The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [69]
The death of Hitler’s Sealion meant that none of that happened in Britain as it did on the Continent. The British were thus saved from having to make the terrible choices and compromises which the populations of Occupied Europe were forced to make. The spirit of 1940 – the undoubted annus mirabilis of British history – was often to be called upon by Churchill in the remaining years of the war, and by many other politicians since.
For British strategists a vast void had opened up. Where were they to strike the Axis next, now that Europe was completely closed off? More out of a lack of any viable alternative than anything else, as well as to protect British interests further afield, the war was transferred to the North African littoral and the Mediterranean. Soon the victory of the battle of Britain was to seem like an all too isolated incident in a dangerously unpredictable struggle.
4
Contesting the Littoral
September 1939–June 1942
You seem to be the only enemy I can be sure of defeating these days.
Lord Wavell, playing backgammon with the Countess of Ranfurly, 3 May 19411
‘Before Alamein, we never had a victory,’ Churchill wrote in his war memoirs. ‘After Alamein we never had a defeat.’ Like so many generalizations, the remark had a kernel of truth, even if one ignores the huge exception of the battle of Britain. But Churchill should have qualified his words with ‘over the Germans’, because Britain won spectacular victories over the Italians in Africa. Indeed these were so significant that they encouraged Hitler to contest the Mediterranean with resources that would have been far better employed in Russia. Faced with the defeat of Fascism in Africa, Hitler decided to try to save his ideological soulmate, Benito Mussolini, in Africa (and later in Greece), even though his strategy dictated that neither place would be the key to the victory he sought, which was always going to be in Russia.
The first of several British commanders in the long Western Desert campaign was Archibald Wavell, a fine example of the British Army officer of the old school. Wavell’s family came to Britain with William the Conqueror, both his father and grandfather had been generals, he had had a brilliant school career and was personally brave in action. A natural sportsman (especially golf and polo), captain of the regimental hockey team, a fine shot, an excellent linguist (Urdu, Pashtu and Russian), he served in the Boer War and on the North-West Frontier and entered Camberley Staff College in 1909 with an 85 per cent exam pass. He married a colonel’s daughter called Queenie, of whom he wrote admiringly to a friend: ‘She rides well to hounds.’ Much to his chagrin, Wavell was stuck at the War Office when the rest of the Army decamped to France and Flanders in August 1914, but although he did later see action it was as a liaison officer with the Grand Duke Nicholas’ army in Turkey, and later serving under General Allenby in Palestine, that Wavell spent most of the Great War. He not only distinguished himself, but got to know the Middle East and was sent out to command in Palestine in 1937–8. He was also the most literary and reflective of Britain’s Second World War generals.
Yet there were always severe personality differences between Wavell and Churchill, amounting at times to mutual detestation. Even though Wavell had supported the creation of Ralph Bagnold’s Long Range Desert Group in North Africa and later encouraged Orde Wingate in his unorthodox fighting practices in the Burmese jungle, Churchill thought him too cautious and conventional a commander, and longed to replace him. When in August 1940 Wavell returned to London to brief the War Cabinet’s Middle East Committee, Anthony Eden thought his account of operations ‘masterly’, but Churchill’s curt cross-questioning left him feeling bruised and insulted.2 Nonetheless, great risks were run in Africa that month, virtually denuding Britain