The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (360 page)

When the signing of the pact was announced in Belgrade, the city exploded into revolt, a rebellion nurtured into being by the resident RAF attaché, who inspired the Yugoslav air forces to action, having prepared the ground with cash and influence peddled by the SOE. “Good news,” Cadogan wrote, “of
coup d’état
in Belgrade.” Peter, the seventeen-year-old prince, was declared king and put upon his father’s throne. Prince Paul fled to Athens. “A great day,” Colville wrote on the twenty-seventh. “Revolution in Belgrade, which puts an entirely different complexion on events in the Balkans and turns darkness into dawn. The P.M. is overjoyed.” So much so that he cabled Hopkins with all the good news coming out of East Africa and Belgrade: “Yesterday was a grand day.”
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It was a false dawn. When the reports from Yugoslavia were confirmed, Churchill concluded, “We must expect bad news.” He was correct. Hitler would not abide a double-cross and a revolt within the same week. Churchill’s practitioners of ungentlemanly warfare in the SOE had produced the coup; but it would be Hitler who set Yugoslavia ablaze. He greeted the news with fury. The time for pseudodiplomacy had passed. He told his generals his decision, dispensing with his usual verbosity: “I have decided to destroy Yugoslavia.”
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O
n March 24, Rommel, fully eight weeks or more before he (and Churchill) expected his desert force to reach full strength, probed tentatively toward the British lines at El Agheila, four hundred miles west of Bardia and five hundred miles east of Tripoli, near the border between Cyrenaica and Tripolitania. Churchill had taken at face value Wavell’s prediction sent to London three weeks earlier that “no large scale attack was likely to develop [against Wavell]
before the end of the summer
” (italics added). Wavell had misread his opponent. And Rommel had misread his. He presumed he would find the British at El Agheila in great strength, and preparing to continue their westward attack. Instead, he found them ill prepared to receive even a reconnaissance in force. Rommel was not one to
let such an opportunity pass without making mayhem. O’Connor may have weeks earlier telegraphed to the world that he’d “killed the fox in the open,” but a new fox had crept right up to the coop, and found the door wide open. Rommel stepped right in. He did so against the expressed orders of his commanders in Berlin, and against the wishes of General Garibaldi, under whom Rommel nominally served. Just the previous week, Berlin had ordered Rommel to avoid any general offensive actions until the early May arrival of his 15th Panzer Division. Churchill, too, had concluded that Rommel’s diminutive African army would not grow strong enough to pose any threat until mid-May. Therefore, upon learning of Rommel’s probe, Churchill cabled Wavell: “I presume you are only waiting for the tortoise to stick his head out far enough before chopping it off.” It was the same message he had sent to French commander in chief Georges in May 1940, when the long thrusts by German panzers appeared to have exposed their flanks.
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Rommel probed for six days, but on the thirtieth, he launched a two-pronged blitzkrieg attack toward Benghazi, eighty miles up the coast, and overland toward Derna. Churchill had failed to take into account the character of his enemy. General Philip Neame, commanding the Western Army, had failed to study both his enemy and the terrain. Not until the week before Rommel made his move, and too late, did Neame inform Wavell that the escarpment south of Benghazi failed to protect his flank. He had believed the escarpment could be penetrated only at a certain few choke points; in fact it was porous. Had Neame flown over the terrain, he would have seen this.
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In East Africa the news was better; by March 30 the British occupied the whole of Eritrea. The war there was about over, in large part due to Wingate’s stunning campaign, which earned him no promotion. He was a little too irregular for the old school generals in Cairo and London. As well, he soon had a breakdown and tried to kill himself by slitting his throat. His reward for his role in conquering Ethiopia was virtual banishment, to Burma. But in less than a year, his nonconformist qualities would serve Churchill well in battling a new enemy far more dangerous than the Italians.
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Rommel’s mischief aside, the run of good fortune—the victories over Aosta in Ethiopia, the battering of the Italian fleet, and the Yugoslavs’ “recapture of their soul”—made for “a wonderful weekend,” Colville told his diary, “the culmination of a week of victories.” They were at Chequers, where Churchill, attired in his dressing gown, “spent much of the weekend pacing—or rather tripping—up and down the Great Hall to the sound of the gramophones (playing martial airs, waltzes and the most vulgar kind of brass-band songs), deep in thought all the while.”
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He wandered the halls, deep in thought, because Ultra had revealed on March 26 that following the Yugoslav pact with Hitler (hours before the Yugoslav coup), several divisions of German troops and mechanized infantry had been ordered from the Yugoslav border to southern Poland. Most significantly, so had three out of the five panzer divisions bivouacked in Romania. Thus, when Ultra revealed the orders to move out were canceled following the Belgrade revolt, the import of the reversal in German movements became clear. Russia had been Hitler’s next target, until the insolent Yugoslavs defied him. A Joint Intelligence Committee report also included the fact that the Germans had lengthened and reinforced runways at several Polish airfields, and they were not doing so, Cadogan concluded, “for the benefit of Lufthansa.”
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On March 30, Churchill cabled Eden, in Athens with Dill, that as a result of the Yugoslav coup and “sure information recently received” (the Enigma decrypts), it looked as if “Bear will be kept waiting a bit.” The orders and counter orders that Ultra revealed made clear to Churchill Germany’s “magnitude of design” directed both southeast toward the Balkans and, eventually, east to Russia: “My reading is that the bad man concentrated very large armoured forces… to overawe Yugoslavia…. The moment he was sure Yugoslavia was in the Axis he moved three of the five panthers towards the Bear believing what was left would be enough to finish the Greek affair.” He noted that “it looks as if heavy [German] forces will be used in the Balkan Peninsula.” On the same day, he cabled William Fadden, acting Prime Minister of Australia (Prime Minister Robert Menzies was in London at the time): “German plans have been upset [by the Belgrade coup] and we may cherish renewed hopes of forming a Balkan front with Turkey…. Result unknowable, but prize has increased and risks have somewhat lessened.” Turkey, in fact, had nothing to gain by coming in on Britain’s side, and did not. Actually, were an enraged Hitler to fling his forces into the Balkans, the foremost risk to Britain—a broad front that would overstretch the already thin lines of the Greek and British forces—would become a reality.
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Although Colville did not understand the reason at the time, Churchill’s belief that the Bear was soon to be baited was why the Old Man had given “a short lecture on the various invaders of Russia, especially Charles XII.” Charles XII, king of Sweden, had in 1700 crushed the Russian army in a battle on the banks of the Narva River. Rather than press his advantage against Czar Peter’s beaten army, Charles turned toward Poland, a strategic blunder that devoured four years and much of his army, and allowed Peter to reform his incompetent and corrupt military and regroup his forces. When, late in the decade, Charles again tried his hand in Russia, Peter was ready, and in 1709, earned his moniker “The Great” by smashing Charles’s army. Colville leaves unrecorded whether in telling the story
Churchill meant to compare the unprepared Stalin, his army purged of its best officers, to the unprepared early Peter, or the later Charles, impetuous and overconfident, to Hitler.
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As horrific had been the fighting on the Western Front in May and June 1940, a clash between Germany and Russia would result in a titanic struggle unlike any the world had ever known. On April 3, Churchill took a calculated risk and sent a personal message to Stalin (as he had the previous summer), through the British ambassador to the Soviets, Sir Stafford Cripps. Churchill made no reference to his highly secret source, but with his usual aversion to obliquity, made his point with clarity and honesty:

Cripps duly received the message. And did nothing with it. Cripps was a devout socialist, and may have been more concerned about Stalin’s reaction to the message than the import of the message itself. In an address to Londoners before the war, Churchill had said of Cripps, “Then there is Sir Stafford Cripps, who is in a class by himself. He wishes the British people to be conquered by the Nazis in order to urge them into becoming Bolsheviks. It seems a long way round. And not much enlightenment when they get to the end of their journey.” Churchill had sent the socialist Cripps to Moscow as a signal to Stalin that Churchill was willing to let bygones be bygones. The signal was either not received or ignored.
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Presuming his first message had been delivered or, given the usual time lost by encoding and decoding, was soon to be delivered, Churchill cabled Cripps again the next day. He advised Cripps on how to develop the argument in person and instructed him to stress to the Soviets that the German move back toward the Balkans could buy time for the Russians to “strengthen their own position.” Again Cripps did nothing. He then made one of the most inexplicable and stupid decisions made by any diplomat during the war: he sat on the message for almost two weeks. When Churchill learned of Cripps’s lapse, he made plain to Eden his incredulity: “I set special importance on the delivery of this message from me to Stalin. I cannot understand why it should be resisted. The Ambassador is not alive to the military significance of the facts. Pray oblige me.” Admonished by Eden, Cripps, the recalcitrant obligee,
again
failed to deliver the message. In coming weeks, Eden warned the Soviet ambassador to the Court of St. James’s,
Ivan Maisky, of the probable German attack. Despite Cripps’s behavior, Stalin was warned by Maisky. By then Churchill’s attention had turned back to the Balkans.
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When Churchill first tried to warn Stalin, the impending battle in Greece, not the possible turn of events in Russia, was the most immediate question at hand. Had the Yugoslavs not revolted, Churchill’s 60,000 troops in northern Greece might have faced a far smaller German force. Then again, absent the Yugoslav coup, large German troop movement through a compliant Yugoslavia would likely have flanked the British in any event. A plethora of Ultra decrypts pointed to only one certainty during the first days of April—that British and Anzac troops arriving in Greece would soon face attack by an overwhelmingly superior force.
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There, Jumbo Wilson’s eastern flank, the Aliakmo Line, was anchored near Salonika, on the Aegean, and stretched for almost fifty miles northwest toward Monastir. Northeast of the British line, six Greek divisions of the Greek Second Army formed the Metaxas Line, which also ran west from the Aegean, and faced north toward Bulgaria’s Struma Valley, the ancient invasion route into Thrace. To the west, the Greek First Army faced the Italians on the Albanian front. The entire front snaked for more than six hundred miles from the Aegean Sea to the Ionian Sea, through high mountain passes and difficult, trackless countryside. It was the exact sort of front Frederick the Great had in mind when he pronounced, “To defend everything is to defend nothing.” Worse, the British lines were not entirely dressed; British battalions still drifted into position. Eden captured the problem in an early March cable to the War Cabinet: “Militarily problem is one of time and space.” By early April the troops needed more time to make ready their defense.
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They would not get it.