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

(#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, Eden soon found that the Yugoslavs had no desire for his presence. ‘Belgrade is denying Eden’s presence,’ recorded Goebbels with satisfaction, ‘he has not been invited and would not be received, even if he came privately. Strong words and dramatic evidence of the Jew-boy funk.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Dill and the commander of the British forces in Greece, Jumbo Wilson, did hold secret meetings with the Yugoslav military, but they achieved nothing. The nearest that Eden got was a train journey to Florina at the end of March, where a Yugoslav general furtively crossed the border to meet him.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Greeks and Yugoslavs refused to cooperate with each other in order to defeat the Germans.

By then it was clear that Eden had made a mistake by heading north. The German threat in the south revealed itself more clearly with each passing day. On 2 April 1941 Rommel’s armoured forces took Agedabia, the limit of his authorized advance. On the same day, Bletchley Park reported that another German armoured division was in Sicily in the process of embarking for Tripoli. The intelligence intercepts still suggested that the German build-up would take over a month. The orders flowing from Germany to the battlefront did not give any real hint of reckless advance. Yet something was afoot. Rommel had little intention of obeying those orders.

The day after the fall of Agedabia, he browbeat his Italian opposite number, General Gariboldi, into submission. Gariboldi demanded that Rommel should halt the advance. Rommel replied that his orders were not to advance unless the British were in headlong retreat. Then he had the authority to exploit the opportunity. As far as he could see, the British were fleeing. There were no armoured forces in front of him. Wavell was showing no appetite for the defence of Benghazi. It was his duty to chase him out of Cyrenaica. With Nelsonian arrogance Rommel seized for himself the triple initiative: over the British, over the Italians and over his own army high command.

(#litres_trial_promo) Eden had to get back to Cairo. The idea was growing that we cannot face the Germans and their appearance is enough to drive us back many score of miles’. Such a suspicion would ‘react most evilly throughout the Balkans’.

(#litres_trial_promo) As he prepared to fly south again, Italian troops–effectively under Rommel’s orders, whatever the formal command arrangements–occupied Benghazi. Rommel’s patron, Goebbels, immediately flooded the airwaves with read-backs of all the gloating statements the British had issued when Benghazi fell into their hands. It was ‘a dreadful humiliation for England’.

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In truth, there was little for Eden to do in Cairo. The dispositions had been made around the Mediterranean, and there was little that the Mediterranean-hopping representative of Britain could do to affect the outcome. The one substantive decision made during his final stay in Egypt was that Tobruk should be reinforced by an Australian division and held for as long as possible. The Mediterranean commanders urged this decision. Eden and Dill added their imprimatur. Eden’s main task was to put a brave face on things, and to get his story straight for future consumption. When his Lockheed touched down at Heliopolis aerodrome on 5 April 1941, Eden himself cut a confident figure. His sartorial elegance had survived the journey, in contrast to his travelling companion who left the aircraft visibly ‘travel stained’. The jaunty air that had marked both Eden’s conversations and reports was still in place. This too was in contrast to the diplomats and officers who surrounded him. They were at the end of their tether, sunk in gloom at their repeated failures. A few hours in Cairo, however, was enough to bring Eden’s mood into line with that of everyone else. For the first time he started showing signs of ‘considerable emotion and agitation’. The atmosphere became one of ‘abysmal gloom’. As news from the battlefront trickled in, most notably that the British commanders in the Western Desert had been captured by the advancing Italo-Germans, there was a sense that people were cracking. They spent hours going over the same unprofitable ground, discussing ad nauseam how it had come to this. Out of these discussions came a ‘line’ about what had gone wrong. The whole scheme of sending assistance to Greece had been based on ‘the definite and positive assurance from the soldiers that they could easily hold the West’. It was the generals who were to blame for this misjudgement. Eden had been let down by the military.

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Eden was certainly wise to prepare such a cover story before he departed, for a double-edged and doubly uncomfortable welcome was in preparation. ‘The great trip’, it was said in Whitehall, ‘has been a failure.’ Churchill was ‘saying he never wished to help Greece’. At the same time the Prime Minister declared of Eden that he wished ‘to exhibit him in triumph’. Whether he liked it or not, Eden was to be yoked to events in the Mediterranean and made to take responsibility for them. Eden delayed his departure long enough to hear the news that the Germans had invaded both Greece and Yugoslavia.

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Thus ended Eden’s Mediterranean adventure. It took him three days to reach home. By that time the news was even worse than when he had left. The Greek army of the north-east, comprising 60,000 men–bigger than the entire British expeditionary force–had surrendered. The Germans had launched a second invasion of Yugoslavia from the southern Reich itself. Zagreb had fallen and the independent Ustasha republic of Croatia had been proclaimed. Rommel had captured Derna, prompting renewed Nazi gloating. ‘Wonderful! wonderful,’ declared Goebbels, ‘stunning blow for London; supplies excellent material for our propaganda. We are on top of the world.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The commanders in the Mediterranean agreed, in part, with what the German propaganda chief said.

(#litres_trial_promo) Arthur Longmore, the RAF commander, was heard to say that ‘it really didn’t matter’ either way whether they held the Mediterranean. ‘All we had to do was to fall South [into Africa] and let the Mediterranean look after itself.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Longmore made the further mistake–ultimately fatal to his career–of saying that Eden’s tour of the Mediterranean had been a disaster.

(#litres_trial_promo) Such statements played into the narrative that the commanders in the Mediterranean were ‘windy’, and it was only the unyielding will of London that kept them up to the task.

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In fact, those commanders had formulated a highly risky ‘island strategy’ for the Mediterranean. They would hold Crete, even though they doubted it was really defensible with the Greek mainland in Italo-German hands, and they would hold Tobruk despite the danger that it would become little more than a ‘beleaguered garrison’.

(#litres_trial_promo) They warned that Malta was already a ‘beleaguered garrison’. There was finally a sufficiency of antiaircraft guns. But by their very nature anti-aircraft guns were solely defensive. A few days previously Somerville’s Force H had managed to fly Hurricanes onto Malta from the west. But short-range fighters were also solely defensive. What was really needed was that Malta should be reactivated as an offensive base, and for that to happen a much greater effort was needed. Malta needed bombers, reconnaissance aircraft, cruisers, destroyers and submarines. But there was no point sending ships and aircraft if they could not survive German air attacks for more than a few days. The Governor reported that this was unlikely. The Germans had established a moral and physical superiority over the island. Any aircraft that arrived were rapidly destroyed. The morale of the pilots was so low that some of them were combat-ineffective. The RAF commander on the island was having a nervous breakdown. Nevertheless, as a first step, Cunningham ordered a destroyer flotilla to the island.

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None of these ideas or actions saved the victor of Cape Matapan from the insistent insinuation that he was insufficiently bold. Just as Somerville had done previously, Cunningham argued that it was a misuse of naval power in the Mediterranean to take capital ships close inshore to bombard cities. The ships would be dangerously vulnerable to land-based aircraft. Whatever the psychological impact of their big guns, the bombardments produced few military results. At the moment of crisis it seemed to him futile to waste strength on high-risk, low-return adventures. He was told that this was simply not good enough. German reinforcements were arriving in Tripoli, he had to be seen to do something.

(#litres_trial_promo) The ‘whole situation’, Churchill declared, was ‘compromised’ by Cunningham’s inability or unwillingness ‘to close the passage from Italy to Libya, or to break up the port facilities of Tripoli’.

(#litres_trial_promo) What was required was a ‘suicide’ mission.

(#litres_trial_promo) Cunningham’s reputation was once again saved by another timely victory. He had consistently pointed out that Tripoli was not the only potential terminus for supply ships from Italy. Now that Darlan had thrown his lot in with the Nazis, there was always the possibility that a deal would be struck to allow the Germans to use Tunisian facilities. Already, the Axis convoys used the Tunisian coast as protection from the British. On 16 April 1941 the destroyers that Cunningham had sent to Malta were guided onto to a German convoy off the Tunisian port of Sfax by signals intelligence. The night-time interception combined elan with precise technical skill, winning universal praise. Five German transports were destroyed.

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Although such victories were to prove the key to the future of Mediterranean warfare, at the time the battle of the Kerkenah Bank seemed but a small ray of light.

(#litres_trial_promo) Churchill described it as a ‘skirmish’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The high command of the German army might say in private that Rommel’s failure to take Tobruk showed that they had been right all along: he was an overrated Nazi stooge. The British, on the receiving end, could but notice the ferocity of his attacks.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Yugoslavs were suing for peace, as were parts of the Greek army. King Peter of Yugoslavia had already arrived in Athens, fleeing into exile. Whilst the Greek forces in the east cooperated with Wilson’s plan to hold the Germans at the Pass of Thermopylae, those on the west coast refused to withdraw to a new defensive line. The western officers maintained that the Italians were the enemy, the English were troublemakers and the Germans were potential friends. Hitler ruled that these ‘brave soldiers’ should be offered ‘honourable surrender’. The generals of the Army of Epirus were a ‘heaven-sent favour’ who would lead Greece into the New Order.

(#litres_trial_promo) Despairing of his country, the Greek Prime Minister committed suicide. In the confusion that followed the collapse of central authority in Athens, British officers, diplomats and secret agents all agreed that both the military and political will to resist had collapsed. Few Greek politicians viewed with favour a plan to carry on the fight from Crete. In the end the British stopped looking for a Greek leader to accompany the King into exile and found a Cretan banker, Emanuel Tsouderos, who might serve as politician. The British evacuated their second monarch, King George of the Hellenes, from Athens in a few days.

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For German aircraft in the Aegean it was a happy, killing time. In one 24-hour period they sank well over twenty ships which were trying to evacuate British troops. Over the same period the bombardment of Tripoli, albeit shorn of its suicidal aspects, proved, as Cunningham had predicted, a damp squib. The only redeeming feature of the operation was that the German air force, so successfully deployed elsewhere, missed the opportunity to sink a British battleship. He had, Cunningham wrote, got away with it by dint of good luck. The cost had been to tie up the Mediterranean Fleet for five days, ‘at the expense of all other commitments and at a time when these commitments were at their most pressing’.

(#litres_trial_promo) You have to understand, he signalled London, that ‘the key which will decide the issue of our success or otherwise in holding the Mediterranean lies in air power’. Stop complaining, the reply came back; it was Cunningham’s duty to establish control of the Mediterranean, not to try and slough it off on the air force.

(#litres_trial_promo) In despair, Cunningham told Churchill that he understood nothing of what was happening in the Mediterranean.

(#litres_trial_promo) He was ‘blind to facts’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Churchill’s riposte was that he understood the failings of those in the Mediterranean only too well. He was providing the tools that they were too scared to use. It was he who had ordered a huge convoy of tanks to be sent from the UK to Egypt. It was he who had ordered Somerville to get the convoy through to Malta; it was he who had insisted that Cunningham pick it up on the other side and see it through to its destination. It was he who had overruled naval objections that ‘their chances of getting through the Mediterranean were remote’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Once more, Cunningham complained, Churchill misrepresented the situation. He was all for the single-minded pursuit of an essential goal, however dangerous, but his actual orders were to divert forces from the convoy. London insisted on another pointless coastal bombardment, this time of Benghazi.

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The mutual disillusion of Whitehall and Grey Pillars was the product of the collision of Cairo strategy with London politics. On the day that Force H sailed from Gibraltar with Churchill’s prized tank convoy, and the Mediterranean Fleet sailed from Alexandria heading west towards Malta, Eden had to give an account of his Mediterranean mission to the House of Commons. Eden’s explanation of the Mediterranean situation on 6 May 1941 was not a happy occasion. The speech was ‘appallingly bad’. He rose to a hostile silence, ‘gave a dim account of his travels and failures’ and sat down to an even more hostile silence. Eden’s enemies said that it was possibly the worst speech of the war. Everyone agreed that it was ‘a complete flop’.

(#litres_trial_promo) As Churchill had always intended, Eden carried the can for the crisis in the Mediterranean. The reviled Foreign Secretary stood as a bulwark for his leader. Churchill–taking a wider view of the war–was more warmly received, and the government survived a vote of confidence with ease. The Mediterranean had raised Eden up, the Mediterranean cast him down. But Eden could not be allowed to fall too far, lest the whole government be dragged down with him. The political strategy Eden had adumbrated in Cairo remained sound–blame the military. The fact had to be established that the government was ‘completely hamstrung’ by the ‘sensational ineptitude of our commanders’.

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Wavell, holding out the hope of a counter-attack, was for the moment safe. Tobruk was a beacon of hope. Indeed in early May 1941 the German army high command had dispatched a mission to discipline Rommel for his failures in front of the town.

(#litres_trial_promo) Cunningham could utter bitter truths because of his glorious victories: Taranto, Matapan and Kerkenah Bank were his shield. Their comrade-in-arms, Arthur Longmore, was less fortunate. He had no such spoils to show. Many in the RAF murmured that he had been too willing to kow-tow to Cunningham, too willing to spread his forces thin in order to support the navy and the army. Instead of trying to make the best of the situation, it should have been his task to celebrate the supremacy of the aeroplane over the ship. Longmore should have forced Cunningham to admit that disaster in the Mediterranean was the navy’s fault. It was Cunningham, and before him Pound, who had padded their budgets with the ridiculous claim that warships could fight planes. If Longmore had few airmen friends, he had even fewer political allies. His pungently expressed pessimism had made him a marked man. Defeat in the Mediterranean was laid at his feet. He was the first Mediterranean commander-in-chief to be sacked.

In the days immediately after the debate it appeared that a ‘very nervous’ Churchill had been right. Italo-German forces attacked the great tank convoy but ‘the scale was very much less than had been anticipated’. Indeed the attackers did not seem very good at their job. The formations were ill-coordinated, jettisoned their bombs too soon, or carried out brave but ineffective independent attacks. Only one of five big cargo ships was sunk. Observing, Somerville concluded that he had caught the Axis air forces by surprise. In addition, his forces were being helped by the heavy cloud over the Mediterranean. Full of praise for the skill of his captains and aircrews, Somerville concluded, nevertheless, that they had got through only because of the ‘luck of the gods’. The German bomber units had been involved in a complex series of exchanges between Sicily, North Africa and Greece. Their base at Trapani was in confusion. The specialist anti-shipping strike aircraft were away. Cunningham took the convoy off Somerville’s hands some fifty miles off Malta. Three days later he delivered its precious cargo into Alexandria. Like Somerville, Cunningham maintained that he too had been lucky. ‘We got through all right,’ he signalled London, ‘but it mainly due to the extraordinary thick weather experienced off Malta and the whole way to Alexandria.’

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This luck soon ran out. At the end of April 1941 Hitler had agreed to a Luftwaffe plan to seize Crete, primarily through the use of air power and parachutists.

(#litres_trial_promo) This was to be the last operation in the Mediterranean before the invasion of Russia. Operation Merkur was an air-force plan, to be carried out by air-force generals. Unsurprisingly, the Luftwaffe generals took air superiority very seriously. Whilst Cunningham was still at sea with the tank convoy, his air-force opposite number took the decision to withdraw RAF squadrons from Crete. Before his enforced departure Longmore had always been sceptical about the military logic of a German airborne invasion of Greece. He doubted whether, given the scale of likely casualties, they would try it, and believed that if they did try, ground troops could defeat the effort. In the meantime, however, he argued that the weight of German air attack from captured Greek bases made Cretan airfields too vulnerable to justify the waste of his resources. Thus when the German parachutists started landing, the RAF had largely vacated the island. Its aircraft fought at the edge of their range from Egyptian bases.

Naval forces sent north of Crete to prevent the Germans reinforcing their airborne troops from the sea proved desperately vulnerable to air attack. Crete was the perfect arena for Stukawaffe. The Stukas were feared by ground troops. If anything they proved even more effective in anti-shipping operations. Their main base on the island of Scarpanto was separated from Crete by the narrow Kaso Strait. The short-range aircraft could thus operate with comfort to the east of Crete. Another base in the Peloponnese was equally well placed for the sea lanes to the west of the island. Even Cyrenaican Stukas could reach ships to the south of Crete. Effectively, Crete was a killing zone. British cruisers and destroyers in particular proved frighteningly vulnerable to attack.

After three days Cunningham had had enough. He made the unilateral decision to recall his fleet to prevent its slaughter by the Luftwaffe. There had been nothing short of a trial of strength between Mediterranean Fleet and the German air force’: the German air force had won. Not only was Cunningham losing ships, he was losing captains at an even quicker rate as they buckled under the accumulated strain of months of air fear’. ‘I am afraid’, Cunningham admitted, we have to admit defeat and accept the fact that losses are too great to justify us trying to prevent seaborne attacks on Crete. This is a melancholy conclusion but it must be faced.’ There was ‘no hiding the fact’ that ‘the future out here does not look too good for the Fleet’. He persuaded his fellow Mediterranean commanders to defy London again and halt the evacuation of the defeated imperial forces even from the south coast of the island. Crete proved, he could not resist pointing out, what he had been saying for months. His ships had survived only because of the foul Mediterranean winter weather. The glorious Mediterranean spring was a death-bringer.