Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Molotov’s conditions for joining the Tripartite Pact enraged Hitler. Four weeks later he issued orders for Operation Barbarossa, a joint Finnish-German-Romanian attack on the Soviet Union. Before this could be carried out, however, the ambiguous situation on the German right flank, in the Balkans, had to be cleared up by Operation Marita. The chief aims of this operation were to drive from the area British forces which had entered Greece in consequence of the Italian attack, and to prevent them from bombing the Romanian oil fields while Germany was occupied with Russia. The original plan called for a pincers movement into Greece from Bulgaria and Yugoslavia after these two countries had been brought into the Axis system by diplomatic activity.

German forces moved steadily into Romania beginning in October 1940; four months later, Moscow was informed by Hitler that these occupying forces had reached “almost 700,000” men. On March 1st Bulgaria joined the Tripartite Pact, and these German forces began to occupy that country the same day.

Yugoslavia did not succumb so easily. For almost six weeks, because of strong opposition in the country and in the Cabinet, Regent Prince Paul resisted the German demands. When Yugoslavia accepted and signed the Tripartite Pact at Vienna on March 25th, it was able to obtain promises of substantial concessions in return: freedom from any German military occupation, release from any promise of military support to Germany under the pact, and a promise of German support for Yugoslavia’s desire for an outlet on the Aegean at Salonika.

Soviet opposition to these German advances was somewhat indirect. There were vigorous protests against the movement of German troops into Romania and Bulgaria. Turkey was informed that Russia would abide fully by the Soviet-Turkish Nonaggression Pact of 1925, if Turkey became involved in hostilities with a third Power (meaning Germany). Most significant of all, a military coup d’état in Yugoslavia overthrew the Yugoslav regency and government on the night of March 26th-27th, replacing the regent, Prince Paul, as head of the state by the young King Peter and installing a less pliant Cabinet under General Düsan Simović. This new government signed a treaty of friendship and nonaggression with the Soviet Union on the night of April 5th-6th. Less than six hours later, Belgrade was subjected to a violent bombardment from the Luftwaffe, and thirty-three German divisions began to invade Yugoslavia and Greece. Both countries were overrun within three weeks and were divided up among the jackal collaborators of Nazi Germany.

From Bulgaria and Hungary, Yugoslavia was invaded by three German columns. The two satellite states followed along behind to occupy the areas allotted to them. Greek forces, overextended, into Albania in the west and outflanked by the German capture of Salonika in the east, fell back southward, but were soon cut off from 68,000 British troops in Thessaly. On April 20th the Greek government advised the British to evacuate because the situation was hopeless, but the almost total destruction of the Piraeus from the air and the sudden capture of the Corinth Canal by German paratroopers made this operation very difficult. Without air protection, the British Navy evacuated 44,000 British troops from various beaches, landing 27,000 of them on the island of Crete.

After a week of bitter mountain fighting, much of it hand-to-hand, with the German Air Force supreme in the sky, the British began to evacuate Crete. When the operation was over on May 1st, Britain had lost 55,000 men in Greece and Crete and had had one battleship, seven cruisers, and thirteen destroyers sunk or damaged; it had lost all North Africa except Egypt itself, and had seen two more countries overrun by Germany. The only possible consolation was to be found in the fact that Yugoslav and Greek resistance had delayed Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union by three weeks, and the heavy German losses in Crete (over 30 percent casualties) persuaded Hitler to renounce all airborne operations in the future. A somewhat more remote benefit rested in the fact that German brutality and Balkan stubbornness gave rise to extensive guerrilla operations which drained Axis strength in the mountains of Yugoslavia, Crete, and Greece.

The loss of Crete gravely threatened the British position in the Near East. In Iraq, on April 3rd, a group of army officers led by Rashid Ali el-Gailani overthrew the government and seized power; a month later this new regime made an attack on British treaty installations in Mesopotamia. Admiral Darlan provided bases in Syria for German and Italian planes going to aid the rebels, and on May 28th signed “Paris Protocols” which almost took France into the war on the side of Germany. These agreements promised to the Iraqi rebels most French military supplies in Syria, and to provide Germany with air bases in Syria and at Dakar, to hand over transport facilities, including ports and railroads in Syria, the port of Bizerte in Tunisia, the railroad from Bizerte to Gabès, French munitions for Germany, French ships for transporting supplies across the Mediterranean, French naval vessels for protecting such shipments, and a submarine base at Dakar. The violent objections of Weygand and other officers against these agreements and the vigorous protests of the United States persuaded Marshal Pétain to overrule Darlan and to cancel the agreements (June 6th).

The rebellion in Iraq was overthrown in May, and a joint force of British and Free French supporters of De Gaulle conquered Syria and Lebanon in June. About the same time, by a tenacious defense of Malta and relentless attacks on Axis convoys to Libya, the British Navy sought to restore its control of the surface of the Mediterranean Sea. This made it necessary for the Axis, in spite of the growing demands of the Battle of the Atlantic and the Battle of Russia, to increase its air and underseas forces in the Mediterranean. In November 1941, 70 percent of Axis supplies for Libya were sunk. In September, Hitler sent the first German submarines (only six of them) to the Mediterranean, and in December he sent the Second Air Fleet of 500 planes under Marshal Albert Kesselring to Sicily. In November the British lost an aircraft carrier and a battleship to U-boats; the following month, in a daring personal exploit, the Italians sent three two-man human torpedoes into Alexandria harbor and sank the two British battleships left in the eastern Mediterranean.

By June 1941, the attrition of British seapower was becoming almost unbearable. With only a handful of operational U-boats, plus some support from surface raiders and land-based planes, the Axis sank, in the period from September 1939 to June 1941, a total of 1,738 merchant ships of a total tonnage of 7,118,112; in addition almost 3,000,000 tons were left damaged in ports. In buying supplies, chiefly from the United States, Britain had used up, by June 1941, almost two-thirds of its dollar assets, gold stocks, and marketable United States securities.

American Neutrality and Aid to Britain

When the European war began in September 1939, American public opinion was united in its determination to stay out. The isolationist reaction following American intervention in the First World War and the Paris Peace Conference in 1917-1919 had, if anything, become stronger in the 1930’s. Historians and publicists were writing extensively to show that Germany had not been solely guilty of beginning the war in 1914 and that the Entente Powers had made more than their share of secret treaties seeking selfish territorial aims, both before the war and during the fighting.

In 1934 a committee of the United States Senate investigated the role played by foreign loans and munition sales to belligerents in getting the United States involved in World War I. Through the carelessness of the Roosevelt Administration, this committee fell under the control of isolationists led by the chairman, Republican Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota. As a result, the evidence before the committee was mobilized to show that American intervention in World War I had been pushed by bankers and munitions manufacturers (“merchants of death”) to protect their profits and their interests in an Entente victory in the early years of the war. Under these influences American public opinion in the late 1930’s had an uncomfortable feeling that American youths had been sent to die in 1917-1918 for selfish purposes concealed behind propaganda slogans about “the rights of small nations,” “freedom of the seas,” or “making the world safe for democracy.” These feelings were reinforced in the late 1930’s by growing disillusionment with the cynicism of authoritarian aggression and the weakness of British appeasement. All this helped to create a widespread determination to keep out of Europe’s constant quarrels in the future and, above all, to avoid any repetition of what was regarded as the “error of 1917.”