but that, he soon discovered, would take time. The 5th Light Division would not be ready for action until early April.

  In the meantime, X Fliegerkorps on Sicily pounded the island of Malta, especially airfields and the naval base of Valletta, and attacked British convoys running the Mediterranean gauntlet. The Kriegsmarine also tried to persuade the Italian navy to attack the British Mediterranean Fleet, but their arguments had little effect until the end of March.

  Preparations for Operation Marita, the invasion of Greece, continued through the first three months of 1941. Formations of the Twelfth Army under Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm List moved through Hungary into Romania. Both countries had anti-Communist regimes and had become Axis allies as a result of energetic diplomacy. Bulgaria also had to be won over so that German forces could cross its territory. Stalin watched these developments with deep suspicion. He was not convinced by the Germans’ assurances that their presence was aimed only against the British, but he could do little.

  The British, all too aware of the German military build-up on the lower Danube, decided to act. Churchill, for reasons of British credibility and in the hope of impressing the Americans, ordered Wavell to abandon any thoughts of advancing into Tripolitania and to send three divisions to Greece instead. Metaxas had just died of throat cancer, and the new prime minister Alexandros Koryzis, faced with the reality of the German threat, was now ready to accept any help, however small. Neither a lugubrious Wavell nor Admiral Cunningham felt that this expeditionary force could hope to hold off the Germans, but since Churchill believed that British honour was at stake and Eden was utterly convinced that it was the right course, on 8 March they had to concede. In fact over half the 58,000-strong force sent to fulfil the British guarantee to Greece consisted of Australians and New Zealanders. They were the formations most readily at hand, but this was to produce a good deal of Antipodean resentment later.

  The commander of the expeditionary force was General Sir Maitland Wilson, known as ‘Jumbo’ because of his enormous height and girth. Wilson had no illusions about the battle ahead. After an over-optimistic briefing by the British minister in Athens, Sir Michael Palairet, he was heard to say: ‘Well, I don’t know about that. I’ve already ordered my maps of the Peloponnese.’ This, the southernmost part of the Greek mainland, was where his troops would have to be taken off in the event of defeat. The Greek adventure was seen by senior officers as likely to be ‘another Norway’. More junior Australian and New Zealand officers, on the other hand, enthusiastically spread out maps of the Balkans to study invasion routes up through Yugoslavia towards Vienna.

  Wilson’s W Force prepared to face a German invasion from Bulgaria. It took up positions along the Aliakmon Line which ran partly along the river of that name and diagonally from the Yugoslav border down to the Aegean coast north of Mount Olympus. Major General Bernard Freyberg’s 2nd New Zealand Division was on the right and the 6th Australian Division on the left, with the British 1st Armoured Brigade out in front as a screen. The Allied troops remembered those days of waiting as idyllic. Although the nights were cold, the weather was glorious, wild flowers covered the mountains in profusion and Greek villagers could not have been more generous and welcoming.

  While British and Dominion troops in Greece waited for the German attack, the Kriegsmarine put pressure on the Italian navy to attack the British fleet to divert attention away from the transports carrying Rommel’s troops to North Africa. The Italians would be supported by X Fliegerkorps in southern Italy and were encouraged to take revenge for the Royal Navy’s bombardment of Genoa.

  On 26 March, the Italian navy put to sea with the battleship Vittorio Veneto, six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and thirteen destroyers. Cunningham, warned of this threat through an Ultra intercept of Luftwaffe traffic, deployed available warships accordingly: his own Force A, with the battleships HMS Warspite, Valiant and Barham, the aircraft carrier HMS Formidable and nine destroyers; and Force B, with four light cruisers and four destroyers.

  On 28 March, an Italian seaplane from the Vittorio Veneto sighted the cruisers of Force B. Admiral Angelo Iachino’s squadron set off in pursuit. He had no idea of Cunningham’s presence east of Crete and south of Cape Matapan. Torpedo aircraft from HMS Formidable hit the Vittorio Veneto, yet it managed to escape. A second wave damaged the heavy cruiser Pola, bringing it to a halt. Other Italian ships were ordered to help and this gave the British their chance. Devastating gunnery sank three heavy cruisers, inluding the Pola, and two destroyers. Although Cunningham was deeply frustrated by the escape of the Vittorio Veneto, the Battle of Cape Matapan represented a great psychological victory for the Royal Navy.

  The German attack on Greece was planned to begin early in April, but an unexpected crisis exploded in Yugoslavia. Hitler had been trying to win over the country, and especially its regent, Prince Paul, as part of his diplomatic offensive to secure the Balkans before Operation Barbarossa. Yet resentment had been growing among the Yugoslavs, largely due to heavy-handed German attempts to obtain all their raw materials. Hitler urged the Belgrade government to join the Tripartite Pact, and on 4 March he and Ribbentrop put heavy pressure on Prince Paul.

  The Yugoslav government delayed, well aware of growing opposition within the country, but the demands from Berlin became too insistent. Finally, Prince Paul and representatives of the government signed the pact on 25 March in Vienna. Two days later, Serbian officers seized power in Belgrade. Prince Paul was removed as regent and the young King Peter II placed on the throne. Anti-German demonstrations in Belgrade included an attack on the car of the German minister. Hitler, according to his interpreter, was left ‘gasping for revenge’. He became convinced that the British had a hand in the coup. Ribbentrop was immediately called out of a meeting with the Japanese foreign minister, to whom he had just suggested that Japanese forces should seize Singapore. Hitler then ordered the OKH to prepare an invasion. There would be no ultimatum or declaration of war. The Luftwaffe was to attack Belgrade as soon as possible. The operation would be called Strafgericht–Retribution.

  Hitler came to see the coup in Belgrade of 27 March as ‘final proof’ of the ‘con
spiracy of the Jewish Anglo-Saxon warmongers and the Jewish men in power in the Moscow Bolshevik headquarters’. He even managed to convince himself that it was a vile betrayal of the German–Soviet friendship pact, which he had already planned to break.

  Although the Yugoslav government had declared Belgrade an open city, Strafgericht went ahead on Palm Sunday, 6 April. Over two days, the Fourth Luftflotte destroyed most of the city. Civilian casualties are impossible to assess. Estimates vary between 1,500 dead and 30,000, with the probable figure roughly halfway between. The Yugoslav government hurriedly signed a pact with the Soviet Union, but Stalin did nothing because he was afraid of provoking Hitler.

  While the bombing of Belgrade went ahead that Sunday morning with 500 aircraft, the German minister in Athens informed the Greek prime minister that Wehrmacht forces would invade Greece because of the presence of British troops on its soil. Koryzis answered that Greece would defend itself. Just before dawn on 6 April, List’s Twelfth Army began simultaneous offensives south into Greece and west into Yugoslavia. ‘At 05.30 hours the attack on Yugoslavia began,’ a Gefreiter in the 11th Panzer Division recorded in his diary. ‘The panzers started up. Light artillery opened fire, heavy artillery came into action. Reconnaissance aircraft appeared, then 40 Stukas bombed the positions, the barracks caught fire… a magnificent sight at daybreak.’

  Early the same morning, the famously arrogant General der Flieger Wolfram von Richthofen, the commander of VIII Fliegerkorps, went to watch the attack of the 5th Mountain Division by the Rupel Pass near the Yugoslav border and see his Stukas in action. ‘At the command post at 04.00 hours,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘As it became light, the artillery began. Powerful fireworks. Then the bombs. The thought arises whether we are not paying the Greeks too much of a compliment.’ But the 5th Mountain Division received a nasty surprise and Richthofen’s aircraft bombed their own troops by mistake. The Greeks proved much more tenacious than he had expected.