by Max Hastings
The desert fiasco brought out both the worst and best in Churchill. He offered absurd tactical suggestions. He chafed at the navy’s failure to bombard Tripoli, Rommel’s supply base—an intolerable risk beneath the German air threat. On land, he urged foolishly: “General Wavell should regain unit ascendancy238 over the enemy and destroy his small raiding parties, instead of our own being harassed and hunted by them. Enemy patrols must be attacked on every occasion, and our own patrols should be used with audacity. Small British parties in armoured cars, or mounted on motor-cycles, or, if occasion offers, infantry, should not hesitate to attack individual tanks with bombs and bombards, as is planned for the defence of Britain.” By contrast, the prime minister was at his best in overruling objections from the Chiefs of Staff, and accepting the huge risk of dispatching a convoy, code-named Operation Tiger, direct through the Mediterranean to Egypt, instead of by the much safer but longer Cape route, with reinforcements of tanks.
Dill returned from Cairo steeped in gloom. John Kennedy, the director of military operations (DMO), sought to revive his spirits, but the CIGS dismissed reassuring words about the outlook. “I think it is desperate239. I am terribly tired.” The next day Kennedy noted, “CIGS is miserable240 & feels he has wrecked the Empire.” That evening, Kennedy, at dinner with a friend, discussed possible evacuation of the entire Middle East. “On balance it was doubtful if we gained more than we lost by staying there. Prestige and effect on Americans perhaps the biggest arguments for staying.” Like most senior soldiers, Kennedy was appalled by events in Greece, and by Britain’s role in the debacle: “Chiefs of staff overawed & influenced241 enormously by Winston’s overpowering personality … I hate my title now, for I suppose outsiders think I really ‘direct’ oper[atio]ns & am partly responsible for the foolish & disastrous strategy which our armies are following.” The self-confidence of Britain’s senior soldiers was drained by successive battlefield defeats. They felt themselves incapable of opposing Churchill, but likewise unable to support many of his decisions with conviction. They saw themselves bearing responsibility for losing the war, while offering no alternative proposals for winning it. Left to their own devices, the generals would have accepted battle only on the most favourable terms. The prime minister, however, believed that operational passivity must spell doom for his hopes both of preventing the British people from succumbing to inertia and persuading the Americans to belligerence.
Following the suicide of the Greek prime minister, Alexander Korizis, on April 18, the will of his nation’s leadership collapsed. In London, Robert Menzies wrote after a War Cabinet on April 24, 1941: “I am afraid of a disaster242, and understand less than ever why Dill and Wavell advised that the Greek adventure had military merits. Of the moral merits I have no doubt. Better Dunkirk than Poland or Czechoslovakia.” Menzies added two days later: “War cabinet. Winston says ‘We will lose only 5000 men in Greece.’ We will in fact lose at least 15000. W is a great man, but he is more addicted to wishful thinking every day.”
Towards the end of April, a young soldier on leave in Lancashire who was visiting housewife Nella Last got up and left the living room as the family tuned to a broadcast by the prime minister. Mrs. Last said: “Aren’t you going to listen to Winston Churchill?”243 Her guest demurred, as she recorded in her diary: “An ugly twist came to his mouth and he said ‘No, I’ll leave that for all those who like dope.’ I said, ‘Jack, you’re liverish, pull yourself together. We believe in Churchill—one must believe in someone.’ He said darkly, ‘Well, everyone is not so struck.’” Mrs. Last, like the overwhelming majority of British people, yearned to sustain her faith in the prime minister. Yet it seemed hard to do so, on such an evening as this: “Did I sense a weariness and … foggy bewilderment as to the future in Winston’s speech—or was it all in my tired head, I wonder? Anyway, I got no inspiration—no little banner to carry. Instead I felt I got a glimpse of a horror and carnage that we have not yet thought of … More and more do I think it is the ‘end of the world’—of the old world, anyway.” The poor woman acknowledged that she was unhappy and frightened. “Its funny how sick one can get, and not able to eat—just through … fear.” Harold Nicolson, parliamentary under-secretary at the Ministry of Information, wrote: “All that the country really wants244 is some assurance of how victory is to be achieved. They are bored by talks about the righteousness of our cause and our eventual triumph. What they want are facts indicating how we are to beat the Germans. I have no idea at all how we are to give them those facts.”
In Greece, the retreating army was much moved by the manner of its parting from the stricken people: “We were nearly the last British troops they would see and the Germans might be at our heels,” wrote Lt. Col. R. P. Waller of his artillery unit’s withdrawal through Athens, “yet cheering, clapping crowds lined the streets and pressed about our cars … Girls and men leapt on the running boards to kiss or shake hands with the grimy, weary gunners. They threw flowers to us and ran beside us crying ‘Come back—You must come back again—Goodbye—Good luck.’” The Germans took the Greek capital on April 27. They had secured the country with a mere 5,000 casualties. The British lost 12,000 men, 9,000 of these becoming prisoners. The rest of Wavell’s expeditionary force was fortunate to escape to Crete from the ports of the Peloponnese.
Dill broadcast his gloom beyond the War Office. “He himself took a depressed view245 of our prospect in Libya, Syria and even Ira[q],” Lord Hankey recorded after a conversation with the CIGS, “and said that the German armoured forces are superior to ours both in numbers and efficiency—even in the actual Tanks. He was evidently very anxious about invasion, and seemed to fear that Winston would insist on denuding this country of essential defensive forces. He asked what a CIGS could do if he thought the PM was endangering the safety of the country.” In such a case he should resign, said Hankey, an increasingly malevolent critic of the prime minister. Dill mused aloud: “But can one resign in war?” It is extraordinary that the head of Britain’s army allowed himself to voice such defeatist sentiments at such a moment in the nation’s fortunes, even to a member of the government, such as Hankey was. Yet it would be another six months before Churchill ventured to sack Dill. The general’s limitations reflected a chronic shortage of plausible warrior chieftains at the summit of Britain’s forces. It was not that Dill was a stupid man—far from it. Rather, he displayed an excess of rationality, allied to an absence of fire, which deeply irked the prime minister.
On May 20, three weeks after Greece was occupied, Gen. Kurt Student’s Luftwaffe paratroops began landing on Crete—to face slaughter at the hands of forty thousand British defenders commanded by Maj. Gen. Bernard Freyberg. Thanks to Ultra, the entire German plan, and even its timings, was known to the British. On the first day, the battle appeared a disaster for the Germans. New Zealand infantrymen, perhaps the finest Allied fighting soldiers of the Second World War, dominated the struggle to hold the island’s key airfields. But that evening, a fatal mistake was made. Defenders withdrew from Máleme airfield to reorganise for a counterattack the next day. On the afternoon of May 21, a fresh battalion of German mountain troops crash-landed at Máleme in Junkers transports. Once they secured the airfield, reinforcements poured in. Freyberg’s force began to withdraw eastwards. The Royal Navy inflicted heavy loss on the German amphibious landings, but itself suffered gravely. “We hold our breath246 over Crete,” wrote Vere Hodgson on May 25. “I feel Churchill is doing the same. He did not seem to mind evacuation of Greece, but he will take the loss of Crete very hard.”
As the Germans strengthened their grip on the island and Freyberg received Wavell’s consent to evacuate, the Luftwaffe pounded the British fleet. Two battleships, an aircraft carrier and many lesser vessels were damaged, four cruisers and six destroyers sunk. Crete became the costliest single British naval campaign of the Second World War. On shore, the defenders lost 2,000 men killed and 12,000 taken prisoner. Some 18,000 were rescued and carried to Egypt by the navy. Freyberg persuaded Chur
chill to assert in his postwar memoirs that the campaign had cost the Germans 15,000 casualties. The true figure, well known by that time, was 6,000, including 2,000 dead. Some 17,500 German invaders had defeated a British force more than twice as numerous. By June 1, it was all over.
Strategically, the fall of Crete was a much less serious matter for the British than would have been the loss of Malta. Admiral Cunningham believed that, if the island had been held, the British would have paid a heavy price for continuing to supply it, in the face of overwhelming German air superiority. It was Hitler’s mistake to allow Student to deploy his parachute division against Freyberg’s garrison, rather than commit the Fallschirmjäger against Malta, Britain’s key Mediterranean island, which the Germans could probably have taken. But Churchill had promised the British people, and the world, that Crete would be staunchly defended. Its loss was a heavy blow to his authority, and even more to his faith in the fighting power of the British Army. Thoughtful civilians, too, perceived the limitations of their own forces. “The difference between the capability247 of the B[ritish] Army when dealing with the Italians and with the Germans is surely too plain to be missed,” Elizabeth Belsey, a Communist living in Huntingdonshire who was deeply cynical about her nation’s rulers, wrote to her army officer husband. “One can detect here and there, especially in Churchill’s speeches, hints that Britain realises the stickiness of her position.”
The prime minister was driven to offer threadbare explanations for the Mediterranean disaster, telling the House of Commons on June 10, “A very great number of the guns which might have usefully been employed in Crete have been, and are being, mounted in merchant vessels to beat off the attacks of the Focke Wulf and Heinkel aircraft, whose depredations have been notably lessened thereby.” But then he tired of his own equivocations, saying: “Defeat is bitter. There is no use in trying to explain defeat. People do not like defeat, and they do not like the explanations, however elaborate or plausible, which are given to them. For defeat there is only one answer. The only answer to defeat is victory. If a government in time of war gives the impression that it cannot in the long run procure victory, who cares for explanations? It ought to go.”
Churchill believed, surely rightly, that Crete could have been held. Yet Freyberg had been his personal choice to lead its defence. The New Zealander, like Gort awarded a World War I Victoria Cross, was the sort of hero he loved. Freyberg was a fine and brave man, but on Crete he showed himself unfit for command responsibility. Many of his troops were fugitives from Greece. The British Army never had the skill, which the Germans later displayed, for welding “odds and sods” into effective impromptu battle groups. In April 1940, for instance, the survivors of German navy destroyers sunk at Narvik were immediately conscripted to join Wehrmacht troops contesting possession of the port with the British. Compare and contrast the attitude of RAF ground personnel in Greece in 1941 and later on other battlefields: they flatly rejected suggestions that they should take up rifles and join the struggle, saying that this was not their job. Almost all chose to accept captivity rather than undertake unfamiliar duties as warriors.
A shortage of wireless sets crippled British communications, and Freyberg’s understanding of the battle. There was little transport to move troops, and the Luftwaffe wrought havoc on such roads as existed. All these factors contributed to defeat, but the ultimate verdict remained inescapable: once again, a British army had been outfought, in a battle conducted on terms which should have favoured it. The New Zealanders’ contribution was outstanding, but other units performed poorly. During the evacuation, much of Freyberg’s force degenerated into a rabble.
Churchill, a few months later248, claimed to regret the Greek commitment, which he described to Colville as the only error of judgement his government had made. Wavell should have garrisoned Crete, he said, and advised the Athens government to make the best terms with Germany that it could. But this was a view expressed while Britain was still struggling for survival. In the longer run of history, the nobility of his purpose in Greece commands respect. As Robert Menzies and others perceived, British passivity in the face of the destruction of Greek freedom would have created a sorry impression upon the world, and especially the United States. Nonetheless, events in the Mediterranean dismayed every enemy of Nazism. A Bucharest Jew, Mikhail Sebastian, wrote: “Once more Germany gives the impression249 of an invincible, demonic, overwhelming force. The general feeling is one of bewilderment and impotence.”
A German war correspondent, Kurt Pauli, approached some British prisoners near Corinth and struck a posture of chivalrous condescension. “You’ve lost the game,”250 he said. Not so, the POWs replied defiantly: “We’ve still got Winston Churchill.” Was this enough, however? Alan Brooke wrote later of “the utter darkness251 of those early days of calamities when no single ray of hope could pierce the depth of gloom.” It was astonishing that the prime minister maintained his exuberance. Robert Menzies wrote: “The PM in conversation will steep himself252 (and you) in gloom on some grim aspect of the war … only to proceed to fight his way out while he is pacing the floor with the light of battle in his eyes. In every conversation he inevitably reaches a point where he positively enjoys the war: ‘Bliss in that age was it to be alive.’ (He says) ‘Why do people regard a period like this as years lost out of our lives when beyond question it is the most interesting period of them? Why do we regard history as of the past and forget we are making it?’”
The near Middle East was only one among many theatres from which bad tidings crowded in upon Britain’s prime minister. On April 30, Iraqi troops attacked the RAF’s Habbaniya air base, outside Baghdad, prompting Churchill and Eden to conclude that they must seize Iraq to preempt a German takeover. The Luftwaffe’s blitz on Britain continued relentlessly, and had by now killed more than thirty thousand civilians. On May 10, the demented deputy führer, Rudolf Hess, parachuted into Scotland on a personal peace mission, which perversely served Nazi propaganda interests better than British. Bewildered people, especially in Moscow and Washington, supposed that some parley between Britain and Germany must indeed be imminent. Fears persisted that Spain would join the Axis. Although foreign exchange was desperately short, the government somehow found the huge sum of $10 million to bribe Spanish generals to keep their country out of the war. The payments, arranged through Franco’s banker Juan March, were made into Swiss accounts. There is no evidence that this largesse influenced Spanish policy, but it represented an earnest of British anxiety about Franco’s neutrality.
On May 20, Germans began to appear in Vichy French Syria, causing Churchill to decree, once more against Wavell’s opposition: “We must go in.” British, Australian and Free French troops were soon fighting a bitter little campaign against the Vichyites, who resisted. Churchill observed crossly253 that it was a pity they had not displayed the same determination against the Germans in 1940. Pétain’s troops were finally overcome. Britain’s seizure of Iraq and Syria attracted little popular enthusiasm at the time, and has not attracted much interest or applause from historians since. Yet these two initiatives reflected Churchill’s boldness at its best. British action removed dangerous instability on Wavell’s eastern flank. The diversion of troops caused much hand-wringing in Cairo, but represented strategic wisdom. If the Germans had been successful in their tentative efforts to rouse the Arab world against Britain, its predicament in the Middle East would have worsened dramatically. The most authoritative modern German historians of the war, the authors of the monumental Potsdam Institute series, consider British successes in Syria, Iraq and Abyssinia more important to the 1941 strategic pattern than defeat on Crete. Churchill, they say, “was right when he asserted254 that on the whole, the situation in the Mediterranean and the Middle East was far more favourable to Britain than it had been a year earlier.” Yet it did not seem so at the time, to the sorely tried British people.
On May 23, a Friday, the battle cruiser Hood blew up during a brief engagement with the Bismar
ck west of Iceland. The days that followed, with the German battleship loose in the North Atlantic, were terrible ones for the prime minister. His despondency lifted only on the twenty-seventh, when, as he addressed the House of Commons, he received news that the Bismarck had been sunk. But convoy losses remained appalling. American assistance fell far short of British hopes, and Churchill not infrequently vented his bitterness at the ruthlessness of the financial terms extracted by Washington for supplies. “As far as I can make out,”255 he wrote to Chancellor Kingsley Wood, “we are not only to be skinned, but flayed to the bone.”
The Middle East remained Britain’s chief battleground. Despite success in securing the eastern flank in Syria and seizing control of Iraq, Churchill’s confidence in his C-in-C, never high, was ebbing fast. “He said some very harsh things about Wavell256, whose excessive caution and inclination to pessimism he finds very antipathetic.” For a few weeks, confidence flickered about a fresh offensive, Battleaxe. Admiral Cunningham was told that if this succeeded, and Wavell’s forces reached Tripoli, the next step would be a landing in Sicily. Such fantasies were swiftly crushed. On June 17, it was learned in London that Battleaxe had failed with the loss of a hundred priceless tanks. Churchill was exasperated to hear that Wavell wanted to evacuate Tobruk. This was militarily rational, for the port’s logistic value was small, yet seemed politically intolerable. In April Churchill had described Wavell in a broadcast as “that fine commander whom we cheered257 in good days and will back through bad.” Now, on June 20, he sacked the Middle East C-in-C, exchanging him with Sir Claude Auchinleck, C-in-C India, whose seizure of Iraq had been executed with impressive efficiency. Wavell was given the Delhi command only because Churchill feared that to consign him to oblivion would play poorly with the public, to whom the general had been represented as a hero.
Clementine Churchill once wrote contemptuously to her husband about the deposed Middle East C-in-C: “I understand he has a great deal258 of personal charm. This is pleasant in civilized times but not much use in total War …” Too many of the British Army’s senior officers were agreeable men who lacked the killer instinct indispensable to victory. Wavell’s best biographer, Ronald Lewin259, has observed that he seemed destined for greatness in any field save that of high command in battle. It might more brutally be suggested that there was less to Wavell than his enigmatic persona led admirers to suppose. He once said to Pownall, “My trouble is that I am not really interested in war.”260 This was a surprisingly common limitation among Britain’s senior soldiers. It goes far to explain why Winston Churchill was much better suited to his own role than were some of his generals to theirs.