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On the day Sollum fell, Churchill lamented that the future was quite unclear. Hitler might involve himself with the Balkans, but Churchill thought that this was unlikely. He might take over the Italian war effort, unlikelier still since ‘that would not be a victory for him’. Churchill’s best guess was that the Germans would come to the Mediterranean to take over French North Africa.
(#litres_trial_promo) In fact Hitler’s mind was elsewhere: he was busy issuing the order for ‘Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.
(#litres_trial_promo) Two days after the Barbarossa decision Mussolini reluctantly admitted to his confederates that, sooner or later, they were going to have to ask for Germany’s help.
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FIVE (#ulink_d15b5710-5fe6-5e48-8da3-c82c160396db)
Mediterranean Eden (#ulink_d15b5710-5fe6-5e48-8da3-c82c160396db)
The Mediterranean image of early 1941 was columns of marching men. They wore Italian uniform and they were walking towards Egypt in great snakes of humanity. They did not come as victors but as the defeated. Hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers trudged towards captivity, their journey immortalized by eager pressmen. Wavell’s ‘raid’ just kept heading west. On 4 January 1941 Wavell’s forces captured Bardia. Eighteen days later they reached Tobruk. Wavell had given his field commander, General O’Connor, two divisions for the campaign. They faced up to ten Italian divisions. The numbers of tanks possessed by each side was more even. Indeed the British and Italian tank forces were roughly equivalent both in terms of numbers and quality. The Italian tanks were grouped together in the elite Brigata Corazzata Speciale commanded by General Babini. At Tobruk O’Connor split his forces, sending the 7th Armoured Division towards Mechili, inland, where he believed that the main body of Italian tanks was deployed. His Australian infantry carried on along the coast towards the town of Derna. On 24 January 1941 the two tank forces ran into each other near Mechili. The battle itself was indecisive. The Italians lost nine tanks, the British seven. Some of the Italian tankers believed that they had done enough damage to start a counter-attack. Graziani, however, would not hear of it. The battle was no more than a delaying action. On 3 February he withdrew from Benghazi. He told Mussolini that they would have to abandon Cyrenaica altogether. His aim was to send his forces to the end of the Balbia. They would hold the Sirtean desert as the forward defence line for Tripoli. There were rumours of much greater (and non-existent) British tank forces on the way.
Accordingly, Babini disengaged his force and retreated to the west. He and O’Connor still had equal numbers of ‘cruiser’ tanks. It was thus with some trepidation that O’Connor put forward a daring plan for the next stage of the advance. Instead of reuniting his forces he would send the armoured division south-west on a short-cut across the desert. They would try to cut the Balbia far to the south of Benghazi, rather than following the coast, taking each town in turn. Wavell and O’Connor met at Tmimi on the road to Derna on 4 February 1941: Wavell approved the plan. Thereafter events moved with great speed.
The reconnaissance elements of the 7th Armoured Division spotted Graziani’s 25,000-strong force retreating along the Balbia on 5 February. By the evening the tank forces themselves had reached the road near the small settlement of Beda Fomm. From a small hill by the roadside, known as ‘the Pimple’, they could survey a fourteen-mile stretch of road. They had reached ‘the Pimple’ before the Italians and thus cut off their line of retreat. It was up to Babini’s tanks to force a way through. The Italian tank force advanced with elan only to run into the dug-in British tanks. The Italians took heavy casualties. Nevertheless, about thirty tanks managed to force their way onto the road south of ‘the Pimple’. The Italian force was thus split. Most of the troops were stuck north of ‘the Pimple’. A powerful independent force of tanks was to the south of the hill, their escape route blocked only by a battalion of the Rifle Brigade supported by a battery of the Royal Horse Artillery. The next day the Italian tanks tried to make their breakthrough. The British gunners held firm, however, continuing to fire until the last of the desperate tanks stopped short of their line. By nine o’clock in the morning of 7 February 1941 it was all over. The Italian main force, deprived of its tanks, and with the Australians coming up behind them on the Balbia, surrendered. ‘Fox killed in the open,’ the triumphant British field commander signalled Wavell.
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In Rome they could barely believe what was happening to the ‘fourth shore’. The intelligence system that had once proved so adept at extracting juicy morsels from diplomats, failed to keep pace with the battle. The Fascist elite was reduced to listening to BBC radio broadcasts. First, news would arrive of defeat. Then garbled accounts of brave resistance would take its place. Mussolini made the final arrangements for his tryst with Hitler only when he had convinced himself that the defence of Bardia would restore honour to Italian arms. Surely, he would wail to his advisers, the generals would stop the English. The ‘heroic infantryman’ or the ‘king of artillery’ would find a way If not the generals, then the fortifications would delay the advance. If the fortifications failed, then the very land would provide succour. The British could not fight their way through desert and along coast. The task of working up and down the cliffs would prove too much. Finally, the full scale of defeat would become clear and recrimination would follow. At that moment news would arrive of yet another humiliating defeat by the Greeks.
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To make matters worse, the British could not help crowing over their victories. It was not their fault that they were useless, Churchill told his Italian listeners. The disasters they were now enduring were the responsibility of one man, the Duce.
(#litres_trial_promo) He had ‘ranged the Italian people in deadly struggle against the British empire’. He alone had created defeat; if he were to be removed then the Italians would be absolved both of crime and cowardice. ‘There stands’, they should cry, ‘the criminal who has brought the deed of folly on our land.’ The message was in a sense well judged–there were plenty in Mussolini’s own intimate circle who heard Churchill and agreed with him.
(#litres_trial_promo) The cost of such barbs was nevertheless high. For years afterwards Churchill’s words would provide the constant alibi for Fascists and their friends. Yet at the time there were no Italians with either the will or the power to overthrow Mussolini. The threat itself put Mussolini on his guard. It also resonated with Churchill’s avid listeners in Germany. The idea that Mussolini must be ‘saved’ from the Italians entered the Führer’s table talk.
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He had, Hitler told his courtiers at Berchtesgaden, reconsidered the situation. The previous month he had ordered the Luftwaffe to teach the Mediterranean Fleet a lesson.
(#litres_trial_promo) At the beginning of January 1941 the first Stukas had touched down in western Sicily. As Hitler addressed his generals they were going into action for the first time. The Mediterranean Fleet played into German hands with a display of the very arrogance that Hitler was determined to humble. The victor of Taranto, Illustrious, was sent through the Sicilian Narrows so that it might cover a convoy bringing crated fighters from Gibraltar to Malta. Many officers had a bad feeling about the operation, but Cunningham waved aside their objections. Illustrious was the talisman of the fleet, everyone felt better when she was around. She proved, however, the perfect target for German bombs. The Italians, too, played their part.
(#litres_trial_promo) Even though they had but a few days to prepare, the two air forces choreographed a complex aerial ruse. Italian torpedo-bombers flew a decoy mission to draw off the Illustrious’s fighters. Once she was denuded of protection the dive-bombers attacked. ‘The dive bombing attacks’, Cunningham ruefully admitted, were most efficiently performed and came as a most unpleasant surprise.’ The carrier was hit six times. The only consolation for the British was that there was no killer blow. The crippled ship was able to get into Malta harbour without being sunk. She brought with her the first concentrated German air raids over the island, as for days afterwards the Stuka crews tried to finish off their prey. As Cunningham said, a ‘potent new factor in Mediterranean war’ had arrived. No one doubted what had happened. Large British ships had been chased from the waters surrounding Sicily and Malta.
(#litres_trial_promo) The passage of even smaller ships had become deeply problematic.
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The battle prompted another Mussolinian mood swing. This example of the two air forces working in such close harmony had cheered him to the extent that he was looking forward to his own visit to Berchtesgaden.
(#litres_trial_promo) He would have been less cheerful if he could have heard what those already there were saying. The Italians had shown ‘matchless amateurism’ according to Hitler.
(#litres_trial_promo) The war in Libya was a piddling and unimportant affair, but the Führer took seriously Churchill’s words. Italy must be saved from itself. A small armoured force sent to Tripoli should do the trick.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Italo-German effort on Sicily, the offer of forces for Tripoli, and Hitler’s promise that the pesky Greeks would be humbled come the spring yielded a surprisingly cordial meeting of the two dictators. They toasted the ‘absolute solidarity between the countries of the Axis’. It was time for them to ‘march together’. Of course, many at the time and since doubted this togetherness. Italian diplomats warned that the Germans intended to displace Italian power rather than come to its aid. The contrast between the confident swagger of the German generals around Hitler and the cowed mien of Italian officers, small of stature and sporting hair dyed jet black, was palpable. Mussolini had come to Hitler as a supplicant and had left a client. Nevertheless, a deal of sorts was done that allowed for cooperation against mutual enemies over the next few months.
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Churchill might boom his voice in the Mediterranean, but in the inner councils of the British war machine he complained that no one seemed inclined to do much to counter this new threat. A formal decision was made in London to aid Greece against a new Italo-German invasion. The view from Alexandria, however, was that the Sicilian Narrows were now closed and that opening them, whilst defending Malta, should have the highest priority. The view from Cairo was that if any aggressive military operations were to take place in the Mediterranean–other than in Libya–they would best be directed against ill-defended small Italian islands in the far east of the Sea. No one appeared to be responding to the Prime Minister’s ideas and demands. Each of the military commanders, Wavell, Cunningham and Longmore, had become used to the semi-independence granted by difficult communications. There was no instrument on the spot capable of enforcing Churchill’s will.
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There was, as it happened, a member of Churchill’s government travelling around the Mediterranean at the very moment of decision. But he was a man whom one would least like to see hove over the horizon in such circumstances. ‘I adore Cairo,’ Chips Channon wrote upon his arrival, ‘it is everything I like, easy, elegant, pleasure-loving, trivial, worldly; me, in fact.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The private secretary to the under-secretary of state was at the very bottom of the Foreign Office food chain. He had arrived in Cairo on a ‘secret’ mission in which no one in London had any faith. Chips’s dearest friend, from their idyllic days as undergraduates, was Prince Paul of Yugoslavia. Since Mussolini had arranged the assassination of King Alexander in 1934, Paul had acted as Regent to his young nephew Peter. Mussolini had long wished to predate the Yugoslavians. As Hitler’s interest in Greece rose, their role became pivotal. The Yugoslavs might join the Greeks as victims. Just as likely they could join with the Germans against the Greeks in return for territorial gain and protection from the Italians.
(#litres_trial_promo) The lure of a Serbo-German alliance warred with Paul’s natural Anglophilia.
In his moment of crisis Paul called out for Chips, and Chips came. As Hitler plotted in the Berchtesgaden, Chips crossed the Mediterranean from Cairo to Athens. He dropped in on another dear friend, King George of Greece. Paul and George, royal cousins, had last met at Chips’s opulent house in Belgrave Square. Now they phoned each other each night, mainly it seemed to complain about the iniquities of their English friends. George warned Chips that beastliness was afoot. It was grim up north. ‘I am already against the Balkans,’ Chips lamented, ‘and long for Cairo.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Next day he hopped on the train from Athens to Belgrade, surrounded by kissing Greeks celebrating their victory over the Italians at Klisura.
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Chips’s welcome in Belgrade was everything he might have wished. His familiar bedroom in the Palace of Beli Dvor awaited him. He was surrounded by the many precious bibelots with which he had showered the beloved Prince down the years. Then they were together, half-dressed, and Yugoslav prince and British politician cast aside the cares of office and ‘fell into each other’s arms’. Their joy was short lived. Barely had Paul had time to curse the entire German race, explain that no one gave the British any credence whilst they were so weak, and beg Chips to ensure that no aid should be sent to Greece, when the true voice of British officialdom arrived to inform the reunited friends that Chips had already been superseded. Wavell had been ordered to take time away from garnering victories in Africa to visit Athens. There he would exhort ‘First Peasant’ Metaxas to prepare to fight the Germans with British aid. ‘Treachery and foolishness,’ cried the two friends.
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Poor Paul, Chips had never had anything to offer other than love and diamond-encrusted knick-knacks. The British government had ignored his Mediterranean progress and had then brushed it aside. Chips’s very pointlessness was not, however, without ultimate effect. ‘This stinks’, the Regent had shouted in a moment of rage, ‘of Anthony.’ The name of the villain that rang around the Palace was not Churchill but his newly appointed Foreign Secretary, their old undergraduate sparring partner Anthony Eden. Many in the Mediterranean attributed to Eden more power than perhaps he ever possessed. Eden was not unhappy to play upon this impression. He wanted to make a splash as soon as possible. Churchill was keen that his choice should have a chance to show his quality, and what better stage than the Mediterranean. Nothing could be achieved with an effete nobody like Chips, but perhaps an effete somebody could transform the situation. Eden, it was agreed, should not just issue instructions to the Mediterranean but should take himself there for as long as was necessary to enforce the government’s will.
The mission was attractive. Eden would be greeted with the bouquets of victory. Somerville was ordered to take Force H and bombard the Italian mainland. He laid a bet. If the mission was a success Churchill and Eden would take the credit, if the Italians sunk one of his capital ships the fiasco would be blamed on the incompetence of the navy in the Mediterranean. It was a win-win bet. His unseen approach on Genoa was a masterpiece of naval operational art. The bombardment of the city was indeed claimed as triumph of political daring in London.
(#litres_trial_promo) The impression was not much different in Rome and Berlin. The general whom Hitler had dispatched to lead his forces in Tripoli, Erwin Rommel, arrived in Rome as the British shells hit Genoa.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘The Duce’s popularity is approaching zero level,’ went back the word to Germany.
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At the same time as the navy landed a direct blow on Italy, the army maintained their extraordinary progress along the coast of Cyrenaica. Tobruk, Derna, Benghazi: in each of the fortified Italian coastal towns the pattern was the same. Imperial troops would breast a rise to see a neatly whitewashed settlement set against the sea. They would admire the skill of the Italian artillerists who opposed them, then the defence would crumble. Within the day the town would be in their hands, albeit thoroughly looted by the indigenous population. It was thus settled that Eden would ‘stop at Benghazi and run over to the Balkans’. What he would do when he reached the Balkans was less clear. Some, such as his travelling companion, the CIGS, Sir John Dill, thought his mission was to persuade Turkey into the war. Others argued that the mission was all about Greece. The dictator Metaxas had listened sceptically to Wavell’s blandishments but had then unexpectedly keeled over, dead. Greece’s confused politicians might now be biddable. Eden was told to fly in, scout out the situation and try and make the best of it.
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In the end Eden didn’t make it to Benghazi. Flying into a headwind his plane almost ran out of fuel. It landed on Malta in the middle of an air raid, diverted to Crete and finally touched down outside Cairo on 19 February 1941.
(#litres_trial_promo) Despite the difficult journey, Eden came down the steps ‘in his usual excellent form. He had every right to feel cheerful–his timing seemed impeccable.
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As Churchill had suspected, the arrival of Eden in Cairo made it very difficult for the military commanders to object too vociferously to the idea of cashing in on the gains made in Cyrenaica. They signed up to the idea of projecting British power north across the Mediterranean. Wavell, Cunningham and Longmore each said a piece on the practical difficulties involved, but lodged no objection in principle. There was none of the outspokenness to which more junior visitors had been treated. When Channon had been in Cairo, Longmore had described Churchill as an adventurer, criticized his grasp of strategy and had ascribed their success up to that point to a mixture of luck and bluff.
(#litres_trial_promo) Eden, on the other hand, was able to report a remarkable degree of unity amongst all the political, diplomatic and military leaders gathered in Cairo. They agreed that they would look north instead of south-east, towards Abyssinia, or west, towards Tripoli. They agreed that if they were looking north it should be towards Greece rather than towards Turkey The dream of whipping up the Turks remained strong for some, but the consensus was that the Turks would do what they always did, make nice noises but play the sides off against one another. In any case there was a limit to the military aid that could be sent north and Greece, unlike Turkey, was under immediate threat. They signed up to the statement that if everything was thrown into assisting the Greeks as quickly as possible then there was a ‘fair chance’ of preventing the country being overrun.
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Armed with this assessment Eden left Cairo for Athens. There was, however, a difference between what appeared in formal statements and the private thoughts of those involved. The Greek decision was in one sense easy to make. Eden provided a very firm political steer. It was thus ‘respectable’ to sign up. At the same time the bullish statements emanating from Cairo, and the impression that the men on the ground were gung-ho for intervention stilled any qualms that might be felt in London. In their heart of hearts, however, most of those who discussed the problem feared that ‘we must eventually be beaten there’.
(#litres_trial_promo) There was for the moment, however, a conspiracy of optimism. In Athens, Eden and his entourage gave no sign of any doubts they might have felt about the enterprise–even though they concluded whilst they were there that Yugoslavia was likely to side with the Germans and that Salonika–the Aegean terminus of the railway line that ran from central Europe to the Mediterranean–was indefensible.
Immediately on his return from Athens, Eden flew out to Adana near Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, boarding a train for Ankara. He reached the Turkish capital on 26 February. The Turks reacted just as expected. They said they would on no account aid Greece. They would fight only if attacked. Yet Eden sent home ‘jaunty and self-satisfied’ telegrams that talked of the ‘frankness’ and ‘friendliness’ and the ‘realism’ of the Turks. Had, some wondered, his head been turned by the welcome choreographed by Ataturk’s heirs? As his train pulled into Ankara, Eden had stood in the transparent observation car at the end of the train. The huge crowd assembled to meet him had climbed onto the railway lines and thronged round the carriage trying to catch sight of the visitor, cheering his triumphal entry.
(#litres_trial_promo) The truth was that the Turks wouldn’t do ‘a damned thing’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Having completed his mission in Turkey to his own–if no one else’s–satisfaction, Eden returned to Athens on 2 March. There he presided over the signature of a formal military aid agreement by Dill and his Greek opposite number, Alexander Papagos. Whilst this document was finalized in Athens, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia was having a deeply disturbing meeting with Hitler in Austria. He was told that the day had come when he must openly ally with the Nazis.
There can be little doubt that Eden’s mission in the Mediterranean achieved exactly what he and Churchill had intended from the outset. He had marshalled the military in such a way that no one could subsequently claim that either of them were dangerous adventurers–the charge of the 1930s, still heard sotto voce, amongst many Conservatives. He had ensured that Greece rather than Turkey would be the focus of British efforts on the northern shore. He had achieved a firm military agreement. All of this news was received with much tut-tutting in London. Eden had, it seemed, demonstrated that if you let a man off the leash in the Mediterranean, particularly in the east, he would soon be running his own show without regard for higher authority. In Greece as in Turkey, it was said, Eden’s head had been turned by the obsequies of his hosts. British policy had become a vanity. ‘He has’, the Cabinet agreed, ‘really run rather ahead of his instructions and agreed to things which the Greeks will take as commitments.’
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At the beginning of March 1941 Churchill sent a rather disingenuous message to Eden, suggesting that he might have overreached himself. They had agreed their joint aims before Eden had left. Whilst he had been away, however, the situation had changed. The Germans had demonstrated that the Suez Canal was vulnerable. At the end of January 1941 their bombers had started flying long-range missions out of Rhodes. The advanced magnetic mines they dropped into the Canal closed it for weeks at a time. The Canal defences had been revealed as weak and ill prepared.
(#litres_trial_promo) The crippled Illustrious barely managed to escape the Mediterranean by this route. The Germans gloated over their success.
(#litres_trial_promo) Projections based on the early success of the mining campaign suggested that less than half the supplies needed to keep the army in Africa active might arrive via this ‘safe’ route. With the southern windpipe constricted, it might not be wise to head north. The threat did not come from mainland Greece but from the Greek islands. Those islands had already yielded a warning about the dangers of a northern campaign. An attempt to seize the tiny island of Castelrizzo had been a farce, ‘a rotten business and reflected little credit on anyone’. The expedition’s naval commander had had a mental breakdown, and the troops landed proved incapable of defending themselves against the ‘unbelievably enterprising’ Italians.
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Neither Yugoslavia nor Turkey would fight. The Yugoslavs had ‘sold their souls to the Devil’. All the Balkan peoples were ‘trash’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Vichyites and Francoists were hungrily eyeing British weakness. Franco and Mussolini had met, as had Franco and Pétain. Franco’s men were becoming more flagrant in the aid they gave to German submarines operating from Spanish ports.
(#litres_trial_promo) Somerville had complained that in seizing French ships his own men had been forced to kill ‘harmless’ civilians and children. ‘It seems to me’, he wrote, ‘that we are just as much of a dictator country as either Germany or Italy and one day the great British public will wake up and ask what we are fighting for.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Darlan could hardly improve on Somerville’s formulation of the issue. He announced to the newly arrived American ambassador that he would ‘first use his propaganda system to explain to the French people that Mr Churchill is responsible for their lack of food, and second, he will use his Navy to convoy French merchant ships and sink any British ships that interfere’. He had repeated the threat in a carefully staged conference with the international press, with Pétain present.
(#litres_trial_promo) The management of the press was a triumph for the ‘ambitious crook’ Darlan. Churchill, fearful of his own reputation in America, effectively abandoned the blockade of French ports.
(#litres_trial_promo) The result, as he himself said, was, ‘convoys growing larger every day are passing in and out of the Straits…with only nominal escorts’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Hitler decreed that Darlan should be regarded as ‘trustworthy’.
(#litres_trial_promo) These curs, Churchill wrote, would not act any more energetically merely because the Germans crushed the Greeks, but they would be emboldened if the Germans crushed the British in Greece.
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These thoughts were of course no help to Eden for, as became clear when the full text of the Dill–Papagos agreement reached London, he had committed Britain ‘up to the hilt’ with no get-out clauses. On 6 March 1941 Churchill announced that Eden’s actions had settled the matter.
(#litres_trial_promo) He had achieved his goal, a commitment to go to Greece’s aid coupled with the ‘secret satisfaction that if things went really wrong there was a good scapegoat handy’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The next day British troops began arriving in the Piraeus.
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Churchill was predictably delighted with this arrangement. His reputation as an adventurer was by no means ill-won. But the scars of Gallipoli, twenty-five years earlier, ran deep. He preferred adventures from which no blame could attach to him. Hence appeasement in the western Mediterranean, matched by wild advance in the east. He and his cronies agreed that it would be an excellent thing if Eden’s Mediterranean sojourn should be extended indefinitely. Eden and Greece must be completely synonymous in the public eye.
(#litres_trial_promo) No one in the Mediterranean could quite make up their minds whether they had been ‘had’. They were told that it was their enthusiasm for the operation that had swung the vote in London in favour of intervention. They were not told of Churchill’s private abusive outburst about their dithering. Their warning that, without reinforcement, disaster was likely was met with the rebuke that they had failed to ‘appreciate what is going on outside the Mediterranean’.
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It was unclear who had talked whom into the Greek adventure. It seemed hard to criticize the decision on moral grounds. The Greeks had shown some ability at fighting; they were certainly under threat. The moral surety of the case might have seemed less secure if the British had been aware that, whilst British troops marched into the line with the Greek army in the north-east, the Greek army in the north-west was trying to cut a deal with the Germans.
(#litres_trial_promo) Eden did not know any of this, but he most definitely had an inkling of his difficult position. In Cairo he pondered the situation. He had done all he could in the Mediterranean, he did not want to stay any longer.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Greek decision had been made, the Yugoslavs had gone to the dark side: the only hope in Belgrade was the kind of deniable ‘special operation’ that Eden wanted nothing to do with. It was left to local diplomats and secret servicemen to ‘play this difficult hand’.
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The only concession Eden would make was that he should have one more tilt at the Turkish problem. Perhaps it would be possible to pull a last-minute rabbit out of the hat. Wavell told him that this idea was pointless. There was little chance that the Turks might cooperate. If they did, it would be a disaster, yet another call on British resources to no military advantage. Eden was determined that his Mediterranean mission should end on a high note and persisted. Thus the penultimate leg of Eden’s Mediterranean travels was a flight to Cyprus, unaccompanied by any military advisers, for a last meeting with the Turks.
(#litres_trial_promo) Eden’s encounter with his Turkish opposite number, Saracoglu, on 18 March 1941 proved a fitting postscript to the whole business. It caused a flurry of excitement but meant nothing. The Turkish foreign minister, convinced that it was advisable to encourage Eden more than his own colleagues thought wise, was unexpectedly accommodating about the idea of a last-minute appeal to Yugoslavia to stand up to the Germans. Eden reported home about his success, but when Saracoglu returned to Ankara the proposal was immediately buried.
In the event, weather delayed Eden in the Mediterranean long enough for the events to unfold in his presence. Whilst Eden had been making his way to Cyprus, Hitler had issued the final order for an attack on Greece. The aim, he said, was to conquer the entire country, and thus force the British permanently out of the Aegean. At the same time as Eden and Saracoglu were negotiating, Hitler was meeting Rommel to discuss his plans for operations on the southern shore. Rommel made a most favourable impression on the Nazi leadership. They lapped up the story that this ‘magnificent officer’ told. The German war machine was operating brilliantly. Any problems were the fault of the Italians. In the background Rommel’s own colleagues grumbled about his inability to grasp either strategy or logistics. Regretfully, Hitler denied Rommel’s request to be allowed to launch an all-out attack to recover Cyrenaica. That would have to wait a few months until victory over Russia. Rommel might make a limited advance to the first major Cyrenaican crossroads of the Balbia at Agedabia, but he could go no further. Rommel picked up the undertow in these conversations, however. He was a true Nazi hero, undervalued by his own colleagues in the Wehrmacht. If he could conjure something spectacular with existing resources it would not go ill for him. After all, the Führer himself had assured him that he would not turn away from Africa ‘under any circumstances’. Immediately upon his return he ordered his one completed armoured division to lead the Italians forward. He would see how far they could take him.
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News of the first German probes filtered back to Cairo. Wavell hoped that they meant little. He had ordered his armoured forces back to Egypt to refit. He was ‘anxious’, but buoyed by the thought that the Germans had so few men in Africa. They could not, he guessed, do anything serious for another month. More immediately eye-catching was the announcement on 25 March 1941 that, in Hitler’s presence in Vienna, the Yugoslavs had paid formal deference to the Nazis. On this rather sour note, Eden reached Malta.
Suddenly, however, the tide seemed to be turning. British cryptanalysts deciphered Luftwaffe signals that talked about some kind of Italian naval activity south of Crete. They could offer no real clue to its purpose. The Italians might be thinking of attacking the ships bringing troops and supplies to Greece, they could be reinforcing the Italian garrisons in the eastern Aegean; more worryingly still, it was possible that an Italo-German expeditionary force was at sea, heading for Greece, Libya or even Malta. Cunningham was ‘therefore faced with the problem of meeting a threat which he knew to exist, but whose nature he could not foretell’. He launched the Mediterranean Fleet into the unknown to try and find the Italians. The same fog that was keeping Eden trapped in the Mediterranean, helped Cunningham. Both sides had decrypts from the other and knew that their ships were heading towards a confrontation. Both sides had aircraft out looking and each spotted the other. Crucially, Admiral Iachino thought he was hunting a force of British cruisers with his battleships. Instead, on 28 March 1941, he found the full Mediterranean Fleet. Although the fast Italian battleships were able to outrun Cunningham’s rustbuckets with ease, the unwary Italian cruiser division blundered into the British pursuit, to be destroyed by the heavy guns of the British battleships. The Mediterranean Fleet had been under a cloud for months and Cunningham’s bravery had been questioned at the highest levels. With the one flourish off Cape Matapan the slate was wiped clean.
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Yugoslavia yielded an even more surprising turn of events. A coup carried out by elements of the Serbian military overthrew the government of the despised Prince ‘Palsy’ and proclaimed that they would govern in the name of King Peter. No one was sure whether the ‘hidden hand’ of the British was behind the coup.
(#litres_trial_promo) Even the British themselves could not be quite sure of the role that they had played. At least three British intelligence agencies had had links with potential coup plotters. All had expressed enthusiasm for the demise of Paul. The long-time SIS resident in Belgrade, whose friends in the air force took a leading part in the final denouement, was nearest to events. The British were, however, by and large, spectators of a power struggle within the Serb elite.
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What the coup did not achieve was the emergence of a pro-British regime. As soon as they possibly could, the plotters were on the phone to Germany offering friendly relations. They were too late. A frothing Hitler had already gathered his generals and told them that the upstarts must be crushed.
(#litres_trial_promo) Indeed he wanted Yugoslavia and its bastard multinationalism erased. ‘This fair-weather nation will have to pay for its provocations against the Reich with its life,’ Hitler decreed. It was essential that the civilian population of Belgrade should be bombed viciously and constantly.
(#litres_trial_promo) Once destroyed, Yugoslavia would be replaced by a series of ethnically cleansed regimes. The Serbs would be purged of their leaders. As for the Croats, it was time to ‘stroke them!’
(#litres_trial_promo) The Ustasha–Insurgents–Croatian terrorists whom the Italians had financed and maintained in exile for many years were assembled at Pistoia.
(#litres_trial_promo) Their leader Ante Pavelic was received by Mussolini with the promise of a new Fascist Croatia. The band was then dispatched to Trieste to await events.
(#litres_trial_promo)
The potential fall-out of the coup held Eden in the Mediterranean. Churchill suggested that he return to Cairo to take control. In the end Eden chose to fly to Athens, passing directly over the battle of Cape Matapan.
(#litres_trial_promo) From Athens there were hopes of moving on to Belgrade. Perhaps the north-east Mediterranean alliance that had eluded him for so many months was now in his grasp. It would then be possible to say when he finally does return to London’ that he did so with ‘“Serbia in the bag” for which he has striven so tirelessly’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Watching his progress, Hitler commented that ‘the travelling warmonger’ might be in Athens, ‘but his activities are no longer a problem so far as his plans are concerned’.
