Inferno - Max Hastings [84]
Dentz, in a gesture of spite, shipped sixty-three British officer and NCO prisoners to Greece en route to POW camps in Germany, even while he was negotiating the armistice. Only British threats that he and his senior colleagues would be denied repatriation secured the captives’ return. Thereafter, 32,032 Vichy and colonial troops chose to sail with their commanders to occupied France, while 5,668 accepted service with de Gaulle. Gen. Georges Catroux, condemned to death in absentia by the Pétain regime for his support of de Gaulle, became Free French plenipotentiary for the Levant. The Syrian people remained unenthusiastic about rule by Frenchmen of any hue, but the region was now safe from German dominance. Churchill’s boldness, amid the caution of his generals, was vindicated, even if the clumsy management of the little campaign promoted scant confidence in British military competence.
The Syrian venture ended in a useful strategic success. The achievement of securing Britain’s flank in the Middle East was more important than the loss of Crete. But across Europe, oppressed and threatened people struggled to find consolation amid so many conspicuous Allied defeats and failures. Mihail Sebastian wrote in Bucharest on 1 June 1941: “So long as Britain does not surrender, there is room for hope.” But with Axis air power now dominant across most of the Mediterranean, the prestige of British arms lay low—and would fall lower yet.
ON 15 JUNE 1941 WAVELL, reinforced by a consignment of tanks dispatched at great risk from Britain through the Mediterranean, launched a new offensive, Operation Battleaxe. Within two days, this foundered after Rommel’s 88mm guns inflicted heavy tank losses on the attackers. Failure cost the Middle East C-in-C his job. He was replaced by Gen. Sir Claude Auchinleck, who in turn appointed Alan Cunningham, victor in Abyssinia, to command the newly christened Eighth Army in the desert. To Churchill’s frustration, there followed a five-month lull in big battlefield operations. The British Army engaged in only minor actions in North Africa and elsewhere, though much was made of the Australian defence of beleaguered Tobruk.
The next desert offensive, Crusader, was launched on 18 November. Cunningham’s forces were much stronger than those of Rommel, who was slow to grasp the weight and identify the focus of the British assault. The Eighth Army swept forward to relieve Tobruk after heavy fighting. Rommel’s counterstrokes failed: he was obliged to withdraw, having suffered 38,000 Italian and German casualties to 18,000 British, and losing 300 tanks to Cunningham’s 278. By the last days of 1941, the Axis army was back at El Agheila, some 500 miles from its farthest point of advance into Egypt. The British briefly supposed that they had turned the tide of the desert war; Churchill rejoiced in a rare success.
But most Axis soldiers saw their predicament as readily reversible. Lt. Pietro Ostellino wrote on 7 December: “I can only now take up this letter: before, the English wouldn’t let me! We were surrounded for two and a half days by forces who were a hundred times superior, with artillery that really hammered us. But we held out until reinforcements arrived, then put the enemy to flight. We captured prisoners and armoured vehicles. Of course, we too suffered painful losses. Please don’t worry if I don’t write to you so often at the moment: the post can’t operate every day.”
The pattern of the desert war was established. The Germans held at least marginal air superiority, because most of the RAF’s best aircraft remained in England, obliging its desert pilots to fight the Luftwaffe’s Bf‑109s with inferior Tomahawks, Kittyhawks and Hurricanes. The British also lagged behind their enemies