From every point of view it would have made more sense to attack Malta, and possibly Gibraltar and Alexandria as well, rather than Greece, in order to deprive the British of their crucial naval bases in the Mediterranean. But Mussolini was oblivious to this strategic imperative. On 11 November 1940 half the Italian battle fleet was effectively rendered inoperative by a British carrier-based air attack at Taranto. A few months later, on 28 March 1941, alerted by the deciphering of an Italian navy message at the decoding centre in Bletchley Park, the British navy off Cape Matapan in the Mediterranean sank three Italian cruisers and two destroyers on their way to intercept British supply convoys to the Greeks. The British forces lost no more than one aircraft.
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For the rest of the war, the remainder of the modern and well-equipped Italian fleet stayed close to port for fear of further damage. Well before this time, too, an attempt to invade British-held Egypt from the Italian colony of Libya had been repulsed by a small but well-trained Anglo-Indian force of 35,000 men, who took 130,000 prisoners in December 1940, along with 380 tanks.
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Perhaps the greatest humiliation came in April 1941, when the Italian occupying force in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Abeba surrendered to a mixed Allied force that successfully wrested the colony back from its Fascist masters in a campaign far shorter than the original Italian war of conquest in 1935-6. British intelligence had succeeded in deciphering so many of the Italians’ battle plans and gained such detailed information about their movements and troop dispositions that the British commanders were aware of everything the Italians were going to do well in advance. A force of 92,000 Italian and 250,000 Abyssinian soldiers was comprehensively defeated by 40,000 British-led African troops. The Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie was triumphantly reinstalled on his throne, while Allied forces had overrun Eritrea and Italian Somaliland by May 1941, leaving the whole north-east of Africa in Allied hands.
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So comprehensive was the Italian debacle that Hitler had little choice but to intervene. On 19 January 1941 Mussolini arrived at the Berghof for two days of talks. The Italian failures had completely transformed the relationship between the two dictators. Whilst Hitler had previously shown some deference to his former mentor, now, though he did his best to be tactful, there was no doubt that he and his entourage were beginning to hold the Italian dictator in some contempt. On 6 February 1941 Hitler briefed General Erwin Rommel on the task of rescuing the situation in North Africa. Born in 1891, and of middle-class origin, Rommel was not a typical German general. Highly decorated in the First World War, he had attracted attention by a book on infantry tactics published in 1937. He had distinguished himself by his boldness in leading a tank division in the invasion of France. Appointed to head the newly formed Africa Corps, he arrived in Tripoli on 12 February 1941 with a brief to prevent any further Italian collapse in Libya. Nominally under Italian command, in fact Rommel showed little regard for the Italian generals. His troops were well trained and adapted quickly to the peculiar conditions of warfare in the flat, featureless, sandy terrain. Rommel was able to use German decrypts of ciphers from the US military attache’ in Cairo to anticipate British moves, while the signals he himself sent to his superiors often said something different to what he actually decided to do. Building on their previous experience of combined air and armoured warfare, Rommel’s troops moved swiftly into action, pushing back a British force weakened by the redeployment of many of its best soldiers to defend Greece against the expected German invasion.
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By 1 April 1941 Rommel had met with such success that he ignored orders from Berlin and drove on hundreds of miles until he was close to the Egyptian border. Halder considered he had gone ‘stark mad’, and thought he had spread his forces too wide and opened himself to a counter-attack. He was sharply critical of Rommel’s ‘pathological ambition’.
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The British sent a new commander, strengthened their forces, and counter-attacked. Rommel had indeed grossly overstretched his supply lines, and had to withdraw. But he eventually managed to obtain more tanks and fuel and finally took the key Libyan seaport of Tobruk in June 1942. The victory prompted Hitler to promote him to the rank of Field Marshal, the youngest in the German army. In this war of rapid movement across vast distances of largely empty desert, Rommel now forced the British back deep into Egypt. He was within striking distance of the Suez Canal, threatening a major British supply route and opening up the enticing prospect of gaining access to the vast oilfields of the Middle East.
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Rommel was widely regarded as a hero not only in Germany but even in Britain. Yet his victories opened up new opportunities for the Nazis and their allies to implement their doctrines of racial superiority on defenceless minorities. The triumphs of the Africa Corps brought terrible suffering to the Jews who lived in often very old-established communities in the major North African cities. 50,000 Jews lived in Tunisia, and as soon as the Germans occupied the country, their homes were raided, their property confiscated, their valuables stolen, and their young men - more than 4,000 of them - sent off to labour camps near the front line. The rape of Tunisian Jewish women by German soldiers was far from uncommon. Walter Rauff, the Gestapo chief in Tunis, transferred from the killing fields of Eastern Europe, quickly instituted a reign of terror against the Jews of Tunis. Many were brutally maltreated; a few were hidden by sympathetic Arabs. The situation of the Jews in the neighbouring Vichy French colonies of Morocco and Algeria was little better. Almost immediately after the regime was established in 1940, some 1,500 Jews serving in the French Foreign Legion were cashiered and imprisoned in a rapidly growing network of labour camps whose number soon exceeded 100. Joined there by internees from a variety of nations, including Poland, Greece and Czechoslovakia, they were forced to work on projects such as the new Trans-Sahara Railway in conditions of considerable brutality. Vichy’s harsh discriminatory laws against Jews in France were applied in French North Africa too. Altogether perhaps 5,000 North African Jews died under Axis occupation, roughly 1 per cent of the total. Their numbers would have been far greater had it been possible to transport them across the Mediterranean to the extermination centres of German-occupied Poland.
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While these dramatic events were in progress, the Germans tried to gain access to vital oil supplies in the Middle East by fomenting unrest against British rule in Iraq. But the British managed to quell the unrest without too much trouble in the summer of 1941, and built on this success by taking over Syria, a French colony, from the Vichy regime. Thus frustrated, Hitler was reduced to making promises that he had at the moment no chance of fulfilling. The Islamic cleric Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, fled to Berlin on the defeat of the uprising in Iraq, and Hitler greeted him on 28 November 1941 with an empty promise to destroy Jewish settlements in Palestine.
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Indeed, in an attempt to avoid offending the Arabs, the Propaganda Ministry for a time recommended replacing the term ‘antisemitic’ with the more specific ‘anti-Jewish’ in the media - the Arabs, after all, were Semites too.
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Yet Rommel’s victories ensured that the dream of gaining access to the massive oilfields of the Middle East was still not dead.
II
The search for oil was not confined to North Africa and the Middle East. On 27 May 1940, in the wake of its stunning successes in the west, the Third Reich secured a monopoly over Romanian oil supplies. By July Romanian oil deliveries to Britain, which had previously made up nearly 40 per cent of the output of the Ploesti oilfield, had been completely cut off.
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But the dictatorship of King Carol of Romania, which had negotiated these deals, ran into trouble when he was forced by Hitler to cede northern Transylvania to Germany’s ally Hungary and surrender further territory in the south to Bulgaria (promised because German troops had to pass through Bulgaria to reach Greece). Carol had also been obliged to cede Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union as part of the deal struck by the Nazi-Soviet Pact the previous year. On 6 September 1940 Carol was forced to abdicate in the face of popular outrage at these concessions, driven out by the army under its leader General Ion Antonescu in alliance with the fascist Iron Guard. Antonescu became Prime Minister in a new coalition government heavily backed by the military. Early in 1941, however, the Iron Guard staged a violent uprising against the new government, directing its fury especially against the country’s 375,000 Jews, whom it blamed, absurdly, for the cession of the lost territories. Under its leader, Horia Sima, the Iron Guard rampaged through Bucharest, hunting down Jews, taking them out into the woods and shooting them. Sima’s men also took 200 Jewish men into a slaughterhouse, stripped them naked, made them go through the whole process of the slaughter-line normally used for animals, and hung their corpses up by their throats from meat-hooks, labelling the bodies ‘fit for human consumption’. There was some evidence that the SS had backed the revolt in the hope of gaining tighter control over the turbulent Balkan state. But after two days the rebellion was quickly crushed by Antonescu, who now became the country’s military dictator. Horia Sima was forced to flee and took refuge in Germany. A rigged plebiscite confirmed the new order. Antonescu, a professional soldier from a military family, now in his fifties, had already established good relations with Hitler, who was deeply impressed with him on a personal level; among other things, the Romanian leader persuaded the Nazis to stop supporting the Iron Guard, thus leaving them at the government’s mercy. Hitler in return held out the prospect of assisting the Romanians to recover the substantial territory they had lost to the Soviet Union and maybe more besides. A close alliance emerged between the two countries. German troops entered Romania but the country remained more than merely nominally independent. By 1941 nearly 50 per cent of Romania’s crude oil output was produced by German-owned companies and exports of petroleum products nearly tripled in comparison to the previous year. It was not least in order to secure these supplies that Hitler decided it was necessary to extricate the Italians from their problems in neighbouring Greece.
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In the composite multinational Kingdom of Yugoslavia, however, the situation had become more difficult for Hitler. On 25 March 1941, the Yugoslav government had yielded to German pressure (which had included the summoning of the Prince Regent Paul to the Berghof for a characteristic piece of bullying by Hitler) and allied itself formally with Germany, thus putting in place another piece of the diplomatic background for the forthcoming invasion of Greece. The reluctant Yugoslav government managed to obtain assurances that no German troops would pass through their country on their way to Greece, and that it would not be asked to provide any military support. As a reward for its goodwill it obtained a commitment that it would be given the Greek port of Salonika once the German conquest of the country was complete. But a German alliance was anathema to the Serb element in the Yugoslav officer corps, who saw in it evidence of excessive Croatian influence in the cabinet and had in any case been deeply committed to the Allied cause and hostile to Germany and Austria since the First World War. In the early hours of 27 March 1941, Serb officers staged a coup d’état, overthrew the Prince Regent and proclaimed Peter II, aged only seventeen, as king. The event was greeted by ecstatic Serbian demonstrations in the streets of Belgrade. An all-party government was formed, for the moment papering over the serious divisions between Serbs and Croats in the face of the likely reaction from Berlin.
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That reaction was not slow in coming. Hitler was furious. He summoned the leaders of the German army and air force and declared that, in view of this betrayal, Yugoslavia would be smashed. The country must be attacked ‘in a lightning operation’ and ‘with merciless harshness’. Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria would all make territorial gains from the defeated country. The Croats would be given their independence. The plans for the invasion of Greece would have to be revised in the shortest possible time so as to include a parallel invasion of Yugoslavia. Here was another state, like Poland, that had dared to defy him, another state, therefore, that had to be utterly destroyed.
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After making the necessary arrangements with Germany’s allies Hungary and Italy, the German Twelfth Army entered southern Yugoslavia and northern Greece on 6 April 1941. On 8-10 April 1941 German, Hungarian and Italian forces invaded northern Yugoslavia. With superior numbers and more modern armour and equipment, and backed by 800 aircraft, the German forces overwhelmed their opponents. The Yugoslav army, although over a million strong, was badly equipped, poorly led and riven by ethnic divisions. It crumbled rapidly. As waves of German bombers devastated the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, German panzer divisions and infantry moved forward rapidly. They took the city on 12 April 1941, leading the Yugoslav government to capitulate five days later. 344,000 Yugoslav troops were captured. German losses amounted to 151 dead. Meanwhile, the Greeks, backed by a British expeditionary force, had put up stiffer resistance, but here too, the tried and tested combination of air command and modern armour overwhelmed the opposition. Split from the Greek army, the retreating British forces decided to evacuate, and a hurriedly assembled naval force, harried by German airplanes, managed to take off about 50,000 troops from the beaches by the end of April, though a number of ships were lost in the process. In despair at the course events were taking, the Greek Prime Minister shot himself on 18 April 1941. German troops entered Athens on 27 April 1941.
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