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By Root 842 0

Navy’s destroyers. Maclean’s heroic fiction was rooted in an extraordinary series of episodes in the eastern Mediterranean in the autumn of 1943 which deserve to be better known to students of the war. This is not, however, because the saga ended in a British triumph, which it certainly did not, but because it provides a case study in a folly which was overwhelmingly Winston Churchill’s responsibility. The story merits rehearsal and analysis, as an example of the consequences of the prime minister’s capacity for rash boldness. If the scale of the campaign was mercifully small, the blunders were many and large. They help to explain why strategists who worked closely with Churchill sometimes despaired of his obsessions.

Rhodes and the much smaller islands of the Dodecanese to the north lie a few miles off the coast of Turkey, and are inhabited by Greeks. Italy had seized them in 1912. Three years later, France and Britain endorsed this shameless imperialist venture as part of the price for Italian accession to the allied cause in World War I. The islands, which possessed few merits save their barren beauty and strategic location, had been garrisoned by Italian forces ever since. They first attracted Churchill’s attention in 1940. He believed, surely wrongly, that if the Allies could dispossess the Italians, such a visible shift of power in the eastern Mediterranean would induce Turkey to enter the war. At his behest, British commandos staged an abortive raid in February 1941. During the ensuing two years, the islands were recognised as beyond Allied reach. But as the Mediterranean skies brightened, Churchill’s Aegean enthusiasm revived. At Casablanca, he urged upon the Americans the importance of seizing Rhodes and the Dodecanese, and tasked his own Chiefs of Staff to prepare a plan. In addition to troops, landing craft would be necessary, together with American fighters. The twin-engined Lightnings and British Beaufighters were the only planes with the range to provide air support over the Aegean from North African bases. The utmost “ingenuity and resource,” urged Churchill, should be deployed to secure the Dodecanese.

Plans were made for two alternative scenarios: the first was a “walk in” to Rhodes with Italian acquiescence and the second was for Operation Accolade, an opposed invasion against German defenders. The priority of Sicily, however, meant that by late summer nothing had been done. John Kennedy wrote on August 13: “We shall have to shut down in the Aegean.” The War Office assumed that the invasion of Italy, together with the commitment to Overlord, rendered operations there implausible. Instead, however, impending Italian surrender imbued the prime minister’s Aegean ambitions with a new urgency. He remained convinced that an Allied coup there would precipitate Turkish belligerence. He ignored the irony that, because of the success of British deception plans designed to make Berlin suppose that the Allies might land in the Balkans, the Germans still deployed strong ground and air forces in the region.

The Americans were not interested in either the operation or the Turks as allies. They believed that British aspirations in the eastern Mediterranean were rooted in old-fashioned imperialism rather than contemporary strategy, and were resolutely opposed to any diversion of resources from Italy, never mind from Overlord. At the Quadrant conference in Quebec in August, they paid lip service to British enthusiasm for an Aegean initiative, but made it plain that whatever Churchill chose to do about Rhodes and the Dodecanese must be accomplished exclusively with the resources available to General Sir Henry “Jumbo” Maitland Wilson, now Middle East C-in-C in Cairo—“his jumbonic majesty,”776 as Macmillan referred to this large and unimaginative dignitary. In other words, the British were on their own. There would be no USAAF Lightning fighters and precious few landing craft. At a time when concentration of force upon the Allies’ central purposes seemed more important than ever before, U.S. leaders recoiled from an entirely