Simon Ball - The Bitter Sea - The Struggle for Mastery in the Mediterranean 1935–1949

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. 32 The crippled Illustrious barely managed to escape the Mediterranean by this route. The Germans gloated over their success. 33 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. 34

Neither Yugoslavia nor Turkey would fight. The Yugoslavs had ‘sold their souls to the Devil’. All the Balkan peoples were ‘trash’. 35 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. 36 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.’ 37 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. 38 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. 39 The result, as he himself said, was, ‘convoys growing larger every day are passing in and out of the Straits…with only nominal escorts’. 40 Hitler decreed that Darlan should be regarded as ‘trustworthy’. 41 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. 42

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. 43 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’. 44 The next day British troops began arriving in the Piraeus. 45

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. 46 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’. 47

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. 48 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. 49 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’. 50

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. 51 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. 52