• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 765 0

substantial measure, until 1944. Pantelleria, the tiny Italian island between Tunisia and Sicily, exercised a baleful fascination upon the War Cabinet. After a dinner at Chequers in November 1940, Churchill fantasised about an assault “by 300 determined men220, with blackened faces, knives between their teeth and revolvers under their tails.” Eden in 1940–41 cherished absurd notions of seizing Sicily: “The Sicilians have always been anti-fascist,” he enthused. A War Office plan dated December 28 called for a descent on the island by two infantry brigades. There was talk of Sardinia, and of the Italian-held Dodecanese Islands. The Chiefs of Staff learned to dread mention of northern Norway in the prime minister’s flights of fancy.

None of these schemes was executed, save a brief and embarrassingly unsuccessful foray into the Dodecanese, because the practical objections were overwhelming. Even the most modest raid required scarce shipping, which could not sensibly be hazarded within range of the Luftwaffe unless air cover was available, as it usually was not. It was hard to identify credible objectives for “butcher and bolt” strikes, and to gather sufficient intelligence to give them a reasonable chance of success. However strongly the prime minister pressed for British forces to display initiative and aggression, the Chiefs of Staff resolutely opposed operations which risked substantial losses in exchange for mere passing propaganda headlines.

… In the autumn of 1940, Africa offered the only realistic opportunities for British land engagement. Libya had been an Italian colony since 1911, Abyssinia since 1936. Churchill owed a perverse debt of gratitude to Mussolini. If Italy had remained neutral, if her dictator had not chosen to seek battle, how else might the British Army have occupied itself after its expulsion from France? As it was, Britain was able to launch spectacular African campaigns against one of the few major armies in the world which it was capable of defeating. Not all Italian generals were incompetents, not all Italian formations fought feebly. But never for a moment were Mussolini’s warriors in the same class as those of Hitler. North Africa, and the Duce’s pigeon-chested posturing as an Axis warlord, offered Britain’s soldiers an opportunity to show their mettle. If the British Army was incapable of playing in a great stadium against top-class opposition, it could nonetheless hearten the nation and impress the world by a demonstration in a lesser league.

Britain’s Chiefs of Staff, however, remained sceptical about the strategic value of any big commitment in the Middle East, win or lose. The Suez Canal route to the east was anyway unusable, because the Mediterranean was too perilous for merchant shipping, and remained so until 1943. The Persian oil fields fuelled British military operations in the theatre of Middle East C-in-C Sir Archibald Wavell, but lay too far from home by the Cape route to provide petrol for Britain, which instead relied upon American supplies. It is often forgotten that, in those days, the United States was overwhelmingly the greatest oil producer in the world. Dill advocated reinforcing the Far East against likely Japanese aggression, and remained in his heart an opponent of the Middle East commitment throughout his tenure as head of the army. The CIGS understood the political imperatives facing Churchill, but foremost in his mind was a fear that acceptance of unnecessary new risk might precipitate further gratuitous disaster. The prime minister overruled him. He believed that the embarrassment of inertia in the Middle East much outweighed the perils of seizing the initiative. In the midst of a war, what would the world say about a nation that dispatched large forces to garrison its possessions on the far side of the world against a possible future enemy, rather than engage an actual one much nearer to hand?

In September 1940, an Italian army led by Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, 200,000 strong and thus outnumbering local British forces by four to one, crossed the eastern Libyan frontier