by Max Hastings
The final act of the Aegean drama began on 12 November, when the Germans attacked Leros. The British garrison there, some 3,000 strong together with 5,500 Italians, had had several weeks to prepare for the inevitable. Nonetheless, when the moment came, everything that could go amiss did so. Before the landing 234 Brigade was commanded by a short, red-faced and heavily moustached officer named Ben Brittorous, who embodied almost every deficiency of the wartime British Army. Brittorous was obsessed with military etiquette, and harassed officers and men alike about the importance of saluting him. In his weeks on Leros he made himself loathed by his troops, and made few effective preparations to meet a German landing. When the Luftwaffe started bombing in earnest, he retired to his tunnel headquarters, and stayed there until relieved of his command a week before the German descent, to be replaced by a gunner officer, Brigadier Robert Tilney. Tilney, newly promoted to lead in battle men whom he knew only slightly, was less disliked than Brittorous, but also seemed to lack conviction. He immediately redeployed his three infantry battalions around the island, with the intention of repelling a German landing on the beaches. Not only did this plan spread the defenders thin, but the brigade was very short of radios and telephones. Communication between Tilney and his units was tenuous even before the Germans intervened.
On 11 November, Ultra informed the British that a landing on Leros, Operation Typhoon, would be launched on the following day. Some 2,730 German troops were committed, a force inferior in size to that of the defenders. Yet the RAF and Royal Navy found themselves unable to do anything effective to interfere with enemy arrangements. Bad weather frustrated planned British bombing attacks on the Luftwaffe’s Greek airfields. The commander of a Royal Navy destroyer flotilla in the area declined to brave a suspected minefield to attack the invasion convoy. The British official historian, Captain Stephen Roskill, wrote later: ‘The enemy had boldly discounted any effective threat to the convoy by day, and by night he had concealed his vessels very skilfully; yet it seems undeniable that it should not have reached its destination virtually unscathed.’
While the German main body landed from the sea, Fallschirmjäger staged another superbly brave and determined air assault. RAF strikes against the landing ships were notably less effective than the Luftwaffe’s close support of the invaders. A fourth British battalion, landed to reinforce 234 Brigade during the battle, failed to affect its outcome. Some of the island’s defenders fought well, but others did not. The limited scale of British casualties indicates that this was no sacrificial stand. On Leros, from battalions of 500 men apiece the Royal West Kents lost eighteen killed in action, the Royal Irish Fusiliers twenty-two, the King’s Own forty-five, the Buffs forty-two.
When the German parachutists landed, the defenders – in much superior numbers – should have launched an immediate counter-attack on the landing zone before the invaders could reorganise. Instead, British infantry simply sat tight and fired from their positions. As the Germans advanced across the island, one British officer was dismayed to see men of the King’s Own fleeing for their lives in the face of mortar fire. At 1800 on the first day, call sign Stupendous of the Long Range Desert Group signalled bitterly from Leros: ‘Lack of RAF support absolutely pitiful: ships sat around here all day, and Stukas just laughed at us.’ The defence lacked mobility and, more important, motivation and competence to match that of the Germans. Jeffrey Holland, who served as an infantry sergeant on Leros, wrote later: ‘As the battle progressed, it was evident that the enemy had deployed…first-class combat troops, who demonstrated consummate skill, courage and self-reliance.’ An SBS man wrote of one scene he observed: ‘We were amazed to see groups of British soldiers in open route order proceeding away from the battle area…The colonel stopped and interrogated them, and they said they had orders to retire to the south. Many were without arms, very dejected and exceedingly tired.’
Brigadier Tilney lost control of most of his force at an early stage, and was enraged to find units retiring without orders. He threatened two battalion commanders with court martial for refusing to order their units into attack. Jeffrey Holland wrote: ‘The Germans moved quickly from one position to another, but never retreated; they seemed willing to accept a high rate of casualties. Their officers and NCOs exposed themselves to fire when directing an attack or defence. They seemed indifferent to the British fire which they sensed was tentative; neither well coordinated nor directed.’
Some courageous British counter-attacks were launched, in which a battalion CO and several company commanders were killed. At midnight on 14 November, Bletchley Park decrypted a German signal warning that the position of the invasion force on Leros was ‘critical’, and that it was essential to get heavy weapons ashore immediately to swing the battle. The Germans on Leros experienced nothing like the walkover they had enjoyed on Kos. But the defenders, having failed to take the initiative at the outset, never regained it. The terrain made it almost impossible for men to dig in, to protect themselves from bombing. Too often in World War II, British troops perceived enemy air superiority as a sufficient excuse to reconcile themselves to defeat.
Maitland-Wilson kept alive Churchill’s hopes of salvaging the battle, signalling on 14 November that British troops on Leros, though ‘somewhat tired’, were ‘full of fight and well fed’. To the end, the prime minister pressed for more energetic measures to support them. On the evening of the 16th, as he approached Malta en route to the Tehran conference, he signalled Air Chief Marshal Tedder: ‘I much regret not to see you tonight, as I should have pressed upon you the vital need of sustaining Leros by every possible means. This is much the most important thing that is happening in the Mediterranean in the next few days…I do not see how you can disinterest yourself in the fate of Leros.’ Tedder wrote scathingly afterwards: ‘One would have thought that some of the bitter lessons of Crete would have been sufficiently fresh in mind to have prevented a repetition…It seems incredible now, as it did then, that after four years’ experience of modern war, people forgot that air-power relies on secure bases, weather, and effective radius of action.’
At 1600 hours on 17 November, the fifth day after the landing on Leros, Tilney surrendered. Some 3,000 British and 5,500 Italian soldiers became prisoners. Almost a hundred wounded men had been evacuated earlier. Several score bold spirits, including the inevitable and invincible Lord Jellicoe, escaped in small boats and eventually made their way to Turkey or small islands from which the navy rescued them. More than 3,000 British, Greek and Italian personnel were successfully evacuated from the nearby island of Samos before the Germans occupied this also. Including aircrew, the British lost around 1,500 killed in Aegean operations between September and November 1943 – 745 Royal Navy, 422 soldiers and 333 RAF. The Long Range Desert Group sacrificed more men in the Dodecanese than in three years of North African fighting. Five British infantry battalions were written off.
Hitler sent a congratulatory message to his Aegean commanders which was, for once, entirely merited: ‘The capture of Leros, undertaken with limited means but with great courage, carried through tenaciously in spite of various setbacks and bravely brought to a victorious conclusion, is a military accomplishment which will find an honourable place in the history of war.’ The British on Leros had advantages – notably that of holding the ground – which should have been decisive, even in the face of enemy air superiority. It was shameful that the German paratroopers were so easily able to overcome larger numbers of defenders who knew that they were coming.
Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, now First Sea Lord, castigated the army: ‘I am still strongly of the opinion that Leros might have been held,’ he wrote later. Brigadier Tilney, a German PoW until 1945, became principal scapegoat for the island’s fall. Blame, however, properly ran all the way up through the chain of command to Downing Street. It was no more possible in 1943 than in 1941 for warships to operate successfully in the face of enemy air superiority. German aircrew were more proficient at attacking shipping than their B
ritish counterparts. British troops on Leros, as so often earlier in the war, showed themselves less effective warriors than their opponents. Far from being an elite, 234 Brigade was a second-rate unit which conducted itself as well as might have been expected in the circumstances. The best apology that can be made for its performance is that it would have served little purpose for men to display suicidal courage, or to accept sacrificial losses, in a campaign which was anyway almost certainly doomed, and at a time when overall Allied victory was not in doubt.
If the defenders of Leros had repulsed the German assault in mid-November, British prestige might have profited, but the balance of power in the Aegean would have remained unchanged, and the agony would have been protracted. The Royal Navy would still have been left with an open-ended commitment to supply Leros under German air attack. As long as Rhodes remained in enemy hands, the British presence in the Dodecanese was strategically meaningless. Far from Leros offering a launching pad for a prospective assault on Rhodes, as Churchill insisted, it was merely a beleaguered liability. The Royal Navy suffered much more pain than it inflicted in the Aegean campaign, and achieved as much as could have been expected. In all, four cruisers, five destroyers, five minesweepers, two submarines and assorted coastal craft were sunk or badly damaged. The RAF could not be blamed for the difficulties of conducting operations beyond the range of effective air cover, but its performance in the anti-shipping role was unimpressive. Some 113 aircraft were lost – the Beaufighter squadrons suffered especially heavily, losing 50 per cent of their strength. Once the airfields on Kos were gone, and with them any hope of operating single-engined fighters, the British should have cut their losses and quit.
In London, the news from the Aegean caused dismay and bewilderment in what was otherwise a season of Mediterranean victories. Cadogan at the Foreign Office wrote on 16 November: ‘Bad news of Leros. Talk of, and plans for, evacuation brings back the bad days of ’40 and ’41. But it’s on a smaller scale of course.’ A Times editorial on 18 November commented justly: ‘The fall of Leros should be a reminder that well-established principles of strategy cannot be neglected with impunity.’ A week later, the newspaper said that ‘this lamentable episode’ raised issues about ‘the broad strategy of our whole Mediterranean campaign…on which British public opinion will require reassurance’.
Britain’s Aegean commitment was trifling in the grand scheme of the war, but represented a blow to national pride and prestige, precipitated by the personal decisions of the prime minister. Once more, he was obliged to confront the limitations of his own soldiers against the Germans – and the vulnerability of British forces without the Americans. John Kennedy described the operation as ‘a justifiable risk. [Maitland-Wilson] could not know how strongly the Boche would resist.’ But four years’ experience of making war against Hitler should have inoculated the prime minister and his generals against recklessness. Ultra intercepts warned London that the Luftwaffe was reinforcing the eastern Mediterranean before British troops were committed. Churchill repeatedly deluded himself that boldness would of itself suffice to gain rewards. This might be so against an incompetent or feeble enemy, but was entirely mistaken against a supremely professional foe who always punished mistakes. The daring of the prime minister’s commitment was unmatched by the battlefield showing of those responsible for carrying it out. In the Aegean, as so often elsewhere, the speed of German responses to changing circumstances stood in stark contrast to faltering Allied initiatives.
Kennedy wrote that ‘the PM on paper has full professional backing for all that has been done’. He meant that the chiefs of staff and Maitland-Wilson formally endorsed the prime minister’s commitments to the Aegean. In truth, however, almost all the higher commanders had allowed his wishes to prevail over their own better judgement. Brooke, unreasonably, joined the prime minister in blaming the Americans for failing to provide support: ‘CIGS feels that the war may have been lengthened by as much as six months by the American failure to realise the value of exploiting the whole Mediterranean situation and of supporting Turkey strongly enough to bring her into the war.’ Yet why should the Americans have sought to save the British from the shipwreck of an adventure which they had always made it plain they did not believe in? There is, moreover, no reason to suppose that additional US air support would have altered outcomes. Likewise, the British official historian seems mistaken in lamenting the diversion from the Aegean in the first days of the campaign of six Royal Navy fleet destroyers, to escort battleships home to Britain. If the destroyers had remained, they would merely have provided the Luftwaffe with additional targets. Even had the British successfully seized Rhodes, it remains unlikely that Turkey would have entered the war, and debatable whether Turkish military assistance was worth much to the Allies.
Some of the same objections could be made to Churchill’s 1943 commitment to the Aegean as to his early Balkan foray in 1915. The Dardanelles campaign, on which he impaled his First World War reputation, was designed to open the Black Sea route to arm Russia. Yet even had the passage been secured, the World War I Allies were chronically short of weapons for their own armies, and had next to none to spare for shipment to the Russians. Likewise in 1943, even if Turkey had joined the conflict its army would have been entirely dependent on Anglo-American weapons and equipment. It was proving difficult to supply the needs of Russian, US, British and French forces. As the Americans anticipated, Turkey would more likely have become a hungry mouth for the Allies to feed than a threat to German purposes in the Balkans.
Churchill bitterly described the Aegean campaign as the Germans’ first success since Alamein. On 21 November he told his wife Clementine in a cable from North Africa: ‘Am still grieving over Leros etc. It is terrible fighting with both hands tied behind one’s back.’ He was, of course, venting frustration that he had been unable to persuade the US to support his aspirations. In his war memoirs he described this as ‘the most acute difference I ever had with General Eisenhower’. He cabled Eden from Cairo, also on 21 November, to suggest that if questions were asked in Parliament about the Aegean, the Foreign Secretary should tell the House defiantly that the hazards of the operation were foreseen from the outset, ‘and if they were disregarded it was because other reasons and other hopes were held to predominate over them. If we are never going to proceed on anything but certainties we must certainly face the prospect of a prolonged war.’ This was lame stuff, to justify the unjustifiable.
Amazingly, at the meeting of the combined chiefs of staff in Cairo on 24 November, the prime minister renewed his pleas for an invasion of Rhodes. Marshall recalled: ‘All the British were against me. It got hotter and hotter. Finally Churchill grabbed his lapels…and said: “His Majesty’s Government can’t have its troops standing idle. Muskets must flame.” ’ Marshall responded in similarly histrionic terms: ‘Not one American soldier is going to die on [that] goddam beach.’ The US chiefs remained unwavering, even when Maitland-Wilson joined the meeting to press the Rhodes case. The British, having lost to the Germans, now lost to the Americans as well. In a letter to Clementine on 26 November, Churchill once more lamented the fall of Leros: ‘I cannot pretend to have an adequate defence of what occurred.’ Indeed, he did not. The Aegean campaign represented a triumph of impulse over reason that should never have taken place. It inflicted further damage upon American trust in the prime minister’s judgement and commitment to the vital objectives of the Grand Alliance. It was fortunate for British prestige and for Churchill’s reputation that it unfolded at a time when successes elsewhere eclipsed public consciousness of a gratuitous humiliation.
SIXTEEN
Tehran
In the eyes of the world, in the autumn of 1943 Churchill’s prestige was impregnable. He stood beside Roosevelt and Stalin, the ‘Big Three’, plainly destined to become victors of the greatest conflict in the history of mankind. ‘Croakers’ at home had been put to flight by the battlefield successes denied to Britain between 1939 and 1942. Yet those who wor
ked most closely with the prime minister, functionaries and service chiefs alike, were troubled by manifestations of weariness and erratic judgement. His government never lacked domestic critics. His refusal seriously to address issues of post-war reconstruction caused widespread dismay. ‘His ear is so sensitively tuned to the bugle note of history,’ wrote Aneurin Bevan – for once justly – ‘that he is often deaf to the more raucous clamour of contemporary life.’ Eden agreed: ‘Mr Churchill did not like to give his time to anything not exclusively concerned with the conduct of the war. This seemed to be a deep instinct in him and, even though it was part of his strength as a war leader, it could also be an embarrassment.’
It was irksome for ministers responsible for addressing vital issues concerned with Britain’s future to find their leader unwilling to discuss them, or to make necessary decisions. There would be growing difficulties in reconciling the views of the government’s Labour and Tory members on post-war policy. Leo Amery wrote of a later meeting: ‘Winston handled the debate [on the Town and Country Planning Bill] with considerable skill and impartiality, but the nearer we get to reconstruction the more difficult it will be to keep the team together.’ On 29 November 1943, Bevin gained admission to the prime minister’s bedroom, where so many remarkable scenes were played out in a setting sketched by Brooke: ‘The red and gold dressing gown in itself was worth going miles to see, and only Winston could have thought of wearing it! He looked rather like some Chinese mandarin! The few hairs were usually ruffled on his bald head. A large cigar stuck sideways out of his face. The bed was littered with papers and despatches. Sometimes the tray with his finished breakfast was still on the bed table. The bell was continually being rung for secretaries, typists, stenographer, or his faithful valet Sawyers.’
