HOW THE BRITISH PEOPLE
HELD THE FORT
ALONE
TILL THOSE WHO HITHERTO HAD
BEEN HALF BLIND WERE
HALF READY.
In the historical memory of many Americans, the year 1941 does not begin until December 7. For Churchill and Britain, the entire year indeed saw a long and terrible struggle in the rapids. It is true that the Home Island fought with the full support of the Dominions, and given the fact that one-quarter of the world’s population lived within the British Empire, it might appear facile to suggest that England stood alone. But in large part it did. Canada would ultimately send 90,000 airmen to Britain; they would play a significant role in the bombing of Germany. But the first Royal Canadian Air Force bomber squadron was not commissioned until mid-1941. Three Royal Canadian infantry divisions and two armored divisions were available for the fight but were widely scattered throughout the Empire, including a division in Britain and a battalion in Hong Kong. Australia offered four infantry divisions. Canberra’s enthusiasm for the European war decreased throughout the year as the threat of Japanese attack increased. New Zealand sent 50,000 soldiers and 10,000 airmen overseas during the next two years, but only Lieutenant General Bernard Freyberg’s North African corps was operational in early 1941. South Africa offered three divisions, but only for deployment in Africa, where Erwin Rommel mauled them as the year wore on. In early 1941, the forces sent by the Dominions, when combined with British forces, were vastly outnumbered by the Axis. After the fall of France, Hitler had demobilized forty divisions, far more than all the armed forces of the Dominions combined. Even late in 1941, after it scrambled for months to put men into uniform, the entirety of the British Empire’s armies worldwide—ninety-nine divisions—was dwarfed by the Wehrmacht by a ratio greater than two to one. In early 1941, almost all of Hitler’s troops were stationed within six hundred miles of London.27
British prospects in the Mediterranean and the Balkans, if the Germans appeared on the scene, looked precarious at best. By the first week of January, the Luftwaffe had stationed more than 150 bombers and fighters in Sicily, just one hundred miles and thirty minutes from Malta. Such a force could menace the Mediterranean from the French Riviera to North Africa. To oppose the German air fleet, the British had but fifteen beat-up Hurricanes parked on Malta, the most critical piece of real estate in the central Mediterranean. Malta was under siege, ringed by Italian minefields and submarines, the Luftwaffe and Italian air force overhead. It was England in miniature—isolated and battered—but with two vital differences: the Germans and Italians, not the RAF, controlled the skies over Malta, and the Italian navy, not the Royal Navy, surrounded the island. Aggressive strategy demanded, as it had since the previous summer, that Mussolini send his fleet and Hitler his paratroopers to take the island.
Menacing German forces had been dispatched to the greater Balkan region. By mid-January almost 500,000 German troops—“tourists,” Berlin claimed, who happened to bring along their tanks and artillery—took up positions along the Romanian side of the Danube, again as in Roman times the boundary that separated the barbarian from the civilized world. This sojourn by the Wehrmacht was Romania’s reward for joining the Axis in November, a decision born more of necessity than choice. Having succumbed in 1940 to Stalin’s demand for the provinces of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, and to Hitler’s demand that northern Transylvania be ceded to Hungary, the Romanian dictator, General Ion Antonescu, could turn only to Hitler for a guarantee that the rump Romania remain intact. It had not occurred to Stalin that 500,000 German troops were about 480,000 more than needed to guarantee Romania’s sovereignty. Yugoslavia and Bulgaria lay south across the Danube. The kingdom of the Bulgars was essentially an eighteenth-century, pre-industrial nation. Its leaders and people lived with the sure knowledge that sooner or later, either Stalin or Hitler—with their mechanized might—would no longer tolerate Bulgarian neutrality. Wherever Hitler intended to go—to Greece in aid of Il Duce seemed a logical destination—he first had to push through Bulgaria. Yet, Bulgarian roads were decrepit and its railroads were in no shape to move a modern army. Bulgaria offered a route south and beyond, but not the best route. Not so Yugoslavia, where the old Hapsburg railroad system connected to the rail lines of Greece, Hungary, Romania, and Austria. Hitler wanted Yugoslavia; Churchill needed Yugoslavia. Hitler could take Bulgaria; Churchill could not protect it. He deduced that the German “tourists” were destined for the Balkans, the threshold to the Mediterranean, the “hinge of fate.”
The German naval war staff understood Churchill’s thinking, and had prepared a paper in the autumn that warned, “The fight for the African area” is “the foremost strategic objective of German warfare as a whole…. It is of decisive importance for the outcome of the war.” The Italians, ill led and inefficient, could not win that fight alone, as their humiliation at the hands of the Greeks and their losses at Taranto and against O’Connor in the desert confirmed. The cagey Franco would not do it, at Gibraltar. Raeder predicted that if the Axis did not occupy Vichy northwest Africa (Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria), Churchill and the Gaullists would do so in due time, supported by American industrial might. Therefore, the German naval planners concluded, Germany must do it. It was Britain’s good fortune that Hitler was a land warrior who rarely (other than in the matter of U-boats) embraced the advice of his very capable admirals. Hitler, looking toward Russia, agreed only to the half measure of sending aircraft to Sicily, and troops to Romania, in anticipation of some future foray into the Balkans, most likely to Greece in support of his hapless ally.28
Churchill outlined his Mediterranean strategy on January 6 in a long memo to “Pug” Ismay and the Chiefs of Staff Committee. He saw three critical objectives, reverse images of what the German naval staff saw. The British must hold what they had from the Suez to Gibraltar; engage and defeat the Italian navy and drive the Italian army from Africa (which O’Connor, having taken Bardia the day before, was doing); and keep the Germans out of the Mediterranean. Churchill interwove his immediate goals and his operational wish list, the former concise, the latter detailing the hopes of an impatient man. Yet in contrast to Hitler, who issued Führer Directives that were orders pure and simple and allowed for no interpretation, Churchill probed and examined and sought guidance from his military chiefs. His first priority for early 1941, he wrote, was “the speedy destruction of the Italian armed forces in North-East Africa.” Tobruk must be established as a base from which to conduct Libyan operations. In East Africa, the Italians must be swept away. That would secure the Suez and the southeast shore of the Mediterranean.
In the western Mediterranean, there was a chance that Franco would deny Hitler transit to Gibraltar, which raised the happy prospect that Hitler might try to force his way to Spain through unoccupied France in violation of the June surrender terms. In that case, Churchill believed that “the Vichy Government… may either proceed to North Africa and resume war from there, or authorize General Weygand to do so.” To that end Churchill offered Pétain and Weygand Britain’s assistance were they to take the fight to Africa. It was a pipe dream. The Vichy leaders were edging closer to, not away from, willing servitude to their German masters. They believed that Germany would win the war; indeed, they wanted Germany to win the war. As well, Weygand, in Morocco, loathed de Gaulle, while de Gaulle loathed Weygand and hated with a fury the Fascist-minded Vichy minister of state, Pierre Laval. The French accorded more importance to their personal grudges than to their national honor. The previous June, Weygand and Pétain had squandered their chance to fight for the honor of France. They had quit, but not before a final act of treachery when they tried to draw in the RAF’s last reserves. With each passing month, Churchill’s goodwill toward the French had diminished. He allowed to Colville on one occasion and to luncheon guests on another that had Britain “thrown away those planes in France… the war might have been lost.”29
He would get no help in the western Mediterranean
from Vichy France. As Laval’s collaboration with the Nazis became ever more apparent, Churchill told Colville he rued the “lamentable lack of Charlotte Cordays.”30
To secure the eastern Mediterranean he proposed a Balkan bulwark of Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey. In essence he hoped to convince the Balkan nations that a bundle of wheat was not as easily broken as individual stalks. With the Italians on the run in Africa, the time had come to divert some of Wavell’s desert forces to Greece, not only to support the Greeks but to gird the loins of the Yugoslavs and Turks. “The attitude of Yugoslavia,” Churchill wrote, “may well be determined by the support we give to Greece,” as would be the attitude of Turkey. He was inviting a showdown with Hitler. But the Greeks understood that the surest way to provoke Hitler was to invite British troops into the fray. As General Alexander Papagos drove the Italians back through mountain passes into Albania, the military situation appeared promising, but Greeks were going hungry. Winter, not the Italian army, was reducing Greek resolve. Mussolini could reinforce his Albanian legions, but Prime Minister Metaxas could not. He desperately needed supplies—tanks, anti-tank guns, rifles, airplanes, ammunition, food, and clothing. He asked the United States for help, but Congress had yet to begin debate on the Lend-Lease bill, and Britain, not Greece, would be the primary beneficiary of any U.S. aid. Metaxas could not crush the Italians without help, yet he continued to decline Churchill’s help, a quite reasonable demurral given the half million Germans encamped on the Romanian side of the Danube.31
Churchill took a regional view. He predicted that if the Germans came to Il Duce’s aid in Greece by way of Romania, Bulgaria, and the Black Sea, “Turkey will come into the war.” He followed this hopeful prognostication with a string of first-magnitude “ifs.” “If Yugoslavia stands firm and is not molested, if the Greeks take Valona and maintain themselves in Albania, if Turkey becomes an active ally, the attitude of Russia may be affected favorably.” That is, Russian fear of an “obnoxious and indeed deadly… German advance to the Black Sea or through Bulgaria to the Aegean” would be lessened by a British presence in the Balkans. Indeed, he wrote, a British presence might persuade Stalin to side with Britain, “but we must not count on this.” True. With Hitler’s armies poised in Romania, it was highly unlikely that any of Churchill’s “ifs” could come to pass. The Yugoslav government was so petrified of provoking Hitler that it refused in March to even meet with Eden, who by then was prowling the region, pleading Churchill’s case for solidarity. Metaxas, in Greece, continued to decline with a polite “no” Churchill’s offers of military aid right up to his sudden death at the end of January, leaving General Alexander Papagos, the hero of the battle against Italy, to ponder Churchill’s proposals, which he finally accepted in early March. The Turks, for their part, wanted nothing whatsoever to do with Churchill’s invitation to commit national suicide. They faced Hitler on one side, and their ancient enemy, Russia, on the other. Against these foes, their army contained not a single tank. In fact, Anthony Eden wanted Turkey to remain neutral for the simple reason that Britain could offer no military protection to Ankara if the Turks joined the British cause.32
Churchill finished his memo with a confident prediction, which echoed the prediction he had made to Colville and to the House the previous summer: “One cannot doubt that Herr Hitler’s need to starve or crush Great Britain is stronger than it has ever been. A great campaign in the East of Europe, the defeat of Russia, the conquest of the Ukraine, and the advance from the Black Sea to the Caspian, would none of them separately or together bring him victorious peace while the British air power grew ever stronger behind him and he had to hold down a whole continent of sullen, starving peoples.” But British airpower was not yet strong enough to make a difference, and against a continental enemy it might never prove sufficiently strong. Armies and well-armed allies would make the difference. But Churchill had no armies, and he had no allies. Even if he had, even were he to build his Balkan bulwark, he could not, unlike Hitler, furnish modern weapons to his friends. Churchill, in fact, had no weapons, old or new, to furnish to anyone. Britain, under U-boat blockade, its cash balances evaporating, had but one option, to hold out at home and in the Mediterranean.33
Churchill’s stream of memos, many dealing with the most mundane of matters, had widened into a river; some of his subordinates would claim a river in flood. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir John Dill, dining one evening with Sir John Reith, a prewar Chamberlain loyalist, allowed that of Churchill’s memos “one… out of ten was perhaps useful—occasionally very good.” Important ministers wasted a great amount of time, Dill offered, by having to deal with “silly minutes from the P.M.” Some of Churchill’s memos indeed treat of subjects not usually associated with Great Men of History, but Churchill would not have been Churchill without his memos. He loved to ponder the finer details of making war, and to then compose the memos that drove Dill to make his intemperate remarks to Reith.34
Among Churchill’s inquiries, he asked after the progress in developing a four-thousand-pound bomb, for he desired to deliver to the Reich the deadliest bomb possible, as soon as possible. Enamored of the idea of dropping incendiaries into the Black Forest with the intention of burning every stick of lumber to the ground, he suggested the RAF test its wares on the French forest of Nieppe, where drought had turned the undergrowth into kindling. Operation Razzle, a scheme to burn German crops, held his interest, although much of Germany’s farmland was in the east, beyond the reach of the RAF. He pushed Duff Cooper at the Ministry of Information to take a more honest approach with the news so that Britons might actually believe some of what they read in their newspapers and heard on the BBC. He insisted the press not announce civilian casualty numbers, reasoning that such figures depressed the morale of frontline troops, which he considered Britons to be. Food was always an issue. In one memo he lamented the egg crisis, in another he proposed a solution: “Backyard fowls use up a lot of scrap, and so save cereals.” He overlooked no beast: “Have you done justice to rabbit production…. They eat mostly grass… so what is the harm in encouraging their multiplication in captivity?” He tagged the rabbit memo “Action This Day.” He believed feeding Britons was more important than buying weapons, and he demanded the import of enough food “to maintain the staying power of the people even if this meant a somewhat slower” buildup of the army. On occasion his coolness bled through. Asked by a minister how best to help the thousands of homeless wandering about London, he suggested they be sent to far-flung places where they would no longer be in the way during air raids.35
He launched a classic memo after reading an account of a general who ordered every soldier in his division to run regular seven-mile jogs:
Is it really true that a 7-mile cross-country run is enforced in this Division from Generals to Privates?… A Colonel or a General ought not to exhaust himself in trying to compete with young boys in running across country 7-miles at a time…. Who is the General of this division, and does he run the 7-miles himself? If so, then he may be more useful in football than in war. Could Napoleon have run 7-miles across country at Austerlitz?… In my experience… officers with high athletic qualifications are not usually successful in the higher ranks.36
Churchill’s memos, Dill told Reith, suggested that he “seemed often unable to appreciate or understand major issues.” Actually, both Dill and Reith were unable to appreciate Churchill’s grasp of all the issues, not only those issues apparent to everybody but also those apparent only to himself. Dill fell silent when Reith asked whether he thought Churchill “did more harm than good—i.e., more nuisance and upset to those running the war.” Reith took Dill’s silence as a yes. “I am sure,” Reith jotted in his diary, “that he [Dill] would have said more harm than good, which is what I feel.”37
What Dill and Reith failed to recognize was that Churchill saw but one “major issue”: victory over Hitlerism. As to his memos having a deleterious effect upon “those running the war,” Reith allowe
d his partisan wrath to unhinge his logic. Churchill was running the war. In doing so he tried to project the image of a ruthless warlord, emitting thunder and lightning, partly in hope of striking fear into the hearts of the Germans—he failed there—but largely to rouse the spirits of his countrymen. There his success was tremendous. Margery Allingham, the mystery novelist, wrote an American friend:
Mr. Churchill is the unchanging bulldog, the epitome of British aggressiveness and the living incarnation of the true Briton in fighting, not standing any damned nonsense, stoking the boilers with the grand piano and enjoying-it mood. Also he never lets go. He is so designed that he cannot breathe if he does. At the end of the fight he will come crawling in, unrecognizable, covered with blood and delighted, with the enemy’s heart between his teeth.
By putting Churchill in the saddle, she wrote, “the British horse gave himself the master whom he knew to be far more ruthless in a British way than anything possible to be produced elsewhere in Europe.”38
The sailors of the French fleet at Oran had the year before experienced Churchill’s “British way” of ruthlessness. Hundreds of thousands of Germans—in Dresden, Hamburg, and Berlin—soon learned the veracity of Allingham’s observation. Two years hence, 40,000 Germans would die during three nights of RAF raids on Hamburg—the same number of Britons who had died during the first year of Luftwaffe bombing. Churchill took no pleasure in such methods, but he believed war could be waged only with fury. His upbringing and his worship of the British Constitution guaranteed lifelong deferential relationships with Parliament and the Chiefs of Staff, relationships that precluded, up to a point, any unilateral actions that might smack of the bloodthirsty, the foolhardy, or the dictatorial. Yet as he demonstrated when he pressed ahead with the raid on Oran, at times he behaved like a coalition of one, his options open-ended. He was not a dictator, but even if he had been, in early 1941 he lacked the means to sate any dictatorial inclinations. He expressed to Dill the core truth of the matter: “I feel very doubtful of our ability to fight the Germans anywhere on the mainland of Europe.”39
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