All Hell Let Loose (19 page)

In the last weeks of 1940, therefore, while the British people supposed themselves the focus of the Nazis’ malignity and headlines around the world described the drama of the blitz, Hitler’s thoughts were far away. His generals began to prepare their armies for a struggle in the east. As early as November, an Estonian double agent told the British SIS representative in Helsinki that he had learned from an Abwehr officer ‘German command preparing June campaign against USSR.’ The SIS man commented dismissively on the implausibility of such an indiscretion, saying, ‘Possibly statement made for propaganda purposes.’ Even had this report been believed in London, the British could have done nothing to shake Stalin’s complacency and promote Soviet preparations to meet the threat.

Save for a small force dispatched to North Africa in June 1941, for a year following France’s surrender, scarcely a single German soldier fired a shot in anger. There was a protracted lull in ground operations, a loss of impetus unapparent at the time but critical to the course of the war. Hitler took no meaningful steps towards converting the largest military conquests in history into a durable hegemony. The German navy was too weak either to support an invasion of Britain or to sever its Atlantic lifeline; the Luftwaffe’s campaign against Britain had failed. It seems flippant to suggest that Hitler determined to invade Russia because he could not think what else to do, but there is something in this, as Ian Kershaw has observed. Many more Nazi battlefield triumphs lay ahead, but some generals privy to their Führer’s intentions already understood the Third Reich’s fundamental difficulty: anything less than hemispheric domination threatened disaster; yet Germany’s military and economic capability to achieve this remained questionable.

Hitler’s Continental triumphs caused the democracies to overrate Germany’s strength, while persuading his own nation rapturously to rejoice in their victories. The German people had entered the war full of misgivings, which by the winter of 1940 were largely dispelled. The Luftwaffe’s failure against Britain troubled few: a young pilot, Heinz Knoke, described the thrill of finding himself among the vast audience in the Berlin Sportpalast addressed by Hitler on 18 December. ‘I do not suppose the world has ever known a more brilliant orator than this man. His magnetic personality is irresistible. One can sense the emanations of tremendous willpower and driving energy. We are 3,000 young idealists. We listen to the spellbinding words and accept them with all our hearts. We have never before experienced such a deep sense of patriotic devotion towards our German fatherland … I shall never forget the expressions of rapture which I saw on the faces around me today.’

Yet such triumphalism was premature. Germany’s 1940 victories created an enormous empire, but while this could be pillaged to considerable effect, it was administered with dire economic incompetence. Germany, contrary to widespread perceptions, was not an advanced industrial state by comparison with the United States, which it lagged by perhaps thirty years. It still had a large peasant agricultural sector such as Britain had shed. Its prestige, and the fear it inspired in the hearts of its enemies, derived from the combat efficiency of the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe, the latter being much weaker than the Allies knew. Time would show that these forces were inadequate to fulfil Hitler’s ambitions. If Britain at the end of 1940 remained beleaguered, Germany’s might rested on foundations more precarious than the world supposed.

Winston Churchill in the winter of 1940 persuaded his people that they had achieved something heroic and important when most were bemused to learn they had done anything at all. ‘The Prime Minister has been saying nice things about us fighter boys in the House of Commons,’ wrote Spitfire pilot Sandy Johnstone. ‘He says we have just won a famous victory although, to be honest, I don’t think any of us has been aware that there has been that sort of battle going on!’ Churchill imbued with grandeur Fighter Command’s triumph and the nation’s resilience under German bombardment. He did not, however, say how Britain might advance from defying the Luftwaffe to overcoming the Nazi empire, because he did not know.

Edward R. Murrow, the American broadcaster, told his CBS radio audience on 15 September that there was no great outpouring of public sentiment following news that bombs had fallen on Buckingham Palace; Londoners shrugged that the king and queen were merely experiencing the common plight of millions: ‘This war has no relation with the last one, so far as symbols and civilians are concerned. You must understand that a world is dying, that old values, the old prejudices, and the old bases of power and prestige are going.’ Murrow recognised what some of Britain’s ruling caste still did not: they deluded themselves that the struggle was being waged to sustain their familiar old society. The privileged elite among whom Evelyn Waugh lived saw the war, the novelist wrote, as ‘a malevolent suspension of normality: the massing and movement of millions of men, some of whom were sometimes endangered, most of whom were idle and lonely, the devastation, hunger and waste, crumbling buildings, foundering ships, the torture and murder of prisoners … [which] had been prolonged beyond reason’. Few of Waugh’s friends understood that the ‘suspension of normality’ would become permanent in its impact upon their own way of life.

Churchill’s single-minded commitment to victory served his country wonderfully well in 1940–41, but thereafter it would reveal important limitations. He sought the preservation of British imperial greatness, the existing order. This purpose would not suffice for most of his fellow countrymen, however. They yearned for social change, improvements in their domestic condition of a kind which seemed to the prime minister almost frivolous amidst a struggle for global mastery. Lancashire housewife Nella Last groped movingly towards an expression of her compatriots’ hopes when she wrote that summer of 1940: ‘Sometimes I get caught up in a kind of puzzled wonder at things and think of all the work and effort and unlimited money that is used today to “destroy” and not so long ago there was no money or work and it seems so
wrong
somehow … [that] money and effort could always be found to pull down and destroy rather than build up.’ Mrs Last was middle-aged, but her children’s generation was determined that once the war was won, money would be found to create a more egalitarian society.

Churchill never defined credible war aims beyond the defeat of the Axis. When the tide of battle turned, this would become a serious weakness of his leadership and a threat to his domestic popularity. But in 1940–41 his foremost challenge was to convince his people that the war could be won. This became more difficult, rather than less, once the Luftwaffe was vanquished: thoughtful people recognised that the nation remained impotent to challenge German dominance of the Continent.

Hurricane pilot George Barclay described an intense discussion between young fliers and senior officers in his airfield mess on Sunday, 29 September 1940, and recorded their conclusions: ‘The British people are still fast asleep. They haven’t begun to realise the power of our enemies and that they have to give their “all” … That we need dictatorial methods to fight dictators … That we shall eventually win the war, but it will be a hell of a job and more so unless we pull ourselves together.’ The message, an eminently sensible one, was that the British must try harder. Many more frustrations, sorrows and defeats lay ahead, and George Barclay himself would lie dead in a desert funeral pyre before Hitler provoked into armed resistance a sufficiency of enemies to encompass his undoing.

1
MUSSOLINI GAMBLES

At the outbreak of war in 1939, Hitler had no intention of waging war in the Mediterranean, and asserted his determination not to commit German resources there. It was his fellow dictator Benito Mussolini who yearned to create an Italian lake, and on his own initiative launched the offensives which brought conflict to the region. In the year after the fall of France in June 1940, only in the African and Balkan theatres did Allied and Axis armies clash. Even after Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, the Mediterranean remained for three more years the focus of the Western Allied military contribution to the struggle against Hitler. All this was the consequence of Mussolini’s decision to become a protagonist in a struggle for which his nation was pitifully ill-equipped.

Hitler possessed in the Wehrmacht a formidable instrument for pursuing his ambitions. The Duce, by contrast, sought to play the warlord with incompetent commanders, unwilling soldiers and inadequate weapons. Italy was relatively poor, with a GDP less than half the size of Britain’s, and barely one-third per capita; it produced only one-sixth as much steel. The nation mobilised its economy less effectively for the Second World War than for the First. Even in the sunshine days of Mussolini’s relationship with Hitler, such was the Nazis’ contempt for their ally that 350,000 Italian workers in Germany were treated little better than slaves; Rome’s ambassador in Berlin was obliged to devote most of his energies to pleading for some amelioration of their working conditions. While Hitler cherished an enduring personal loyalty to Mussolini, whom he had once seen as a mentor, most Germans mistrusted and mocked Italy’s leader. Berliners claimed that whenever the Duce met the Führer, barrel-organ grinders played the popular tune ‘
Du Kannst nicht Treue sein
’ – ‘You Cannot be Faithful’. In 1936, when a foolish woman at a party asked Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg who would win the next war, he is alleged to have answered, ‘Madam, I cannot tell you that. Only one thing I can say: whoever has Italy on his side is bound to lose.’ There was a contemptuous joke in Nazi Party circles of Hitler’s lackey Wilhelm Keitel reporting, ‘My Führer, Italy has entered the war!’ Hitler answers, ‘Send two divisions. That should be enough to finish them.’ Keitel says, ‘No, my Führer, not against us, but with us.’ Hitler says, ‘That’s different. Send ten divisions.’

In the early months of the war, there was a droll consensus between the Germans and British against initiating Middle Eastern operations. So weak was Britain’s global position that its chiefs of staff set their faces against committing forces there. Once Mussolini joined the Axis, the Mediterranean became valueless as a shipping route to the East, in the face of enemy air and naval dominance. The head of the British Army, Gen. Sir John Dill, preferred to dispatch to Asia such men and weapons as could be spared, to strengthen the Empire’s defences against the looming Japanese threat. Churchill, however, would have none of this: since it was impossible to give battle on the Continent, he determined to do so in Africa. In the summer of 1940 he shipped precious tanks to Britain’s Middle East C-in-C, Gen. Sir Archibald Wavell. Other precautionary measures were adopted: 16,000 Gibraltarians – all but 4,000 of the Rock’s civilian population – were evacuated first to North Africa, thence to England. It was likely that seizure of the fortress at the gates of the Mediterranean would become an Axis objective, perhaps with the collusion of Spain’s dictator, Gen. Francisco Franco.

The Royal Navy had a relatively large Mediterranean fleet, but its C-in-C, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, recognised its vulnerability when almost bereft of air cover – as Churchill did not. For more than two years after Italy entered the war and France left it, Cunningham’s forces remained grievously disadvantaged by shortage of both carriers and land bases from which to operate aircraft. Huge expanses of sea were beyond the range of British fighters flying from Gibraltar, Malta, Egypt or Palestine. The Axis, by contrast, could strike at will from an almost unlimited choice of airfields. It was remarkable that between 1940 and 1943 the Royal Navy asserted itself with some success in the Mediterranean, under such handicaps of means and strategic weakness. Cunningham and his warship captains displayed a skill, dash and courage which went far to compensate for the paper superiority of the Italian battlefleet.

Ashore, the war in the North African desert engaged only a handful of British and imperial divisions, while most of Churchill’s army stayed at home. This was partly to provide security against invasion, partly for lack of weapons and equipment, partly owing to shortage of shipping to move and supply troops overseas. The clashes between desert armies were little more significant in determining the outcome of the global conflict than the tournaments between bands of French and English knights which provided
entr’actes
during the Hundred Years War. But the North African contest caught the imagination of the Western world, and achieved immense symbolic significance in the minds of the British people.

Hostilities were conducted upon a narrow strip of sand along the Mediterranean littoral, seldom more than forty miles wide, which was navigable by tanks. For thirty-two months between September 1940 and May 1943, the rival armies struggled for mastery in a series of seesaw campaigns which eventually traversed more than 2,000 miles of coastal territory. Shifts of advantage were heavily influenced by the distances each side was obliged to move fuel, ammunition, food and water to its fighting units: the British fared best in 1941–42 when closest to their bases in the Nile Delta; Axis forces when nearer to Tripoli. It is foolish to romanticise any aspect of the war, given the universal reality that almost every participant would have preferred to be in his own home; that to die trapped in a blazing tank was no less terrible at Sollum or Benghazi than at Stalingrad. But the emptiness of desert battlefields, where there was neither much slaughter of innocents nor destruction of civilian property, rendered absent some of the horrors imposed by collateral damage in populated regions.

While campaigning in the desert was never comfortable, in the protracted intervals between battles it was preferable to winter Russia or monsoon Asia. It is sometimes suggested that in North Africa there was ‘war without hate’. This is an exaggeration, because there was certainly fear, which bred spasms of animosity; most men in the heat of action feel ill-will towards those seeking to kill them. But extremes of brutality, especially the murder of prisoners, were generally avoided by both sides. Italians and Germans, British, Indians, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans subsisted and fought in a wild and alien environment where none had any emotional stake. They engaged in a common struggle against sand, flies, heat and thirst, even before the enemy entered the reckoning.

In the autumn of 1940, Mussolini was impatient to the point of obsession to achieve some conspicuous Italian success to justify seizing a share of the booty from anticipated Axis victory. Though ignorant of both military and naval affairs, he craved foreign conquests to ennoble fascism and stiffen the frail spirit of his people at home. ‘The army has need of
glory
,’ he said. Libya, an Italian colony, adjoined British-controlled Egypt, where Wavell had a small imperial force of one British division, 7th Armoured, together with an Indian and a New Zealand formation, soon reinforced by two Australian divisions. Britain’s presence was anomalous to the verge of absurdity: Egypt was an independent sovereign state ruled by King Farouk, where the British supposedly exercised rights only to defend the Suez Canal. The Cairo government did not formally enter hostilities until February 1945. The sympathies of most Egyptians lay with the Axis, which they believed would liberate them from more than seventy years of British domination. Indeed, such views were widespread among Arab nationalists throughout the Middle East, and were stimulated by Hitler’s 1940 successes. That August, the secretary of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem visited Berlin to discuss fomenting a revolt in Iraq. In addition, he suggested, prospective rebels in Palestine and Transjordan might be armed with weapons provided by the Vichy French in Syria. The aspiring insurgents’ principal demand was that the Nazis should commit themselves to the future independence of the Arab states.

Yet in 1940 Germany’s leaders were not much interested in Muslim revolts, less still in Arab freedom. Moreover, at this stage they conceded to Italy the principal diplomatic role in the region. Mussolini’s ambitions for extending his African empire were wholly incompatible with local peoples’ aspirations: in pursuit of them, his generals had already massacred many thousands of Libyan and Abyssinian tribesmen. Only in 1941 did the Germans engage with Arab nationalists, notably in Iraq and Persia. Their attempted interventions there were late, half-hearted, and easily frustrated by forces dispatched to reassert British hegemony.

In Egypt in September 1939, Britain invoked a clause of its treaty with Farouk which obliged him, in the event of a war, to provide ‘all the facilities and assistance in his power, including the use of ports, aerodromes and means of communication’. Thereafter, the British treated the country as a colonial possession, governed through their ambassador Sir Miles Lampson. They based their Mediterranean fleet at Alexandria, and in February 1942 deployed troops in Cairo to stifle a nascent Egyptian rebellion. In the course of the war, desperate hunger among the peasantry caused several food riots; the plight of the Egyptian
felaheen
contrasted starkly with the sybaritic lifestyle of the British military colony centred upon Middle East headquarters, Shepheard’s Hotel, the Gezira Sporting Club and a nexus of barracks, supply and repair bases throughout the Nile Delta, where contempt for ‘the wogs’ was almost universal.

American visitors were dismayed by the lassitude and imperial condescension of the British in Egypt, who seemed to regard the conflict being waged in the western wilderness as a mere event in a sporting calendar. This perception was unjust to those doing the fighting and dying: it failed to recognise the British Army’s tradition of seeking to make war with a light heart. But a core of truth about the North African campaign was that the British role until late 1942 was characterised by an amateurishness that was occasionally inspired, but more often crippled its endeavours.

So large was the paper strength of Mussolini’s armies that in the summer of 1940 it seemed possible they would expel the British from northern and eastern Africa. There were 600,000 Italian and colonial troops in Libya and Abyssinia, confronting fewer than a hundred thousand men under Wavell’s orders in the Middle East, Kenya, Sudan and Somaliland. In August, to Churchill’s fury the Italians seized Somaliland almost bloodlessly. Mussolini’s people had little stomach for hard fighting, but a hearty appetite for victories. During the brief period when cheap African conquests seemed in prospect while the Luftwaffe’s efforts against Britain were visibly flagging, an Italian journalist wrote proudly, and with an earnestness that reflected his people’s genius for self-delusion: ‘We want to reach Suez with our own forces alone; perhaps
we
will win the war and not the Germans.’ But Mussolini’s operations were handicapped by his confusion about both means and purposes: at home, he demobilised part of his army to bring in the harvest. Ignoring the vital principle of concentration of force, he prepared to launch an invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece. He failed to exploit a critical window of opportunity to seize Malta. In North Africa, his commanders lacked equipment, skill and resolve. In September 1940, in a gesture symbolic of Italy’s generals’ insouciance about the struggle, the Ministry of War in Rome reverted to its peacetime practice of closing for business each day at 2 p.m.

An Italian diplomat vented his disgust on the mood he encountered during a visit to Milan: ‘Everyone thinks only of eating, enjoying themselves, making money and relaying witticisms about the great and powerful. Anyone who gets killed is a jerk … He who supplies the troops with cardboard shoes is considered a sort of hero.’ A young Italian officer wrote home from Libya: ‘We’re trying to fight this war as though it were a colonial war in Africa. But this is a European war … fought with European weapons against a European enemy. We take too little account of this in building our stone forts and equipping ourselves with such luxury.’

Mussolini dismissed Hitler’s offer of two armoured divisions for North Africa, which might have been decisive in securing a swift Axis victory: he was determined to keep the Germans out of his own jealously defined sphere of influence. A quarter of Italy’s combat aircraft were dispatched to join the Luftwaffe’s attack on Britain, leaving Italian troops in Libya almost without air support, while a large army in Albania – occupied by Mussolini in 1939 – was held in readiness to attack either Yugoslavia or Greece, as the Duce deemed expedient. The Italians made policy and strategy in the belief that they were participating in the residual military operations of a short war soon to conclude in Axis victory. Mussolini was fearful that the British might make terms with Hitler before he had achieved his own conquests. Instead, Italy would become the only nation whose strategic fortunes were decisively affected by events in Africa, where it lost progressively twenty-six divisions, half its air force and its entire tank inventory, together with any vestige of military credibility.

The British began operations in the summer of 1940 with a succession of raids across the Libyan border. Marshal Rodolfo Graziani deployed some 250,000 men against 36,000 British in Egypt and a further 27,000 – including a division of horsed yeomanry – in Palestine. Mussolini’s commander had made his reputation by destroying the Abyssinian army in 1935 with liberal infusions of poison gas. In 1940 he showed himself a resolute defeatist with no stomach for battle. Graziani advanced cautiously into Egypt in September until, unnerved by the British show of aggression and a gross overestimate of Wavell’s strength, he halted and dug in south and east of Sidi Barrani. One of his generals, Annibale Bergonzoli, christened ‘electric whiskers’ by the British, found some of his artillery officers so craven that during British air attacks he was obliged to hit and kick them back to their guns from the trenches where they had taken refuge. A three-month pause ensued, during which Mussolini chafed, still anxious that the war might come to an end before he had conquered Egypt; Churchill, meanwhile, was equally impatient at the delay before Wavell was ready to launch his counter-strokes.