Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [67]
In the autumn of 1940, Hitler had declared that “not one man and not one pfennig” would he expend in Africa. His strategic attention was focused upon the east. Mussolini, with his ambition to make the Mediterranean “an Italian lake,” was anyway eager to achieve his own conquests without German aid. But when the Italians suffered humiliation, Hitler was quite unwilling to see his ally defeated, and to risk losing Axis control of the Balkans. In April, he launched the Wehrmacht into Yugoslavia and Greece. An Afrika Korps of two divisions under Gen. Erwin Rommel was dispatched to Libya. A new chapter of British misfortunes opened.
Churchill’s decision to dispatch a British army to Greece in the spring of 1941 remains one of the most controversial of his wartime premiership. When the commitment was first mooted back in October, almost all the soldiers opposed it. On November 1, Eden, the secretary for war, cabled from Cairo: “We cannot, from Middle East resources231, send sufficient air or land reinforcements to have any decisive influence upon course of fighting … To send such forces there … would imperil our whole position in the Middle East and jeopardize plans for offensive operations.” These remarks prompted a tirade from the prime minister, and caused Eden to write in his diary two days later: “The weakness of our policy232 is that we never adhere to the plans we make.”
Passion and disdain: Winston Churchill walking in Whitehall with Lord Halifax in March 1938, when the lofty peer was already foreign secretary and his companion still in the wilderness.
Outside Downing Street in May 1940
Blitzkrieg: German columns advancing through France in May 1940
In Paris on May 31, 1940, with Dill, Attlee and Reynaud
Disaster and deliverance: Dunkirk
Invasion fever: Inspecting an unconvincing roadblock.
Invasion fever: the Mid-Devon Hunt combine business with pleasure by patrolling Dartmoor.
French warships blaze at Mers-el-Kebir under British bombardment, July 3, 1940.
The Battle of Britain: Hurricane pilots scramble.
The cockpit of war in 1940: The filter room at RAF Fighter Command, Bentley Priory
A classic image, sometimes branded as faked for the benefit of German propaganda, but nonetheless symbolic: A Luftwaffe Heinkel over the London docks in September 1940
The blitz: A street scene repeated a thousand times across the cities of Britain
A study in defiance: Churchill portrayed by Cecil Beaton in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street on November 20, 1940
It seemed extraordinarily unlikely that a mere four divisions—all that could be spared from Wavell’s resources—would make the difference between Greek victory and defeat. Aircraft especially were lacking. With German intervention looming in North Africa, such a diversion of forces threatened Britain’s desert campaign. Kennedy told Dill on January 26 that he would have liked to see the Chiefs of Staff adopt much firmer resistance to the Greek proposal—“We were near the edge of the precipice233 … CIGS said to me that he did not dissent, and considered the limitation placed upon the first reinforcements to be offered to the Greeks to be a sufficient safeguard. This seemed to me to be frightfully dangerous … If the Germans come down to Salonika the whole thing is bound to collapse, and nothing short of 20 divisions and a big air force, maintained by shipping we cannot afford, would be of any use … What we should do is keep the water in front of us. Anything we send to Greece will be lost if the Germans come down.” As so often with the counsels of Churchill’s generals, this view represented prudence. Yet what would the