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’s watchword for the winter of 1940: “We will think of something better by the winter of 1941.” Then he adjourned to the smoking room, where he devoted himself to an intent study of the Evening News, “as if it were the only source of information222 available to him.” Forget for a moment the art of his performance in the chamber. What more brilliant stagecraft could the leader of a democracy display than to read a newspaper in the common room of MPs of all parties, in the midst of a war and a blitz? “‘How are you?’223 he calls gaily to the most obscure Member … His very presence gives us all gaiety and courage,” wrote an MP. “People gather round his table completely unawed.”

Despite Wavell’s protests, Churchill insisted upon sending a British force to replace Greek troops garrisoning the island of Crete, who could thus be freed to fight on the mainland. The first consignment of matériel dispatched to Greece consisted of 8 antitank guns, 12 Bofors antiaircraft guns, and 20,000 American rifles. To these were added, following renewed prime ministerial urgings, 24 field guns, 20 antitank rifles and 10 light tanks. This poor stuff reflected the desperate shortage of arms available for Britain’s soldiers, never mind those of other nations. Some Gladiator fighters, biplanes capable of fighting the Italian air force but emphatically not the Luftwaffe, were also committed. Churchill was enraged by a cable from Sir Miles Lampson, British ambassador in Egypt, dismissing aid to Greece as “completely crazy.” The prime minister told the Foreign Office: “I expect to be protected from this kind of insolence.” He dispatched a stinging rebuke to Lampson: “You should not telegraph at Government expense224 such an expression as ‘completely crazy’ when applied by you to grave decisions of policy taken by the Defence Committee and the War Cabinet after considering an altogether wider range of requirements and assets than you can possibly be aware of.”

On the evening of November 8, however, the prospect changed again. Eden returned from Cairo to confide to the prime minister first tidings of an offensive Wavell proposed to launch in the Western Desert the following month. This was news Churchill craved: “I purred like six cats.”225 Ismay found him “rapturously happy.” The prime minister exulted: “At long last we are going to throw off226 the intolerable shackles of the defensive. Wars are won by superior will-power. Now we will wrest the initiative from the enemy and impose our will on him.” Three days later, he cabled Wavell, “You may … be assured that you will have my full support at all times in any offensive action you may be able to take against the enemy.” That same night of November 11, twenty-one Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers, launched from the carrier Illustrious, delivered a brilliant attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto, and sank or crippled three battleships. Britain was striking out at the enemy.

Churchill accepted that the North African offensive must now assume priority over all else, that no troops could be spared for Greece. A victory in the desert might persuade Turkey to come into the war. His foremost concern was that Wavell, whose terse words and understated delivery failed to generate prime ministerial confidence, should go for broke. Dismayed to hear that Operation Compass was planned as a limited “raid,” Churchill wrote to Dill on December 7: “If, with the situation as it is227, General Wavell is only playing small, and is not hurling in his whole available forces with furious energy, he will have failed to rise to the height of circumstances … I never ‘worry’ about action, but only about inaction.”

On December 9, at last came the moment for the “Army of the Nile,” as Churchill had christened it, to launch its assault. Wavell’s 4th Indian and 7th Armoured divisions, led by Lt. Gen. Sir Richard O’Connor, attacked the Italians in the Western Desert. Operation Compass achieved brilliant success. Mussolini’s generals showed themselves epic bunglers. Some 38,000 prisoners were taken in the first three days, at a cost