by Martin Allen
Britain’s forces in North Africa had been tapped of much of their strength in order to support Greece against the expected Axis offensive in the Balkans. To Churchill’s great discomfort it was now discovered that Hitler had dispatched substantial forces to North Africa to stiffen the Italians. The Afrika Korps, under the brilliant leadership of Erwin Rommel, began pummelling the remaining British forces into a withdrawal back towards Egypt.
On the afternoon of 6 April 1941, an emergency conference was held at GCHQ Cairo. It was attended by Anthony Eden (still in Egypt after his negotiations with the Greek government), Generals Wavell and Dill, Air Marshal Longmore and Admiral Cunningham. The subject of their debate was whether the British Army should make a stand in the western desert or rapidly withdraw to the Nile delta. Unsurprisingly, the politicians said the army should make a stand; but the military men’s opinion was that a tactical withdrawal two hundred miles back towards Egypt would enable a better defensive line to be created, supported by much shorter lines of communication. This was duly reported back to London. The following morning, an extremely concerned Churchill telegraphed General Wavell, saying: ‘You should surely be able to hold Tobruk … at least until or unless the enemy brings up strong artillery forces. It seems difficult to believe that he can do this for some weeks. He would run a great risk in masking Tobruk and advancing upon Egypt. In phraseology more characteristic of Hitler’s panicked proclamations to his army trapped in Stalingrad just two years later, Churchill commented: ‘Tobruk therefore seems to be a place to be held to the death without thought of retirement.’13
On receiving this sobering communication, Wavell immediately flew from Cairo to Tobruk to assess the situation for himself. It was to be a trip from which the Commander-in-Chief was lucky to return. After touring Tobruk and seeing for himself the inadequacy of its defences Wavell flew back to Egypt, but his plane developed engine trouble and crashed in the desert. As luck would have it no one was seriously injured, but it was a very subdued Wavell who – in the panic of the crash he had hastily burnt all his secret papers – limped back into Cairo in the early hours of the following morning to report: ‘I do not feel we shall have long respite … Tobruk is not [a] good defensive position; [and the] long line of communication behind is hardly protected at all.’14
This was dire news for Churchill, who now saw the prospect of a successful two-pronged German push via the Balkans and North Africa descending on the Middle East to take both the Suez Canal and Britain’s oil. He could perceive with devastating clarity the dangers ahead, and was forced to take a firm stand against the generals who were counselling a tactical withdrawal. He immediately drafted a telegram to Wavell that declared:
From here it seems unthinkable that the fortress of Tobruk should be abandoned without offering the most prolonged resistance … The enemy’s line is long and should be vulnerable provided he is not given time to organise at leisure. So long as Tobruk is held and its garrison includes even a few armoured vehicles which can lick out his communications, nothing but a raid dare go past Tobruk. If you leave Tobruk and go 260 miles back to Mersa Matruh may you not find yourself faced with something like the same problem? We are convinced you should fight it out at Tobruk.15
Before he could dispatch this backbone-stiffening telegram Churchill was relieved to receive a message from Cairo that Wavell had, despite grave concern, decided ‘to hold Tobruk … and build up … [the] defences in Mursa Mutruh area’. However, Wavell commented, ‘My resources are very limited … [and] it will be a race against time.’ Breathing a huge sigh of relief, Churchill shelved his original telegram, instead sending a placatory: ‘We all cordially endorse your decision to hold Tobruk, and will do all in our power to bring you aid.’16
History has not recorded Wavell’s response, but he had no illusions that he and his troops were facing a desperate fight with their backs to the wall.
In London, Churchill’s mood was no better. Not only was North Africa a desperate worry, but the Balkans were swiftly proving to be a catastrophe as well. The fall of western Europe had been devastating both psychologically and strategically, but it was a disaster against which island Britain could, with effort and resolve, hold out. If, however, Hitler’s objective in 1941 was the Middle East, then the fall of the Balkans might herald an entirely more serious situation. The fall of Greece would, in just a few weeks, cause Churchill to wire President Roosevelt: ‘[Do] not underrate the gravity of the consequences which may follow from a Middle Eastern collapse. In this war every post is a winning-post, and how many more are we going to lose?’17
That same day Churchill would also dispatch an urgent telegram to Wavell, informing him:
A commitment in Iraq was inevitable. We had to establish a base at Basra [oil terminal], and control that port to safeguard Persian oil in case of need … The security of Egypt remains paramount. But it is essential to do all in our power to save Habbaniya [Britain’s RAF base in the Iraqi desert, providing air superiority in the region] and to control the [oil] pipe-line to the Mediterranean.18
The insecurity of Britain’s position in the spring of 1941 should not be underestimated, for the events taking place had the potential to see Britain quickly fall to defeat. The situation was also causing Churchill deep political concern, and his premiership could have been at risk had Britain suffered another major reverse. In March MP Harold Nicolson, working under Duff Cooper at the Ministry of Information, noted the rumblings of disquiet, and commented that while the country might be able to withstand Hitler’s worst, the people were becoming so exhausted by the war that it might soon become difficult for the government to reject a reasonable German peace offer. If things became very bad, he wrote, there might even be a move ‘to attribute the whole disaster to the “war mongers”, and to replace Churchill by Sam Hoare or some appeaser’.19
Such comments, restricted to the confidentiality of a diary, were bad enough, but they were indicative of the underlying political mood. Churchill would have been fully aware of this, as such noises were being made even in the corridors of power. The previous autumn David Lloyd George had circulated a memorandum to friends and supporters in which he expressed the view that Britain’s only chance of victory was ‘if Hitler was stupid enough to attack Russia’. His conclusion was that ‘terms must therefore be sought in order to avoid a wasting war’.20 By mid-spring 1941 Lloyd George’s line had hardened, and he was openly expressing his dissatisfaction with Churchill’s leadership.21 Churchill, for his part, repaid the compliment by comparing the aged politician to the leader of Vichy France, the ‘illustrious and venerable Marshal Pétain’.22
If the long, hot summer of 1940 is recognised as Britain’s time of greatest danger, then the spring of 1941 was the time of Winston Churchill’s worst political peril. As Prime Minister since May 1940, Churchill had almost single-handedly held Britain together in the post-Dunkirk period, through the Battle of Britain and the dangerous winter of 1940. Yet now, at the time when Britain’s fate seemed to hang in the balance, the voices of dissent in Westminster and Whitehall were growing ever stronger.
On 16 April, with the military situation in Greece deteriorating by the hour, Churchill reluctantly sent secret orders to Admiral Cunningham to set plans in motion for an emergency evacuation from Greece. It was, as Churchill later commented, a ‘grim prospect [that] now gaped upon us all’.23
Oliver Harvey, close friend and confidant of Anthony Eden, and soon to become the Foreign Secretary’s Principal Private Secretary, encapsulated the political mood in his diary, noting there was ‘much criticism of Winston, I hear, in City circles, for bad judgement’. The next day he augmented this, commenting that there was rising condemnation of Churchill, led by ‘the remnants of the Chamberlainites’, who were using Britain’s military failures as a ‘dishonest cloak of defeatism – at the end of that road lies L[loyd] G[eorge], who, abetted by that ass [Basil] Liddell Hart, would readily be a Pétain to us, with the support of the Press Barons and City Magnates
’.24 At the same time, Harold Nicolson was writing in his diary, ‘as in last July, I wake up with terror in the dawn’.25
Despite the dire politico-military situation, Churchill himself did not surrender to despair. Regardless of all the signs of impending disaster in North Africa, the Balkans and possibly the Middle East as well, by mid-April 1941 the Prime Minister was at long last beginning to receive heartening intelligence reports which indicated that Hitler might be about to level his sights on Russia.
On 16 April Churchill had received a secret intelligence submission from MI14 entitled ‘World Assessment’. It contained a report on the Russian situation that declared: Tor some considerable time there have been persistent rumours that Germany intends to attack Russia, mainly in order to secure the Ukraine as a rich source of food supplies.’ This was tempered with the comment: For the present, however, it seems most likely that Germany is intending merely to warn Russia against any interference with her Balkan plans.’ Despite these mixed signals, the report ended on an optimistic note: ‘Nevertheless, Germany almost certainly, eventually intends sooner or later to seize the Ukraine.’26
In addition to these Military Intelligence appraisals, Churchill had received many important ‘ULTRA’ decrypts from Britain’s top-secret code-breaking establishment, Station X, based at Bletchley Park. During the early part of the war Germany’s Enigma codes had seemed unbreakable. The information gleaned from this source was still minimal in April 1941, but the code-breakers were able to detect a pattern which bore a strong resemblance to that which had occurred prior to the German attack on the west in 1940. The names of high-level officers – von Bock, Kluge, Guderian, Kleist and others – were beginning to be associated with a major military build-up in the east. It was not associated with the Balkan campaign, which left only Russia. Another range of signals decrypted at Bletchley Park was associated with the Luftwaffe and the Reichsbahn (the railroads), and indicated that Germany was constructing aerodromes alongside railway lines in occupied Poland, and that spurs were being put in place to connect these aerodromes to Germany’s rail network. The military analysts concluded that the ground was being prepared for a large-scale eastern campaign.
In April 1941 the number of signals being intercepted was not great, suggesting that a campaign was not yet imminent; but the signs were that the German leadership was gearing up for a major campaign that summer. The question was whether Hitler would choose to attack the Middle East first, as a way of knocking Britain out of the war, and postpone the invasion of Russia till a later date. On this complicated politico-military balancing act Britain’s survival depended. The success or failure of SO1’s deception campaign could make all the difference.
Many such important matters occurred during that eventful April of 1941, including on the sixteenth the proposal by Anthony Eden (newly returned from Egypt) to the Russian Ambassador in London, Ivan Maiski, of an Anglo–Soviet pact. This came to nothing, as Stalin saw it as just another ploy by the West to embroil him in a war with Germany.27
Russian Intelligence was just as good as that of the west – indeed was superior in several key respects – so Stalin was almost certainly already aware of the German military build-up in the east. However, having negotiated with the German government in the past, Stalin misread all the signs.
The Nazis always liked to negotiate from strength, even in trade and economic matters. Thus the Russians mistakenly concluded that the German build-up in the east was a ruse to strengthen the Reich’s hand in a fresh round of trade negotiations, and so gain almost the entire Ukrainian wheat harvest, greater access to Russian mineral resources and industrial output, and more Caucasian oil. The Russians failed to understand that Hitler was, by 1941, of a mind to obtain what he wanted permanently, and by force.
There is one last key element that enabled Churchill to realise that there was a genuine German intent towards invasion of the Ukraine and southern Russia. It is likely that at some point during the previous five months of peace negotiations, either Haushofer or Hess informed Samuel Hoare that they were sincere in their wish for peace with Britain because Germany intended to pursue her Lebensraum priorities in the east. That was after all what Prince Hohenlohe had openly declared to Hoare at their meeting in Madrid in early March, and it could well have been imparted with greater authority by Haushofer or Hess as well, as the urgency of obtaining the British peace faction’s agreement for an armistice increased.
That the tension was rising on both sides was clear – on the British side because SO1 wanted to see some return for their efforts; and on the German side because the leadership wanted a clear indication that the conflict with Britain would soon end, thus allowing the Nazis’ primary objective of eastward expansion into Russia. The German leadership’s need for success in the peace negotiations began to cause precipitate and unpredictable actions in which Rudolf Hess would take a lead, attempting to force the timid Britons into an agreement that would see an end to the war in the west.
CHAPTER 6
Someone is Expected
On Saturday, 19 April 1941, Rudolf Hess was again preparing to fly his Me-110E from the Messerschmitt company’s airstrip in Augsburg. Chief test pilot Helmut Kaden would later recall that ‘Hess’s last attempt to fly to Britain occurred on 19 April.’1 However, this trip would not be like the others, and Hess’s presence at the Augsburg airstrip this day would raise more questions than it answered.
A week previously, Hess had met his old friend Albrecht Haushofer, who had briefed him on the details of his latest discussions with Sam Hoare in Madrid. It is possible that Haushofer also gave the Deputy-Führer his own assessment of the likelihood of the peace negotiations’, and the Hoare-Halifax coup d’état’s, success. There would have been little reason to send Haushofer all the way to Madrid simply to pass a message to Hoare unless he was also there to glean as much as he could about the progress of this most important of missions.
On the afternoon of Friday, 18 April, the Messerschmitt works had received a telephone call from the Deputy-Führer’s office instructing them to prepare his plane once again. It was to be ready and waiting for him the following morning.
Thus on the morning of Saturday, 19 April, Hess’s Me-110E was taken from its hangar, the pre-flight checks were completed, the fuel tanks filled, and the twin Daimler-Benz engines run up to temperature. Hess soon arrived with his usual entourage, changed into his flying gear, boarded his plane and taxied it to the edge of the runway. However, he did not take off, but sat on the runway for nearly twenty minutes, risking serious damage to the plane’s powerful engines, which were not designed for prolonged ground-based tickover. He was eventually forced to shut them down for fear of overheating them. Yet he remained in his plane,2 waiting for something – no one knew what – exchanging an occasional pleasantry with the ground crew, who knew better than to ask the Reich’s Deputy-Führer what he was doing.
Eventually, after a further fifteen minutes, a telephone call from Berlin came through to Messerschmitt’s runway office, and ‘a car was sent out to bring him [Hess] back to the office to take the call. Within a few minutes Hess strode out from the building, saying: “That’s it, it’s off for today!”’3 To everyone’s surprise, the Deputy-Führer promptly changed out of his flying kit, clambered into his car, and he and his entire entourage left again. It was all very strange, to say the least.
It has been suggested that this was yet another failed attempt by Rudolf Hess to fly to Britain; but again, that was not actually the case.
It is now known, from Albrecht Haushofer’s confidential conversation with Sam Hoare, that by the late spring of 1941 the German negotiators were insisting that a British VIP – the representative of the ‘man of influence’ – travel to some neutral spot for a meeting with the head of the Auslandsorganisation. Yet neither the Germans nor, more importantly, the British were ready for such a meeting. If previous events are examined in relation to the situation on 19 April, a pattern emerges which gives an indica
tion of what caused Hess to abandon his flight.
All the evidence indicates that Sam Hoare had made several trips to Switzerland for covert meetings with Hess. It is known that Albrecht Haushofer was also meeting Hoare, not only in Switzerland but in Madrid too. All the previous occasions on which Hoare and Captain Hillgarth, as well as Haushofer and Hess, had travelled to Switzerland were weekends. They also tended to be near the middle of the month – there may have been a political or technical reason for this. Yet on this occasion, Saturday, 19 April, Sam Hoare was not in Switzerland, but was involved in a series of meetings connected to the security of Gibraltar, which was of course critically important to Britain’s continued access to the Mediterranean.
Britain’s Governor of Gibraltar, General Mason-MacFarlane, had been to London in March and early April to meet the Chiefs of Staff, following which he planned to return to Gibraltar via Lisbon. On hearing this news, Hoare had immediately wired the Foreign Office in London that he urgently needed to meet Mason-MacFarlane, and would travel to Lisbon with his three service attachés, to catch Mason-MacFarlane during his brief stopover. Cadogan immediately wired back: ‘Is not a visit by yourself and your three service chiefs to Lisbon a rather spectacular step and likely to provoke undesirable speculation?’4 Hoare, on reflection, cancelled his trip; but he did not entirely give up on the idea.
In the second week of April, Hoare suddenly departed Madrid without consulting London. He headed south, fetching up on Mason-MacFarlane’s doorstep in Gibraltar. It was a course of action that created much annoyance in the Foreign Office, causing Assistant Under-Secretary Roger Makins to comment angrily: ‘The Ambassador went to Gibraltar in spite of categorical instructions that he was not to do so. He did not inform us of his movements, nor has he given any explanation why it was necessary for him to spend a week in Gibraltar. As we feared, he has laid himself open both to speculation and attack.’5