Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  In early March, Eden and Dill flew to meet the Athens government. Their brief from the prime minister was to expedite aid to Greece, where British troops began to land on the 4th, and to incite the Turks to belligerence. Churchill was under few delusions about the risks: ‘We have taken a grave and hazardous decision to sustain the Greeks and to try and make a Balkan front,’ he wrote to Smuts on 28 February. Bulgaria joined the Axis on 1 March. Yugoslavia was threatened. The Turks remained resolutely neutral, and the chiefs of staff anyway feared that Turkey as an ally would prove a liability. Yet now that the British were committed, and amid acute political and diplomatic difficulties, Eden and Dill laboured to give effect to earlier declarations of goodwill. Their reports to London remained unfailingly gloomy. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, commanding the Desert Air Force, was scornful about the haverings of almost all the politicians and senior officers making decisions in the Middle East. ‘Wavell, I think, is a fine man,’ he wrote, ‘but the rest?!!! They swing daily from easy optimism to desperate defeatism and vice versa.’

  At a war cabinet meeting in London on 7 March, attended by Australian prime minister Robert Menzies, Churchill’s enthusiasm for the Greek commitment caused him, as so often, to talk roughshod over inconvenient material realities. He asserted, for instance: ‘We should soon have strong air forces in Greece.’ On the contrary, the RAF’s feeble contingent—barely a hundred aircraft strong—was drastically outnumbered by the 1,350 planes of the Axis. Tokenism dominated the subsequent campaign. The British bombed Sofia’s railyards in an attempt to hamper German supply movements to Yugoslavia. Yet this night attack was carried out by just six Wellingtons, a force insufficient convincingly to disrupt an exercise on Aldershot ranges. The nine squadrons committed by the RAF chiefly comprised obsolete and discredited aircraft, Gladiator biplane fighters and Blenheim light bombers. After achieving some early successes against the Italians, faced with modern German fighters such types could contribute nothing. Their destruction also entailed the loss of precious pilots. From January onwards, as the Luftwaffe ranged increasingly assertively over the Mediterranean, the Royal Navy was obliged to operate almost without air cover—and paid the price. By 14 April, the RAF in Greece had just forty-six serviceable planes.

  There is no objective test by which the moral benefits of attempting to aid Greece can be measured against the cost of subjecting yet another British army to defeat. The official historians of British wartime intelligence have highlighted one misjudgement in the spring of 1941: Churchill and his generals failed to perceive, because Ultra signal intercepts did not tell them, that Hitler’s fundamental purpose in the Balkans was not offensive, but defensive. He sought to protect the Romanian oilfields and secure his southern flank before attacking Russia. It is unlikely, however, that 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 visi
ting 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 critic of the prime minister. Dill mused aloud: ‘But can one resign in war?’ It is extraordinary that the head of Britain’s army allowed himself to voice such defeatist sentiments at such a moment in the nation’s fortunes, even to a member of the government such as Hankey was. Yet it would be another six months before Churchill ventured to sack Dill. The general’s limitations reflected a chronic shortage of plausible warrior chieftains at the summit of Britain’s armed forces. It was not that Dill was a stupid man—far from it. Rather, he displayed an excess of rationality, allied to an absence of fire, which deeply irked the prime minister.

  On 20 May, three weeks after Greece was occupied, General Kurt Student’s Luftwaffe paratroops began landing on Crete—to face slaughter at the hands of 40,000 British defenders commanded by Major-General Bernard Freyburg. Thanks to Ultra, the entire German plan, and even its timings, were known to the British. On the first day, the battle appeared a disaster for the Germans. The British 14th Brigade defeated them at Heraklion, and the Australians were likewise victorious at Rethymnon. New Zealand infantrymen, perhaps the finest Allied fighting soldiers of the Second World War, held Maleme airfield. But that evening the New Zealanders’ commanders made a fatal mistake, withdrawing from Maleme to reorganise for a counter-attack next day. On the afternoon of 21 May, a fresh battalion of German mountain troops crash-landed there in Junkers transports. Having secured the airfield, reinforcements poured in. Freyburg’s force began to withdraw eastwards. The Royal Navy inflicted heavy losses on the German seaborne reinforcement convoy, but itself suffered gravely. ‘We hold our breath over Crete,’ wrote Vere Hodgson on 25 May. ‘…I feel Churchill is doing the same. He did not seem to mind evacuation of Greece, but he will take the loss of Crete very hard.’

  As the Germans strengthened their grip on the island and Freyburg received Wavell’s consent to evacuate, the Luftwaffe pounded the British fleet. Two battleships, an aircraft-carrier and many lesser vessels were damaged, four cruisers and six destroyers sunk. Crete became the costliest single British naval campaign of the Second World War. On shore, the defenders lost 2,000 men killed and 12,000 taken prisoner. Eighteen thousand were rescued and carried to Egypt by the navy. Freyburg persuaded Churchill to assert in his post-war memoirs that the campaign had cost the Germans 15,000 casualties. The true figure, well-known by that time, was 6,000, including 2,000 dead. Some 17,500 German invaders had defeated a British and Commonwealth force more than twice as numerous. By 1 June, it was all over.

  Strategically, the fall of Crete was a much less serious matter for the British than would have been the loss of Malta. Admiral Cunningham believed that if the island had been held the British would have paid a heavy price for continuing to supply it, in the face of overwhelming German air superiority. It was Hitler’s mistake to allow Student to deploy his parachute division against Freyburg’s garrison, rather than commit the Fallschirmjäger against Malta, Britain’s key Mediterranean island, which the Germans could probably have taken. But Churchill had promised the British people, and the world, that Crete would be staunchly defended. Its loss was a heavy blow to his authority, and even more so to his faith in the fighting power of the British Army. Thoughtful civilians, too, perceived the limitations of their own forces. ‘The difference between the capability of the B[ritish] Army when dealing with the Italians and with the Germans is surely too plain to be missed,’ Elizabeth Belsey, a communist living in Huntingdon who was deeply cynical about her nation’s rulers, wrote to her soldier husband. ‘One can detect here and there, especially in Churchill’s speeches, hints that Britain realises the stickiness of her position.’

  The prime minister was driven to offer threadbare explanations for the Mediterranean disaster, telling the House of Commons on 10 June: ‘A very great number of the guns which might have usefully been employed in Crete have been, and are being, mounted in merchant vessels to beat off the attacks of the Focke Wulf and Heinkel aircraft, whose depredations have been notably lessened thereby.’ But then he tired of his own evasions, saying: ‘Defeat is bitter. There is no use in trying to explain defeat. People do not like defeat, and they do not like the explanations, however elaborate or plausible, which are given to them. For defeat there is only one answer. The only answer to defeat is victory. If a government in time of war gives the impression that it cannot in the long run procure victory, who cares for explanations ? It ought to go.’

  Churchill believed, surely rightly, that Crete could have been held. Yet Freyburg had been his personal choice to lead its defence. The New Zealander, like Gort a World War I VC, was the sort of hero whom he loved. Freyburg was a fine and brave man, but on Crete he showed himself unfit for command responsibility. Many of his troops were fugitives from Greece. The British Army never had the skill which the Germans later displayed for welding ‘odds and sods’ into effective impromptu battle groups. A shortage of wireless sets crippled British communications, and Freyburg’s understanding of the battle. There was little transport to move troops, and the Luftwaffe wrought havoc on such roads as existed. It was possible to argue that the British, Australian and New Zealand combat units on Crete—as distinct from the great ‘tail’, which degenerated into a rabble during the evacuation—fought wel
l. They were baffled and angry when, after savaging Student’s paratroopers, they found themselves ordered to withdraw. Failure on Crete was the responsibility of British—and New Zealand—higher commanders. But the ultimate verdict remained inescapable: once again, an imperial army had been beaten, in a battle conducted on terms which should have favoured the defenders.

  Churchill a few months later claimed to regret the Greek commitment, which he described to Colville as the only error of judgement his government had made. Wavell should have garrisoned Crete, he said, and advised the Athens government to make the best terms with Germany that it could. But this was a view expressed while Britain was still struggling for survival. In the longer run of history, the nobility of his purpose in Greece commands respect. As Robert Menzies and others perceived, British passivity in the face of the destruction of Greek freedom would have created a sorry impression upon the world, and especially the United States. Nonetheless, events in the Mediterranean dismayed every enemy of Nazism. A Bucharest Jew, Mikhail Sebastian, wrote: ‘Once more Germany gives the impression of an invincible, demonic, overwhelming force. The general feeling is one of bewilderment and impotence.’ A German war correspondent, Kurt Pauli, approached some British prisoners near Corinth and struck a posture of chivalrous condescension. ‘You’ve lost the game,’ he said. Not so, the PoWs replied defiantly: ‘We’ve still got Winston Churchill.’

  Was this enough, however? Alan Brooke wrote later of ‘the utter darkness of those early days of calamities when no single ray of hope could pierce the depth of gloom’. It was astonishing that the prime minister maintained his exuberance. Robert Menzies wrote: ‘The PM in conversation will steep himself (and you) in gloom on some grim aspect of the war…only to proceed to fight his way out while he is pacing the floor with the light of battle in his eyes. In every conversation he inevitably reaches a point where he positively enjoys the war: “Bliss in that age was it to be alive.” (He says) “Why do people regard a period like this as years lost out of our lives when beyond question it is the most interesting period of them? Why do we regard history as of the past and forget we are making it?” ’