In one of his fireside chats, regular radio broadcasts to the nation, on 3 September 1939, the day Britain and France declared war on Germany, Roosevelt said, ‘This nation will remain a neutral nation. But I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well’, and, when asked at a press conference whether the United States could stay out of the war, he replied,‘I not only sincerely hope so but I believe we can, and every effort will be made by this administration to do so.’29 The president closed American territorial waters to belligerent submarines – which meant German submarines – and declared a ‘limited National Emergency’. The legal world was unsure as to exactly what a limited national emergency was, but it did allow the president to persuade both Houses of Congress to amend the Neutrality Acts to allow the provision of armaments to belligerents who could collect and pay for them – the so-called ‘cash and carry’ provision of the Neutrality Act of 1939. In November British ships began docking in American ports and taking delivery of such weapons as American industry could supply – not a lot at that time, but it would soon get bigger and better. As only the British, who had a blue water navy, could collect and carry, this was a blatant act in support of the Allies and as such became the first political issue of the war for the United States. The cash-and-carry amendment was furiously opposed by the America First Committee, a curious amalgam of pro-Nazis, socialists, communists and those who honestly believed that America should have no part in adventures abroad, but it became an issue of patriotism, and cinemas began to play the American national anthem after all performances, and the well-known firm Dictator Carpets changed its name to Liberty Carpets.*
After the Battle of France in 1940 and the British retreat from the Continent, there were those in power in the United States who thought that Britain could not survive. These included Joseph Kennedy,* the American ambassador in London, and Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, who called for the Royal Navy to be sent to North American ports to prevent it being used as a bargaining chip in the inevitable peace negotiations with Germany. Once it became apparent that Britain would not negotiate, Roosevelt became more vociferous in support of the Allied cause (and after June 1940 the ‘Allies’ consisted only of the British Empire), although he still had to tread warily and during the 1940 election campaign, when justifying his increased defence expenditure, he said unequivocally,‘Your boys are not going to be sent to any foreign wars.’ His victory in that election was not the landslide of 1936, but it was solid enough. He obtained 55 per cent of the popular vote but he carried thirty-eight states and he had bypassed Congress by agreeing to give the British fifty American destroyers in exchange for the use of British bases in the Caribbean. The destroyers were obsolete by modern standards but they were desperately needed by the Royal Navy as escort vessels.
By the summer of 1940 Britain was running out of money with which to pay the necessary cash on the nail demanded for American weaponry, and in March 1941 Roosevelt pushed through the Lend-Lease Act, which not only allowed him to supply equipment to the British on the provisio that after the war it would be returned in kind or paid for, but also gave him very wide powers to grant military aid to whomsoever he pleased. America was to be ‘the arsenal of democracy’ and the gearing up of the assembly lines to produce ships, vehicles and guns accelerated the dragging of America out of the Depression – now there were jobs for all. Roosevelt likened the act to lending one’s neighbour a hose when his house was on fire. The Selective Service Act, which the president signed in September 1940 and which for the first time in peacetime instituted compulsory military service, brought accusations of dictatorship, but the Act was extended by Congress in August 1941, albeit by only one vote. Roosevelt was gradually nursing American public opinion towards involvement in the war on the side of the British (or on the side of the four basic freedoms, as the president put it), but as late as the spring of 1941 a Gallup poll showed that a substantial majority of Americans, while willing the British to win, or rather willing Germany to lose, were opposed to American entry. Roosevelt might want to go farther than his stated ‘all help short of war’ but public and Congressional opinion would not support him firing the first shot. Fortunately for the British, someone else would soon fire that shot.
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Apart from a brief interlude between 1933 and 1935, the Italian armed forces had been at war since 1923, in either Somaliland, Abyssinia or Spain. Italy’s problem was that, while her armed forces had coped adequately against tribesmen armed with spears, or civilian idealists in the International Brigades, they were not ready for a war against a Western enemy. At the outbreak of war Italian equipment was of roughly the same standard as that of the British or the French, but the problem was not quality, but quantity. The Italian industrial base was not sufficiently developed to support a long or intensive war. The League of Nations sanctions in 1936 had helped a little, by forcing Italians to make items that they would otherwise have imported, but it was far from enough. In the whole of the Second World War, Italy manufactured 13,523 aircraft. In 1942 alone Germany produced 15,596.30 There was little thought given to what Italy’s long-term military policy might be, apart from supporting the creation of a new Roman Empire. Italy had failed to obtain the eastern side of the Aegean Sea in 1918, and with the Treaty of Tirana in 1926 Albania became in effect an Italian protectorate. Mussolini decided to go one better and on 7 April 1939 launched Operation Overseas Tirana. An expeditionary force of 22,000 men with eighty-one tanks and sixty-four artillery pieces invaded Albania and in three days it was all over. Italian casualties were twelve dead and eighty-one wounded, and King Victor Emmanuel III added the crown of Albania, which he had described as ‘a land containing four stones’, to the Emperorship of Abyssinia which he had held since May 1936. Despite telling Hitler that he would not be ready to enter the war on Germany’s side until 1942, Mussolini declared war on France and Britain on 10 June 1940, by which time the British had scuttled from Europe and France was on her knees. It was the most blatant piece of opportunism seen in Europe since Henry of Navarre embraced Catholicism, and it infuriated the French, who considered that surrendering to the Germans was fair enough – they had been beaten by them – but they were damned if they would surrender to Italy, whose sole move against the southern portion of the Maginot Line had been firmly repulsed. The Germans too thought it was bad form and General Franz Halder, the German Chief of the General Staff, thought it thoroughly dishonourable,31 as indeed it was.
As an ex-journalist, Mussolini knew a great deal about propaganda, but a lot less about waging war. He planned to take Egypt from a reeling Britain by launching a simultaneous two-pronged attack eastwards from Libya and northwards from Italian Somaliland. The Italian Commander-in-Chief in Libya, the fifty-eight-year-old Marshal Rudolfo Graziani, who had been in post since his predecessor, Marshal Balbo, had been shot down and killed (presumably accidentally) by his own anti-aircraft guns in June 1940, knew better. He was well aware that butchering Senussi tribesmen was not the same thing as taking on the British, under-equipped and numerically inferior though the Egyptian garrison might be, and much procrastination and prevarication winged its way from Tripoli to Rome. In the view of the Italian staffs in Abyssinia and Italian Somaliland, however, the southern prong might well be a runner, but only if the inconvenient British garrison of British Somaliland, bounded by the Gulf of Aden to the north, Abyssinia to the south and west and Italian Somaliland to the east, was dealt with first. Elimination of this British enclave would ensure that an advance towards Egypt would not be threatened from the rear, and the capture of British Somaliland might allow the Italian navy to close the exit from and approach to the Suez Canal (although how Italian ships could possibly get there was never satisfactorily answered).
In Italian Somaliland and Abyssinia the Duke of Aosta had two Italian colonial infantry divisions, a total of 280,000 mostly locally enlisted natives with Italian officers, and this was increased to 324,000 by conscripting Italian residents. The Bri
tish had the Somaliland Camel Corps, three Indian and one King’s African Rifles infantry battalions, with a fifth battalion, the Second Battalion The Black Watch, sent as a reinforcement just before the Italian attack, or about 4,000 men altogether. When twenty-six Italian battalions supported by light tanks, aircraft and horsed cavalry invaded on 3 August 1940, the camels and the five British battalions dealt them a very bloody nose indeed, and after holding the Italians up for four days their commander, fifty-one-year-old Major-General Alfred Godwin-Austen, withdrew in good order to the coast, embarked his troops and sailed away. The British had around fifty killed (including four soldiers of the Black Watch), the Italians around ten times that. It was thought that the death toll included Captain Eric Wilson, commanding the Somaliland Camel Corps machine-gun section. Hugely outnumbered, Wilson and his tiny detachment held off the Italians until all his men were wounded or killed. Severely wounded himself, he fought on alone, before being eventually overrun. Listed as killed in action, Wilson was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross ‘for most conspicuous gallantry’. It was not until the following year that Wilson turned up at an Italian prisoner-of-war camp and his family could be told that, like those of Mark Twain’s, the reports of his death had been much exaggerated. Eric Wilson VC survived being accused of being an imposter, lived to the respectable age of ninety-six and died in December 2008.
There was no point in the British trying to hold on to the colony when they could not be reinforced or resupplied, and Godwin-Austen showed considerable skill in extricating his little command at considerable cost to his enemy. Churchill, who assumed that lack of casualties indicated lack of fighting spirit, did not see it that way and his suspicions of General Sir Archibald Wavell, Commander-in-Chief Middle East Command, were intensified when he refused to sack Godwin-Austen.* The capture of British Somaliland was trumpeted as a great victory for the new Romans, but in truth it was nothing of the sort. The Duke of Aosta was well aware of the difficulties in advancing north into Egypt and in any case he was not left to enjoy the fruits of victory, such as they were, for long.
On 19 January 1941 Lieutenant-General William Platt with two Indian divisions supported by a squadron of 4 Royal Tank Regiment with Matilda infantry tanks invaded Eritrea from the Sudan, followed on 29 January by Lieutenant-General Alan Cunningham (younger brother of Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, Commander Mediterranean Fleet) with 1 South African Division, a Rhodesian brigade, a Kenyan brigade and a brigade from the Gold Coast (now Ghana) attacking north-east into Italian Somaliland from Kenya, the whole supported by a diversionary operation against western Abyssinia by local guerrillas led by British officers including Gideon Force commanded by the very dubious Major Orde Wingate.† Every two hours, on the even hour, Royal Signals operators were instructed to radio the Italian high command and ask, ‘Do you wish to surrender?’ For the first few months the answer was always the same:‘Not yet.’32 By May the Italians had lost 230,000 men killed, wounded or taken prisoner; the British had lost a few hundred, and on 19 May the Duke of Aosta and his remaining 7,000 troops surrendered.
Meanwhile, to the north, Mussolini had told his army commander in Libya to stop making excuses and get on with the invasion of Egypt, and on 13 September 1940 five divisions crossed the Libyan–Egyptian border, moved down the Halfaya Pass and approached Sollum, the first town in British Egypt.* The garrison, a platoon of the Coldstream Guards, thought it wise to withdraw. The Italians had little intelligence about British deployments west of the Suez Canal and much artillery ammunition was expended bombarding tracts of empty desert. Harassed by the Royal Air Force and inconvenienced by British minefields, the Italians moved at a rate of twelve miles a day and got as far as Sidi Barrani, where they stopped. Sidi Barrani is 50 miles inside Egypt and 400 miles from Cairo. It cannot be described as a one-horse town for there are no horses. It was, and is, a fly-blown collection of ramshackle buildings on either side of the main coastal road, and of no tactical significance whatsoever. Graziani had, however, obeyed his master’s orders and invaded Egypt. Now he had his men dig in and build wired and entrenched forts while he set his engineers to improving the road behind him and deliberated what to do next.
The combat element of the British garrison in Egypt was the Western Desert Force, commanded since June by Lieutenant-General Richard O’Connor, fifty-one in 1940 and a thoroughgoing professional who had commanded an infantry battalion in action in 1918 at the age of twenty-nine. O’Connor reported to the General Officer Commanding in Chief (GOC in C) Egypt, another lieutenant-general, Henry Maitland Wilson, who was eight years older than O’Connor. A large (the unkind might say fat) officer who enjoyed riding but who needed a horse well up to weight, ‘Jumbo’ Wilson was a supportive administrator rather than a field commander, and reported in turn to Wavell, C-in-C Middle East. The Western Desert Force consisted of the British 7 Armoured Division, the Indian 4 Infantry Division and an ad hoc brigade-sized all-arms grouping known as Selby Force, after its commander Brigadier ‘Uncle Arthur’ Selby, hitherto Commander Mersa Matruh Garrison. In support there was 7 Royal Tank Regiment with Matilda infantry tanks.
On the face of it, the Italians had little to worry about. They outnumbered the British by more than two to one in manpower, and by two to one in artillery, generally the most competent component of the Italian Army, and the Italian medium tanks at least should have been able to give a good account of themselves against those of the British. There were problems, however. The Italian 75mm field guns, while generally well handled, were not a match for the British 25-pounders;* there was an acute shortage of vehicles and consequently problems in the resupply of ammunition and fuel; the standards of training of native levy units was not good; technical understanding amongst mainland Italian soldiers was low; and for once the British had more tanks than their enemy. Instead of remaining mobile, or as mobile as they could be given the shortage of transport, the Italians had locked themselves up in their so-called forts and had dispersed their tanks until they were little more than pill boxes – a mistake they might have rectified had they studied French tactics in the Battle of France.
On 7 December 1940 the British struck back. Operation Compass began and the RAF destroyed thirty-nine Italian aircraft on the ground. By 6 February 1941, when the Italian Tenth Army surrendered, in what had been originally intended as a five-day raid, the Western Desert Force (renamed XIII Corps on 1 January 1941 and augmented by an Australian division) had captured Tobruk, Benghazi and Beda Fomm, had covered 700 miles, taken 110,000 prisoners, including twenty-two generals and an admiral, and captured 845 artillery pieces, 380 tanks and huge numbers of soft-skinned vehicles. It was also reported that the British had captured the Italian Army’s mobile brothel.†The total butcher’s bill for the British was 500 killed (of whom only twenty-four were British Army) and around 1,400 wounded and missing. The RAF shot down in combat or destroyed on the ground 1,249 Italian aircraft at a cost to itself of eleven fighters and four bombers shot down or crashed. O’Connor’s famous signal ‘fox killed in the open’ was sent in clear so that it would be picked up by any Italian listening.* It was a spectacular victory, albeit against a second-class enemy, and if the momentum had been maintained the Italians could have been chased out of North Africa completely, and the Germans never allowed to get there. That, however, was not to be.
Operation Compass was not the only British military operation beginning in 1940, but others had less success. Persuaded that the Vichy French government of Senegal on the western bulge of Africa was only waiting for a suitable moment to declare for the Free French, the British launched Operation Menace. The driving force behind this caper and the man who managed to convince Churchill that it would work was Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle, fifty years old and promoted to brigadier-general in May 1940. He was regarded as a maverick in the French Army, largely through his vocal opposition to static fortress defence (the Maginot Line) and his advocacy (rightly) of all-arms mechanized formations. His 4 Armoured Division gave
a good account of itself in the battle for France, and appointed under-secretary of state for war and national defence by the prime minister, Reynaud, in June he escaped to England after the surrender. Tried in absentia and sentenced to death for desertion by a French military court, he was recognized as head of the Free French by the British on 22 June 1940, largely because there was nobody else. While he had been a competent formation commander, he very quickly developed delusions of grandeur and was perfectly prepared to let the Allies win the war while he plotted how to rule France after it. General Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff from December 1941, would describe his ‘overbearing manner, his megalomania and his lack of co-operative spirit’, but in his early days in England de Gaulle appealed to Churchill, who shared his apparent wish to be up and at them.33 A naval task force including two battleships and an aircraft carrier with de Gaulle himself and landing parties of Free French and British troops duly set sail, and on arrival off Dakar, the port and capital of Senegal, on 23 September they called upon the authorities to forsake Vichy and join the Free French. The Senegal French were perfectly happy as they were, however, and had recently had a stiffening of morale in the shape of two cruisers and three destroyers of the French navy.* In the ensuing naval bombardment and French reply, ships of the Royal Navy were damaged, a French submarine was sunk and a landing party was repulsed. On 26 September the operation was called off. It had been a total failure, largely through faulty intelligence, misplaced faith in de Gaulle and a lack of security in London. The French air force mounted air raids on Gibraltar in retaliation – they had little effect – but Vichy France stopped short of declaring war.
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