Finest Years (18 page)

Churchill's decision to dispatch a British army to Greece in the spring of 1941 remains one of the most controversial of his wartime premiership. When the commitment was first mooted back in October, almost all the soldiers opposed it. On 1 November Eden, the Secretary for War, cabled from Cairo: ‘
We cannot, from Middle East
resources, send sufficient air or land reinforcements to have any decisive influence upon course of fighting…To send such forces there…would imperil our whole position in the Middle East and
jeopardize plans for offensive operations.' These remarks prompted a tirade from the prime minister, and caused Eden to write in his diary two days later: ‘
The weakness of our policy
is that we never adhere to the plans we make.'

It seemed extraordinarily unlikely that a mere four divisions—all that could be spared from Wavell's resources—would make the difference between Greek victory and defeat. Aircraft were lacking. With German intervention looming in North Africa, such a diversion of forces threatened Britain's desert campaign. Kennedy told Dill on 26 January that he would have liked to see the chiefs of staff adopt much firmer resistance to the Greek proposal—‘
We were near the edge
of the precipice…CIGS said to me that he did not dissent, and considered the limitation placed upon the first reinforcements to be offered to the Greeks to be a sufficient safeguard. This seemed to me to be frightfully dangerous…If the Germans come down to Salonika the whole thing is bound to collapse, and nothing short of 20 divisions and a big air force, maintained by shipping we cannot afford, would be of any use…What we should do is keep the water in front of us. Anything we send to Greece will be lost if the Germans come down.' As so often with the counsels of Churchill's generals, this view represented prudence. Yet what would the British people say, never mind Goebbels, if the British lion skulked timorous beside the Nile?

Churchill changed his mind several times about Greece. Probably the most significant indication of his innermost belief derives from remarks to Roosevelt's envoy Harry Hopkins early in January. Hopkins reported to Washington on the 10th: ‘
He thinks Greece
is lost—although he is now reinforcing the Greeks and weakening his African army.' Just as the prime minister's heart had moved him to dispatch more troops to France in June 1940 against military logic, so now it inspired him to believe that the Greeks could not be abandoned to their fate. An overriding moral imperative, his familiar determination to do nothing common or mean, drove the British debate in the early months of 1941. He nursed a thin hope that, following the success of
Compass
, Turkey might join the Allies if Britain displayed staunchness in the Balkans.

It is likely that Churchill would have followed his instinct to be seen to aid Greece even if Wavell in the Middle East had sustained opposition. As it was, however, the C-in-C provoked amazement among senior soldiers by changing his mind. When Dill and Eden arrived in Cairo in mid-February on a second visit, they found Wavell ready to support a Greek commitment. On the 19th, the general said: ‘We have a difficult choice, but I think we are more likely to be playing the enemy's game by remaining inactive than by taking action in the Balkans.' Now it was Churchill's turn to wobble. ‘Do not consider yourself obligated to a Greek enterprise if in your hearts you feel it will only be another Norwegian fiasco,' he signalled Eden on 20 February. Dill, however, said that they believed there was ‘a reasonable chance of resisting a German advance'. Eden said to Wavell: ‘It is a soldier's business. It is for you to say.' Wavell responded: ‘War is an option of difficulties. We go.' On the 24th, Churchill told his men in Cairo: ‘While being under no illusions, we all send you the order “Full Steam Ahead”.'

The Greek commitment represented one of Anthony Eden's first tests as Foreign Secretary, the role to which he had been translated in December, on the departure of Lord Halifax to become British ambassador in Washington. In the eyes of many of his contemporaries, Eden displayed a highly-strung temperament, petulance and lack of steel which inspired scant confidence. An infantry officer in the First World War, endowed with famous charm and physical glamour, he established his credentials as an anti-appeaser by resigning from Chamberlain's government in 1938. Throughout the war, as afterwards, he cherished a passionate ambition to succeed Churchill in office, which the prime minister himself encouraged. Churchill valued Eden's intelligence and loyalty, but the soldiers thought him incorrigibly ‘wet', with affectations of manner which they identified with those of homosexuals. Sir James Grigg, Permanent Under-Secretary at the War Office, and later Secretary for War, thought Eden ‘a poor feeble little pansy', though it should be noted that Grigg seldom thought well of anyone. But in a world in which talent is rarely, if ever, sufficient to meet the
challenges of government, it remains hard to identify a better candidate for the wartime foreign secretaryship. Eden often stood up to Churchill in a fashion which deserves respect. But his reports to Downing Street from the Mediterranean in 1940-41 reflected erratic judgement and a tendency towards vacillation.

Dill, head of the army, remained deeply unhappy about sending troops to Greece. But in the Middle East theatre, Wavell's was the decisive voice. Many historians have expressed bewilderment that this intelligent soldier should have committed himself to a policy which promised disaster. Yet it does not seem hard to explain Wavell's behaviour. For months the Middle East C-in-C had been harassed and pricked by the prime minister, who deplored his alleged pusillanimity. As early as August 1940, when Wavell visited London, Eden described the general's dismay at Churchill's impatience with him: ‘
Found Wavell waiting
for me at 9am. He was clearly upset at last night's proceedings and said he thought he should have made it plain that if the Prime Minister could not approve his dispositions and had not confidence in him he should appoint someone else.' Though this early spat was patched up, the two men never established a rapport. Churchill wrote down Wavell as ‘
a good average colonel
…[who] would make a good chairman of a Tory association'. The general displayed remarkable social gaucheness, for instance pitching his camp during visits to London later in the war at the home of ‘Chips' Channon, one of the most foolish, if richest, men in Parliament. All through the autumn of 1940, bad-tempered signals flew to and fro between Downing Street and Cairo, provoked by the prime minister's impatience with Wavell's caution, and his C-in-C's exasperation with Churchill's indifference to military realities as he himself perceived them.

Again and again Churchill pressed Wavell, and indeed all his generals, to overcome their fears of the enemy, to display the fighting spirit which he prized above all things, and which alone, he believed, would enable Britain to survive. It seems necessary to recognise the loneliness of wartime commanders, thrust onto centre stage in a blaze of floodlights. Unlike ministers, most of whom had for years
been famous men in the cockpit of affairs, even the highest-ranking of Britain's soldiers, sailors and airmen had passed their careers in obscurity, unknown beyond the ranks of their own services. Now, suddenly, such a man as Wavell found himself the focus of his nation's hopes. Even after the Libyan battlefield successes of recent months, the C-in-C in Cairo would have been less than human had he not been galled by Churchill's goading. In 1939 Poland had been left to face defeat alone, for it lay beyond the reach of a British or French army. In 1940 many Frenchmen and Belgians believed themselves betrayed by their Anglo-Saxon ally. In 1941 Britain's prime minister almost daily urged the peoples of the free world to join hands to contest mastery with the Nazis. Was a British army now to stand ingloriously idle, and watch Greece succumb?

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.