The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (342 page)

Mersa Matruh was tethered to Alexandria by a small-gauge railroad that snaked 150 miles alongside the same coastal road Alexander had marched on. The British could therefore supply themselves, but the Italian supply lines, though secure, reached back hundreds of miles. That (and the array of their forts) was their weakness. The plan called for the British field commander Lieutenant General Richard O’Connor to move his Western Desert Force—30,000 men supported by six hundred Bren Gun carriers, and scores of light and heavy tanks—undetected from Mersa Matruh to Sidi Barrani. In the tradition of the Saracens, who had learned a millennium earlier the need to live by the desert’s rules or die by them, fuel and water
had been secreted in cisterns along the route. O’Connor’s tanks and men would drink their fill on the two-day journey west. Then, upon reaching the Italian camps, O’Connor’s plan called for his armor and troops to insinuate themselves unseen and unheard (not likely in the emptiness of the desert) behind the gap between camp Nibeiwa and camps Sofafi and Rabia. O’Connor then intended to run his tanks and infantry smack into the exposed flanks and rear of the Italians, a most daring maneuver given that O’Connor’s forces were outnumbered by almost three to one.

Traditionally, an entrenched defensive force equal in numbers to an attacking force is judged to hold an effective advantage of at least three to one over the attackers. O’Connor’s army of 30,000 was, in that sense, at a nine-to-one disadvantage, or would have been had the Italians been facing in the right direction. To the west of Sidi Barrani, almost 150,000 more Italian troops waited in northern Libya. However complete O’Connor’s surprise, if a division or two of the Italian forces in Libya drove to the aid of Sidi Barrani, O’Connor’s imputed numerical disadvantage could run to nearly twelve to one. He was placing his army in a nutcracker in hopes that the nut would shatter the cracker. With a little overreaching and a bit of bad luck, his army might find a place in military history alongside Custer’s 7th Cavalry at Little Bighorn, the Light Brigade at Balaclava, and the Anzacs
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at Gallipoli.

Distance was O’Connor’s other enemy. Once he motored out of Mersa Matruh, each mile thereafter stretched his supply lines. Were he to find success at Sidi Barrani and thrust westward, he faced nothing but emptiness. Libya spanned one thousand miles of desert except for a narrow strip along the coast where a single road twisted from Bardia in the east to Tripoli in the west. The country was a sea of sand and flaked stone, without roads, devoid of vegetation, bereft of any landscape features that afforded troops protection. The Italians in Libya were linked to Italy by secure seaborne supply lines, and thus the cologne, silk bedsheets, and fine cutlery. O’Connor’s force found itself alone in the desert, a true expeditionary unit, fully detached from all that sustained it.

Wavell and O’Connor knew how to fight in the desert, whereas apparently the Italians knew only how to camp there. The British understood that desert warfare was a fluid thing, with mobility the key. Destruction of enemy forces was more important than possession of turf, which could no more be held in the desert than could a patch of water in the open ocean. Wavell’s immediate goal was not to sail O’Connor’s army across the wide
sand seas of Libya, but simply to smash up the Italians at Sidi Barrani and, if things went well, to raid twenty-five miles farther to the west, to Buq Buq. To pull that off, the British would need stealth, great good luck, total surprise, and an enemy with scant fighting will.

They got all four. During the night of December 8 and early hours of the ninth, O’Connor’s infantry and supporting Matilda tanks threaded their way between Nibeiwa and the two southernmost Italian forts. To guide their movement, a British advance force had lit a string of beacons crafted from oil drums with one side peeled away, that side facing east, to be seen by O’Connor’s troops but not by the Italians. The British had been spotted by an Italian flier, but when he gave his initial (verbal) report, he was told to put it in writing. If he did so, it was either ignored or not read. By 2:00
A.M.
on the ninth, O’Connor’s force was in place behind Nibeiwa. It was a true imperial army made up of Englishmen, Hindus, Sikhs, Ulstermen, and Highlanders, with New Zealanders manning the troop transports. Two regiments of Matilda tanks were drawn up, ready to support the infantry. This was what the twenty-six-ton monsters had been built for. Virtual castles on steel treads, their two-pound guns could outshoot Italian light tanks while giving cover to the imperial infantry. After a breakfast of bacon, hot tea, and a shot of rum for the road, O’Connor’s men moved out. From the Italian camps the breeze carried the aromas of cooking fires and fresh coffee and hot rolls.
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The British interrupted breakfast. The pipers of the Cameron Highlanders sounded the charge, the keening of their pipes reaching Nibeiwa as the first rounds from the Matildas smashed into the Italian lines. The tanks came on in ranks, flanked by Bren Gun carriers, their heavy machine guns raking the Italians. Charging pell-mell behind the tanks came the Highlanders, the morning sun bright upon their helmets and bayonets. The Italians fought furiously with machine guns and grenades; General Pietro Maletti burst from his tent, shooting, and was immediately shot dead. Twenty Italian light tanks were reduced to piles of smoking steel by the Matildas, which rolled on, crushing defenders under their treads. It was over in less than three hours, the camp destroyed, more than two thousand prisoners taken. Ten miles north, two more camps waited. The 1st Royal Fusiliers, kicking a soccer ball, led the charge. White flags went up in the Italian camps. The commander of one stood five hundred of his men at attention when the British entered to accept his surrender.

O’Connor’s men and tanks rolled onward for two days, north toward Sidi Barrani. By December 12, the entire line of fortifications was swept away, and Sidi Barrani taken, after being shelled to rubble by Matildas and Royal Navy cruisers. The success was so stunning and unexpected that the British found themselves outnumbered by their 39,000 prisoners. One battalion
commander radioed that he had captured “five acres of officers, about 200 acres of other ranks.” Churchill, delighting in the early reports, referred to the Greek general battling the Italians when he told Colville, “So, we shan’t have to make use of General Papagos after all!” He phoned the King: “My humble congratulations to you, Sir, on a great British victory, a great Imperial victory.” It was, wrote Colville, “the first time since the war began that we have really been able to make use of the word victory.”
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O’Connor thrust farther west to Buq Buq, where the original plan called for the raid to end. Wavell, in Cairo, received a message: “We have arrived at the second B in Buq Buq.” O’Connor rolled right through, bagging more prisoners. The Italians were on the run, in full flight to Libya. Mussolini was furious. “Five generals are prisoners and one is dead,” he told Ciano. “This is the percentage of Italians who have military characteristics and those who have none.”
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Before Compass kicked off, Churchill had worried to Dill that Wavell might be “playing small” by not “hurling in his full available forces.” Within a week of launching his operation, Wavell—shy, tongue-tied Wavell—considered just months earlier by Churchill to be somewhat “dumb,” became his hero of the hour. Churchill learned that Wavell had written two books; knowing neither the titles nor the subject matter, he ordered Colville to locate the volumes. It seems the reticent Wavell was a poet, historian, and biographer as well as a fighter. He had penned
The Palestine Campaigns
in 1928 and had just published his latest work,
Allenby,
in which he recounted how Field Marshal Viscount Allenby accomplished in Palestine during the Great War what no other British general in that war could bring off: the total destruction of the enemy at his front with minimum loss to his own men. Wavell had served under Allenby in the Middle East and shared that field marshal’s philosophy of leadership: trust subordinates, give them clear orders, and allow them to fill them. Display courage, moral and physical, where called for, not for love of danger but because hard work is to be done. This was the sort of stuff Churchill admired, admitting as it did to a larger view of things, a certain bon ton that would fit in well at his dinner table, as a foil of course for his even larger view of things.
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By December 16, O’Connor was across the Libyan border. Churchill cabled Wavell: “Your first objective now must be to maul the Italian Army and rip them off the African shore to the utmost possible extent.” His message to Wavell on the eighteenth dispensed with literalness altogether, reading in its entirety, “St. Matthew, Chapter 7, Verse 7.” (“Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”) Churchill had risked all by sending men and tanks from Britain to Egypt when invasion appeared imminent. He had gambled, and so far had won.
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T
he Blitz grew more murderous as the year went out. On December 8 the House of Commons was hit. The next day, Henry “Chips” Channon
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wandered upon the scene as Churchill rambled among the rubble. “Suddenly I came upon Winston Churchill wearing a fur-collared coat, and smoking a cigar…. ‘It’s horrible,’ he remarked… and I saw he was much moved, for he loves Westminster.” Channon, surveying the smoking ruins of the ancient building, remarked, “They would hit the best bit.” Churchill, chewing on his cigar, grunted, “Where Cromwell signed King Charles’s death warrant.” That night Channon wrote that he had “sensed the historical significance of the scene—Winston surveying the destruction he had long predicted, of a place he loved.”
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London had seen more than 450 raids between September and late December; the bombs sometimes fell at the rate of one hundred per minute. On December 29 the capital sustained its worst beating. It was Sunday, the preferred day for bombing commercial areas, when warehouses full of combustible goods were locked tight for the weekend, with no employees on duty to snuff out the incendiaries. The new moon promised relief for the raiders, and in tandem with the recent solstice, it made for a low tide that brought the Thames down to the level of a stream. High cloud cover and a heavy mist favored the raiders.
K-Grup 100
leading the way in specially equipped Heinkels lifted off from the squadron’s base in Brittany at about 5:30
P.M.
local time, an hour later than London time. Once airborne, they picked up the main
X-Gerat
radio beam, broadcast from Cherbourg. The beam was on St. Paul’s. Behind the pathfinders came more than two hundred bombers, from bases all over northern France. The raid lasted only two hours, but the incendiaries did their work. The first flight of
K-Grup 100
missed its target by one thousand yards, putting its incendiaries on the south side of the Thames, near Elephant and Castle. Somehow the remainder of the fleet missed the pathfinders’ markers and put their bombs square on the designated target, the City (London’s financial district), with the result that fires raged along both banks of the river. In fact, even the river burned.
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Edward R. Murrow, on the roof of the BBC, opened his broadcast:
“Tonight the bombers of the German Reich hit London where it hurts the most, in her heart. St. Paul’s Cathedral, built by Sir Christopher Wren, her great dome towering over the capital of the Empire, is burning to the ground as I talk to you now.” But St. Paul’s, wrapped in a cowl of filthy black smoke, was not burning. As Murrow spoke, a few fire wardens scrambling among the ancient joists under the lead roof of the cathedral managed to stay ahead of the firebombs.
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Other precincts fared worse. The Germans dropped “Molotov breadbaskets,” containers that spit out dozens of incendiaries as they fell. The Guildhall went down, and eight of Wren’s churches. Paternoster Row disappeared, the publishers and bookbinders done in—as they had been in the Great Fire of 1666—by their stockpiles of glue and paper. Among the lost and irreplaceable treasures: William the Conqueror’s eleventh-century parchment charter granting London its freedom. More than a thousand fires started in the East End, always the recipient of ordnance when the Germans released their bombs thirty seconds too soon. Fire wardens, silhouetted by the whipping flames and the glow of exploding incendiaries, scrambled along smashed rooftops, while firemen below scrambled as walls collapsed. The fires burned for two days. Across the river, in Southwark, firemen ran hoses out hundreds of feet onto the mudflats of the Thames, only to watch them melt. “Poor old” London, Harold Nicolson wrote, “is a char woman among capitals, and when her teeth begin to fall out she looks ill indeed.” When Churchill and Clementine toured the wreckage the next day, an old woman approached and asked when the war would end. Churchill turned to her and replied, without a smile: “When we have beaten them.”
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