Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe

In the last weeks of 1940, therefore, while the British people supposed themselves the focus of the Nazis’ malignity and headlines around the world described the drama of the blitz, Hitler’s thoughts were far away. His generals began to prepare their armies for a struggle in the east. As early as November, an Estonian double agent told the British SIS representative in Helsinki that he had learned from an Abwehr officer ‘German command preparing June campaign against USSR.’ The SIS man commented dismissively on the implausibility of such an indiscretion, saying, ‘Possibly statement made for propaganda purposes.’ Even had this report been believed in London, the British could have done nothing to shake Stalin’s complacency and promote Soviet preparations to meet the threat.

Save for a small force dispatched to North Africa in June 1941, for a year following France’s surrender, scarcely a single German soldier fired a shot in anger. There was a protracted lull in ground operations, a loss of impetus unapparent at the time but critical to the course of the war. Hitler took no meaningful steps towards converting the largest military conquests in history into a durable hegemony. The German navy was too weak either to support an invasion of Britain or to sever its Atlantic lifeline; the Luftwaffe’s campaign against Britain had failed. It seems flippant to suggest that Hitler determined to invade Russia because he could not think what else to do, but there is something in this, as Ian Kershaw has observed. Many more Nazi battlefield triumphs lay ahead, but some generals privy to their Führer’s intentions already understood the Third Reich’s fundamental difficulty: anything less than hemispheric domination threatened disaster; yet Germany’s military and economic capability to achieve this remained questionable.

Hitler’s Continental triumphs caused the democracies to overrate Germany’s strength, while persuading his own nation rapturously to rejoice in their victories. The German people had entered the war full of misgivings, which by the winter of 1940 were largely dispelled. The Luftwaffe’s failure against Britain troubled few: a young pilot, Heinz Knoke, described the thrill of finding himself among the vast audience in the Berlin Sportpalast addressed by Hitler on 18 December. ‘I do not suppose the world has ever known a more brilliant orator than this man. His magnetic personality is irresistible. One can sense the emanations of tremendous willpower and driving energy. We are 3,000 young idealists. We listen to the spellbinding words and accept them with all our hearts. We have never before experienced such a deep sense of patriotic devotion towards our German fatherland…I shall never forget the expressions of rapture which I saw on the faces around me today.’

Yet such triumphalism was premature. Germany’s 1940 victories created an enormous empire, but while this could be pillaged to considerable effect, it was administered with dire economic incompetence. Germany, contrary to widespread perceptions, was not an advanced industrial state by comparison with the United States, which it lagged by perhaps thirty years. It still had a large peasant agricultural sector such as Britain had shed. Its prestige, and the fear it inspired in the hearts of its enemies, derived from the combat efficiency of the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe, the latter being much weaker than the Allies knew. Time would show that these forces were inadequate to fulfil Hitler’s ambitions. If Britain at the end of 1940 remained beleaguered, Germany’s might rested on foundations more precarious than the world supposed.

Winston Churchill in the winter of 1940 persuaded his people that they had achieved something heroic and important when most were bemused to learn they had done anything at all. ‘The Prime Minister has been saying nice things about us fighter boys in the House of Commons,’ wrote Spitfire pilot Sandy Johnstone. ‘He says we have just won a famous victory although, to be honest, I don’t think any of us has been aware that there has been that sort of battle going on!’ Churchill imbued with grandeur Fighter Command’s triumph and the nation’s resilience under German bombardment. He did not, however, say how Britain might advance from defying the Luftwaffe to overcoming the Nazi empire, because he did not know.

Edward R. Murrow, the American broadcaster, told his CBS radio audience on 15 September that there was no great outpouring of public sentiment following news that bombs had fallen on Buckingham Palace; Londoners shrugged that the king and queen were merely experiencing the common plight of millions: ‘This war has no relation with the last one, so far as symbols and civilians are concerned. You must understand that a world is dying, that old values, the old prejudices, and the old bases of power and prestige are going.’ Murrow recognised what some of Britain’s ruling caste still did not: they deluded themselves that the struggle was being waged to sustain their familiar old society. The privileged elite among whom Evelyn Waugh lived saw the war, the novelist wrote, as ‘a malevolent suspension of normality: the massing and movement of millions of men, some of whom were sometimes endangered, most of whom were idle and lonely, the devastation, hunger and waste, crumbling buildings, foundering ships, the torture and murder of prisoners…[which] had been prolonged beyond reason’. Few of Waugh’s friends understood that the ‘suspension of normality’ would become permanent in its impact upon their own way of life.

Churchill’s single-minded commitment to victory served his country wonderfully well in 1940–41, but thereafter it would reveal important limitations. He sought the preservation of British imperial greatness, the existing order. This purpose would not suffice for most of his fellow countrymen, however. They yearned for social change, improvements in their domestic condition of a kind which seemed to the prime minister almost frivolous amidst a struggle for global mastery. Lancashire housewife Nella Last groped movingly towards an expression of her compatriots’ hopes when she wrote that summer of 1940: ‘Sometimes I get caught up in a kind of puzzled wonder at things and think of all the work and effort and unlimited money that is used today to “destroy” and not so long ago there was no money or work and it seems so wrong somehow…[that] money and effort could always be found to pull down and destroy rather than build up.’ Mrs. Last was middle-aged, but her children’s generation was determined that once the war was won, money would be found to create a more egalitarian society.

Churchill never defined credible war aims beyond the defeat of the Axis. When the tide of battle turned, this would become a serious weakness of his leadership and a threat to his domestic popularity. But in 1940–41 his foremost challenge was to convince his people that the war could be won. This became more difficult, rather than less, once the Luftwaffe was vanquished: thoughtful people recognised that the nation remained impotent to challenge German dominance of the Continent.

Hurricane pilot George Barclay described an intense discussion between young fliers and senior officers in his airfield mess on Sunday, 29 September 1940, and recorded their conclusions: ‘The British people are still fast asleep. They haven’t begun to realise the power of our enemies and that they have to give their “all”…That we need dictatorial methods to fight dictators…That we shall eventually win the war, but it will be a hell of a job and more so unless we pull ourselves together.’ The message, an eminently sensible one, was that the British must try harder. Many more frustrations, sorrows and defeats lay ahead, and George Barclay himself would lie dead in a desert funeral pyre before Hitler provoked into armed resistance a sufficiency of enemies to encompass his undoing.

5

The Mediterranean

1 MUSSOLINI GAMBLES

At the outbreak of war in 1939, Hitler had no intention of waging war in the Mediterranean, and asserted his determination not to commit German resources there. It was his fellow dictator Benito Mussolini who yearned to create an Italian lake, and on his own initiative launched the offensives which brought conflict to the region. In the year after the fall of France in June 1940, only in the African and Balkan theatres did Allied and Axis armies clash. Even after Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, the Mediterranean remained for three more years the focus of the Western Allied military contribution to the struggle against Hitler. All this was the consequence of Mussolini’s decision to become a protagonist in a struggle for which his nation was pitifully ill-equipped.

Hitler possessed in the Wehrmacht a formidable instrument for pursuing his ambitions. The Duce, by contrast, sought to play the warlord with incompetent commanders, unwilling soldiers and inadequate weapons. Italy was relatively poor, with a GDP less than half the size of Britain’s, and barely one-third per capita; it produced only one-sixth as much steel. The nation mobilised its economy less effectively for the Second World War than for the First. Even in the sunshine days of Mussolini’s relationship with Hitler, such was the Nazis’ contempt for their ally that 350,000 Italian workers in Germany were treated little better than slaves; Rome’s ambassador in Berlin was obliged to devote most of his energies to pleading for some amelioration of their working conditions. While Hitler cherished an enduring personal loyalty to Mussolini, whom he had once seen as a mentor, most Germans mistrusted and mocked Italy’s leader. Berliners claimed that whenever the Duce met the Führer, barrel-organ grinders played the popular tune ‘Du Kannst nicht Treue sein’ – ‘You Cannot be Faithful’. In 1936, when a foolish woman at a party asked Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg who would win the next war, he is alleged to have answered, ‘Madam, I cannot tell you that. Only one thing I can say: whoever has Italy on his side is bound to lose.’ There was a contemptuous joke in Nazi Party circles of Hitler’s lackey Wilhelm Keitel reporting, ‘My Führer, Italy has entered the war!’ Hitler answers, ‘Send two divisions. That should be enough to finish them.’ Keitel says, ‘No, my Führer, not against us, but with us.’ Hitler says, ‘That’s different. Send ten divisions.’

In the early months of the war, there was a droll consensus between the Germans and British against initiating Middle Eastern operations. So weak was Britain’s global position that its chiefs of staff set their faces against committing forces there. Once Mussolini joined the Axis, the Mediterranean became valueless as a shipping route to the East, in the face of enemy air and naval dominance. The head of the British Army, Gen. Sir John Dill, preferred to dispatch to Asia such men and weapons as could be spared, to strengthen the Empire’s defences against the looming Japanese threat. Churchill, however, would have none of this: since it was impossible to give battle on the Continent, he determined to do so in Africa. In the summer of 1940 he shipped precious tanks to Britain’s Middle East C-in-C, Gen. Sir Archibald Wavell. Other precautionary measures were adopted: 16,000 Gibraltarians – all but 4,000 of the Rock’s civilian population – were evacuated first to North Africa, thence to England. It was likely that seizure of the fortress at the gates of the Mediterranean would become an Axis objective, perhaps with the collusion of Spain’s dictator, Gen. Francisco Franco.

The Royal Navy had a relatively large Mediterranean fleet, but its C-in-C, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, recognised its vulnerability when almost bereft of air cover – as Churchill did not. For more than two years after Italy entered the war and France left it, Cunningham’s forces remained grievously disadvantaged by shortage of both carriers and land bases from which to operate aircraft. Huge expanses of sea were beyond the range of British fighters flying from Gibraltar, Malta, Egypt or Palestine. The Axis, by contrast, could strike at will from an almost unlimited choice of airfields. It was remarkable that between 1940 and 1943 the Royal Navy asserted itself with some success in the Mediterranean, under such handicaps of means and strategic weakness. Cunningham and his warship captains displayed a skill, dash and courage which went far to compensate for the paper superiority of the Italian battlefleet.

Ashore, the war in the North African desert engaged only a handful of British and imperial divisions, while most of Churchill’s army stayed at home. This was partly to provide security against invasion, partly for lack of weapons and equipment, partly owing to shortage of shipping to move and supply troops overseas. The clashes between desert armies were little more significant in determining the outcome of the global conflict than the tournaments between bands of French and English knights which provided entr’actes during the Hundred Years War. But the North African contest caught the imagination of the Western world, and achieved immense symbolic significance in the minds of the British people.

Hostilities were conducted upon a narrow strip of sand along the Mediterranean littoral, seldom more than forty miles wide, which was navigable by tanks. For thirty-two months between September 1940 and May 1943, the rival armies struggled for mastery in a series of seesaw campaigns which eventually traversed more than 2,000 miles of coastal territory. Shifts of advantage were heavily influenced by the distances each side was obliged to move fuel, ammunition, food and water to its fighting units: the British fared best in 1941–42 when closest to their bases in the Nile Delta; Axis forces when nearer to Tripoli. It is foolish to romanticise any aspect of the war, given the universal reality that almost every participant would have preferred to be in his own home; that to die trapped in a blazing tank was no less terrible at Sollum or Benghazi than at Stalingrad. But the emptiness of desert battlefields, where there was neither much slaughter of innocents nor destruction of civilian property, rendered absent some of the horrors imposed by collateral damage in populated regions.

While campaigning in the desert was never comfortable, in the protracted intervals between battles it was preferable to winter Russia or monsoon Asia. It is sometimes suggested that in North Africa there was ‘war without hate’. This is an exaggeration, because there was certainly fear, which bred spasms of animosity; most men in the heat of action feel ill-will towards those seeking to kill them. But extremes of brutality, especially the murder of prisoners, were generally avoided by both sides. Italians and Germans, British, Indians, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans subsisted and fought in a wild and alien environment where none had any emotional stake. They engaged in a common struggle against sand, flies, heat and thirst, even before the enemy entered the reckoning.

In the autumn of 1940, Mussolini was impatient to the point of obsession to achieve some conspicuous Italian success to justify seizing a share of the booty from anticipated Axis victory. Though ignorant of both military and naval affairs, he craved foreign conquests to ennoble fascism and stiffen the frail spirit of his people at home. ‘The army has need of glory,’ he said. Libya, an Italian colony, adjoined British-controlled Egypt, where Wavell had a small imperial force of one British division, 7th Armoured, together with an Indian and a New Zealand formation, soon reinforced by two Australian divisions. Britain’s presence was anomalous to the verge of absurdity: Egypt was an independent sovereign state ruled by King Farouk, where the British supposedly exercised rights only to defend the Suez Canal. The Cairo government did not formally enter hostilities until February 1945. The sympathies of most Egyptians lay with the Axis, which they believed would liberate them from more than seventy years of British domination. Indeed, such views were widespread among Arab nationalists throughout the Middle East, and were stimulated by Hitler’s 1940 successes. That August, the secretary of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem visited Berlin to discuss fomenting a revolt in Iraq. In addition, he suggested, prospective rebels in Palestine and Transjordan might be armed with weapons provided by the Vichy French in Syria. The aspiring insurgents’ principal demand was that the Nazis should commit themselves to the future independence of the Arab states.

Yet in 1940 Germany’s leaders were not much interested in Muslim revolts, less still in Arab freedom. Moreover, at this stage they conceded to Italy the principal diplomatic role in the region. Mussolini’s ambitions for extending his African empire were wholly incompatible with local peoples’ aspirations: in pursuit of them, his generals had already massacred many thousands of Libyan and Abyssinian tribesmen. Only in 1941 did the Germans engage with Arab nationalists, notably in Iraq and Persia. Their attempted interventions there were late, half-hearted, and easily frustrated by forces dispatched to reassert British hegemony.

In Egypt in September 1939, Britain invoked a clause of its treaty with Farouk which obliged him, in the event of a war, to provide ‘all the facilities and assistance in his power, including the use of ports, aerodromes and means of communication’. Thereafter, the British treated the country as a colonial possession, governed through their ambassador Sir Miles Lampson. They based their Mediterranean fleet at Alexandria, and in February 1942 deployed troops in Cairo to stifle a nascent Egyptian rebellion. In the course of the war, desperate hunger among the peasantry caused several food riots; the plight of the Egyptian felaheen contrasted starkly with the sybaritic lifestyle of the British military colony centred upon Middle East headquarters, Shepheard’s Hotel, the Gezira Sporting Club and a nexus of barracks, supply and repair bases throughout the Nile Delta, where contempt for ‘the wogs’ was almost universal.

American visitors were dismayed by the lassitude and imperial condescension of the British in Egypt, who seemed to regard the conflict being waged in the western wilderness as a mere event in a sporting calendar. This perception was unjust to those doing the fighting and dying: it failed to recognise the British Army’s tradition of seeking to make war with a light heart. But a core of truth about the North African campaign was that the British role until late 1942 was characterised by an amateurishness that was occasionally inspired, but more often crippled its endeavours.

So large was the paper strength of Mussolini’s armies that in the summer of 1940 it seemed possible they would expel the British from northern and eastern Africa. There were 600,000 Italian and colonial troops in Libya and Abyssinia, confronting fewer than a hundred thousand men under Wavell’s orders in the Middle East, Kenya, Sudan and Somaliland. In August, to Churchill’s fury the Italians seized Somaliland almost bloodlessly. Mussolini’s people had little stomach for hard fighting, but a hearty appetite for victories. During the brief period when cheap African conquests seemed in prospect while the Luftwaffe’s efforts against Britain were visibly flagging, an Italian journalist wrote proudly, and with an earnestness that reflected his people’s genius for self-delusion: ‘We want to reach Suez with our own forces alone; perhaps we will win the war and not the Germans.’ But Mussolini’s operations were handicapped by his confusion about both means and purposes: at home, he demobilised part of his army to bring in the harvest. Ignoring the vital principle of concentration of force, he prepared to launch an invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece. He failed to exploit a critical window of opportunity to seize Malta. In North Africa, his commanders lacked equipment, skill and resolve. In September 1940, in a gesture symbolic of Italy’s generals’ insouciance about the struggle, the Ministry of War in Rome reverted to its peacetime practice of closing for business each day at 2 p.m.

An Italian diplomat vented his disgust on the mood he encountered during a visit to Milan: ‘Everyone thinks only of eating, enjoying themselves, making money and relaying witticisms about the great and powerful. Anyone who gets killed is a jerk…He who supplies the troops with cardboard shoes is considered a sort of hero.’ A young Italian officer wrote home from Libya: ‘We’re trying to fight this war as though it were a colonial war in Africa. But this is a European war…fought with European weapons against a European enemy. We take too little account of this in building our stone forts and equipping ourselves with such luxury.’

Mussolini dismissed Hitler’s offer of two armoured divisions for North Africa, which might have been decisive in securing a swift Axis victory: he was determined to keep the Germans out of his own jealously defined sphere of influence. A quarter of Italy’s combat aircraft were dispatched to join the Luftwaffe’s attack on Britain, leaving Italian troops in Libya almost without air support, while a large army in Albania – occupied by Mussolini in 1939 – was held in readiness to attack either Yugoslavia or Greece, as the Duce deemed expedient. The Italians made policy and strategy in the belief that they were participating in the residual military operations of a short war soon to conclude in Axis victory. Mussolini was fearful that the British might make terms with Hitler before he had achieved his own conquests. Instead, Italy would become the only nation whose strategic fortunes were decisively affected by events in Africa, where it lost progressively twenty-six divisions, half its air force and its entire tank inventory, together with any vestige of military credibility.

The British began operations in the summer of 1940 with a succession of raids across the Libyan border. Marshal Rodolfo Graziani deployed some 250,000 men against 36,000 British in Egypt and a further 27,000 – including a division of horsed yeomanry – in Palestine. Mussolini’s commander had made his reputation by destroying the Abyssinian army in 1935 with liberal infusions of poison gas. In 1940 he showed himself a resolute defeatist with no stomach for battle. Graziani advanced cautiously into Egypt in September until, unnerved by the British show of aggression and a gross overestimate of Wavell’s strength, he halted and dug in south and east of Sidi Barrani. One of his generals, Annibale Bergonzoli, christened ‘electric whiskers’ by the British, found some of his artillery officers so craven that during British air attacks he was obliged to hit and kick them back to their guns from the trenches where they had taken refuge. A three-month pause ensued, during which Mussolini chafed, still anxious that the war might come to an end before he had conquered Egypt; Churchill, meanwhile, was equally impatient at the delay before Wavell was ready to launch his counter-strokes.

On 19 January 1941, Maj. Gen. William Platt led a small army from Sudan into Eritrea, seizing the formidable fortress of Keren after heavy fighting on 27 March, at a cost of 536 killed, mostly Indian soldiers, and 3,229 wounded. Meanwhile in February, another British force under Gen. Alan Cunningham, brother of the admiral, advanced from Kenya into Somaliland, marched up the coast to Mogadishu, then turned north for a thrust 774 miles overland to Harar. By 6 April, Cunningham had taken Addis Ababa, Abyssinia’s capital, having suffered only 501 battle casualties. Fighting persisted for another six months against pockets of Italian resistance, but the Abyssinian campaign was crowned with British success, after some hard fighting on short commons. Though combat losses were few, 74,550 men succumbed to sickness or accidents and 744 of them died, as did 15,000 camels supporting the British advance. More than 300,000 Italians became prisoners.

But the most dramatic offensive took place in Egypt, where on 6 December 1940 Wavell unleashed Lt. Gen. Sir Richard O’Connor’s Operation Compass against Graziani. This began tentatively, with modest objectives, then expanded dramatically amid stunning success. Imperial forces swept into Libya, capturing Italians in tens of thousands. A British gunner described one of O’Connor’s racing columns, ‘loaded with the everyday paraphernalia for making war in the wilderness – rations, ammunition, petrol and that most precious of all requirements, 4-gallon flimsy aluminium containers of water, all carried in three-ton canvas-covered Bedfords. [There were] 5-cwt Morris Scout trucks with the section officer or battery captain standing up in the passenger seat, divisional pennants fluttering in the wind-stream; a couple of RHA 25-pounder guns, cylindrical water bowsers skittering on two wheels behind a 15-cwt. Sometimes a troop of Hussars’ light tanks, their tracks screeching and rattling and bouncing over the boulders, their long, slender wireless aerials bobbing and waving. The rolling convoy moved in unison, fanned out in open order, fifty yards separating each vehicle, sand streaming from the wheels like spray in heavy rain.’

The Italian defences crumbled with extraordinary speed. ‘They can’t take it,’ an Australian soldier wrote home contemptuously. ‘They can’t take pain (I saw hundreds of their wounded…all in tears), they can’t take shells (they flinch when one drops a hundred yards away), the sound of British tanks terrorised them and the sight of our bayonets was enough to make them throw up their hands. Fascism…pooh!’ Likewise an officer: ‘All Australians now know that one Aussie is still equal to…50 Italians – almost, anyway.’ Lt. Tom Bird employed a cricketing metaphor: ‘One can’t help feeling that it is a great bit of luck to have been able to have a practice over or two, so to speak, with the Italians. What more delightful people to fight could there be?’ Nothing went right for the Italian war effort. Mussolini’s propaganda department in Rome made a film designed to demonstrate the superiority of fascist manhood. To this end, a fight was staged between former world heavyweight champion Primo Carnera and Kay Masaki, a black South African taken prisoner in the desert. Masaki had never entered a boxing ring in his life, and was knocked down when the cameras began to roll. He picked himself up, however, and struck Carnera a blow that rendered him unconscious.

To the outside world, the relative insignificance of Britain’s desert triumphs was plain. Romanian Mihail Sebastian wrote on 7 February 1941: ‘It goes without saying that the whole of the war in Africa (however interesting and dramatic) is only a sideshow. The struggle is between the British and the Germans; that is where everything will be decided.’ He was right, of course, but in blitzed London there was rejoicing. By 9 February, O’Connor’s force had advanced five hundred miles and taken El Agheila; the road west towards Tripoli lay open. Thereafter, to the bewilderment of ordinary soldiers, the advance ended; deep in the sands of Mussolini’s colony they halted, and languished. ‘Every day was the same as the day before,’ gunner Doug Arthur wrote wearily. ‘Saturday could have been Monday, Friday could have been Tuesday, even Pancake Tuesday, for all we knew…we didn’t know what was really going on, where we were going or what faced us when we got there.’

They were going no further in Libya. Four of Wavell’s divisions, including the New Zealand division and much of the Australian contingent, were transferred to Greece to meet the anticipated German assault there. It was afterwards claimed that the Greek diversion cost the British a unique opportunity to clear the North African coast and regain control of the southern Mediterranean. This seems doubtful: Lt. Gen. Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps was already landing at Tripoli, to succour the faltering Italians and thereafter dominate the campaign; the British supply line was stretched to its limits; O’Connor’s tanks and vehicles were almost worn out. Fighting the Italians flattered the capabilities of Western Desert Force, while the simultaneous Abyssinian campaign was a heavy drain on imperial resources. Even if none of Wavell’s men had gone to Greece, it is unlikely that the British were strong enough to complete the conquest of North Africa.

During the three months before the British offensive in Libya petered out in February 1941, it achieved an important marginal impact, unrecognised at the time: Compass contributed to keeping Spain out of the war. Franco faced the same dilemmas as Mussolini, but reached different conclusions. He was ideologically enthusiastic towards the Axis and wished to share the spoils of Allied defeat. But he was cautious about exposing his country, ravaged by recent civil war, to the hazards of a new struggle until the British had been reduced to impotence. From 1939 onwards Spain was no neutral, but a belligerent-in-waiting: Spanish foreign minister Serrano Suner, in particular, was wholeheartedly committed to joining the Axis cause. The shrewd Portuguese ambassador in Madrid, Pedro Teotonio Pereira, reported to Lisbon on 27 May 1940: ‘Beyond doubt Spain continues to hate the Allies…German victories are received with joy.’ Pereira asserted that almost all Spaniards wanted Germany to triumph, and regretted only that the destitution of their country made it inopportune to commit themselves immediately to its cause: ‘They do not judge the war to be infamous, but themselves in a bad position to take part.’

Franco intended to fight, but only if Germany accepted his stiff tariff: ‘Spain cannot enter por gusto [for fun],’ he told Hitler during their meeting at Hendaye on the Franco–Spanish border in October 1940. A secret protocol to the Spanish–German accord, finally signed in November, declared Madrid’s readiness to join the Tripartite Pact: ‘In fulfilment of its obligations as an ally, Spain will intervene in the present war of the Axis Powers against England after they have provided it with the military support necessary for its preparedness…Germany will grant economic aid to Spain by supplying it with food and raw materials.’ The Economic Ministry in Madrid drew up a formidable shopping list: 400,000 tons of fuel, half a million tons of coal, 200,000 tons of wheat, 100,000 tons of cotton and vast consignments of fertiliser.

Franco’s military planners busied themselves preparing a possible takeover of Portugal as well as Gibraltar. Thereafter, however, relations with Germany soured. The Spanish dictator was galled when Hitler refused to concede to him French colonies in Africa, partly because Germany still hoped to enlist Vichy France as an active ally. Mussolini strongly opposed Spanish belligerence, partly because he was a competitor with Franco for the same French colonies, and also because he sought unreserved personal hegemony over the Mediterranean littoral. Hitler, in his turn, had his own shopping list, wishing to appropriate some of Franco’s colonies as German overseas bases: Spanish Equatorial Guinea, Fernando Po and one of the Canary Islands. The most intractable sticking point in negotiations was that the Spanish leader, like Mussolini, was unwilling to allow large numbers of German troops into his country. He admired Hitler vastly, and cherished illusions that the Führer would create a new European polity in which Spain, for so long an abused underdog, would be conceded its rightful place in the sun. But he had no intention of allowing his country to become a Nazi fiefdom.

Hitler’s key strategic objective was seizure of Gibraltar. Having scant faith in the Spanish army to accomplish this, he prepared plans for the Wehrmacht to do so. For Franco, however, in the words of historian Stanley Payne, ‘it was a point of both honor and national interest that Spanish forces carry out the operation’. An impasse developed: the Germans would not provide Spain with the weapons and supplies for Franco to make an attempt on Gibraltar, and Franco would not grant the Wehrmacht rights of passage for its own assault. He knew the Spanish people were unwilling to accept the sacrifices of a new war. His generals were hostile, not least because the British were paying them a fortune in secret bribes – $13 million in all – to keep their country neutral. As long as Britain remained undefeated, the Royal Navy could blockade Spain, with devastating economic consequences. Once again, British sea power exercised an important, though invisible, influence upon events.

British successes in Libya and Abyssinia further discouraged Franco from any hasty commitment to fight, at precisely the moment when Hitler was ready to dispatch tanks and troops to take Gibraltar. On 7 December 1940, the Abwehr’s chief Admiral Wilhelm Canaris met Franco in Madrid, to seek his agreement that German forces should start moving into Spain within a month. Franco refused. Canaris cabled Berlin on the 10th, saying that Spain would not move as long as the British maritime threat persisted. Hitler lost patience, and Operation Felix, the Gibraltar attack, was shelved. By February 1941, his attention had switched irrevocably eastwards. He needed every division for his intended invasion of Russia. His interest in Gibraltar waned, and with it Germany’s willingness to pay an extravagant price for Spanish belligerency. Spain remained an active friend of the Axis for almost two years thereafter, until the successful Allied invasion of North Africa made obvious the turn of the tide. Italian aircraft bombing Gibraltar refuelled at Spanish airfields; vital commodities including tungsten continued to flow from Spain to Germany; the country swarmed with Nazi diplomats and spies, who were provided with every facility to impede the Allied war effort. Franco sent a token division to assist Hitler’s invasion of Russia; Luftwaffe weather and reconnaissance aircraft flew from Spanish bases until 1945. But Spain maintained nominal neutrality. Gibraltar remained unconquered, and thus the gateway to the Mediterranean stayed open to Allied shipping.

If Franco had joined the war, the inevitable fall of Gibraltar would have doomed Malta. It would have been much harder – perhaps impossible – for the British to hold the Middle East. The damage to their prestige and confidence would have been immense, and Churchill might not have survived as prime minister. Franco deserved no gratitude from the Allies, because cautious Spanish diplomacy was driven by self-interest; he held back only because he overvalued his own worth to the Axis. But the outcome was much to the advantage of both Britain and Spain.

Rommel, who had made his reputation in the 1940 French campaign, arrived in Africa on 12 February 1941. His soldiers, flushed with victory in Europe, were in exuberant mood, perceiving their deployment as a romantic adventure. ‘We are all twenty-one years old and crazy,’ wrote panzergrenadier lieutenant Ralph Ringer. ‘Crazy, because we have volunteered of our own free will to go to Africa and have talked about nothing else for weeks…tropical nights, palm trees, sea breezes, natives, oases and tropical helmets. Also a little war, but how can we be anything but victorious?…Like madmen we jumped around and hugged each other, we really were going to Africa!’ Lt. Pietro Ostellino, one of the small minority of dedicated fascists in the Italian army, wrote exultantly to his wife on 3 March: ‘Here things are going very well and our reoccupation of Cyrenaica, which has been held by the enemy, is a matter of days or even hours away. We hasten to the front line for the honour of the Patria. You must be proud and offer your sufferings to the cause for which your husband is fighting with enthusiasm and passion.’ He added three days later: ‘Morale is very high, and in cooperation with our valiant allies we are getting ready to do great things…Ours is a holy cause and God is with us.’

Rommel launched his first offensive against the British in Libya on 24 March, easily capturing El Agheila at the base of the Gulf of Sirte. British tanks checked the Afrika Korps at Mersa Brega, but the weak forces now commanded by Lt. Gen. Philip Neame were obliged to withdraw. On 4 April, Rommel attacked again, forcing a new retreat by threatening Neame’s supply line. Many British tanks were disabled by mechanical failure, and the Germans had little difficulty in pushing on to Tobruk. The port was left to be defended by an Australian garrison, while the main imperial forces fell back across the Egyptian frontier, almost to the start line of their December offensive.

Wavell had impressed on Neame that it was more important to keep his army intact than to hold ground, but soldiers ignorant of this higher purpose were simply bewildered by their own headlong flight. Gunner Len Tutt described an action in which his 25-pounder battery held off panzers for some hours, then as darkness fell was suddenly ordered to withdraw: ‘The rot seemed to set in. We dropped into action a little way down the road but had hardly surveyed the position before we were ordered to withdraw again. There seemed no overall direction. Too many units were on the move at the same time, a mistake which contributed to a growing panic. We soon saw the danger signs: men abandoning a stalled truck and running to get on another vehicle, when possibly a few seconds under the bonnet would have kept it going. Others were abandoned because they had run out of petrol, and yet there were three-tonners loaded down with the stuff passing on either side.’ There was further seesaw fighting in which the Halfaya Pass and Fort Capuzzo changed hands several times, but at the end of May the Germans and Italians occupied the disputed ground.

Pietro Ostellino wrote on 13 May near Tobruk: ‘We are well advanced now and it is only a question of time. It is quite hot, but bearable, and I am in good health – brown as a salami, partly from the sun and also because we are covered in sand which sticks to our skin and with sweat forms a layer of mud. We have enough water, but fifteen minutes after washing we are back to what we were before.’ Soon afterwards, hearing news of the Axis advance into Greece, he wrote: ‘Yesterday I received a letter from Uncle Ottavio from Albania in which he talks of the great victory they have achieved there. We will soon be emulating them and will throw the English out of everywhere.’ Though the Australians held out in Tobruk even after the Afrika Korps raced past towards Egypt, strategic advantage lay firmly with Rommel. And meanwhile across the Mediterranean, as Ostellino noted, the British had suffered a further series of disasters.

2 A GREEK TRAGEDY

The struggle for the Balkans began with a black farce precipitated by Mussolini. Having dickered with a takeover of Yugoslavia, instead, on 28 October 1940 he launched 162,000 men into Greece from Albania, an operation only revealed to Marshal Graziani in North Africa by Rome Radio’s news broadcasts. Even Hitler was kept in the dark: the Duce was so nettled by Germany’s takeover of Romania – deemed part of Italy’s sphere of influence – without consultation with Rome that he determined to turn the tables by presenting Berlin with his own fait accompli in Greece. The pretext for war was mythical Greek support for British operations in the Mediterranean. A small country of seven million people was expected to offer no significant resistance; Greece’s defences faced Bulgaria, not Albania. The British were committed by treaty to support the Athens government, but initially offered only a few weapons and aircraft. Mussolini told his officers: ‘If anyone makes any difficulties about beating the Greeks, I shall resign from being an Italian.’ His foreign minister Ciano, sometimes dovish, favoured the invasion as offering easy pickings. He believed Athens would capitulate in the face of token bombing, and sought to ensure such an outcome by allocating millions of lire to bribe Greek politicians and generals. It remains uncertain whether this money was paid, or merely stolen by fascist intermediaries.

Rome was anyway denied its desired outcome. The Greek people, enraged by an Italian submarine’s sinking of the Greek cruiser Helli weeks before Mussolini’s declaration of war, responded to invasion with resolute defiance. Graffiti appeared: ‘Death to the spaghetti-eaters who sank our Helli’. Although grievously impoverished, Greece mobilised 209,000 men and 125,000 horses and mules. Its dictator General Ioannis Metaxas, whose rule had hitherto been divisive, wrote in his diary as tensions with Italy mounted: ‘Now everyone is with me.’ A peasant named Ahmet Tsapounis sent him a telegram: ‘Not having any money to contribute to the nation’s war effort, I give instead my field at Variko…which is 5.5 acres. I humbly ask you to accept this.’ On predominantly Greek-inhabited Cyprus, popular sentiment had hitherto been pro-Axis, because it was believed that a Nazi victory would free the island from British colonial rule. Now, however, a Cypriot wrote: ‘The supreme desire was for the defeat of the armies which had invaded Greek soil, to be followed by “the fruits of victory” – “freedom”, as promised by Churchill.’

To the astonishment of the world, not only did the Greek army repel the Italian invasion, but by November its forces had advanced deep into Albania. Italian general Ubaldo Soddu suggested asking the Greeks for an armistice. In Athens, Maris Markoyianni heard a small boy ask: ‘When we’ve beaten the Italians, what shall we do with Mussolini?’ Hitler was furious about the Greek fiasco. He had always opposed it, and emphatically so until after the November US elections: he feared that new Axis aggression must aid Roosevelt. He had urged Mussolini to secure Crete before attacking the mainland, to frustrate British intervention. In a letter from Vienna on 20 November, he expressed dismay about Italian blundering. The Duce, replying, blamed his setbacks on bad weather; Bulgarian assurances of neutrality, which allowed the Greeks to shift large forces westwards; and local Albanians’ unwillingness to aid the Axis. He told Hitler that he was preparing to launch thirty divisions ‘with which we shall utterly destroy Greece’. Those who supposed him a less brutal tyrant than Germany’s Führer were confounded by his directive to Badoglio, his chief of staff: ‘All [Greek] urban centres of over 10,000 population must be destroyed and razed to the ground. This is a direct order.’

He achieved nothing of the kind. Instead, through the months that followed the Greek and Italian armies remained stalemated in the Albanian mountains, amid the worst winter weather for half a century. Sergeant Diamantis Stafilakas from Chios wrote in his diary on 18 January 1941: ‘The door of our shelter will not open because of the snow. The fierce wind drives the snow up against it. Today it is raining again. We are soaked through. There is no chance of lighting a fire because the smoke chokes us. Our nights are spent in excruciating discomfort, so that I get up, go outside and walk around. I tried to build a new shelter, and managed to dig down twenty centimetres before the snow began again and I gave up.’

Frostbite inflicted thousands of casualties. Spyros Triantafillos grieved at abandoning his beloved grey horse after it broke down in a snowdrift: ‘Starving, soaked to the bone, tortured by endless movement on rocky ground, it was doomed to stay there. I emptied my saddlebags to follow the others on foot, then stroked the back of its neck a little and kissed it. It might be an animal, but it had been my comrade in war. We had faced death many times together, had lived through unforgettable days and nights. I saw it looking at me as I walked away. What a look that was, my friends. It revealed so much anguish, so much sadness. I wanted to cry, but the tears did not come. War leaves no time for such things. Momentarily I thought of killing it, but couldn’t bear to do so. I left it there, staring after me until I disappeared behind a rock.’

Hitler, exasperated, ignored Mussolini’s protestations that he could defeat the Greeks unaided. On 13 December, he issued Directive No. 20 for Operation Marita: ‘In the light of the threatening situation in Albania, it is doubly important to frustrate English efforts to establish, behind the protection of a Balkan front, an air base which would threaten Italy…and, incidentally, the Romanian oilfields.’ Following the installation of General Ion Antonescu as Romania’s prime minister on 12 October 1940, that country and its vital oil reserves fell under German control; most Romanians considered Germany an inescapable ally, when their country was threatened by the territorial ambitions of the Soviet Union.

By January, the Luftwaffe was attacking British shipping in the Mediterranean from Sicily. General Metaxas died suddenly on the 29th. In March, German diplomatic pressure persuaded Bulgaria to join the Axis; Yugoslavia likewise acceded, though a palace coup in Belgrade installed a short-lived pro-British regime. The morale of the Italian people slumped, as it became apparent that their leader’s ambitions had suffered humiliating frustration, with the consequence that they themselves must bow to German hegemony in the Mediterranean region. A police informant in Milan wrote: ‘Many, many pessimists see Italy as a protectorate of Germany, and conclude that if we endured three wars, the severe losses of the navy, the sacrifice of our raw materials and gold reserves…in order to achieve the loss of our political, economic and military independence, there is nothing to be proud of about the policies followed.’ The privations of the Italian people worsened through the winter, with prices soaring. The ration of pasta and rice was cut to two kilos per person per month, when the average worker consumed four hundred grams a day. Italian enthusiasm for the war, always brittle, never recovered from its slump following the 1940–41 defeats. Thereafter, most of Mussolini’s soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians were unhappy prisoners, chained to Hitler’s chariot wheels.