The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  He needn’t have bothered. Thermopylae fell, not in three weeks, but in three days.

  George II, king of the Hellenes, offered that it was now Wavell’s “duty to take immediate steps for the re-embarkation of such portion of his army as he could.” Wavell and Wilson agreed. So, too, on April 21 did Churchill and the War Cabinet. Churchill wanted it “made clear to the Commanders-in-Chief that the main thing was to get the men away, and we should not worry about saving vehicles.” The Anzacs, Churchill told the War Cabinet, “had fought with distinction a rear-guard battle against heavy odds in the most depressing form of action for soldiers.” They have “added one more glorious page” to their history. They may have fought a glorious rearguard action, but it was for naught. The Spartans had at least delayed the Persians long enough for the Athenian fleet to ready a trap at Salamis, where it defeated the invaders, who fled for home. This time, the defenders fled. As the Tommies boarded their transports, Greek civilians showered them with flowers, as they had when the Tommies arrived. Then the ships set sail with their cargoes of defeated warriors.208

  Hitler celebrated his fifty-second birthday on April 20, ensconced in his special train Amerika, which had pulled onto a siding just outside a tunnel near Mönichkerchin in the Austrian Alps, lest any unfriendly airplanes appear. None did. The skies remained clear and the Führer enjoyed his latest success amid the splendor of an alpine spring and the accolades of a swarm of OKW big shots, parked in their train at the other end of the tunnel. Hitler, in a gesture both curious and rare for him, ordered that when the Greek army surrendered—as it must, as all his foes must—all prisoners were to be freed. This was his way of paying tribute to the inheritors of the hoplite tradition, brave warriors who happened to meet in battle modern Teutonic warriors more brave and more numerous. Hitler had not sought the battle. He believed Greece was a conflict forced upon him by the mad dog Churchill who had had the bullheaded temerity to send his meager armies to interfere with the Führer’s plans for the Balkans.209

  With the British and Greek forces flushed from the eastern flank, General Thrasyvoulos Tsakalotos, commander of the Greek First Army, saw the hopelessness of his position in the western part of the country. Tsakalotos, in parley with the commander of the SS division at his front, requested that he be allowed to surrender to the Germans, and only the Germans, for even though Tsakalotos knew his war was over, he was determined not to surrender to Mussolini’s forces who, he felt, had earned nothing. Mussolini, seeing that he was about to be denied a role in the armistice, dispatched an envoy to Berlin, where Hitler once again sated the needs of his inept ally. While Il Duce waited for the Führer’s reply, he kept up the attack against Tsakalotos, who inflicted six thousand more casualties on the Italians, this while the war in Greece (or at least the German-Greek-British part of it) had concluded days before. But in the end, Il Duce slipped in on German coattails, and the British skulked out, fleeing by ship to Crete, their baggage once again left behind.210

  Greece surrendered on April 27. The swastika flag flew that night above the Acropolis. In just three weeks Hitler had destroyed the Yugoslavs, the Greeks, and the British Expeditionary Force. Churchill had divided and re-allocated to Greece his Middle East resources, knowing full well—as he had told Hopkins in January—that Greece was likely lost. Historians have since sniped at him for the military folly of his Greek foray. Yet that is a narrow assessment. It was actually a political decision backed up (insufficiently) by military means. Britain had honored its commitments to Greece, as it had not to Czechoslovakia. In doing so Churchill displayed his bullheaded propensity for doing the right thing with the best of intentions but often in the most wrong of places and at the most wrong of times. He possessed—the Achilles in him—a keen intelligence that was sometimes overridden by improbable notions born of passion disguised as contemplation. Greece was a fitting place for Churchill to have failed so tragically.211

  Rommel, by roaring right past Tobruk and the Australians holed up within, had cut off Tobruk without a fight, as if it were a lone island fortress upon the sea that, when bypassed, became by virtue of its isolation irrelevant. Thus ended Churchill’s plan to hook out of Tobruk in order to bring Rommel to bay. In Tobruk the men of two Australian divisions, the 9th and the 7th, surrounded but for sporadic relief delivered by sea, peered from the trenches from which they had so boisterously driven the Italians just three months earlier. And there—joined by a ragtag mix of Indians, both Muslims and Hindus, free Poles, and British regulars, more than 22,000 in all—they would remain, under siege for almost eight months. Lord Haw-Haw anointed the besieged men “The Rats of Tobruk.” Trenches and barbed wire and minefields ran for thirty miles around the city. As in the Great War, any man who showed himself by day would not likely live to nightfall. Remembrances of Gallipoli began to resurface half a world away, in Canberra. Australia had sent its three best divisions for deployment to the Middle East, where it now appeared they would be sacrificed to Churchill’s desert strategy. Churchill had cited in his February address the “love for us which has flowed from the Dominions.” With their best troops holed up in the desert, and the threat of Japanese hostilities on the horizon, Australians had about run out of love for King and Empire and Churchill. Australia wanted its men home.212

  One piece of good news emerged from the desert in late April. Rommel appeared to have finally lunged a dune too far. Having pushed almost three hundred miles east from Benghazi, Rommel and his Italian helpmates, as Churchill had predicted, found themselves too far removed from their supply depots. Rommel needed Tobruk and its port in order to resupply and keep up the push to Egypt. He had scarcely any reserves left, except of sheer will and determination. Wavell was coming up short in both will and determination; he was tired, and Churchill knew it. Wavell’s forces—especially his tanks—were in worse shape than Rommel’s. By sending an army to Greece, the British had, in effect, reinforced Rommel, and had paid the price. Churchill had accepted the risks in Greece and North Africa not only because of the pledges made to Greece and because Alexandria, Cairo, and the Suez were Rommel’s ultimate objectives, but because British military prowess was under worldwide scrutiny. Churchill had American public opinion in mind when he told Eden that the fight in the desert must go on, if for no other reason than to debunk the notion “that we cannot face the Germans and that their appearance is enough to drive us back many scores of miles.” Actually, their appearance in the desert had been enough to drive the British back many hundreds of miles. The battle for Cyrenaica was over, again. And Greece was lost.213

  In America that week, Charles Lindbergh told audiences in St. Louis, New York, and Chicago that American weapons were killing innocent Europeans, that no amount of arms would gain England parity with Germany, that the British had lost not only Greece but any claim of righteousness, and their prestige, and the war.214

  In late April, Stafford Cripps finally passed along Churchill’s warning of the German troop movements to the Soviet foreign minister Molotov, who passed it along to Stalin. Stalin’s response was identical to his response to Churchill’s friendly overtures of a year earlier: he never replied. Churchill was furious, more with Cripps than with Stalin. Yet Churchill kept Cripps on as ambassador, for during Churchill’s Wilderness Years, Cripps had supported Churchill on the Hitler menace and the need to re-arm.

  By late April, Yugoslavia and Greece had been crushed, and Hitler’s roads east to the Urals stretched away open and dry through measureless fields of spring wheat greening under cobalt skies. The conquest of the Balkans had forced a postponement of Operation Barbarossa from mid-May to mid-June, a justifiable delay in the Führer’s estimation given that the defiance of the Yugoslavs could not go unpunished. The punishment took some time to administer, yes, but Hitler presumed he had all the time he needed to deal with Russia. Yet, wrote William L. Shirer, the Führer’s decision to “vent his personal spite against a small country that had dared to defy him was probably the single most catastrophic
decision of Hitler’s career.” This was so because, unless Hitler crushed the Russians by late October, Russia’s most fearsome ally would appear on the battlefield: winter.215

  Yet Hitler had not made his decision in a vacuum; he had been provoked by the British-sponsored coup in Belgrade and by the British troops assembling in Greece. It is worth noting that Royal Navy sea power underlay Britain’s ability to put an army into Greece, albeit an ally. Sea power had brought the men across the Mediterranean, and sea power took them back again. When Churchill had declared almost a year earlier that the Royal Navy could not win the war but could still lose it, he was speaking in terms of the navy’s role in defeating the U-boats. He also had reflected upon the fact that if more than a quarter million men could be gotten off the beaches of Dunkirk by ships, a quarter million men could be put on other beaches by ships. Greece had been a crushing defeat for Churchill, but the Royal Navy had demonstrated the vital role of sea power in putting thousands of men on beaches, friendly or unfriendly. If Churchill could put an army into Greece, he could someday put a larger army into France, Italy, or French North Africa.

  But in late April 1941, Churchill’s foray into Greece appeared the single most catastrophic decision of his career, a greater disaster than even his 1915 Dardanelles gambit. His Balkan strategy had ended in a complete and devastating rout. The British did not need nearly as many transports to ferry their troops from Greece as had carried them there. Jumbo Wilson made his way back to Egypt; General Sir Bernard Freyberg, commander of the New Zealanders in Greece, was ordered to prepare a defense on Crete. More than 40,000 British, New Zealand, and Australian troops were taken off the beaches between April 24 and 30, but at the cost of several hospital ships lost. Stukas sank the transport Slamat, putting seven hundred survivors into the sea. They were picked up by two destroyers, which in turn were sunk by German dive-bombers, killing almost all the survivors. Evacuees included Palestinian Jews, Yugoslavs, Greeks, and Cypriots. With more than two dozen ships lost, Admiral Cunningham’s fleet was ill prepared to defend Hitler’s next target, Crete. Greece joined Norway and Dunkirk on the list of inglorious British evacuations, the most inglorious to date, in fact, for where 90 percent of the men were gotten off the French and Norwegian beaches, almost 30 percent remained behind in Greece, killed or captured.216

  The British press, informed by the Ministry of Information of the impending news, reacted with respectful reticence. Some in the American press tried to put things in a cheery light. According to Time, “although the campaign had been lost, there were indications that after details of the Battle of Greece became known, the Greek campaign might possibly go down in history as one of the most brilliant tactical operations of British Empire arms.” Time also offered, “Although Hitler’s men have not yet been stopped, this battle showed that if ever Britons confront Germans on anything like equal terms, Britain stands a good chance of winning.” Not only was the British army—the entire British, colonial, and Dominion armies throughout the Empire—outnumbered by more than two to one by the Führer’s armies, Hitler had yet to engage any enemy on anything like equal terms.217

  Churchill had some explaining to do. The “bulwark” of Yugoslavia-Greece-Turkey had failed to materialize, and neutral Turkey now found itself facing two potential enemies—Germany and Russia—without the means to defend itself against either. Churchill, in his memoirs, insists that had Wavell only protested the depletions of his North African forces for deployment to Greece, the War Cabinet would have heeded his advice. He alluded to Wavell’s veto power when he explained the Greek debacle to the Commons. Indeed, Wavell had cabled Churchill in mid-March that it had been “very fortunate” that Eden and Dill were in Cairo when “difficult and dangerous decisions had to be taken.” Wavell added: “I am sure the decisions were the right ones, though they will bring us new hazards and anxieties.” Yet Churchill’s telegrams to Wavell leave no doubt that he put his Middle East commander in a box. Wavell could either accede to Churchill’s wishes or protest them and face the consequences, which usually took the form of a verbal bludgeoning. A favorite Churchill tactic when faced with a field officer who questioned his military judgment was to stress political goals over strictly military, thus placing the recalcitrant commander—who was not after all a political animal—in a hopeless position. Wavell was about as strong a soldier as there was, but Churchill was the stronger politician.218

  In the end, and too late, Wavell’s predictions of new hazards proved spot on. With Greece overrun, the door was now open for Stalin to swing toward the Dardanelles, or for Hitler to do likewise, or for both to move in concert. Churchill had long been “working on the Turks” to bring them in on Britain’s side, but he admitted in a cable to Cripps that the Turks “are unresponsive through fear.” Indeed, the Turks were justifiably fearful that either Hitler or Stalin, or both, would soon put an end to their sovereignty. Sound military logic demanded it. After crushing Turkey, Hitler could elect to strike into Iraq, or swing through Syria to the Suez Canal, or both. Were he to sate a modicum of Stalin’s appetite for greater influence in Bulgaria and Romania (traditional Russian spheres of influence), Hitler would find himself free to pursue his Mediterranean strategy with an ally on his eastern flank. It was the strategy that his naval planners had stressed was necessary in order to defeat Britain. He was poised to eviscerate the greatest empire in history, to succeed where Napoleon had failed. He prepared to take the next step, to the island he deemed vital to his plan: Crete. But the plan that Crete was vital to was Barbarossa. Crete was home to three RAF airfields, from which long-range British bombers could reach the Ploesti oil fields, in Romania. Hitler needed that oil to fuel his march to Moscow. He was going to Crete to fight the British, but first and foremost, he was going in order to secure his flank.219

  In early April, Mollie Panter-Downes wrote in The New Yorker: “For the past fortnight Londoners had been listening to the unnatural silence at nights and wondering what was brewing.” By mid-month they knew. The Blitz, in its third incarnation, had returned. The Luftwaffe again had England’s biggest cities dead in its sights. On April 16 more than five hundred German bombers pounded London until dawn. During the raid, Colville dashed to the American embassy in Churchill’s armored car to ask Winant’s advice on a telegram. He found the ambassador on duty, his wife by his side. The bombs, Colville wrote, “came down like hailstones.” By the next morning the city looked as devastated as had been predicted in the late thirties, when the appeasers claimed that the bombers would always get through. The Admiralty wore a new gash. St. James’s Palace, where Churchill’s parents had moved in 1880, was burning. Austin Thompson, the vicar of St. Peter’s, Eaton Square, stepped out onto the steps of his church to call people in to shelter; a bomb erased both the vicar and his church from the cityscape. Chelsea Old Church was demolished, Jermyn Street wrecked, Mayfair badly damaged. Pall Mall, Piccadilly, and lower Regent Street were heavily damaged. Mounds of glass shards lined the edges of roads. Of the more than five hundred German bombers that had made the run, only a dozen had been shot down.220

  Daylight and fair weather brought out the sightseers, including Pamela Churchill in the company of Averell Harriman, the two of them observed by Colville poking about the devastation in the Horse Guards Parade (in fact, they had just begun their love affair). Churchill made his way through the smoldering rubble in time to chair the 11:30 War Cabinet meeting, where he stunned Cadogan by noting that the damage to the Admiralty improved his view of Nelson’s Column—which had emerged undamaged—from his place at the table. Much of the capital did not share Nelson’s good fortune. By afternoon a steady, cold rain swept through the city, lending an air of desolation to the scene.221

  The map of Europe in late April looked as if the sinister octopus of newsreel fame had spewed its black ink into almost every corner of the Continent. Switzerland, Portugal, and Sweden survived only at Hitler’s pleasure; each offered him a secure diplomatic conduit to the world beyond. Switzerland
also afforded safe haven for his stolen gold, Sweden a steady flow of iron ore. Spain sat in his camp philosophically, but fearing an end to his U.S. food shipments—and sure starvation for his people—the wily Franco was still not about to grant the Wehrmacht free passage to Gibraltar, although Hitler could certainly force his way through Spain were he so inclined. But for these few exceptions to Hitler’s rule, the entire map of Europe had gone black. All, that is, but the obstinate Island.

  On April 27, Churchill sent Eden to take responsibility in the Commons for the Greek debacle. By virtue of the power traditionally vested in him, a British foreign secretary would be expected to face the Commons after such a disastrous overseas gamble, yet Churchill made sure that the Foreign Office under Eden no longer operated with the smug independence it had enjoyed for more than a century, ever since “Pam” Palmerston made the office a virtual co-equal of the Office of Prime Minister. Churchill “had no love of the foreign office” Colville wrote, and “suspected them of pursuing their own policy” and of being “defeatist and prone toward socialism.” He “mistrusted their judgment.” Eden labored at Churchill’s pleasure, and served with absolute loyalty. Despite that loyalty, Churchill allowed Eden to assume the role of archery target for the MPs, as if Eden actually had initiated the unfortunate course of events in the Balkans. Yet, at the end of the day, by a vote of 477–3, the Commons voiced its support for the government.222

  Several months later, to Colville’s astonishment, Churchill proclaimed that he “had instinctively had doubts” about the Greek venture from the beginning. The Greeks, Churchill told Colville, should have been advised to make the best terms they could with Hitler. He claimed blame for the fiasco lay with the War Cabinet and especially with Dill, whom, Colville noted, Churchill “has now got his knife right into.” Colville, incredulous at Churchill’s claims, wrote of the incident as if he doubted his own powers of recollection, such were Churchill’s powers of persuasion. But on April 27, Churchill would have been hard-pressed to blame the government for the Greek tragedy, for everybody knew quite well that the prime minister was the government. That evening, in his first radio address since his “Give us the tools” speech of February 9, he took to the airwaves to explain as best he could this latest in the series of damnable events.223