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officers and men alike about the importance of saluting him. In his weeks on Leros, he made himself loathed by his troops, and made few effective preparations to meet a German landing. When the Luftwaffe started bombing in earnest, he retired to his tunnel headquarters, and stayed there until relieved of his command a week before the German descent, to be replaced by a gunner officer, Brig. Robert Tilney. Tilney, newly promoted to lead in battle men whom he knew only slightly, was less disliked than Brittorous, but also seemed to lack conviction. He immediately redeployed his three infantry battalions around the island, with the intention of repelling a German landing on the beaches. Not only did this plan spread the defenders thin, but the brigade was very short of radios and telephones, so communication between Tilney and his units was tenuous, even before the Germans intervened.

On November 11, Ultra informed the British that a landing on Leros, Operation Typhoon, would be launched on the following day. Some 2,730 German troops were committed, a force inferior in size to that of the defenders. Yet the RAF and Royal Navy found themselves unable to do anything effective to interfere with enemy arrangements. Bad weather frustrated planned British bombing attacks on the Luftwaffe’s Greek airfields. The commander of a Royal Navy destroyer flotilla in the area declined to brave a suspected minefield to attack the invasion convoy. The British official historian, Capt. Stephen Roskill, wrote later: “The enemy had boldly discounted790 any effective threat to the convoy by day, and by night he had concealed his vessels very skilfully; yet it seems undeniable that it should not have reached its destination virtually unscathed.”

Cairo, August 1942. Front row, left to right: Smuts, WSC, Auchinleck, Wavell; (back row, left to right) Tedder, Brooke, Harwood, Richard Casey

Arrival in Moscow: The bespectacled Molotov stands beside Harriman and Churchill in front of their Liberator.

A British fiasco is matched by a Soviet triumph. A scene on the beach at Dieppe after the disastrous August 1942 raid.

A British fiasco is matched by a Soviet triumph. Soviet troops advance towards their great victory at Stalingrad at the turn of the year.

Out of the desert at last. The British advance at El Alamein in November 1942.

Out of the desert at last. American war leaders at Casablanca in January 1943: Marshall and King sit on either side of Roosevelt, while behind them stand (left to right) Hopkins, Arnold, Somervell and Harriman.

Clockwise from top left: Politicians, admirable and otherwise: Bevan, Cripps, Attlee, Bevin and Beaverbrook

Churchill with General Anderson at the Roman amphitheatre at Carthage, where he addressed men of Britain’s desert army in May 1943

The agony of Italy: U.S. troops advance through characteristically intractable terrain.

Churchill’s folly in the Dodecanese. Beaufighters attack German shipping off Kos on October 3, 1943.

Churchill’s folly in the Dodecanese. German troops land on the island, to achieve one of their last gratuitous military successes of the war.

At Algiers in June 1943 with (left to right) Eden, Brooke, Tedder, Cunningham, Alexander, Marshall, Eisenhower and Montgomery

With Clementine in the saloon of his special train in Canada in August 1943

The “Big Three” at Tehran on November 30, 1943, Churchill’s sixty-ninth birthday, with the U.S. president visibly ailing

Churchill’s last major personal strategic initiative of the war, the Anzio landing of January 1944

While the German main body landed from the sea, Fallschirmjäger staged another superbly brave and determined air assault. RAF strikes against the landing ships were notably less effective than the Luftwaffe’s close support of the invaders. A fourth British battalion, landed to reinforce the 234th Brigade during the battle, failed to affect its outcome. Some of the island’s defenders fought well, but others did not. The limited scale of British casualties indicates that this was no sacrificial