War of Shadows

by Gershom Gorenberg

  The dangers he faced multiplied, and the directions from which they could come. After Germany and Russia divided Poland, Wavell got a message from the Imperial General Staff about the potential for Germany and Russia to launch a joint offensive south through the Caucasus toward either Egypt or the oil fields of Iraq. On the eve of Italy entering the war, Wavell wondered whether he would have to defend the Greek island of Crete. He expected an attack on Malta. The rock island jutted from the sea, like an eastern sister of Gibraltar, in the straits between Sicily and Tunisia. Malta was both dangerous and tempting to the Italians: its narrow, deep harbor served the Royal Navy, its airfields the Royal Air Force.11

  Wavell’s forces had not grown at the same pace as the threats. In January 1940, the First Cavalry Division had shipped out from England to Palestine. It was the last unit in the British army still using horses, and the horses came along. It would be summer before the division finally began its metamorphosis into an armored force.12

  Weaponry was in short supply throughout Wavell’s command. The arms from Britain’s factories were going almost entirely to the British Expeditionary Force in France. Then came the evacuation from Dunkirk. The British left behind—in Churchill’s listing—“7,000 tons of ammunition, 90,000 rifles, 2,300 [artillery] guns, 82,000 vehicles,” and more.13 After that loss, the armies in Britain itself desperately needed supplies to face the expected German invasion.

  When British war correspondent Alan Moorehead came to Cairo in late spring, he found that staff officers at headquarters had not yet woken up to the war. “No one worked from one till five-thirty or six, and even then work trickled through the comfortable offices borne along in a tide of gossip and Turkish coffee and pungent cigarettes.” The long siesta break was understandable, perhaps, given the “roasting afternoon heat,” but the heat didn’t keep the officers from their afternoon polo matches. “Slowly, painfully, reluctantly”—after the first air-raid sirens in Cairo, after the French commanders in Lebanon and Syria lined up with Vichy, after the first skirmishes on the Libyan border, “the Middle East dragged itself out of its apathy.” By “Middle East,” he meant the British there, especially the staff officers whom Wavell inherited.

  The numbers were absurdly imbalanced. Lampson’s figure of 250,000 Italian troops in Libya was not the highest estimate. Wavell had 36,000 in Egypt and less than 28,000 in Palestine. The Seventh Armored Division, deployed in the Western Desert of Egypt, was supposed to have 220 medium tanks. It actually had only 65 and was short on spare parts. Wavell had been given a division of the Indian army, the colonial army of British India made up of Indian soldiers under British and Indian officers. The Indian division lacked the artillery it was supposed to have. Moorehead got word that the Australian division training in Palestine was so ill-equipped that “they were using sticks tied with red flags as anti-tank guns and sticks tied with blue flags as Brens.” The New Zealand division from which Bagnold drew his volunteers reached Egypt without its weaponry, which had gone down at sea.

  Wavell’s initial strategy was to bluff, to “make one tank look like a squadron, make a raid look like an advance.” He sent small units on short stabs into Libya at night to attack, blow up munition dumps, hold a position for a few hours or days, and retreat.14 These operations took place just across the border with Egypt. Bagnold’s Boys would expand the realm of surprise much further into Libya. They were a gift that fit Wavell’s desires and exceeded his hopes.

  WAVELL DID NOT expect bluff to work forever. On the last day of July 1940, in the war cabinet in London, Secretary of State for War Anthony Eden read a telegram from the general saying that the Italians looked ready for a major offensive. Wavell thought trying to hold the Egyptian coastal village of Sollum near the Libyan border would be too costly. “The lack of equipment in the Middle East now necessitated a withdrawal,” at least as far as Sidi Barani, fifty miles further back, Wavell warned. Eden told the war cabinet that a convoy with ammunition would leave Britain for Egypt in a few days, possibly also carrying “some armored cars” and spare parts. Beyond that meager commitment, he said, “it was impossible at the present time to spare any considerable reinforcement in the way of tanks, etc.”15

  In that “present time,” Britain was preparing for German landings on its beaches. In mid-July Eden summoned General Alan Brooke and appointed him commander in chief of the Home Forces, responsible for the defense of all Britain. “The idea of failure at this stage of the war is too ghastly to contemplate,” Brooke wrote in his diary. Brooke was violating the security rule against generals keeping diaries. But he longed to write letters to his wife, which would have been a greater violation. He was terribly alone. The terror of the job was that his forces and supplies were insufficient, and that he could never show his own fear to anyone. Brooke visited Churchill at the Cabinet War Rooms, an underground bunker near 10 Downing Street, “where I may have to be near the PM if an invasion starts,” and found him “full of the most marvellous courage.” Inspecting his units could be less inspiring. “Found it in a lamentable backward state of training… and deficient of officers,” Brooke said of one division.

  Wavell flew home. Churchill wanted to hear him in person. Brooke left a meeting with Eden and Wavell on August 10 dismayed by the decisions made. He’d been forced to part with three tank regiments. Those regiments, he’d note, constituted “a large proportion of my total armored forces” for defending Britain against the expected invasion.16

  Let us note the timing: two weeks after Eden said that tanks could not possibly be spared, Churchill himself told the war cabinet that, “now that we were so much stronger” at home, the regiments could be sent to Egypt. Without them, he said “we might find ourselves in serious trouble in the Middle East.”17

  Whatever had been churned out of British factories or arrived from America in that brief time—however confident Churchill was that the combined strength of the Royal Navy and stormy Channel weather would defeat an invasion before it began—the real meaning of the decision was that Egypt and the Middle East were worth taking a potentially fateful risk to defend. They were the keystone in the long arch of the empire. Churchill believed passionately, without qualms, in the empire, in the right and duty of Britain to rule over supposedly lesser peoples around much of the globe.18 But the reasons for defending Egypt were more than emotional or ideological. They were also strategic. The Middle East was what still gave Britain a hold on the Mediterranean and a chance to threaten Italy and Germany from the south. The Suez Canal and the oil fields of Iraq and southern Persia were prizes that had to be kept from the Axis.

  Yet sending reinforcements was still the kind of choice whose weight is known only to leaders in time of war. “The decision to give this blood-transfusion while we braced ourselves to meet a mortal danger was at once awful and right,” Churchill would write after the war.19 It was a wager, with the very existence of Britain as the stakes.

  And however much it was made in Britain’s imperial interests, however incidental or irrelevant the millions of people who actually lived in the Middle East were to the decision, it meant that Britain would seek to prevent their falling under Axis rule. It was a wager that changed the shape of the war, and of the Middle East then and after.

  THE EUROPEAN WAR became a world war in another way. For every action in one place, there were distant unequal reactions.20 Hitler did not intend to bring America’s welders, riveters, and steelyard workers into the war. But he did. In mid-May, as Germany’s tanks crossed from Belgium into France, Franklin Roosevelt spoke before a joint session of Congress and asked for the spectacular sum of $1.2 billion in emergency military funds. Oceans no longer made America safe, he said. Airplanes could carry war to its shores at three hundred miles per hour. If the Germans seized Greenland, bombers taking off from there could reach New England in six hours. Instead of building twelve thousand warplanes a year, he said, America must build at least fifty thousand. Every arms factory and shipyard had to work twenty-four hours a
day. “Nations that were not ready and were unable to get ready found themselves overrun by the enemy,” Roosevelt said.21

  Churchill cabled, pleading for weaponry from America’s stores. Roosevelt agreed, but his old friend and isolationist secretary of war, Henry Woodring, stonewalled.22 (In their personal dispute, they acted out the national argument: rearmament had wall-to-wall support; helping Britain divided the country.) The army chief of staff, General George Marshall, solved the problem by defining the supplies in US armories that the British needed as suddenly being surplus, and then selling it to two companies that sold it to Britain at cost. Two days after the Dunkirk evacuation, ships were carrying half a million “surplus” rifles, 130 million rounds of ammunition, 900 howitzers, and much more from America to Britain. Tanks were missing from the cargo. America didn’t have enough of those, and wasn’t yet making enough.

  Mussolini did not intend to give another forceful shove on the rudder of American policy. But he did. “The hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor,” Roosevelt declared in a speech the day Italy declared war, expecting an Italian invasion of France. “We will extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation,” he promised.23

  A week later, he appointed Frank Knox, who’d been the Republican candidate for vice president in 1936, as secretary of the navy. Roosevelt asked for Secretary of War Woodring’s resignation, and replaced him with Republican Henry Stimson, who’d been Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state. On the eve of their appointments, both Knox and Stimson had called for instituting a military draft and increasing aid to Britain. In effect, the president had created a bipartisan war cabinet, but without the Republican Party’s assent.

  That week Life magazine’s lead illustrated feature was headlined “This Is How the U.S. May Be Invaded.” The scenario, described as beginning in July 1941, opened with Japanese aircraft carriers launching a surprise attack on the Panama Canal Zone. It continued with an Axis landing in New Jersey, and concluded with a drawing captioned, “U.S. envoys sue for peace in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall before a Fascist tribunal seated before a Nazi flag.”24

  The war changed Roosevelt’s personal course as well. He was nearing the end of his second term, as much as any president had ever served. He’d had a minor heart attack, though it was kept even more secret than his inability to walk. Early in the year, he’d told Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau that he wouldn’t run for reelection unless “things get very, very much worse in Europe.” Now things were entirely worse. “With deep-dyed anti–New Dealers turning into Third-Termers overnight,” an unsigned Life article said, “his chances of reelection rose rapidly.”25 In July, at a Democratic convention orchestrated to show that the party had risen as one to beg him to run again, he was nominated for another term.

  “We are all agreed that Roosevelt seems determined to get us into the war as soon as he can,” Charles Lindbergh wrote in his diary, after a meeting in Washington with isolationist members of Congress. At a rally in Chicago, Lindbergh was the headline speaker. The organizers were disappointed they’d only half-filled the seventy-five-thousand-seat Soldier Field stadium, but Lindbergh’s speech was broadcast on national radio. The famous aviator mocked Roosevelt’s claim that an air force could use Greenland, “with its Arctic climate [and] its mountainous terrain,” as a base. (America would prove him wrong.) He dismissed the idea that the United States should take a side in the war, or that there was any difference between the sides. “In the past, we have dealt with a Europe dominated by England and France. In the future we may have to deal with a Europe dominated by Germany,” Lindbergh declared. What mattered for America was to stop giving “grandstand advice to Britain,” to stop making “accusations of aggression and barbarism on the part of Germany,” and to stay out of European affairs.

  On September 4, Lindbergh was back in Washington for a meeting with his closest congressional ally, Republican representative James Van Zandt, and a Yale law student named R. Douglas Stuart. That day Stuart founded the America First Committee to unite the isolationist movement, for which Lindbergh would become the spokesman. Lindbergh listed one other person at the meeting at Van Zandt’s office: Major Bonner Frank Fellers of the US Army.26

  It was Fellers’s last day in the States before shipping out to Madrid, where he would become assistant military attaché. In a way, he was finally about to begin his career.27

  Fellers was forty-five. He still looked trim, but his hairline had receded so far that “my forehead has practically crept up to the back of my neck,” as he’d written to a friend. In his letters, he took himself lightly. In person, he relaxed people into saying more than they expected or really should have. In his reports, he stated his views with omniscient certainty. He’d grown up on a Midwestern farm, which was common for army officers of the day. He’d transferred to West Point from a Quaker college, a background that was anything but common. His curiosity, and his ambition, needed more space than Indiana and Illinois allowed. He got his commission on November 1, 1918, a moment before the armistice, and spent twenty-two years in the peacetime army as a lieutenant and captain, only making major that summer of 1940. This pace showed his unusual drive: he’d advanced three ranks in the time it took the average US Army officer to rise one step in the doldrums of the interwar years. In the peacetime army, old officers neither died nor faded away; they stayed and stood in the way of young officers.28

  Assigned to Manila in 1922, Fellers took leave, sailed to Japan, fell in love with the country, and sent a report to the assistant chief of staff for military intelligence noting that he’d spotted machine-gun nests guarding the railway tunnels, that target practice was held four times yearly for the shore guns protecting Kobe harbor, and that schoolboys went on hikes in squad formation led by army officers. In the years that he spent stateside, he collected friends, including ex-president Herbert Hoover, celebrity journalist Frazier Hunt, and a top diplomat at the Soviet embassy. In the late 1930s Fellers traveled from Paris across the length of the Soviet Union to Japan and then back again. His reports quoted Russian scientists, a Soviet general, Ukrainian peasants, a Czech officer, and a high Nazi official. He was invited back to West Point—to teach English. His prose, it seemed, won more attention than his strategic analysis.

  In March 1940 Fellers wrote a paper against America entering the war. “The bitter criticism in America of Herr Hitler is strongly tinged with British and Jewish propaganda,” he wrote. He decried immigration of Jewish refugees, a view that was unremarkable in the officer class. He attacked the ban on Japanese immigration, an exceptional position when “scientific racism” and the yellow peril were accepted truths in that class.29 He went to the Republican convention in 1940 and favored isolationist candidate Robert Taft. He despised Roosevelt. But the mission to Madrid meant that he now was assigned full-time to military intelligence. Ultimately, it meant that Bonner Fellers would be one of Roosevelt’s valued sources on a war that Fellers had opposed as fervently as Lindbergh did.

  ACCOUNTS OF THE British bombing raid on Tobruk on June 18 mention only one plane shot down by Italian antiaircraft crews: an Italian bomber, piloted by Italo Balbo. An aviator whose international fame rivaled Lindbergh’s, Balbo was also the governor and military commander of Libya, and was under Mussolini’s orders to invade Egypt. He was returning from a reconnaissance flight and died in the crash.

  Lindbergh’s fame came from crossing the Atlantic alone. Balbo’s fame came from the spectacle of group flight. His greatest exploit was leading twenty-five Italian flying boats together, in formation, across the Atlantic. That was in 1933, when he headed the Italian air force. The extravaganza expressed the Fascist ethic of turning individuals into cogs in the machine of the nation. One leg of the journey took them from Iceland through the fogs of Greenland to Labrador. When they landed in Lake Michigan off the Chicago shore, the mayor proclaimed Balbo Day. In New York, Balbo and his pilots got a ticker-tape parade. President Roosevelt in
vited him for lunch.

  Back home, a jealous Mussolini appointed Balbo to the Libya post, a prestigious exile. Balbo was a prominent Fascist, one of the leaders of the March of Rome that had put Mussolini in power. Now, though, he was much too popular for Mussolini’s tastes. As time passed he made himself even less popular in Rome by criticizing the alliance with Germany, and by dissenting from Mussolini’s turn to anti-Semitism.

  The latter policy was partly imitation of Hitler. But in Mussolini’s own description, it followed logically from the conquest of Ethiopia, where he enacted race laws separating whites and blacks. What happened in the colony became a prelude to what happened in Italy. The 1938 Manifesto of the Race, signed by leading scientists, defined Italians as Aryans and declared Jews biologically inferior and unassimilable. Until that moment, Italian Jews may have been the most assimilated in Europe; many were members of the Fascist Party. The racial laws that followed excluded them from the party, from schools, professions, and marriage to Aryans.

  The laws were supposed to apply equally in Libya, where a fifth of Tripoli, the largest town, was Jewish. So was 5 percent of Benghazi, the largest town in Cyrenaica, the eastern part of the colony. Balbo’s own policy had been the opposite. He had sought to force the local Jews to become more Italian, with measures that included public whipping of those who closed their stores on Saturdays. He avoided implementing many of the race decrees. He was a Fascist of an obsolete variety; he had not kept up.30

  All this led to reports that downing Balbo “may or may not have been accidental.”31 Evidence of a plot never surfaced. His death, however, did remove him as an obstacle to implementing Rome’s policies against Libya’s population.

  Which is a reminder: Libya had a population. Desert war is often described as purer than war in other lands, as being more like a sea battle, involving only combatants maneuvering in uninhabited space. Yet there were inhabited islands in the ocean of sand. In fertile areas along the coast, there were entire archipelagoes. Tobruk was a town in June 1940. Benghazi was a small, flourishing city with elegant avenues. Civilians died when bombs fell, just as they did in Europe. And for those who lived, the battles determined who ruled them.