by Max Hastings
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 another794, 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 defense. They seemed indifferent to the British fire which they sensed was tentative; neither well coordinated nor directed.”
Some courageous British counterattacks were launched, in which a battalion commanding officer and several company commanders were killed. At midnight on November 14795, 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 November 14 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 sixteenth, as he approached Malta en route to the Tehran conference, he signalled Air Chief Marshal Tedder: “I much regret not to see you tonight796, 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 lessons797 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 November 17, 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 able to overcome larger numbers of defenders who knew that they were coming.
Adm. Sir Andrew Cunningham, now first sea lord, castigated the army: “I am still strongly of the opinion that Leros798 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 British 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, the 234th 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 antishipping role was unimpressive. Some 113 aircraft were lost—the Beaufighter squadrons suffered especially heavily, losing 50 percent 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 November 16: “Bad news of Leros799. 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 November 18 commented justly: “The fall of Leros should be a reminder800 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 bla
ming the Americans for failing to provide support: “CIGS feels that the war may have been lengthened801 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 U.S. air support would have altered outcomes. Likewise, the British official historian seems mistaken802 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, or that 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 earlier 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, U.S., 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 El Alamein. On November 21, he told his wife, Clementine, in a cable from North Africa: “Am still grieving over Leros etc803. 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 United States to support his aspirations. In his war memoirs, he described this as “the most acute difference I ever had with General Eisenhower.”804 He cabled Eden from Cairo, also on November 21, 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 reasons805 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 November 24, the prime minister renewed his pleas for an invasion of Rhodes. Marshall recalled: “All the British were against me806. 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 U.S. 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 November 26, Churchill once more lamented the fall of Leros: “I cannot pretend to have an adequate defence of what occurred.”807 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 principal 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.
FIFTEEN
Tehran
IN THE EYES of the world, by 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 worked 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 to seriously address issues of postwar reconstruction caused dismay. “His ear is so sensitively tuned808 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 anything809 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. On November 29, 1943, Minister of Labour Ernest 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 gown810 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 dispatches. 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.”
On this occasion, Bevin raised some issue of postwar planning. Churchill said crossly that he was just leaving to see Stalin, was preoccupied with other things, “and that it was really too much to go into detailed questions at the moment.”811 Bevin was as angry as the prime minister. There was never a right time to catch Churchill to discuss matters which did not command his interest. Yet he was so often criticised for declining to seriously address postwar issues that it is salutary to compare his attitude with that of Hitler. The Nazis inflicted crippling economic, social and military damage upon their own empire by setting about forging a new “Greater Germany” while the war’s outcome was still unresolved. Churchill’s single-minded preoccupation with achieving victory may have dismayed his colleagues, but it seems a fault on the right side.
The British people acknowledged him as the personification of their war effort. As the dominance of the United States and the Soviet Union grew, his rhetoric and statesmanship were the most formidable weapons which his flagging nation could wield to sustain its place at the summit of the Grand Alliance. But in the last eighteen months of the war, while he received his share of the applause for Allied victories, he also suffered increasing frustrations and disappointments. At every turn, cherished projects were stillborn, favoured policies atrophied, because they could not be executed without American resources or goodwill, which were unforthcoming. This was by no means always to Britain’s disadvantage. Some schemes, such as the Aegean campaign, did not deserve to prosper. But no man less liked to be thwarted than Churchill. Much happened, or did not happen, in the years of American ascendancy which caused the prime minister to fume at his own impotence.
His words remained as magnificent in the years of victories as they had been in those of defeats. He enjoyed moments of exhilaration, because he had a large capacity for joy. But the sorrows were frequent and various. He refused to abandon his obsession with getting the Turks into the war, cabling Eden, en route back from Moscow, that it was necessary to “remind the Turkey that Christmas was coming.”812 He dismissed proposals summarily to depose the king of Italy, saying, “Why break off the handle of the jug813 before we get to Rome and have a chance of securing a new handle for it!” He told the Cabinet one day, amid a discussion about Soviet perfidy in publishing claims in Pravda that Britain had opened unilateral peace negotiations with the Nazis:
“Trying to maintain good relations814 with a communist is like wooing a crocodile, you do not know whether to tickle it under the chin or beat it on the head. When it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile, or preparing to eat you up.”
In those months, Churchill’s mind was overwhelmingly fixed upon the Mediterranean campaign. But it would have well served the interests of the British war effort had he also addressed another important issue which he neglected. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, C-in-C of Bomber Command, chose this moment to divert the bulk of his increasingly formidable force away from the Ruhr, where Lancasters and Halifaxes had been pounding factories for years, to attack Germany’s capital. This was one of the major strategic errors of the RAF’s war. The Berlin region was certainly industrially important, but was also far from Britain, heavily defended and often shrouded in winter overcast. This assault continued until April 1944, at a cost in RAF losses that became prohibitive, without dealing the decisive blow Harris sought—and which he had promised the prime minister. Bomber Command lost the “Battle of Berlin.”
