by Scott Palter
“Wouldn’t matter. They won’t come back. They have direct appeal to their government. They will fight in Iraq, because that’s their ticket home. No way they will put their head back in the lion’s mouth in Palestine. Palestine falls the month after Egypt does.”
Wavell tried to cut in. The supply planner rudely motioned him to silence. “Why this opinion that all will be lost?”
O’Connor went on in a low monotone, “You can count. Count the forces in Egypt. Field guns, planes, tanks, armored cars. Count the weekly loss rates. Don’t bother counting the reinforcements, because you have sent nothing more than a few dozen planes. Which are already lost playing pretend air force. You haven’t even bothered to send fresh drafts for the infantry battalions. Units take losses every day. Minor combat, bombardments, illness, accidents. You just allow these units to waste away. Your excuses don’t matter. You have sent forces to multiple places in Africa. You haven’t sent them here.”
“There are two Australian divisions on the way.”
“There are two packets of untrained, virtually unarmed recruits on the way here. Zero field guns, zero fighting vehicles, zero planes. Merely grand promises of future American and Canadian production. Our enemy attacks in a few weeks. They will break the line. Our second-rate brigades will fall apart. They are full of recruits fit for nothing more than labor service. Our good ones will be ground down. The enemy has total air superiority. So no daylight movement of units or supply. They outnumber our good units by roughly three to one. In artillery by eight to one. In fighting vehicles by forty to one. In planes by over a hundred to one. You all went through the mill. With those sort of odds any infantry force, however brave and well led, gets ground down. Our boys are excellent battalion soldiers, and my two colleagues here are stalwart senior officers. Ten days to two weeks, either the entire 8th Army goes in the bag or gets destroyed trying to flee without air cover. You will have thrown away the last real army Britain has. It’s been a month since we fell back on the Alamein lines. Where are the reinforcements that could have held it? What on Earth prompted you to start a war with France instead?”
The three again looked at each other. This time it was the Tory who got designated to speak. “Winston did Dakar, and after that it just all sort of happened. At any given point Egypt was forty to sixty days away. So it slid while the big names squabbled. Took us till now to untangle the mess at Army HQ. Dill was a disaster, but Cabinet never anticipated the morass that would be made replacing him with Lord Gort. Effectively no one had real responsibility, for far too long. The permanent staff abused this interregnum. They had their own agendas and no grip on reality.” The three delegates had the decency to look as appalled as the situation warranted.
Wavell was a good trooper and loyal, but he had finally had enough. “We have been politely telling you how bad it is for a month. London has not wanted to hear us. You want the truth? Are you really ready for the truth? Can you handle the truth? Can London?” The three from London nodded, their faces grim. “Egypt, Palestine, and Iraq are lost. The correct answer is to flee up the Nile and across the Canal. Dynamite the port of Alexandria, every bridge in Egypt, the entire urban infrastructure. Burn the files of every ministry. Leave Cairo in a sea of flames and blasted buildings. Blow up the supplies we cannot take away. Accept leaving rear guards repeatedly to die behind mine fields so the rest can get away. Accept that tens of thousands of British nationals, that hundreds of thousands of Empire peoples and minorities who depended on us, will be lost. We will take major losses, but can hold again at Basra and somewhere south of Khartoum while you fools salvage what you can at a peace conference. We have been repeatedly asked to make bricks with mud and no straw. We will do the Birkenhead Drill when and as required. Australia will never forgive you for throwing their corps away. Indeed, once the line starts to go I fully expect the Australians to bolt for Sinai, pleading orders from their government.” Wavell ran out of breath. He took a fresh sheet of paper and did a duplicate of O’Connor’s note. “Gentlemen, which of you wants which of our commands?”
The London three sat there aghast. Asked leave to contact the War Cabinet for instructions. The three generals each separately thought the same basic thought. “About time!”
1400 hours local; 1300 hours CET
20 October 1940
Drill field adjacent to Brigade Strauss HQ, in the rear of Italian XXI Corps positions at Alamein
Coxita’s harangue was into its second hour. The Catalans had arrived this morning, exhausted from their journey here by rail to Naples, sea to Sirte, and truck to the front. At every stage they were treated as a low-priority bother by the commands involved. This meant even their feeding was never assured; and lodging often meant spending days sleeping in train stations or adjacent lots, waiting for some transport officer to take pity on them. Now, right after a hearty breakfast and being assigned tents, this ex-commissar bitch was making them stand in formation through an endless lecture attempting to reconcile the Leninism of the late period Spanish Republic with the current Nazi Europa – through the ideology of old-shirt Falange syndicalist futurism and the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The ideological gymnastics would have rated gold medal had the Olympic Games included such an event. Meanwhile the two hundred or so men in the oversized company were out on their feet, swaying in the savage heat to which they had not yet become acclimated. Two had already fainted and the third was just falling to his knees as Coxita droned on, managing to equate syndicalism with Leninism, from which she segued to German state capitalism, and brushing aside the suppression of Catalonia in 1937.
Lieutenant Colonel John Di Salo had humored his mistress on this ‘welcome in’. She spoke their native Catalan and had made a similar conversion … but now it was beginning to make him seem a fool to people who mattered, such as Brigadier Strauss. He strode up, took the microphone from Coxita, and bellowed out in a command voice, “DISMISSED!” He wasn’t fully fluent in Catalan but knew the key words of command.
The men barked out a ragged cheer, gathered up the fallen, and retreated to their tents in exhausted, staggering steps. All they wanted was more water and then sleep. Coxita was bouncing on the balls of her feet from frustration. She felt she was just beginning to arrive at her point. She looked into her man’s face to argue … and was instantly silent. She had never seen him this angry. He was an aristocrat. One trained in a very high-tone British sensibility. One did not show anger or fatigue or any similar emotion. Acting out in public was for proles.
She took his hand while he half-dragged her back to the tent they shared. She was not resisting him. She was self-absorbed, but not THAT foolish. The problem was that he was 15 centimeters taller than she was. Her legs were a bit long for her total height, but even so his stride was simply too long for her to comfortably keep up with. Usually he would adjust his pace so she could maintain position by taking her steps more quickly. This time he was moving at a brisk pace just this side of jogging. The anger may have been gone from his face, replacing by a gentleman’s frozen mask, but his body language radiated hostile.
Once inside the tent he brutally spun her half around, then slapped her face. Hard. It wasn’t a punch, but even open-handed the sound exploded like a cannon shell. She was knocked off her feet, breaking the fall with one hand. The hand held up her upper torso, while her lower body and legs were sprawled on the tent’s wooden floor. Her nose wasn’t broken, but there was blood oozing from it and her upper lip. He looked down on her and spoke, his voice soft but with a harsh, commanding tone. “If you ever humiliate me like that again, I will have you shipped back to Italy and dumped on the docks at Naples. You’ll get the clothes on your back, one hundred lire, and your military ID marked ‘discharged’. That’s a thousand times better than where I found you, about to be raped to death by a gang of drunken Rif mercenaries.”
She nodded her head meekly. Her survival walked on a knife edge. “Yes, John.” Her voice came off more childish than her years. She knew no other way to
sound submissive. At almost twenty years of age and 170 cm, the persona was not especially convincing. She was intellectually aware that her man had let her slide on this often in the past. Not today.
“I have humored your ideological obsessions for some time. It was absurd but … but your beauty and other charms earned you those eccentricities. You have now gone from charmingly gauche, to making me look a fool obsessed with your sexual allure. It ends today. Old-shirt Falangism can be an amusing part of your persona. You really don’t know what it means, but neither does anyone else we will meet in Egypt. For the rest, no more grand speeches on ideology. These Catalans all made their accommodations with reality. You made yours when you spread your legs for me. You adjusted further when you stayed with me in London. You could have thanked me for your escape and gone your way into the Left underground. The Republic had more than enough British sympathizers. You found luxury more appealing than proletariat austerity. This Clara woman of Hauptmann Bats. You will present yourself to her. You will be ingratiating, as much so as necessary. You will find an ideological line you can swallow to justify your conversion, your newly discovered old-shirt syndicalism. You will do this to my satisfaction or you will be on the docks of Naples looking for a new man.”
Coxita meekly nodded and bowed her head. Emotionally, she would rather crawl across broken glass for three kilometers than abase herself in front of Clara, supposed Communist. That was the teenage-self speaking. John was right. She’d had her chances to leave. She had stayed. The bills were now coming due, and she would pay what she must to be an aristocrat’s concubine instead of a dockside proletariat street whore.
0600 hours British Double Summer Time and CET
21 October 1940
Side conference room near the main War Cabinet meeting room, Westminster, London
The War Cabinet was suffering from information overload. The bombshell report from Cairo headed the list. It hit on top of Lord Gort informing the assembled ministers that the armored brigade en route to Egypt had been diverted to Lagos, Nigeria. The French had invaded Nigeria’s Northern Region, which was now seen as lost. Somebody on one of the service staffs had diverted the convoy, in response to the pleas of the Governor-General. Somehow no one had bothered to tell the War Cabinet for three days. The tanks and crews were now ashore, wondering what to do next. The convoy with the First Infantry Division, promised as reinforcements to Montgomery in Sierre Leone, had in turn been diverted to the Gold Coast. De Gaulle, Montgomery, the Free French in Equatorial Africa, Percival in Kenya … the list went on and on. Everyone and his cousin were demanding men, tanks, planes, supplies. There were two convoys at sea with planes. Neither had yet reached the Azores. Loading at Liverpool and the western ports was another large convoy with 50th Infantry Division, an army tank brigade, corps-level artillery, and two squadrons of Hurricane fighters. A decision must be made of where to send these. The Services must be told they could not divert convoys on their own hook, no matter how frantic the pleas from a Governor-General. The German proposal for a restricted sea war zone was also unprecedented and potentially worrisome.
On top of this, Winston had tossed a bomb on them. As part of his fiddling with India, he had put into the heads of a group of local dignitaries that Bombay had once been crown land. Passed to Britain in the 17th Century as part of the dowry of a Portuguese princess. Winston had proclaimed the city to again be British soil, apart from whatever happened to the rest of India. Wanted to hold a special election for Bombay’s seat in Commons. No one had a clue of what to make of this daft proposal.
The War Cabinet had argued in circles all through the prior evening and now into the following morning. The members were falling down exhausted and had talked themselves hoarse. Prime Minister Bevin, Labor Party Leader Clement Atlee, and Rab Butler, nominally as Foreign Secretary, but in fact as representative for the 1922 Committee, had retired to a side room to try to make some sense out of what had happened.
Bevin had summoned the only War Cabinet secretariat member he trusted, Kim Philby, to take notes and prepare memoranda. The discussion had then rambled for a further hour before Philby at last took charge. “Gentlemen, may I suggest you are approaching this backwards.” He had everyone’s attention.
“How so?” This was from Atlee, still trying to decide how much he trusted Bevin’s new protégé.
“Start with the Middle East. Wavell’s full plan will split the Ministry. It has His Majesty’s forces acting in a Nazi-like manner. Laying waste to whole nations under British protection. The legalists, moralists, and humanitarians will never stomach this. British public probably won’t either, once they hear of it. Our newspaper-reading middle class sees affairs of state in moral terms. Plus, we would be wrecking the main prizes we have already mostly conceded to the Hun at the Peace Talks. Might well upset them. So, no scorched earth.”
Mention of peace talks brought a response from the foreign secretary. “If we are agreed to give over the three, why not just let me make peace now? I can get a signed peace at Lisbon within a week in return for all three lands. I can quite possibly even get us left with the port of Basra and a small glacis around it.”
Atlee shook his head savagely, more to clear it of fatigue than in anger at Butler. He disliked the man on principle, but not in this case as a matter of policy. “For the same reasons we couldn’t last week or the week before. That collection of self-regarding grand men of British politics won’t accept anything so raw till we lose Cairo, Jerusalem and probably Baghdad as well. The same litany over minority rights, local sovereignty, Suez Canal shares and a hundred other things that have nothing to do with world political realities. Their minds are still in the era when the world accommodated itself to British whims. Did you see their response to being baldly told that thousands of subjects of the crown, hundreds of thousands of imperial peoples and protected minorities would be abandoned to their fate? They pronounced it unthinkable, but then how did they respond to being told that the only way to do mass evacuation required putting down the inevitable local Arab risings the way the Huns put down Belgium in ’14? Equally unthinkable! They cried out that some middle way must be in their opinions be found, so nothing so beastly happened to anyone. They are living in a dream world. Half the time, when listening to them natter on, I wish we had kept the air war going. Maybe, after half of Britain’s cities burned to the ground, they would comprehend what modern war was.” The other three were eyeing Atlee strangely. They had all thought similar things, but here he was saying it aloud.
“That’s all well and good, Clem. We have to do something. They won’t ever agree to anything. We must decide between us, and present them with facts they cannot reverse. I’m prepared to dig my political grave.” Bevin looked around at the other two officeholders, who nodded assent. “Kim, you will draft the following orders over our signature. Wavell is relieved as Commander-in-Chief. He’s to fold his headquarters into Cunningham’s and return home. We need a military adviser to cabinet who can face down Gort and his brain-dead minions, most of whom were Dill’s beforehand.” He looked around the table. They were still with him. “The committee of three is to remain in Cairo. If precluded by time or communications constraints, they are given the authority to act on our behalf. O’Connor’s resignations are rejected. Ninth Army is his. Advise him to get his supplies now while it’s possible.” Again he looked around the table for dissent. Atlee was uneasy. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, but no words came out. Instead it was a sound, low and throaty. Almost like a moan. Bevin was PM, but Clement had the duty as party leader to sell this pile of manure to the Labor caucus. A body that included many ‘men of principle’ who prided themselves on never letting worldly reality interfere with principles. “Both commanders are to begin evacuation of British nationals and, space and security situation permitting, to get out as many empire peoples and protected minorities as possible. These evacuations are voluntary, but people involved will be told of their danger … ”
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sp; “Stress it’s war zone danger,” Butler put in. “Cannot risk telling the man in the street that we are pulling out quickly. The places will melt down and endanger our forces. Caution both commanders that not spooking the Arabs, so as to provoke uprisings and endanger military operations, takes precedence.” The Foreign Secretary looked around the table and saw consternation. “If we don’t give our lads an order of priorities, you are just playing Pilate – washing your hands of the lynch mob to come. That crowd in there will savage them when the blame is collectively ours. This is the fruit of the generation between the wars, of over-commitment and unwillingness to pay for redeeming our promises. I’m as much to blame as anyone. We three can mount the steps to the chopping block together. I think history will absolve us, but I am prepared to see my name dragged in the mud. Are you?” No one nodded; but neither did they say no.
“Demolitions?” Philby knew this part had to be made clear, one way or the other.
No one wanted to speak. There was no easy answer. Bevin finally stated the obvious, thereby taking the moral responsibility. “No demolitions except in the case of immediate military necessity. We act as though we will hold these lands forever, as if we will recover them soon if lost. So we don’t blow up ports until they are in direct danger of loss. The same for putting the block ships into the Canal. We don’t burn down Cairo’s waterworks just to leave burdens on the new occupiers. We don’t do mass killings of Arab civilians to terrorize them into submission. On the other hand, if it saves British lives, needs must. We already have revolts in Palestine and Iraq. Egypt will explode when the Line goes there.”
