Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [66]
At 6:45, British tanks lumbered forward. The Italians resisted fiercely, but by dawn the next day the sky was lit by the flames of their blazing supply dumps, prisoners in the thousands were streaming into British cages, and the defenders were ready to surrender. O’Connor dispatched his tanks on a dash across the desert to cut off the retreating Italians. The desert army was in a mood of wild excitement. “Off we went across the unknown country228 in full cry,” wrote Michael Creagh, one of O’Connor’s division commanders. In a rare exhibition of emotion, O’Connor asked his chief of staff: “My God, do you think it’s going to be all right?” It was indeed “all right.” The British reached Beda Fomm ahead of the Italians, who surrendered. In two months, the desert army had advanced four hundred miles and taken 130,000 prisoners. On February 11, another of Wavell’s contingents advanced from Kenya into Abyssinia and Somaliland. After hard fighting—much tougher than in Libya—here, too, the Italians were driven inexorably towards eventual surrender.
For a brief season, Wavell became a national hero. For the British people in the late winter and early spring of 1940–41, battered nightly by the Luftwaffe’s bombardment, still fearful of invasion, conscious of the frailty of the Atlantic lifeline, success in Africa was precious. It was Churchill’s delicate task to balance exultation about a victory with caution about future prospects. Again and again, in his broadcasts and speeches, he emphasised the long duration of the ordeal that must lie ahead, the need for unremitting exertion. To this purpose he continued to stress the danger of a German landing in Britain: in February 1941, he demanded a new evacuation of civilian residents from coastal areas in the danger zone.
Churchill knew how readily the nation could lapse into inertia. The army’s Home Forces devoted much energy to anti-invasion exercises, such as Operation Victor in March 1941. Victor assumed that five German divisions, including two armoured and one motorised, had landed on the coast of East Anglia. On March 30, presented with a report on the exercise, Churchill minuted mischievously, but with serious intent: “All this data would be most valuable for our future offensive operations. I should be very glad if the same officers would work out a scheme for our landing an exactly similar force on the French coast.” Even if no descent on France was remotely practicable, Churchill was at his best in pressing Britain’s generals to forswear a fortress mentality.
But public fear and impatience remained constants. “For the first time the possibility229 that we may be defeated has come to many people—me among them,” wrote Oliver Harvey, Eden’s private secretary, on February 22, 1941. “Mr. Churchill’s speech has rather sobered me,”230 wrote London charity worker Vere Hodgson after a prime ministerial broadcast that month. “I was beginning to be a little optimistic. I even began to think there might be no Invasion … but he thinks there will, it seems. Also I had a feeling the end might soon be in sight; he seems to be looking a few years ahead! So I don’t know what is going to happen to us. We seem to be waiting—waiting, for we know not what.”
Churchill had answers to Miss Hodgson’s question. “Here is the hand that is going to win the war,” he told guests at Chequers, who included Duff Cooper and General Wladyslaw Sikorski, one evening in February. He extended his fingers as if displaying a poker hand: “a Royal Flush—Great Britain, the Sea,