The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (337 page)

On October 27 Churchill sent Roosevelt a message that captured Britain’s declining fortunes and the growing dangers facing the Empire. It was part boosterism, part desperate appeal. Churchill told the president that the U-boat and air attacks on the Northwest Approaches—“our only remaining lifeline”—could be “repelled only by the strongest concentration of our flotillas.” Yet in order to concentrate its destroyers in the approaches, the Home Fleet would have to lessen its presence in the North Sea, or reduce its destroyer presence along the south coast of England, or both. It could not be in all places at once. British food stocks were low and shipping losses were growing very worrisome, for in the last week of October, losses reached almost 160,000 tons, a figure that would have been
thought a disastrous
monthly
loss the year before. Churchill told Roosevelt that much in the way of American matériel was needed for Home Island defense, and that the war would probably widen sometime in 1941 to include both Greece and Turkey, further threatening Britain’s already precarious position in the eastern Mediterranean. He ended his telegram with: “The world cause is in your hands.”
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C
hurchill’s prediction regarding Greece proved spot-on, but his timing was off. The next day, October 28, Mussolini—without consulting Hitler—ordered eleven divisions, including the elite Alpini regiment, Italy’s finest fighters, across the Albanian border, over the Epirus Mountains and into Greece. The Italians far outnumbered the Greeks, had tanks where the Greeks did not, and fielded superior artillery. But, writes historian John Keegan, Mussolini had window-dressed his army “with expensive new equipment,” to the detriment of its fighting integrity. Thus, the Italians were overall weaker in arms, particularly in infantry. Infantry and machine guns made the difference in the mountain passes that tanks could not traverse. Mussolini’s troops lacked something else critical to attaining victory, too: motivation. They did not share Il Duce’s sense of destiny.
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Mussolini’s motives were that he didn’t much like the Greeks and sought to assert enlightened Italian influence in the Balkans, and that he craved to show Hitler that Germany was not the only great power in Europe. Mussolini’s son-in-law Count Ciano had scribbled in his diary the previous November: “For Mussolini, the idea of Hitler waging war, and worse still, winning it, is altogether unbearable.” The charge into Greece would show Hitler that he, Il Duce, was no
fantoccini
(puppet). A collateral benefit could be expected to accrue as well from the takeover—the occupation of Greece would provide secure bases in closer proximity to British targets in the eastern Mediterranean. Yet the Italian charge across the doorstep of Egypt had brought Mussolini within reach of the biggest prizes short of London—Alexandria, Cairo, and the Suez. To capture those trophies, he would need to send his navy into full-blown battle against the Royal Navy. With the French fleet neutralized, the Italian and British Mediterranean fleets were fairly evenly matched; the Italians in fact held the edge in submarines and capital ships, the British in aircraft carriers, of which Mussolini had none. But where Mussolini sought to avoid a climactic naval battle, Churchill, in the spirit of Nelson,
invited
a fight. Mussolini’s prospects at sea appeared solid. His prospects on land appeared even more solid. In the Western Desert the Italians outnumbered Wavell’s forces by almost three
to one, with another 180,000 Italian troops bivouacked to the southeast in the Horn of Africa. Even were an attack on Wavell to result in a bloody stalemate, the British would be pushed to the brink.
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Yet Mussolini’s superior numbers on the ground counted for nothing without control of the sea. The Mediterranean formed the four center squares of Mussolini’s chessboard, and Churchill’s. By all that was strategically sound, Mussolini should have tried to drive the British out, supported in the air by his own air forces and the Luftwaffe. But in his most disastrous decision of the war (after joining Hitler in the first place), Il Duce chose to safeguard his navy and throw his ground troops into Greece, where the Greeks let the Italians wear themselves out assaulting mountain redoubts. Hitler learned of Mussolini’s strike while aboard his armored train en route to meet Il Duce in Florence. Arriving at the station, the Führer stepped from his car onto a red carpet. Mussolini strode forward, saluted, and announced, “Führer, we are on the march! Victorious Italian troops crossed the Greco-Albanian border at dawn today.” They repaired to a small room, where Hitler’s first words, spoken quietly as they clasped hands, were, “The whole outcome will be a military catastrophe.”
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Churchill learned of Mussolini’s gambit early on the twenty-eighth when Colville interrupted a meeting at the CWR to announce that the Italians were bombing Athens. “Then we must bomb Rome,” replied Churchill. Within hours the War Cabinet authorized the bombing, with specific orders to avoid dropping any ordnance on Vatican City. “We must be careful not to bomb the Pope,” Churchill told Colville, because “he has a lot of influential friends.” Churchill’s concern for the safeguarding of His Holiness’s person had little to do with the pope’s moral presence on the world stage. Churchill’s view of the Papacy ran to the traditional Anglican; the pope was largely irrelevant. As British bombers made for Rome, Hugh Dalton, knowing of the woeful inaccuracy of their aim, expressed hope that the pope not be hit. Churchill replied, “I should like to tell the old man to get down into his shelter and stay there for a week.” The pope may have had friends in high places, but Churchill was not one of them. Within days the Italian army in Greece learned it had no friends—divine or otherwise. Mussolini threw in reserves that brought his strength up to fifteen divisions, but in just over four weeks, the outnumbered Greeks drove the Italians back through the mountain passes, back into Albania, whence they had come. If Greece were fated to fall to the Axis powers, Germany would have to do the heavy fighting.
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The Greeks had a friend: Churchill. And they had a guarantee from Britain: a pledge made by Chamberlain in 1939 to step up with military help if Greek sovereignty was threatened. Given the sorry state of British military affairs, that was now an empty promise. To Churchill, however, a
promise was a promise. Greek survival was at stake. That British survival was at stake as well had to be weighed against a very compelling, very English reason for keeping its promise to Greece: honor. Britain had failed the Czechs. It could not fail the Greeks. “We will give you all the help in our power,” Churchill told Greek prime minister Ioannis Metaxas, who at first demurred, for fear of invoking Hitler’s wrath. Only one military option was available to Churchill to meet his diplomatic obligation, to divide British forces in the Near East and send some to Greece and Crete. The rest would remain in Egypt to face down the Italian armies encamped since September at Sidi Barrani.

It was a solution that defied the most fundamental military maxim: Do not divide forces if the division results in the increased likelihood of the destruction of all forces in detail. To send part of the Egyptian command to Greece was, Eden wrote in his diary, “strategic folly.” Eden, in Cairo since mid-October on a mission to assess the offensive possibilities offered there, telegraphed Churchill on November 1: “We cannot from Middle East resources send sufficient air or land reinforcements to have any decisive influence upon course of fighting in Greece.” Churchill replied the next day: “Greek situation must be held to dominate other now. We are well aware of our slender resources.” All three senior commanders in the Middle East—General Wavell, Admiral Cunningham, and air chief marshal Sir Arthur Longmore—shared Eden’s opinion. Churchill did not. Wavell and General Dill expressed their doubts to each other but did not express them forcefully to Churchill, who thought Wavell and Dill pessimistic in any event, and chalked up any hesitancy on their parts to their natural conservatism. Yet their positions called for them to give the boss the bad with the good, regardless of the boss’s reaction. They chose—after Churchill made clear his displeasure with their opinions—to hedge their bets.
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Churchill retired early on All Hallows Eve, felled by a stomach ailment for which Dr. Wilson prescribed castor oil, but he was out and about on November 1, and in fine fettle. Attired in his RAF uniform, he inspected a Hurricane squadron at Northolt, of which he was honorary commodore. During the ride to the base, he told Colville he was much annoyed at the Italians—several Italian pilots had been captured after being shot down over London—and planned to bomb Rome regularly as soon as he could put Wellingtons on Malta. Colville expressed hope that the Colosseum not be damaged; to which Churchill replied that it wouldn’t hurt if the Colosseum had a few more bricks knocked off. He quoted from Byron’s
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

As they drove on, he continued his harangue against the Italians, “whose impertinence in sending bombers to attack us [Britain],” Colville said, “has much annoyed him.” He expressed regret at not having studied Greek, lamented the failure of Eton and Harrow to send fighter pilots to the RAF, and predicted a smashing electoral victory for Roosevelt. He also predicted America would enter the war. He punctuated his monologue with bursts of
“Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree.”
He mused on the pleasures of the game chemin de fer and the joy he found at the gaming tables of the Riviera. “I should now like,” he said, “to have dinner—at Monte Carlo—and then to go and gamble!”
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He would soon enough go and gamble in the Mediterranean, with men and arms in the deserts of Libya, in Greece, and in the air above Malta, on Crete, and at the anchorage in Taranto, where the pride of the Italian fleet rode at anchor. Churchill was about to test his luck on several fronts at once. He should have known that to do so with any hope of success requires virtually limitless resources. His were slender; he knew it, and since May had repeatedly cabled that fact to Roosevelt. He had also rued the state of his resources in a memo that went out the day
before
Mussolini invaded Greece. It took the form of a sharp reply to his old Harrow schoolmate Leo Amery, secretary of state for India, who had proposed sending even more reinforcements to Wavell: “I regret very much,” Churchill told Amery, “the use of expressions like ‘gamble’ when applied to the necessary precautions for the life of this country against far superior air forces.” He reminded Amery that more than 70,000 troops had already sailed to Egypt; another 53,000 were due there by year’s end. “It is very easy to write in a sweeping manner when one does not have to take account of resources, transport, time and distance.”
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Yet despite his dismissive missive to Amery, and despite his understanding on a strategic level that Egypt—and only Egypt—was the hand to play, he intended to play both the Greek and Egyptian hands. The advantage to be gained in Egypt by offense was the reason that Eden had been dispatched to the Middle East in the first place—to push Wavell into deploying his reinforced army westward in order to forestall an Italian attack before the Germans wandered mightily onto the scene. Wavell had staked out a sound defensive position, but a defensive posture was, for Churchill, no posture at all. He had not sent 70,000 troops from England merely to sit and wait for the Italians. He had sent them to fight Italians, and on British terms. He did not much respect the Italian fighting man. To Colville he allowed, “The Italians are harder to catch than kill.” He knew that the North African desert was the place to deal decisively with the Italians, and he had built up his forces accordingly. Then, all the plans changed—within the day—when Il Duce barged into Greece. Churchill
justified the decision to help Greece by citing Britain’s prewar pledge to Greece, but the decision was borne in large part by his loathing of Mussolini and the Italian soldier. He believed he could lick Il Duce in any fight, anywhere, anytime, so why not two fights at once? Thus, a few days after Il Duce’s thrust, Churchill admonished Dill, “Don’t forget—the maximum possible for Greece.”
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Two days
before
the start of Mussolini’s Greek crusade, Churchill, intending to take the fight only to the Italians in the desert, telegraphed concise instructions to Eden, then in Cairo, and about to depart for Khartoum: “Before leaving, you should consider searchingly with your Generals possibilities of forestalling [an Italian] offensive…. I thought their existing plans for repelling an attack by a defensive battle and counterstroke very good, but what happens if the enemy do not venture until the Germans arrive in strength? Do not send any answer to this, but go into it thoroughly and discuss it on return.” Churchill, in his memoirs, writes that his memo to Eden of October 26 included the opinion, expressed clearly, “that any forestalling operation on a large scale in the Western Desert would command my keen support.” Yet his memoirs fail to note his clear instructions to Eden, also contained within the memo of the twenty-sixth, to keep mum on any big plans until his return to London. Rather, in a nimble rearrangement of the history of those weeks, Churchill writes of Eden: “He was told in extreme secrecy [by Wavell, in Cairo] that a plan was being drawn up to attack the Italians in the Western Desert instead of waiting for them to open their offensive against Mersa Matruh, in Egypt. Neither he nor Wavell imparted these ideas to me or the Chiefs of Staff. General Wavell begged the Secretary of State for War not to send any telegram on this subject, but to tell us verbally about it when he got home. Thus for some weeks we remained without knowledge of the way their minds were working.”
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