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By Root 746 0

was only one among many theatres from which bad tidings crowded in upon Britain’s prime minister. On April 30, Iraqi troops attacked the RAF’s Habbaniya air base, outside Baghdad, prompting Churchill and Eden to conclude that they must seize Iraq to preempt a German takeover. The Luftwaffe’s blitz on Britain continued relentlessly, and had by now killed more than thirty thousand civilians. On May 10, the demented deputy führer, Rudolf Hess, parachuted into Scotland on a personal peace mission, which perversely served Nazi propaganda interests better than British. Bewildered people, especially in Moscow and Washington, supposed that some parley between Britain and Germany must indeed be imminent. Fears persisted that Spain would join the Axis. Although foreign exchange was desperately short, the government somehow found the huge sum of $10 million to bribe Spanish generals to keep their country out of the war. The payments, arranged through Franco’s banker Juan March, were made into Swiss accounts. There is no evidence that this largesse influenced Spanish policy, but it represented an earnest of British anxiety about Franco’s neutrality.

On May 20, Germans began to appear in Vichy French Syria, causing Churchill to decree, once more against Wavell’s opposition: “We must go in.” British, Australian and Free French troops were soon fighting a bitter little campaign against the Vichyites, who resisted. Churchill observed crossly253 that it was a pity they had not displayed the same determination against the Germans in 1940. Pétain’s troops were finally overcome. Britain’s seizure of Iraq and Syria attracted little popular enthusiasm at the time, and has not attracted much interest or applause from historians since. Yet these two initiatives reflected Churchill’s boldness at its best. British action removed dangerous instability on Wavell’s eastern flank. The diversion of troops caused much hand-wringing in Cairo, but represented strategic wisdom. If the Germans had been successful in their tentative efforts to rouse the Arab world against Britain, its predicament in the Middle East would have worsened dramatically. The most authoritative modern German historians of the war, the authors of the monumental Potsdam Institute series, consider British successes in Syria, Iraq and Abyssinia more important to the 1941 strategic pattern than defeat on Crete. Churchill, they say, “was right when he asserted254 that on the whole, the situation in the Mediterranean and the Middle East was far more favourable to Britain than it had been a year earlier.” Yet it did not seem so at the time, to the sorely tried British people.

On May 23, a Friday, the battle cruiser Hood blew up during a brief engagement with the Bismarck west of Iceland. The days that followed, with the German battleship loose in the North Atlantic, were terrible ones for the prime minister. His despondency lifted only on the twenty-seventh, when, as he addressed the House of Commons, he received news that the Bismarck had been sunk. But convoy losses remained appalling. American assistance fell far short of British hopes, and Churchill not infrequently vented his bitterness at the ruthlessness of the financial terms extracted by Washington for supplies. “As far as I can make out,”255 he wrote to Chancellor Kingsley Wood, “we are not only to be skinned, but flayed to the bone.”

The Middle East remained Britain’s chief battleground. Despite success in securing the eastern flank in Syria and seizing control of Iraq, Churchill’s confidence in his C-in-C, never high, was ebbing fast. “He said some very harsh things about Wavell256, whose excessive caution and inclination to pessimism he finds very antipathetic.” For a few weeks, confidence flickered about a fresh offensive, Battleaxe. Admiral Cunningham was told that if this succeeded, and Wavell’s forces reached Tripoli, the next step would be a landing in Sicily. Such fantasies were swiftly crushed. On June 17, it was learned in London that Battleaxe had failed with the loss of a hundred priceless tanks. Churchill was exasperated