It was not possible for me to listen to more than half the speeches of the animated debate, which lasted till nearly three in the morning. I had of course to be shaping my rejoinder for the next day; but my thoughts were centred on the battle which seemed to hang in the balance in Egypt.
The debate, which had talked itself out in the small hours of its first day, was resumed with renewed vigour on July 2. Certainly there was no denial of free speech or lack of it. One member even went so far as to say:
We have in this country five or six generals, members of other nations, Czechs, Poles, and French, all of them trained in the use of these German weapons and this German technique. I know it is hurtful to our pride, but would it not be possible to put some of those men temporarily in charge in the field, until we can produce trained men of our own? Is there anything wrong in sending out these men, of equal rank with General Ritchie? Why should we not put them in the field in charge of our troops? They know how to fight this war; our people do not, and I say that it is far better to win battles and save British soldiers’ lives under the leadership of other members of the United Nations than to lose them under our own inefficient officers. The Prime Minister must realise that in this country there is a taunt on everyone’s lips that if Rommel had been in the British Army he would still have been a sergeant.* Is that not so? It is a taunt right through the Army. There is a man in the British Army—and this shows how we are using our trained men—who flung 150,000 men across the Ebro in Spain: Michael Dunbar. He is at present a sergeant in an armoured brigade in this country. He was Chief of Staff in Spain; he won the battle of the Ebro, and he is a sergeant in the British Army. The fact of the matter is that the British Army is ridden by class prejudice. You have got to change it, and you will have to change it. If the House of Commons has not the guts to make the Government change it, events will. Although the House may not take any notice of me to-day, you will be doing it next week. Remember my words next Monday and Tuesday. It is events which are criticising the Government. All that we are doing is giving them a voice, inadequately perhaps, but we are trying to do it.
The main case against the Government was summed up by Mr. Hore-Belisha, the former Secretary of State for War. He concluded, “We may lose Egypt or we may not lose Egypt—I pray God we may not—but when the Prime Minister, who said that we would hold Singapore, that we would hold Crete, that we had smashed the German army in Libya … when I read that he had said that we are going to hold Egypt, my anxieties became greater.… How can one place reliance in judgments that have so repeatedly turned out to be misguided? That is what the House of Commons has to decide. Think what is at stake. In a hundred days we lost our Empire in the Far East. What will happen in the next hundred days? Let every Member vote according to his conscience.”
I followed this powerful speech in winding up the debate. The House was crammed. Naturally I made every point which occurred to me. Mr. Hore-Belisha had dwelt upon the failures of the British tanks and the inferiority of our equipment in armour. He was not in a very strong position to do this on account of the pre-war record of the War Office. I was able to turn the tables upon him.
The idea of the tank was a British conception. The use of armoured forces as they are now being used was largely French, as General de Gaulle’s book shows. It was left to the Germans to convert those ideas to their own use. For three or four years before the war they were busily at work with their usual thoroughness upon the design and manufacture of tanks, and also upon the study and practice of armoured warfare. One would have thought that even if the Secretary of State for War of those days could not get the money for large-scale manufacture he would at any rate have had full-size working models made and tested out exhaustively, and the factories chosen and the jigs and gauges supplied, so that he could go into mass production of tanks and anti-tank weapons when the war began.
When what I may call the Belisha period ended we were left with some 250 armoured vehicles, very few of which carried even a 2-pounder gun. Most of these were captured or destroyed in France.
I willingly accept, indeed I am bound to accept, what the noble Lord [Earl Winterton] has called the “constitutional responsibility” for everything that has happened, and I consider that I discharged that responsibility by not interfering with the technical handling of armies in contact with the enemy. But before the battle began I urged General Auchinleck to take the command himself, because I was sure nothing was going to happen in the vast area of the Middle East in the next month or two comparable in importance to the fighting of this battle in the Western Desert, and I thought he was the man to handle the business. He gave me various good reasons for not doing so, and General Ritchie fought the battle. As I told the House on Tuesday, General Auchinleck on June 25 superseded General Ritchie and assumed command himself. We at once approved his decision, but I must frankly confess that the matter was not one on which we could form any final judgment, so far as the superseded officer is concerned. I cannot pretend to form a judgment upon what has happened in this battle. I like commanders on land and sea and in the air to feel that between them and all forms of public criticism the Government stands like a strong bulkhead. They ought to have a fair chance, and more than one chance. Men may make mistakes and learn from their mistakes. Men may have bad luck, and their luck may change. But anyhow you will not get generals to run risks unless they feel they have behind them a strong Government. They will not run risks unless they feel that they need not look over their shoulders or worry about what is happening at home, unless they feel they can concentrate their gaze upon the enemy. And you will not, I may add, get a Government to run risks unless they feel that they have got behind them a loyal, solid majority. Look at the things we are being asked to do now, and imagine the kind of attack which would be made on us if we tried to do them and failed. In war-time if you desire service you must give loyalty.…
I wish to speak a few words “of great truth and respect”—as they say in the diplomatic documents—and I hope I may be granted the fullest liberty of debate. This Parliament has a peculiar responsibility. It presided over the beginning of the evils which have come on the world. I owe much to the House, and it is my hope that it may see the end of them in triumph. This it can do only if, in the long period which may yet have to be travelled, the House affords a solid foundation to the responsible Executive Government, placed in power by its own choice. The House must be a steady stabilising factor in the State, and not an instrument by which the disaffected sections of the Press can attempt to promote one crisis after another. If democracy and Parliamentary institutions are to triumph in this war it is absolutely necessary that Governments resting upon them shall be able to act and dare, that the servants of the Crown shall not be harassed by nagging and snarling, that enemy propaganda shall not be fed needlessly out of our own hands, and our reputation disparaged and undermined throughout the world. On the contrary, the will of the whole House should be made manifest upon important occasions. It is important that not only those who speak, but those who watch and listen and judge, should also count as a factor in world affairs. After all, we are still fighting for our lives, and for causes dearer than life itself. We have no right to assume that victory is certain; it will be certain only if we do not fail in our duty.… Sober and constructive criticism, or criticism in Secret Session, has its high virtue; but the duty of the House of Commons is to sustain the Government or to change the Government. If it cannot change it it should sustain it. There is no working middle course in war-time.… Only the hostile speeches are reported abroad, and much play is made with them by our enemy.
… The mover of this Vote of Censure has proposed that I should be stripped of my responsibilities for defence in order that some military figure or some other unnamed personage should assume the general conduct of the war, that he should have complete control of the Armed Forces of the Crown, that he should be the Chief of the Chiefs of Staff, that he should nominate or dismiss the generals or the ad
mirals, that he should always be ready to resign—that is to say, to match himself against his political colleagues, if colleagues they could be considered—if he did not get all he wanted, that he should have under him a Royal Duke as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, and finally, I presume, though this was not mentioned, that this unnamed personage should find an appendage in the Prime Minister to make the necessary explanations, excuses, and apologies to Parliament when things go wrong, as they often do and often will. That is at any rate a policy. It is a system very different from the Parliamentary system under which we live. It might easily amount to or be converted into a dictatorship. I wish to make it perfectly clear that as far as I am concerned I shall take no part in such a system.
Sir John J. Wardlaw-Milne here injected, “I hope my right honourable friend has not forgotten the original sentence, which was ‘subject to the War Cabinet’?”
I continued:
“Subject to the War Cabinet”, against which this all-powerful potentate is not to hesitate to resign on every occasion if he cannot get his way. It is a plan, but it is not a plan in which I should personally be interested to take part, and I do not think that it is one which would commend itself to this House.
The setting down of this Vote of Censure by Members of all parties is a considerable event. Do not, I beg of you, let the House underrate the gravity of what has been done. It has been trumpeted all round the world to our disparagement, and when every nation, friend and foe, is waiting to see what is the true resolve and conviction of the House of Commons, it must go forward to the end. All over the world, throughout the United States, as I can testify, in Russia, far away in China, and throughout every subjugated country, all our friends are waiting to know whether there is a strong, solid Government in Britain and whether its national leadership is to be challenged or not. Every vote counts. If those who have assailed us are reduced to contemptible proportions and their Vote of Censure on the National Government is converted to a vote of censure upon its authors, make no mistake, a cheer will go up from every friend of Britain and every faithful servant of our cause, and the knell of disappointment will ring in the ears of the tyrants we are striving to overthrow.
The House divided, and Sir John Wardlaw-Milne’s motion of “No Confidence” was defeated by 475 votes to 25.
My American friends awaited the issue with real anxiety. They were delighted by the result, and I woke to receive their congratulations.
A curious historical point had been made in the debate by Mr. Walter Elliot when he recalled Macaulay’s account of Mr. Pitt’s Administration. “Pitt was at the head of a nation engaged in a life-and-death struggle.… But the fact is that after eight years of war, after a vast expenditure of life and … wealth, the English Army under Pitt was the laughing-stock of all Europe. They could not boast of a single brilliant exploit. It had never shown itself on the Continent but to be beaten, chased, forced to re-embark.” However, Macaulay proceeded to record that Pitt was always sustained by the House of Commons. “Thus through a long and calamitous period every disaster that happened without the walls of Parliament^ was regularly followed by triumph within them. At length he had no longer an Opposition to encounter, and in the eventful year 1799 the largest majority that could be mustered to vote against the Government was twenty-five.” “It is odd,” said Mr. Elliot, “how history is in some ways repeated.” He could not know before the division how true this was. I too was astonished that the figure of twenty-five was almost exactly the one I had named to the President and Harry Hopkins when I was with them at the White House on the day of the Tobruk news.
CHAPTER XIII
THE EIGHTH ARMY AT BAY
THE capture of Tobruk without a long siege revolutionised the Axis plans. Hitherto it had been intended that after it was taken Rommel should stand on the Egyptian frontier and Malta should be seized by airborne and seaborne forces. As late as June 21 Mussolini reiterated these orders. The day after Tobruk fell Rommel reported that he proposed to destroy the small British forces left on the frontier, and thus open the way to Egypt. The condition and morale of his forces, the large captures of munitions and supplies, and the weakness of the British position prompted pursuit “into the heart of Egypt”. He requested approval. A letter also arrived from Hitler pressing Rommel’s proposals upon Mussolini.
Destiny has offered us a chance which will never occur twice in the same theatre of war.… The English Eighth Army has been practically destroyed. In Tobruk the port installations are almost intact. You now possess, Duce, an auxiliary base whose significance is all the greater because the English themselves have built from there a railway leading almost into Egypt. If at this moment the remains of this British Army are not pursued to the last breath of each man, the same thing will happen as when the British were deprived of success when they nearly reached Tripoli and suddenly stopped in order to send forces to Greece.…
The goddess of Battles visits warriors only once. He who does not grasp her at such a moment never reaches her again.*
The Duce needed no persuasion. Elated at the prospect of conquering Egypt, he postponed the assault on Malta till the beginning of September, and Rommel—now a Field-Marshal, rather to Italian surprise—was authorised to occupy the relatively narrow passage between Alamein and the Qattara Depression as the starting-point for future operations whose final objective was the Suez Canal. Kesselring held a different view. Believing that the Axis position in the Desert would never be secure until Malta was captured, he was alarmed at the change of plan. He pointed out to Rommel the dangers of this “foolhardy enterprise”.
Hitler himself had not been confident of success against Malta, as he mistrusted the ability of the Italian troops who would have formed the major part of the expedition. The attack might well have failed. Nevertheless it now seems certain that the shattering and grievous loss of Tobruk spared the island from the supreme trial. This is a consolation of which no good soldier, whether involved or not, should avail himself. The burden falls upon the High Command rather than on the Generals concerned, and still less upon the troops.
Rommel swiftly organised his pursuit, and on June 24 crossed the frontier to Egypt, opposed only by our light mobile columns, and the stubborn and magnificent fighter squadrons of the Royal Air Force, who really covered the retreat of the Eighth Army to Mersa Matruh. Their position here was not strong. About the town itself there was an organised defensive system, but south of it were only some lines of unconnected minefields inadequately guarded. As in the case of the rejected frontier position, the Matruh line, if it were to be successfully held, needed a powerful armoured force to guard its southern flank. The 7th Armoured Division, though now rebuilt to nearly a hundred tanks, was not yet capable of such a task.
General Auchinleck himself came forward to Matruh on June 25, and decided to take over direct operational command of the Army from General Ritchie. He should have done this when I asked him to in May. He quickly concluded that it was not possible to make a final stand at Matruh. Arrangements were already in hand for the preparation and occupation of the Alamein position, a hundred and twenty miles farther back. Dispositions were made to halt the enemy, if only for a time, and the New Zealand Division, which had arrived at Matruh from Syria on June 21, were at length moved on the 26th into action on the ridge about Minqa Qaim. That evening the enemy broke through the front of the 29th Indian Infantry Brigade, where the minefield was incomplete. The next morning they streamed through the gap, and then, passing behind the New Zealanders, encircled and attacked them from three sides. Desperate fighting continued all day, and at the end it seemed that the division was doomed. General Freyberg had been severely wounded. But he had a worthy successor. Brigadier Inglis was determined to break out. Shortly after midnight the 4th New Zealand Brigade moved due east across country with all its battalions deployed and bayonets fixed. For a thousand yards no enemy were met. Then firing broke out. The whole brigade charged in line. The Germans were taken completely by surpr
ise, and were routed in hand-to-hand fighting under the moon. The rest of the New Zealand Division struck south by circuitous routes. This is how Rommel has described the episode:
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