The Bitter Sea: The Struggle for Mastery in the Mediterranean 1935–1949

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.

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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’.