by Max Hastings
What is the Second Front? There is no cause to heed the waffling of certain people who pretend that they don’t know what we are talking about; who claim that there is already not only a second front, but also, a third, a fourth, and probably even a fifth and a sixth front (including the air and submarine campaigns, etc.). If we are to speak seriously about a second front in Europe, this would mean a campaign which, as comrade Stalin pointed out as early as the autumn of 1942, would divert, say, sixty German divisions and twenty of Germany’s allies.
We know all the excuses used to justify delays … for example, arguments about [Hitler’s] mythological “Atlantic Wall,” and the allegedly insoluble shipping problem. The “impregnable Atlantic Wall” exists only in the minds of those who want to believe in such lies … After the success of the big allied landing in North Africa last year, and that of the allies’ operation in Sicily, it seems ridiculous to cite “shipping problems” where a landing in Western Europe is concerned.
Amid the torrent of Soviet propaganda, bombast and insults, it was hard for British and American ministers and diplomats to know what Moscow’s real views were. Long after the war, Molotov conceded to a Russian interviewer that Stalin was much more realistic than he ever acknowledged to Churchill and Roosevelt. The old Soviet foreign minister spoke gratefully of the Italian campaign:
Even such help was serviceable to us774. After all, we were not defending England, we were defending socialism, you see. And could we expect them to help the cause of defending socialism? Bolsheviks would have been idiots to expect this! We just needed to be able to press them, to say “what villains you are!” … The [British] people of course realized that Russians were fighting while their own country wasn’t. And not only did [the Anglo-Americans] hold back, they wrote and said one thing to us, but did something completely different. This made their own people see the truth and ask their own leaders: why are you playing tricks? This undermined faith in the imperialists. All this was very important to us.
In Britain, in 1943, there were more miners’ strikes than at any time since 1900. The Times editorialised on September 3, amid another standstill in the pits: “The disposition to strike … may have some common origin. There is a too prevalent view that the war is going so well that effort in industry can be relaxed.”
Trades unionist Jack Jones wrote to Brendan Bracken from Cardiff on October 3, 1943:
I think I may claim to know the mind of our workers775, who are quite as loyal as the men and women of the Forces. Yet they strike! And at a time when it is more important than ever that they shouldn’t. There may be even more disastrous stoppages through the coming winter.
Time itself induces war-weariness and frayed nerves, especially when what one is doing is unspectacular, out of the limelight and monotonous … A gnawing doubt is a sort of match ready to set aflame an undefined resentment against war conditions … What they want to steady them is a tonic. I remember during the last war the tonic effect on the South Wales miners of a visit and talk by L[loyd] G[eorge] … But this war dwarfs the last, and Mr. Churchill has had much more on his plate than ever L.G. had … My faith in Mr. Churchill’s leadership is greater than ever. But I feel that now his capacity for inspiring others should, if it is humanly possible, be devoted to the steadying and inspiring of the splendid production line of our Home Front.
Churchill’s failure to reach out explicitly to the industrial working class, beyond his national broadcasts and speeches, in part reflected disinclination. He preferred to address himself to the conduct of the war and foreign affairs; and in part, also, there was the fact that he had little to say to the factory people which they would wish to hear. He left to Ernest Bevin, in particular, the task of rallying Labour-voting miners and factory workers. He himself could not offer such people the vision of postwar Britain, and especially of socialist change, on which their hearts and minds were set. Churchill’s single-minded commitment to victory lay at the heart of his greatness as a war leader. But for a growing number of his people, in the autumn of 1943 this was not enough.
In that season, between the Italian and Normandy campaigns, he made one of his last attempts to implement an explicitly British strategic initiative, against American wishes. He believed that the eastern Mediterranean offered opportunities for exploitation, which Washington was too blind to recognise. He therefore sought to address these with exclusively British forces. The consequence was a disaster, albeit minor in the scale of global war, which emphasised in the most painful fashion Germany’s residual strength, together with the limitations of British power when the United States withheld its support.
FOURTEEN
Sunk in the Aegean
ONE OF THE most celebrated movie epics about the Second World War is Carl Foreman’s The Guns of Navarone, based upon the 1957 thriller of that title written by Alastair Maclean. It depicts the landing of a British special forces team on a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. After stupendous feats of derring-do, they contrive the undoing of its German defenders, and safe passage for the Royal Navy’s destroyers. Maclean’s heroic fiction was rooted in an extraordinary series of episodes in the eastern Mediterranean in the autumn of 1943 which deserve to be better known to students of the war. This is not, however, because the saga ended in a British triumph, which it certainly did not, but because it provides a case study in a folly which was overwhelmingly Winston Churchill’s responsibility. The story merits rehearsal and analysis, as an example of the consequences of the prime minister’s capacity for rash boldness. If the scale of the campaign was mercifully small, the blunders were many and large. They help to explain why strategists who worked closely with Churchill sometimes despaired of his obsessions.
Rhodes and the much smaller islands of the Dodecanese to the north lie a few miles off the coast of Turkey, and are inhabited by Greeks. Italy had seized them in 1912. Three years later, France and Britain endorsed this shameless imperialist venture as part of the price for Italian accession to the allied cause in World War I. The islands, which possessed few merits save their barren beauty and strategic location, had been garrisoned by Italian forces ever since. They first attracted Churchill’s attention in 1940. He believed, surely wrongly, that if the Allies could dispossess the Italians, such a visible shift of power in the eastern Mediterranean would induce Turkey to enter the war. At his behest, British commandos staged an abortive raid in February 1941. During the ensuing two years, the islands were recognised as beyond Allied reach. But as the Mediterranean skies brightened, Churchill’s Aegean enthusiasm revived. At Casablanca, he urged upon the Americans the importance of seizing Rhodes and the Dodecanese, and tasked his own Chiefs of Staff to prepare a plan. In addition to troops, landing craft would be necessary, together with American fighters. The twin-engined Lightnings and British Beaufighters were the only planes with the range to provide air support over the Aegean from North African bases. The utmost “ingenuity and resource,” urged Churchill, should be deployed to secure the Dodecanese.
Plans were made for two alternative scenarios: the first was a “walk in” to Rhodes with Italian acquiescence and the second was for Operation Accolade, an opposed invasion against German defenders. The priority of Sicily, however, meant that by late summer nothing had been done. John Kennedy wrote on August 13: “We shall have to shut down in the Aegean.” The War Office assumed that the invasion of Italy, together with the commitment to Overlord, rendered operations there implausible. Instead, however, impending Italian surrender imbued the prime minister’s Aegean ambitions with a new urgency. He remained convinced that an Allied coup there would precipitate Turkish belligerence. He ignored the irony that, because of the success of British deception plans designed to make Berlin suppose that the Allies might land in the Balkans, the Germans still deployed strong ground and air forces in the region.
The Americans were not interested in either the operation or the Turks as allies. They believed that British aspirations in the eastern Mediterranean were rooted in o
ld-fashioned imperialism rather than contemporary strategy, and were resolutely opposed to any diversion of resources from Italy, never mind from Overlord. At the Quadrant conference in Quebec in August, they paid lip service to British enthusiasm for an Aegean initiative, but made it plain that whatever Churchill chose to do about Rhodes and the Dodecanese must be accomplished exclusively with the resources available to General Sir Henry “Jumbo” Maitland Wilson, now Middle East C-in-C in Cairo—“his jumbonic majesty,”776 as Macmillan referred to this large and unimaginative dignitary. In other words, the British were on their own. There would be no USAAF Lightning fighters and precious few landing craft. At a time when concentration of force upon the Allies’ central purposes seemed more important than ever before, U.S. leaders recoiled from an entirely gratuitous dispersal.
The prime minister was undeterred. He pressed Maitland Wilson to land on Rhodes anyway. The general, not one of his country’s great military thinkers but compliant to Churchill’s wishes, earmarked 4th Indian Division to execute Accolade. Then, however, it was decided that the Indians were needed in Italy. Maitland Wilson’s cupboard was left almost bare of fighting units. He cabled Eisenhower on August 31: “Any enterprise against Rhodes or Crete except an unopposed walk-in is now impossible.” The prime minister disagreed. The Germans were everywhere in retreat. On the Eastern Front, they had just suffered devastating defeat at Kursk. They had been expelled from Sicily. Italy was about to quit the war. On every front, Ultra signal decrypts revealed German commanders bewailing their flagging strength in the face of Allied dominance. Surely, in such circumstances, even small forces boldly handled could crush the residual German presence in the Aegean. While operations in the eastern Mediterranean were to be conducted on a modest scale, they held special lustre in the prime minister’s eyes, because speed, dash and a touch of piracy might yield an exclusively British triumph.
Urged on by London, Maitland Wilson resurrected Accolade, with such ragbag forces as he could scrape together. On September 9, the prime minister greeted news of the blossoming of his cherished project with a notation: “Good. This is a time to play high777. Improvise and dare.” Four days later, he cabled Maitland Wilson: “The capture of Rhodes by you at this time with Italian aid would be a fine contribution to the general war. Can you improvise the necessary garrison? … What is your total ration strength? This is the time to think of Clive and Peterborough, and of Rooke’s men taking Gibraltar …” The prime minister’s reference to “ration strength” was, of course, a goad designed to remind the C-in-C of the vast number of men under his command, scattered across hundreds of thousands of square miles, and mostly employed on logistical or garrison tasks. Churchill’s stirring appeal to the memory of historic imperial triumphs ignored the fact that now Maitland Wilson’s troops would face the German army.
A fundamental doctrinal divide persisted throughout the war: the British liked minor operations, while the Americans, with the marginal exception of MacArthur, did not. U.S. strategic thinking, like that of the Germans and Russians, was dominated by a belief in concentration of force. The U.S. Army undertook very few raids such as the British, and Churchill in particular, loved—Vaasgo, Bruneval, St.-Nazaire, Bardia, Dieppe and many more. Special forces absorbed a dismayingly high proportion of Britain’s most ardent warriors, volunteers attracted by the prospect of early independent action rather than deferred encounters within the straitjacket of a military hierarchy. Brooke deplored the proliferation of army and marine commando units. He believed, probably rightly, that their functions778 could have been as well performed by regular units specially trained for specific tasks. The mushroom growth of British special forces reflected the prime minister’s conviction that war should, as far as possible, entertain its participants and showcase feats of daring to inspire the populace. In this, elite “private armies” fulfilled their purpose. But they ill-served the wider interests of the British Army, which was chronically short of good infantrymen for the big battlefields. Too many of Britain’s bravest soldiers spent the war conducting irregular and self-indulgent activities of marginal strategic value.
Operations in the Mediterranean since 1940 had inspired the creation of a range of exotic units which basked in the prime minister’s support and were led by social grandees or inspired eccentrics, often both. The Special Air Service (SAS), Special Boat Squadron (SBS), Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), Popski’s Private Army, Special Interrogation Group and their kin provided much pleasure to the adventurous spirits who filled their ranks, and inflicted varying degrees of inconvenience upon the enemy. In the absence of more substantial forces, when Italy suddenly announced its accession to the Allied cause, Maitland Wilson turned to one of the “private armies,” the Special Boat Squadron, to make the first moves in the Aegean. While its raiders began landing piecemeal on every island they could reach, the Middle East C-in-C dispatched its commander as an emissary to the Italians, to urge that they should turn on their local Germans without delay, and without waiting for British troops.
Maj. Earl Jellicoe, son of the World War I admiral, led the SBS with notable courage and exuberance. On the night of September 9, Jellicoe, abruptly plucked from the fleshpots of Beirut, was parachuted onto Rhodes with a wireless operator and an Italian-speaking Polish officer, who served under the nom de guerre of “Major Dolbey” and had never jumped before. Dolbey broke his leg on landing. Jellicoe, finding himself under fire as soon as he hit the ground, felt obliged to swallow the letter which he carried from Gen. Maitland Wilson to the Italian governor, Adm. Inigo Campioni. When the shooting stopped, however, Italian soldiers transported the British party to Campioni’s quarters. There, with Dolbey interpreting amid acute pain from his shattered leg, Jellicoe set about persuading the governor to throw in his lot with the Allies.
At first, Campioni seemed enthusiastic. But when he learned that the British could hope to land only a few hundred men on Rhodes, while strong German forces were on the spot, his zeal ebbed. He was still prevaricating about active, as distinct from token, belligerence when the six-thousand men of the German assault division on Rhodes staged their own coup, overran the whole island and made prisoner its thirty-five-thousand-man Italian garrison. Jellicoe and Dolbey were fortunate that Campioni allowed them to sail away and avoid capture. Gen. Maitland Wilson wrote later that the admiral’s spirit “was clearly affected by the delay779 and by the fact that the Germans were there while we were not.” The unfortunate Italian had the worst of all worlds. Having disappointed the British, he was later shot by the Germans.
Possession of Rhodes and its excellent airfields enabled Hitler’s forces to dominate the Aegean. The only prudent course for the British was now to recognise that their gambit had failed, and to forsake their ambitions. Far from doing this, however, they set about reinforcing failure. If they could seize other nearby islands, they reasoned, these might provide stepping stones for an October landing on Rhodes, to reverse the verdict of September 11. This was a reckless decision, for which immediate blame lay with Maitland Wilson, but ultimate responsibility was Churchill’s, who dispatched a stream of signals urging him on. Not only did the British lack strong forces to fight in the Dodecanese, but an opposed assault on Rhodes would have required a bloodbath, in pursuit of the most marginal strategic objective. The Times of September 18 reported the launching of operations in the Dodecanese, and commented: “Presumably the Germans will try to oust the allies by landing parachutists, but it is hoped … that the allied forces will be sufficient to thwart the German efforts. Thus the situation in the Aegean becomes pregnant with possibilities.”
These were not, however, to the advantage of the British. What followed in September and October 1943 was a debacle, punctuated by piratical exploits and dramas, each one of which was worthy to become a movie epic. Patrols of the Long Range Desert Group, deprived of sands on which to fight since the North African campaign ended, began descending on the Dodecanese by landing craft, plane, naval launch, caique, canoe and boat
s of the superbly named Raiding Forces’ Levant Schooner Flotilla. A company of the Parachute Regiment was flown into Kos by Dakota transports. Men of Jellicoe’s SBS reached Kastellorizo in two launches, and thereafter deployed to other islands. Companies of the 234th Brigade, the only available British infantry force, were transported piecemeal to Kos and Leros as fast as shipping could be found to get them there.
A squadron of South African–manned Spitfires was deployed on Kos, which alone had an airfield. A British officer set up his headquarters there alongside that of the Italian garrison, their conspicuously hesitant new allies. An SOE officer landed on Samos, followed by several hundred troops. A general serving as military attaché in Ankara crossed from the Turkish coast. There were soon five thousand British personnel scattered through the archipelago. Command arrangements were chaotic, with almost absolute lack of coordination between army, navy and air force. But in those naïve early days, many of the newcomers relished the sensation of adventuring upon azure seas and islands steeped in classical legend. Amid barren hills, olive groves and little white-painted village houses, British buccaneers draped with submachine guns and grenades mingled with the local Greeks, breathed deep the Byronic air, pitched camps and waited to discover how the Germans would respond.
They were not long left in doubt. Hitler had no intention of relinquishing control of the Aegean. The Germans began to meet tentative British incursions by sea and air with their usual energy and effectiveness. Almost daily skirmishes developed, with RAF Beaufighters strafing German shipping, Luftwaffe planes attacking Kos, and LRDG patrols and elements of the SBS fighting detachments of Germans wherever they met them. An officer of yet another British intelligence group, MI9, was suddenly hijacked—and shot in the thigh—by pro-Fascist sailors on an Italian launch ferrying him between local ports. These men changed sides when they heard on the radio of Mussolini’s rescue from mountain captivity by Otto Skorzeny’s Nazi commandos. On several islands Germans, Italians and British roamed in confusion, ignorant of one another’s locations or loyalties. Two British officers being held prisoner found their Austrian guard offering to let them escape if he might come too. Captors and captives often exchanged roles, as the tides of the little campaign ebbed and flowed.