Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [69]
Again and again Churchill pressed Wavell, and indeed all his generals, to overcome their fears of the enemy, to display the fighting spirit which he prized above all things, and which alone, he believed, would enable Britain to survive. Even after the Libyan battlefield successes of recent months, the C-in-C in Cairo would have been less than human had he not been galled by Churchill’s goading. In 1939 Poland had been left to face defeat alone, for it lay beyond the reach of a British or French army. In 1940 many Frenchmen and Belgians believed themselves betrayed by their Anglo-Saxon ally. In 1941, Britain’s prime minister almost daily urged the peoples of the free world to join hands to contest mastery with the Nazis. Was a British army now to stand ingloriously idle, and watch Greece succumb?
At a War Cabinet meeting in London on March 7, attended by Australian prime minister Robert Menzies, Churchill’s enthusiasm for the Greek commitment caused him, as so often, to talk roughshod over inconvenient material realities. He asserted, for instance: “We should soon have strong air forces in Greece.” On the contrary, the RAF’s feeble contingent—barely a hundred aircraft strong—was drastically outnumbered by the 1,350 planes of the Axis. Tokenism dominated the subsequent campaign. The British bombed Sofia’s rail yards, in an attempt to hamper German supply movements to Yugoslavia. Yet this night attack was carried out by just six Wellingtons, a force insufficient to convincingly disrupt an exercise on the Aldershot ranges. The nine squadrons committed by the RAF chiefly comprised obsolete and discredited aircraft, Gladiator biplane fighters and Blenheim light bombers. After achieving some early successes against the Italians, faced with modern German fighters such types could contribute nothing. Their destruction also entailed the loss of precious pilots. From January onwards, as the Luftwaffe ranged increasingly assertively over the Mediterranean, the Royal Navy was obliged to operate almost without air cover—and paid the price. By April 14, the RAF in Greece had just forty-six serviceable planes.
There is no objective test by which the moral benefits of attempting to aid Greece can be measured against the cost of subjecting yet another British army to defeat. The official historians of wartime intelligence have highlighted one misjudgement in the spring of 1941: Churchill and his generals failed to perceive236, because Ultra signal intercepts did not tell them, that Hitler’s fundamental purpose in the Balkans was not offensive, but defensive. He sought to protect the Romanian oil fields and secure his southern flank before attacking Russia. It is unlikely, however, even had this been recognised in London, that it would have caused Churchill to opt for inaction. Throughout its history, Britain has repeatedly sought to ignore the importance of mass on the battlefield, dispatching inadequate forces to assert moral or strategic principles. This was the course which Churchill adopted in March 1941. It has been suggested that Wavell should have resigned, rather than send troops to Greece. But field commanders have no business to make such gestures. Wavell did his utmost to support his nation’s purposes, though he knew that, as commander-in-chief, he would bear responsibility for what must follow. On April 7, when he bade farewell to Dill as the CIGS left Cairo for London with