Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [70]
The outcome was as swift as it was inevitable. The Germans crushed Yugoslav resistance during two days’ fighting in Macedonia on April 6–7, then embarked upon a series of dramatic outflanking operations against the Greeks. The Greek army was exhausted and demoralised, following its winter campaign against the Italians. Its initial achievement in pushing forward into Albania, which had so impressed the British, represented the only effort of which it was capable. Within days, sixty-two thousand British, Australian and New Zealand troops in Greece found themselves retreating southwards in disarray, harried at every turn by the Luftwaffe. An April 6 air raid on Piraeus blew up a British ammunition ship, wrecking the port. The RAF’s little fighter force was ruthlessly destroyed.
Worse, even before the Germans occupied Greece, the Afrika Korps attacked in Libya. On April 3, the British evacuated Benghazi, then found themselves retreating eastwards pell-mell back down the coast road, along which they had advanced in triumph two months earlier. By April 11, when Rommel reached the limit of his supply chain, he had driven the British back almost to the start line of their Compass offensive. It was fortunate that Hitler had dispatched to Libya too small a force and inadequate logistical support to convert British withdrawal into outright disaster. So much was wrong with the leadership, training, weapons and tactics of Wavell’s desert army that it is questionable whether it could have repulsed the Afrika Korps even in the absence of the Greek diversion. Inevitably, however, Greece was deemed responsible for defeat in Libya.
The desert fiasco brought out both the worst and best in Churchill. He offered absurd tactical suggestions. He chafed at the navy’s failure to bombard Tripoli, Rommel’s supply base—an intolerable risk beneath the German air threat. On land, he urged foolishly: “General Wavell should regain unit ascendancy238 over the enemy and destroy his small raiding parties, instead of our own being harassed and hunted by them. Enemy patrols must be attacked on every occasion, and our own patrols should be used with audacity. Small British parties in armoured cars, or mounted on motor-cycles, or, if occasion offers, infantry, should not hesitate to attack individual tanks with bombs and bombards, as is planned for the defence of Britain.” By contrast, the prime minister was at his best in overruling objections from the Chiefs of Staff, and accepting the huge risk of dispatching a convoy, code-named Operation Tiger, direct through the Mediterranean to Egypt, instead of by the much safer but longer Cape route, with reinforcements of tanks.
Dill returned from Cairo steeped in gloom. John Kennedy, the director of military operations (DMO), sought to revive his spirits, but the CIGS dismissed reassuring words about the outlook. “I think it is desperate239. I am terribly tired.” The next day Kennedy noted, “CIGS is miserable240 & feels he has wrecked the Empire.” That evening, Kennedy, at dinner with a friend, discussed possible evacuation of the entire Middle East. “On balance it was doubtful if we gained more than we lost by staying there. Prestige and effect on Americans perhaps the biggest arguments for staying.” Like most senior soldiers, Kennedy was appalled by events in Greece, and by Britain’s role in the debacle: “Chiefs of staff overawed & influenced241 enormously by Winston’s overpowering personality … I hate my title now, for I suppose outsiders think I really ‘direct’ oper[atio]ns & am partly responsible for the foolish & disastrous strategy which our armies are following.” The self-confidence of Britain’s senior soldiers was drained by successive battlefield defeats. They felt themselves incapable of opposing Churchill, but likewise unable to support many of his decisions with conviction. They saw themselves bearing responsibility for losing the war, while offering no alternative proposals for winning it. Left to their own devices, the generals