With those questions in mind, and with no military means available to dissuade the Japanese from mischief, Churchill cabled Roosevelt and asked for a bit of show-the-flagmanship in the Pacific, a friendly visit by an American naval squadron—“the bigger the better”—to Singapore, to help persuade the Japanese to behave. That such a display of American sea power might provoke the Japanese to a warlike response against the Americans certainly occurred to Churchill, because he understood the true intent of the Tripartite Pact. Not already at war was the key concept of the pact, unmasking it as a transparent attempt by the Axis to forestall intervention by the only nation of import not yet at war: the United States. As Churchill saw it, an American fleet cruising menacingly across the Japanese sea routes to Malayan rubber and Indonesian oil might be just the ticket to get the United States into the war. The U.S. fleet made no such foray.409
The United States all year had been in no mood for handling any hot potatoes tossed its way by Churchill. Navy chief admiral Harold (“Betty”) Stark wanted to keep his ships safe at Pearl Harbor, not send them traipsing about the Singapore Strait in support of Churchill’s empire. Even if willing, America wasn’t ready. The United States was still struggling out of the Depression, half aware of the coming storm and not half prepared to deal with it. America was willingly isolated in a state of blissful peace, the blush of renewed economic prosperity on the horizon. No mere three-way Axis deal could keep America out of war if that peace was disturbed; nor could Churchill’s pleas bring America into it if it was not. America was not entirely oblivious to far-flung events, or at least European events. The most listened-to broadcast of 1940 had been Roosevelt’s “dagger in the back” speech. Millions of Italian-Americans still thought Il Duce a stand-up guy. Americans knew old Europe, from where their parents had come, but the Pacific was another story. Dozens of islands—Guam, Corregidor, Wake, Midway, Guadalcanal—were terra incognita to most Americans. Not until the final weeks of 1941 would they—and most Britons—know just where Pearl Harbor was located.410
America was re-arming, after a fashion. With an eye toward strengthening its global presence, the U.S. Navy (at 160,000 officers and men, smaller than both the Italian and German navies) ordered eight new aircraft carriers. Delivery was specified for 1945. The army, an anemic force of 500,000 (if the National Guard was included) field-tested its tough new General Purpose vehicle, GP for short. The GOP’s nomination of Wendell Willkie, rather than the isolationist Robert Taft, to run against Roosevelt had sent a subtle message to the world that neither American political party had completely buried its head in the sands of isolation. Roosevelt signed into law America’s first peacetime draft bill, a call-up of 800,000 men to serve for one year. Without once using the word “draft” when announcing the law, he termed it the revival of “the three-hundred-year-old American custom of the muster.” If his ongoing pledges that American boys would not be fighting in any overseas wars was to be taken at face value, an obvious question arose: Where in the world would 800,000 mustered men serve?411
Since May, Churchill had wrangled, pestered, and beseeched Roosevelt to join him in his battle for Britain’s survival, without success. His missives to Roosevelt were, on the surface, full of facts and figures concerning British air and sea losses, arms production, and finances, yet, with the exception of his long December 7 letter, they are similar in voice to the letters that nine-year-old Winston wrote from St. George’s School, seeking the approval of his mother and father. Churchill recalled that, as a boy, his father seemed to him “to own the key to everything or almost everything worth having.” Roosevelt held that key in 1940.412
Churchill had gained the heights of power only to gaze down upon a nation at its military nadir. He was the defender of a realm that quite possibly would soon prove defenseless. RAF successes against Göring—limited and by no means guaranteed to continue—served up a meager and teasing hope of future victory. These were the months about which Churchill later wrote that it was “equally good to live or die.” During those December days, a prediction Churchill made after witnessing the French disaster seemed as likely to be fulfilled as not: in mid-June, on his last flight from France, he had turned to Ismay and asked, “Do you realize we probably have a maximum of three months to live?” Those three months were now coming up on six, but absent an ally, the months gained were simply a stay of execution. Britain’s finest hour had given way to its longest nights. The Germans had not arrived by sea, but when the Channel calmed in April and May, when the lilacs announced the coming of spring—and Hitlerwetter—surely the Germans would come. Yet, as he had since June, Churchill believed that if the Germans came, they would fail.413
On December 6, from the North African desert, came news that a British imperial army was on the march, and, unlike the BEF in June, this army was marching forward. Just after midnight, Operation Compass—Wavell’s plan to push the Italians out of western Egypt—began when British troops, tanks, and trucks departed Mersa Matruh and headed west, toward the seven Italian camps anchored at Sidi Barrani, seventy-five miles and a two-day march distant. Mersa Matruh, an azure sea to its front, stone cliffs rising around the town on the landward sides, had been an active port and sponge-fishing center since before the Greeks first came to Cyrene (modern Libya) almost twenty-six centuries earlier. It was from here in around 500 BCE that the Persian forces of Cambyses II turned into the desert, in search of the oasis of Siwa, about two hundred miles south, and the first stop on the ancient caravan route to the Sudan. Cambyses and his entire army disappeared somewhere in the desert, perhaps in the great Sand Sea to the southwest, perhaps in the Qattara Depression, an enormous and lifeless bed of salt and sand fifty miles wide, two hundred miles long, and, at more than four hundred feet below sea level, one of the most hellish geographical features on the planet. Alexander the Great, also in search of Siwa, followed the route of Cambyses in 331 BCE. After nearly meeting the Persians’ fate, the Macedonian finally made it to the oasis, where the oracle of Zeus Ammon confirmed that the young warrior was indeed of divine ancestry. Alexander departed, sure of his destiny, and conquered the world. Three centuries later, the divine Cleopatra and her lover Anthony favored Mersa Matruh (then named Paraetonium) for frolics in the surf, and elsewhere.
Mersa Matruh was tethered to Alexandria by a small-gauge railroad that snaked 150 miles alongside the same coastal road Alexander had marched on. The British could therefore supply themselves, but the Italian supply lines, though secure, reached back hundreds of miles. That (and the array of their forts) was their weakness. The plan called for the British field commander Lieutenant General Richard O’Connor to move his Western Desert Force—30,000 men supported by six hundred Bren Gun carriers, and scores of light and heavy tanks—undetected from Mersa Matruh to Sidi Barrani. In the tradition of the Saracens, who had learned a millennium earlier the need to live by the desert’s rules or die by them, fuel and water had been secreted in cisterns along the route. O’Connor’s tanks and men would drink their fill on the two-day journey west. Then, upon reaching the Italian camps, O’Connor’s plan called for his armor and troops to insinuate themselves unseen and unheard (not likely in the emptiness of the desert) behind the gap between camp Nibeiwa and camps Sofafi and Rabia. O’Connor then intended to run his tanks and infantry smack into the exposed flanks and rear of the Italians, a most daring maneuver given that O’Connor’s forces were outnumbered by almost three to one.
Traditionally, an entrenched defensive force equal in numbers to an attacking force is judged to hold an effective advantage of at least three to one over the attackers. O’Connor’s army of 30,000 was, in that sense, at a nine-to-one disadvantage, or would have been had the Italians been facing in the right direction. To the west of Sidi Barrani, almost 150,000 more Italian troops waited in northern Libya. However complete O’Connor’s surprise, if a division or two of the Italian forces in Libya drove to the aid of Sidi Barrani, O’Connor’s imputed numerical disadvantage could run to nearly t
welve to one. He was placing his army in a nutcracker in hopes that the nut would shatter the cracker. With a little overreaching and a bit of bad luck, his army might find a place in military history alongside Custer’s 7th Cavalry at Little Bighorn, the Light Brigade at Balaclava, and the Anzacs* at Gallipoli.
Distance was O’Connor’s other enemy. Once he motored out of Mersa Matruh, each mile thereafter stretched his supply lines. Were he to find success at Sidi Barrani and thrust westward, he faced nothing but emptiness. Libya spanned one thousand miles of desert except for a narrow strip along the coast where a single road twisted from Bardia in the east to Tripoli in the west. The country was a sea of sand and flaked stone, without roads, devoid of vegetation, bereft of any landscape features that afforded troops protection. The Italians in Libya were linked to Italy by secure seaborne supply lines, and thus the cologne, silk bedsheets, and fine cutlery. O’Connor’s force found itself alone in the desert, a true expeditionary unit, fully detached from all that sustained it.
Wavell and O’Connor knew how to fight in the desert, whereas apparently the Italians knew only how to camp there. The British understood that desert warfare was a fluid thing, with mobility the key. Destruction of enemy forces was more important than possession of turf, which could no more be held in the desert than could a patch of water in the open ocean. Wavell’s immediate goal was not to sail O’Connor’s army across the wide sand seas of Libya, but simply to smash up the Italians at Sidi Barrani and, if things went well, to raid twenty-five miles farther to the west, to Buq Buq. To pull that off, the British would need stealth, great good luck, total surprise, and an enemy with scant fighting will.
They got all four. During the night of December 8 and early hours of the ninth, O’Connor’s infantry and supporting Matilda tanks threaded their way between Nibeiwa and the two southernmost Italian forts. To guide their movement, a British advance force had lit a string of beacons crafted from oil drums with one side peeled away, that side facing east, to be seen by O’Connor’s troops but not by the Italians. The British had been spotted by an Italian flier, but when he gave his initial (verbal) report, he was told to put it in writing. If he did so, it was either ignored or not read. By 2:00 A.M. on the ninth, O’Connor’s force was in place behind Nibeiwa. It was a true imperial army made up of Englishmen, Hindus, Sikhs, Ulstermen, and Highlanders, with New Zealanders manning the troop transports. Two regiments of Matilda tanks were drawn up, ready to support the infantry. This was what the twenty-six-ton monsters had been built for. Virtual castles on steel treads, their two-pound guns could outshoot Italian light tanks while giving cover to the imperial infantry. After a breakfast of bacon, hot tea, and a shot of rum for the road, O’Connor’s men moved out. From the Italian camps the breeze carried the aromas of cooking fires and fresh coffee and hot rolls.414
The British interrupted breakfast. The pipers of the Cameron Highlanders sounded the charge, the keening of their pipes reaching Nibeiwa as the first rounds from the Matildas smashed into the Italian lines. The tanks came on in ranks, flanked by Bren Gun carriers, their heavy machine guns raking the Italians. Charging pell-mell behind the tanks came the Highlanders, the morning sun bright upon their helmets and bayonets. The Italians fought furiously with machine guns and grenades; General Pietro Maletti burst from his tent, shooting, and was immediately shot dead. Twenty Italian light tanks were reduced to piles of smoking steel by the Matildas, which rolled on, crushing defenders under their treads. It was over in less than three hours, the camp destroyed, more than two thousand prisoners taken. Ten miles north, two more camps waited. The 1st Royal Fusiliers, kicking a soccer ball, led the charge. White flags went up in the Italian camps. The commander of one stood five hundred of his men at attention when the British entered to accept his surrender.
O’Connor’s men and tanks rolled onward for two days, north toward Sidi Barrani. By December 12, the entire line of fortifications was swept away, and Sidi Barrani taken, after being shelled to rubble by Matildas and Royal Navy cruisers. The success was so stunning and unexpected that the British found themselves outnumbered by their 39,000 prisoners. One battalion commander radioed that he had captured “five acres of officers, about 200 acres of other ranks.” Churchill, delighting in the early reports, referred to the Greek general battling the Italians when he told Colville, “So, we shan’t have to make use of General Papagos after all!” He phoned the King: “My humble congratulations to you, Sir, on a great British victory, a great Imperial victory.” It was, wrote Colville, “the first time since the war began that we have really been able to make use of the word victory.”415
O’Connor thrust farther west to Buq Buq, where the original plan called for the raid to end. Wavell, in Cairo, received a message: “We have arrived at the second B in Buq Buq.” O’Connor rolled right through, bagging more prisoners. The Italians were on the run, in full flight to Libya. Mussolini was furious. “Five generals are prisoners and one is dead,” he told Ciano. “This is the percentage of Italians who have military characteristics and those who have none.”416
Before Compass kicked off, Churchill had worried to Dill that Wavell might be “playing small” by not “hurling in his full available forces.” Within a week of launching his operation, Wavell—shy, tongue-tied Wavell—considered just months earlier by Churchill to be somewhat “dumb,” became his hero of the hour. Churchill learned that Wavell had written two books; knowing neither the titles nor the subject matter, he ordered Colville to locate the volumes. It seems the reticent Wavell was a poet, historian, and biographer as well as a fighter. He had penned The Palestine Campaigns in 1928 and had just published his latest work, Allenby, in which he recounted how Field Marshal Viscount Allenby accomplished in Palestine during the Great War what no other British general in that war could bring off: the total destruction of the enemy at his front with minimum loss to his own men. Wavell had served under Allenby in the Middle East and shared that field marshal’s philosophy of leadership: trust subordinates, give them clear orders, and allow them to fill them. Display courage, moral and physical, where called for, not for love of danger but because hard work is to be done. This was the sort of stuff Churchill admired, admitting as it did to a larger view of things, a certain bon ton that would fit in well at his dinner table, as a foil of course for his even larger view of things.417
By December 16, O’Connor was across the Libyan border. Churchill cabled Wavell: “Your first objective now must be to maul the Italian Army and rip them off the African shore to the utmost possible extent.” His message to Wavell on the eighteenth dispensed with literalness altogether, reading in its entirety, “St. Matthew, Chapter 7, Verse 7.” (“Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”) Churchill had risked all by sending men and tanks from Britain to Egypt when invasion appeared imminent. He had gambled, and so far had won.418
The Blitz grew more murderous as the year went out. On December 8 the House of Commons was hit. The next day, Henry “Chips” Channon* wandered upon the scene as Churchill rambled among the rubble. “Suddenly I came upon Winston Churchill wearing a fur-collared coat, and smoking a cigar…. ‘It’s horrible,’ he remarked… and I saw he was much moved, for he loves Westminster.” Channon, surveying the smoking ruins of the ancient building, remarked, “They would hit the best bit.” Churchill, chewing on his cigar, grunted, “Where Cromwell signed King Charles’s death warrant.” That night Channon wrote that he had “sensed the historical significance of the scene—Winston surveying the destruction he had long predicted, of a place he loved.”419
London had seen more than 450 raids between September and late December; the bombs sometimes fell at the rate of one hundred per minute. On December 29 the capital sustained its worst beating. It was Sunday, the preferred day for bombing commercial areas, when warehouses full of combustible goods were locked tight for the weekend, with no employees on duty to snuff out the incendiaries. The new moon promised relief for the r
aiders, and in tandem with the recent solstice, it made for a low tide that brought the Thames down to the level of a stream. High cloud cover and a heavy mist favored the raiders. K-Grup 100 leading the way in specially equipped Heinkels lifted off from the squadron’s base in Brittany at about 5:30 P.M. local time, an hour later than London time. Once airborne, they picked up the main X-Gerat radio beam, broadcast from Cherbourg. The beam was on St. Paul’s. Behind the pathfinders came more than two hundred bombers, from bases all over northern France. The raid lasted only two hours, but the incendiaries did their work. The first flight of K-Grup 100 missed its target by one thousand yards, putting its incendiaries on the south side of the Thames, near Elephant and Castle. Somehow the remainder of the fleet missed the pathfinders’ markers and put their bombs square on the designated target, the City (London’s financial district), with the result that fires raged along both banks of the river. In fact, even the river burned.420
Edward R. Murrow, on the roof of the BBC, opened his broadcast: “Tonight the bombers of the German Reich hit London where it hurts the most, in her heart. St. Paul’s Cathedral, built by Sir Christopher Wren, her great dome towering over the capital of the Empire, is burning to the ground as I talk to you now.” But St. Paul’s, wrapped in a cowl of filthy black smoke, was not burning. As Murrow spoke, a few fire wardens scrambling among the ancient joists under the lead roof of the cathedral managed to stay ahead of the firebombs.421
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