Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [87]
The absence of Western aid made it all the more urgent that Britain should be seen to fight in the west, that the desert army should once more take the offensive. Auchinleck, “an obstinate, high-minded man”300 as Churchill described him in an unpublished draft of his war memoirs, insisted that he could not attack before autumn. Operation Crusader, as the new desert push was code-named, was repeatedly postponed. Churchill chafed and fulminated, even muttering implausibly about replacing Auchinleck with Lord Gort. But he continued to receive the same message from Cairo. The only bright spot in North Africa was the continuing defence of Tobruk by the 7th Australian Division. Churchill was exasperated beyond measure later in the year when the Australian government, in Canberra, by then led by Labor’s John Curtin after Robert Menzies’s eviction from power, insisted that this formation should be evacuated from the beleaguered port and replaced by British troops. On August 25, British forces entered Persia after the pro-Nazi shah’s rejection of an ultimatum from London, demanding the expulsion of several hundred Germans from the country. Churchill and Eden shared an embarrassment about the Persian incursion, intensified when Russian forces moved into the north of the country. Persia became an important supply route for aid to Stalin, but the British were conscious that their seizure of power there echoed Hitler’s method of doing business.
At home, Churchill urged the RAF’s Bomber Command to intensify its night attacks on German industry. Yet these were not merely ineffectual, they were also shockingly costly. Between August 1 and 18 alone, 107 British bombers were lost over Germany and France. The night blitz on Britain incurred Luftwaffe losses of less than 1 percent for each raid, a substantial proportion of these to accidents. Yet the RAF’s wartime bomber losses averaged 4 percent. This was a sobering statistic for young aircrew obliged to carry out thirty sorties to complete a tour of operations. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy’s heroic and bloody Mediterranean convoy battles to sustain the defence of Malta commanded much media attention, but did nothing to divert German attention from the east.
As the Russians fell back, whole armies disintegrating before the Nazi juggernaut, Stalin was infuriated when Eden and Lord Moyne, government leader in the House of Lords, made speeches ruling out any prospect of an early Second Front. The ministers’ intention was, of course, to quash speculation at home. But in Moscow, their remarks were perceived as crass. They obliged Hitler, by explicitly forswearing any threat to his rear. Stalin cabled Maisky at the end of August: “The British government, by its passive301, waiting policy, is helping the Nazis. The Nazis want to knock off their enemies one at a time—today the Russians, tomorrow the British … Do the British understand this? I think they do. What do they want out of this? They want us to be weakened. If this suspicion is correct, we must be very severe in our dealings with the British.”
British efforts to guard secrets from their new cobelligerent were fatally compromised by the plethora of Communist sympathisers, headed by Donald Maclean and John Cairncross, who had access to privileged information. More British documents, cables, committee minutes and Ultra intercepts were passed to the Soviet Union than Russia’s intelligence service had resources to translate. For instance Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s intelligence chief, reported to his leader on August 28, 1941:
We would like to inform you on