The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (361 page)

A
s London and the world waited for news of a German thrust into Greece, Yugoslavia, or even Turkey, Rommel’s diminutive forces—short on food, gasoline, and bullets—rolled eastward against Wavell in Cyrenaica. The leagues of Libyan desert so gloriously snatched from Mussolini by O’Connor were again a battleground. But this time the Germans had taken the field. “It seems most desirable,” Churchill telegraphed to Wavell on April 2, “to stop the German advance against Cyrenaica.” Any “rebuff” to the Germans, he added, would have “far-reaching prestige effects.” A rebuff was not a victory, but after Norway and Dunkirk, “rebuff” had about it a certain ring. Ground could be given up for the purposes of “tactical
manoeuvre,” Churchill instructed Wavell, “but any serious withdrawal from Benghazi would appear most melancholy.”
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On April 2, the day that Churchill sent his telegram, Rommel’s tanks overran and busted up Neame’s front line. Wavell ordered a brigade from the 7th Australian Division to deploy from Cairo to Libya in order to stanch the bleeding. It would have made no difference whether the outgunned Tommies and Aussies faced the Germans in Greece or in Libya; they would have fared the same in either theater. Churchill had forced Wavell to block two invasion forces, one intent on barging into Egypt, the other into Greece. With his armies intact and arrayed against one or the other of the German forces, Wavell might have stood a chance. But with his armies divided, Wavell stood little chance against either.

Even before he learned of the Australians’ redeployment, Churchill saw the implications, military as well as political, of Rommel’s advance. He cabled Eden, in Athens: “Far more important than the loss of ground [in North Africa] is the idea that we cannot face the Germans and that their appearance is enough to drive us back many scores of miles. This may react most evilly throughout Balkans…. Sooner or later we shall have to fight the Huns.”
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They
were
fighting the Huns, in the Libyan desert, and not faring well. Churchill, having correctly guessed that Rommel had overextended himself, tried to encourage Wavell: “I cannot feel that there is at this moment a persistent weight behind the German attack…. If this blob, which has come forward against you, could be cut off you might have a prolonged easement.” Of course, were Rommel’s forces to “succeed in wandering onwards they will gradually destroy the effects of your victories.”
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Rommel wandered powerfully onward. The seasoned Australian 6th Division had been recalled to Cairo to prepare for deployment to Greece. Its replacement in the desert—the Australian 9th Division—lacked the experience to stop Rommel. On April 3 news reached official London that Wavell had ordered Benghazi evacuated. It was as if a diabolical projectionist were running backward the reel of O’Connor’s victories: Mersa Brega, Beda Fomm, now Benghazi, all taken by the British early in the year, all now lost to Rommel in just days. Wavell told Churchill that in view of the situation, withdrawal toward Derna would be necessary.

The withdrawal turned into a rout.

Short on tanks and gasoline, Rommel commanded his supply trucks to stay close behind the few remaining panzers and to raise as much dust as possible, to simulate a much larger force. The trick worked. Tommies and the newly arrived Aussies of the 9th Division, thinking at least two divisions of German and Italian tanks—six hundred in all—were heading their way, fled eastward, pell-mell toward Derna, 150 miles up the coast.
The Australians, never at a loss for gallows humor, dubbed the race to safety the “Benghazi Handicap.” To his wife Rommel wrote that “the British are falling over themselves to get away.”
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British command had broken down; troops lacked orders, whether to stand and fight or retreat. They ran, covered in yellow dust, their shirts soaked with sweat and stiff as sandpaper. Their faces took on a sickly yellow cast. By the platoon, by the battalion, by the regiment, they fled. Neame tried to restore order. He could not. Wavell flew out from Cairo and saw that Neame had lost control. O’Connor was summoned, too late to turn things around. Derna fell on the night of the sixth. The main British units beat such a hasty exit from the city that the Northumberland Fusiliers realized what was happening only when they saw the 9th Australian division roaring past them out of town. O’Connor and Neame were among the last to flee, in darkness, by car to Timimi, about one hundred miles to the east. Alas, the hero of Operation Compass got turned around somewhere in the desert and ended up rambling down a lost highway, directly toward Derna and the Germans. Within a few minutes, O’Connor and Neame found their car surrounded by men shouting in a foreign tongue. Their driver presumed it was Cypriot, for many of the British truck drivers were Cypriot. When German machine pistols were thrust into his face, O’Connor understood that the Cypriot thesis was terribly wrong. He and Neame spent the next three years as prisoners of war in Italy.
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London’s citizens were not privy to the debacle in the desert. Nor did they know of the troop buildup in Greece. Of Wavell’s prospects, Colville wrote on April 3: “The PM is greatly worried.” Churchill’s worry stemmed not only from Wavell’s ongoing struggle against Rommel in Africa, but because he knew that the British people had been fed only rumors about the Greek deployment. “I must return to the need of telling public,” Churchill cabled to Wavell, “that we have sent strong forces to Greece.” The American press was running with the story, he explained, while the British press had so far honored HMG’s plea for restraint. Even Colonel Donovan had spilled the beans, praising the valor of Britain for sending troops from Egypt to Greece. Such sentiments could only cause Britons to ask,
What
troops have been sent from
where,
and
to where?
It was time for Churchill to come clean with his yeomanry.
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He had given to Wavell, then taken, and now would give again. On April 4, Churchill cabled Wavell: “I warned the country a week ago that they must not expect continuance of unbroken successes and take the rough with the smooth.” Therefore, he added, “be quite sure that we shall back you up in adversity even better than in good fortune.” He was true to his word, taking the great risk of running a convoy (code-named Tiger by Churchill) of six ships carrying almost three hundred new tanks straight
through the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Alexandria, under the guns of the Luftwaffe. He called them his “tigercubs.” When one of the ships, approaching Malta, hit a mine and went down, Churchill lamented to Colville, “My tiger has lost a claw.” Though he harbored great hopes for his remaining cubs, they would not arrive in Alexandria until early May, at which time it was learned that because their gearboxes tended to jam and they lacked the proper filters to keep the desert sand from mucking up the works, the tanks could not be readied for action until late May at the earliest. Until then, Wavell would have to make do with what he had, which, with Rommel stripping away more each hour, was not enough.
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With Derna lost, Churchill concluded that Tobruk, one hundred miles to the east, held the key. From that city the British could swing out to meet Rommel’s advanced guard and then swing back north and west to pin the overextended Germans between the escarpment and the sea. “Bravo Tobruk!” Churchill cabled Wavell. “We feel it vital that Tobruk be regarded as sally-port, and not, please, as an ‘excrescence.’ ” The plan looked good on paper. Churchill encouraged Wavell: “Tobruk is your best offensive hook…. All our best information shows they are frightfully short of everything. It would be a fine thing to cop the lot.”
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Rommel, intending to cop Tobruk at his leisure, drove right past the city. By April 10, he had rolled up almost three hundred miles of British turf as if it were a throw rug.

T
en days earlier, on March 31, Churchill had told Colville that he was quite sure Germany would attack Yugoslavia before either Greece or Turkey. He was partially correct. On April 6 Hitler attacked
both
Yugoslavia and Greece.
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Belgrade was hit first, as punishment for its insolence. German bombers flying in relays from Romanian airfields cruised overhead all day on the sixth, unopposed but for ineffectual AA. They came on for the next two days, hundreds of bombers unleashing thousands of pounds of bombs, enough to bury more than 17,000 of the city’s residents under the rubble. CBS newsman Cecil Brown reported from the scene: “Belgrade one-quarter destroyed and thousands dead in a few hours… refugees streaming from Belgrade far across the fields for as far as the eye can see.” The terrorized animals at the Belgrade zoo escaped. A great bear, dazed and uncomprehending, shuffled past burning buildings, through the smoke, and down to the banks of the Danube. With Stalin in mind, Churchill later wrote, “The bear… was not the only bear who did not understand.”
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On its march from the Hungarian border to Belgrade, the Wehrmacht lost just 151 men killed to the Yugoslav’s untold thousands killed, wounded, missing, or captured. CBS’s Brown, arrested briefly by the Germans as a spy, saw firsthand “young murderers bent on wiping out the Serbian people.” The Nazis shot down Serbs “the way you would not shoot a dog, not even a mad dog.” The Yugoslavs fought on; they sent ammunition to the front on carts drawn by steers “moving at four miles an hour against twenty-two-ton Nazi tanks speeding into battle at forty miles an hour.” Brown watched in horror and in awe as the Serbians committed national “suicide by defying Hitler and the New Order.” It was not a battle, but a massacre.
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Once the Germans crushed Yugoslavia and poured through the Vardar Valley, the British, Anzac, and Greek forces arrayed to the south were doomed. Had the Germans attacked only by way of Bulgaria, the Greek and British lines would have been perfectly arrayed. But as the German attack came from both Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, the Allies found themselves cut off, east from west. For eighteen days, outflanked and outnumbered by more than four to one, the British fought a valiant and well-executed rearguard action, covering almost 250 miles from Salonika to Olympus, then to Larissa, to Thermopylae, and on to Thebes and Athens. All the while, German infantry, German tanks, and German planes ripped at their flanks.
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The rearguard action at Thermopylae, fought mostly by the Anzacs, was as heroic and futile a feat as the battle fought there in 480
BCE,
when King Leonidas and his bodyguard of three hundred Spartans checked ten thousand Persians. The terrain had changed over the centuries, to the detriment of the British defenders. The pass in ancient times was only about a dozen yards wide, a strip of high ground between the mountains and the sea. The Spercheios River delta had since widened the pass by more than a mile in places. The Germans, as had the Persians, approached from the north. The British and Anzacs, as had the Spartans, dug in at the pass and on the slope of the hillside, which by virtue of its soil content and the oblique angle of the sun’s first light, glows bloodred at sunrise. The modern coast road to Athens approaches the pass but turns inland and cuts through a small valley before climbing above and skirting the ancient pass. The Germans came on, the rumble of the three armored divisions audible for miles, the seismic pounding of their approach enough to disturb the water in a canteen, or a man’s guts. To bring fire down on the modern road necessitated placing artillery and machine guns all the way up the slope above the ancient pass. This the Anzacs did and, once dug in, for a short while checked the Germans. But the British left flank hung in the air. Wavell asked the Greeks if they could cover the naked flank.
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They could not. So rapid was the German advance that by the time Churchill fumed to Wavell that Jumbo Wilson was tardy in getting news out of Greece, the battle was over. On April 20, Churchill cabled Eden in Cairo to ask if Thermopylae might be held for three weeks in order to delay the Germans and allow the “Libyan situation to be stabilized.” Such a delay, Churchill wrote, would allow reinforcements to be sent from Egypt to Greece. He asked Ismay for a map of the Thermopylae Line.
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He needn’t have bothered. Thermopylae fell, not in three weeks, but in three days.

George II, king of the Hellenes, offered that it was now Wavell’s “duty to take immediate steps for the re-embarkation of such portion of his army as he could.” Wavell and Wilson agreed. So, too, on April 21 did Churchill and the War Cabinet. Churchill wanted it “made clear to the Commanders-in-Chief that the main thing was to get the men away, and we should not worry about saving vehicles.” The Anzacs, Churchill told the War Cabinet, “had fought with distinction a rear-guard battle against heavy odds in the most depressing form of action for soldiers.” They have “added one more glorious page” to their history. They may have fought a glorious rearguard action, but it was for naught. The Spartans had at least delayed the Persians long enough for the Athenian fleet to ready a trap at Salamis, where it defeated the invaders, who fled for home. This time, the defenders fled. As the Tommies boarded their transports, Greek civilians showered them with flowers, as they had when the Tommies arrived. Then the ships set sail with their cargoes of defeated warriors.
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