Inferno - Max Hastings [78]
By January, the Luftwaffe was attacking British shipping in the Mediterranean from Sicilian bases. General Metaxas died suddenly on 29 January. 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 brutally apparent that their own leader’s ambitions had suffered humiliating frustration, and that the consequence was that they themselves must share in bowing 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 had worsened through the winter, with prices soaring. The official ration of pasta and rice was cut to 4.4 pounds per person per month, when the average worker consumed fourteen ounces a day. Italian popular enthusiasm for the war, always brittle, never recovered from its disastrous 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.
On 6 April, thirty-three German divisions, six of them armoured, swept into Yugoslavia, easily overwhelming its army. A Luftwaffe bomber attack on the capital killed 17,000 people, an appalling toll which reflected its citizens’ absolute unpreparedness for their fate. Six days later the invaders occupied the city, and on 17 April the Yugoslavs capitulated.
A 56,000-strong British-led force, mostly composed of Australians and New Zealanders, began to land in Greece in March, to deploy in the northeast. Churchill’s insistence on committing imperial troops at the discretion of British commanders provoked serious and understandable dismay among the leaders of the white dominions. In theory, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand formations could be deployed only with the express sanction of their home governments. But, especially in 1940–41, before dominion ministers dug in their heels against abuses of their constitutional rights, such approval was often sought only retrospectively. The Australian prime minister, Robert Menzies, attended the 24 February 1941 British War Cabinet meeting at which the decision was made to dispatch an army to Greece; but he and his fellow ministers were wilfully misled about the opinions and fears of commanders in the theatre, including their own most senior officers. Only after the first New Zealand soldiers had been in Greece for some weeks in December 1940 did their government in Auckland learn of the fact. Anzac rather than British forces were called upon to bear the chief burden of the most hazardous Allied military gamble of the Mediterranean campaign, serving under a British commander-in-chief. Australian politicians, in particular, were deeply dismayed.
Anzac soldiers, however, cherished more innocent sensations. The New Zealanders were voyaging towards their first battlefield; like most young men in such circumstances, they revelled in excited anticipation and exotic sensations, oblivious of peril. Lance-Bombardier Morry Cullen wrote home euphorically about the thrill of sailing the Mediterranean: “I have never seen such beautiful shades of blue, from a light sky shade to the deepest blue black and there was hardly a ripple on the water.