Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45. Max Hastings
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even had this been recognised in London, it would have caused Churchill to opt for inaction. Throughout its history, Britain has repeatedly sought to ignore the importance of mass on the battlefield, dispatching inadequate forces to assert moral or strategic principles. This was the course Churchill adopted in March 1941. It has been suggested that Wavell should have resigned, rather than send troops to Greece. But field commanders have no business to make such gestures. Wavell did his utmost to support his nation’s purposes, though he knew that, as commander-in-chief, he would bear responsibility for what must follow. On 7 April, when he bade farewell to Dill as the CIGS left Cairo for London with Eden, he said, ‘I hope, Jack, you will preside at my court martial.’
The outcome was as swift as it was inevitable. The Germans crushed Yugoslav resistance during two days’ fighting in Macedonia on 6-7 April, then embarked upon a series of dramatic outflanking operations against the Greeks. The Greek army was exhausted and demoralised following its winter campaign against the Italians. Its initial achievement in pushing forward into Albania, which had so impressed the British, represented the only effort of which it was capable. Within days, 62,000 British, Australian and New Zealand troops in Greece found themselves retreating southwards in disarray, harried at every turn by the Luftwaffe. A 6 April air raid on Piraeus blew up a British ammunition ship, wrecking the port. The RAF’s little fighter force was ruthlessly destroyed.
Worse, even before the Germans occupied Greece, the Afrika Korps attacked in Libya. On 3 April the British evacuated Benghazi, then found themselves retreating pell-mell back down the coast road eastwards along which they had advanced in triumph two months earlier. By 11 April, when Rommel reached the limit of his supply chain, he had driven the British back almost to the start-line of their Compass offensive. It was fortunate that Hitler had dispatched to Libya too small a force and inadequate logistical support to convert British withdrawal into outright disaster. So much was wrong with the leadership, training, weapons and tactics of Wavell’s desert army that it is questionable whether it could have repulsed the Afrika Korps even in the absence of the Greek diversion. Inevitably, however, Greece was deemed responsible for defeat in Libya.
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 ascendancy 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, codenamed 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 DMO, sought to revive his spirits, but the CIGS dismissed reassuring words about the outlook. ‘I think it is desperate. I am terribly tired.’ Next day Kennedy noted: ‘CIGS is miserable & 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 débâcle: ‘Chiefs of staff overawed & influenced 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. Churchill, 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 Koryzis, on 18 April, the will of his nation’s leadership collapsed. In London, Robert Menzies wrote after a war cabinet on 24 April 1941: ‘I am afraid of a disaster, 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?’ 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 wants 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 27 April. 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 view of our prospect in Libya, Syria and even Irak,’ 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