Although Colville did not understand the reason at the time, Churchill’s belief that the Bear was soon to be baited was why the Old Man had given “a short lecture on the various invaders of Russia, especially Charles XII.” Charles XII, king of Sweden, had in 1700 crushed the Russian army in a battle on the banks of the Narva River. Rather than press his advantage against Czar Peter’s beaten army, Charles turned toward Poland, a strategic blunder that devoured four years and much of his army, and allowed Peter to reform his incompetent and corrupt military and regroup his forces. When, late in the decade, Charles again tried his hand in Russia, Peter was ready, and in 1709, earned his moniker “The Great” by smashing Charles’s army. Colville leaves unrecorded whether in telling the story Churchill meant to compare the unprepared Stalin, his army purged of its best officers, to the unprepared early Peter, or the later Charles, impetuous and overconfident, to Hitler.188
As horrific had been the fighting on the Western Front in May and June 1940, a clash between Germany and Russia would result in a titanic struggle unlike any the world had ever known. On April 3, Churchill took a calculated risk and sent a personal message to Stalin (as he had the previous summer), through the British ambassador to the Soviets, Sir Stafford Cripps. Churchill made no reference to his highly secret source, but with his usual aversion to obliquity, made his point with clarity and honesty:
I have sure information from a trusted agent that when the Germans thought they had got Yugoslavia in the net, that is to say, after March 20, they began to move three out of the five Panzer Divisions from Romania to Southern Poland. The moment they heard of the Serbian revolution this movement was countermanded. Your Excellency will readily appreciate the significance of these facts.189
Cripps duly received the message. And did nothing with it. Cripps was a devout socialist, and may have been more concerned about Stalin’s reaction to the message than the import of the message itself. In an address to Londoners before the war, Churchill had said of Cripps, “Then there is Sir Stafford Cripps, who is in a class by himself. He wishes the British people to be conquered by the Nazis in order to urge them into becoming Bolsheviks. It seems a long way round. And not much enlightenment when they get to the end of their journey.” Churchill had sent the socialist Cripps to Moscow as a signal to Stalin that Churchill was willing to let bygones be bygones. The signal was either not received or ignored.190
Presuming his first message had been delivered or, given the usual time lost by encoding and decoding, was soon to be delivered, Churchill cabled Cripps again the next day. He advised Cripps on how to develop the argument in person and instructed him to stress to the Soviets that the German move back toward the Balkans could buy time for the Russians to “strengthen their own position.” Again Cripps did nothing. He then made one of the most inexplicable and stupid decisions made by any diplomat during the war: he sat on the message for almost two weeks. When Churchill learned of Cripps’s lapse, he made plain to Eden his incredulity: “I set special importance on the delivery of this message from me to Stalin. I cannot understand why it should be resisted. The Ambassador is not alive to the military significance of the facts. Pray oblige me.” Admonished by Eden, Cripps, the recalcitrant obligee, again failed to deliver the message. In coming weeks, Eden warned the Soviet ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Ivan Maisky, of the probable German attack. Despite Cripps’s behavior, Stalin was warned by Maisky. By then Churchill’s attention had turned back to the Balkans.191
When Churchill first tried to warn Stalin, the impending battle in Greece, not the possible turn of events in Russia, was the most immediate question at hand. Had the Yugoslavs not revolted, Churchill’s 60,000 troops in northern Greece might have faced a far smaller German force. Then again, absent the Yugoslav coup, large German troop movement through a compliant Yugoslavia would likely have flanked the British in any event. A plethora of Ultra decrypts pointed to only one certainty during the first days of April—that British and Anzac troops arriving in Greece would soon face attack by an overwhelmingly superior force.192
There, Jumbo Wilson’s eastern flank, the Aliakmo Line, was anchored near Salonika, on the Aegean, and stretched for almost fifty miles northwest toward Monastir. Northeast of the British line, six Greek divisions of the Greek Second Army formed the Metaxas Line, which also ran west from the Aegean, and faced north toward Bulgaria’s Struma Valley, the ancient invasion route into Thrace. To the west, the Greek First Army faced the Italians on the Albanian front. The entire front snaked for more than six hundred miles from the Aegean Sea to the Ionian Sea, through high mountain passes and difficult, trackless countryside. It was the exact sort of front Frederick the Great had in mind when he pronounced, “To defend everything is to defend nothing.” Worse, the British lines were not entirely dressed; British battalions still drifted into position. Eden captured the problem in an early March cable to the War Cabinet: “Militarily problem is one of time and space.” By early April the troops needed more time to make ready their defense.193
They would not get it.
As London and the world waited for news of a German thrust into Greece, Yugoslavia, or even Turkey, Rommel’s diminutive forces—short on food, gasoline, and bullets—rolled eastward against Wavell in Cyrenaica. The leagues of Libyan desert so gloriously snatched from Mussolini by O’Connor were again a battleground. But this time the Germans had taken the field. “It seems most desirable,” Churchill telegraphed to Wavell on April 2, “to stop the German advance against Cyrenaica.” Any “rebuff” to the Germans, he added, would have “far-reaching prestige effects.” A rebuff was not a victory, but after Norway and Dunkirk, “rebuff” had about it a certain ring. Ground could be given up for the purposes of “tactical manoeuvre,” Churchill instructed Wavell, “but any serious withdrawal from Benghazi would appear most melancholy.”194
On April 2, the day that Churchill sent his telegram, Rommel’s tanks overran and busted up Neame’s front line. Wavell ordered a brigade from the 7th Australian Division to deploy from Cairo to Libya in order to stanch the bleeding. It would have made no difference whether the outgunned Tommies and Aussies faced the Germans in Greece or in Libya; they would have fared the same in either theater. Churchill had forced Wavell to block two invasion forces, one intent on barging into Egypt, the other into Greece. With his armies intact and arrayed against one or the other of the German forces, Wavell might have stood a chance. But with his armies divided, Wavell stood little chance against either.
Even before he learned of the Australians’ redeployment, Churchill saw the implications, military as well as political, of Rommel’s advance. He cabled Eden, in Athens: “Far more important than the loss of ground [in North Africa] is the idea that we cannot face the Germans and that their appearance is enough to drive us back many scores of miles. This may react most evilly throughout Balkans…. Sooner or later we shall have to fight the Huns.”195
They were fighting the Huns, in the Libyan desert, and not faring well. Churchill, having correctly guessed that Rommel had overextended himself, tried to encourage Wavell: “I cannot feel that there is at this moment a persistent weight behind the German attack…. If this blob, which has come forward against you, could be cut off you might have a prolonged easement.” Of course, were Rommel’s forces to “succeed in wandering onwards they will gradually destroy the effects of your victories.”196
Rommel wandered powerfully onward. The seasoned Australian 6th Division had been recalled to Cairo to prepare for deployment to Greece. Its replacement in the desert—the Australian 9th Division—lacked the experience to stop Rommel. On April 3 news reached official London that Wavell had ordered Benghazi evacuated. It was as if a diabolical projectionist were running backward the reel of O’Connor’s victories: Mersa Brega, Beda Fomm, now Benghazi, all taken by the British early in the year, all now lost to Rommel in just days. Wavell told Churchill that in view of the situation, withdrawal toward Derna would be necessary.
The withdrawa
l turned into a rout.
Short on tanks and gasoline, Rommel commanded his supply trucks to stay close behind the few remaining panzers and to raise as much dust as possible, to simulate a much larger force. The trick worked. Tommies and the newly arrived Aussies of the 9th Division, thinking at least two divisions of German and Italian tanks—six hundred in all—were heading their way, fled eastward, pell-mell toward Derna, 150 miles up the coast. The Australians, never at a loss for gallows humor, dubbed the race to safety the “Benghazi Handicap.” To his wife Rommel wrote that “the British are falling over themselves to get away.”197
British command had broken down; troops lacked orders, whether to stand and fight or retreat. They ran, covered in yellow dust, their shirts soaked with sweat and stiff as sandpaper. Their faces took on a sickly yellow cast. By the platoon, by the battalion, by the regiment, they fled. Neame tried to restore order. He could not. Wavell flew out from Cairo and saw that Neame had lost control. O’Connor was summoned, too late to turn things around. Derna fell on the night of the sixth. The main British units beat such a hasty exit from the city that the Northumberland Fusiliers realized what was happening only when they saw the 9th Australian division roaring past them out of town. O’Connor and Neame were among the last to flee, in darkness, by car to Timimi, about one hundred miles to the east. Alas, the hero of Operation Compass got turned around somewhere in the desert and ended up rambling down a lost highway, directly toward Derna and the Germans. Within a few minutes, O’Connor and Neame found their car surrounded by men shouting in a foreign tongue. Their driver presumed it was Cypriot, for many of the British truck drivers were Cypriot. When German machine pistols were thrust into his face, O’Connor understood that the Cypriot thesis was terribly wrong. He and Neame spent the next three years as prisoners of war in Italy.198
London’s citizens were not privy to the debacle in the desert. Nor did they know of the troop buildup in Greece. Of Wavell’s prospects, Colville wrote on April 3: “The PM is greatly worried.” Churchill’s worry stemmed not only from Wavell’s ongoing struggle against Rommel in Africa, but because he knew that the British people had been fed only rumors about the Greek deployment. “I must return to the need of telling public,” Churchill cabled to Wavell, “that we have sent strong forces to Greece.” The American press was running with the story, he explained, while the British press had so far honored HMG’s plea for restraint. Even Colonel Donovan had spilled the beans, praising the valor of Britain for sending troops from Egypt to Greece. Such sentiments could only cause Britons to ask, What troops have been sent from where, and to where? It was time for Churchill to come clean with his yeomanry.199
He had given to Wavell, then taken, and now would give again. On April 4, Churchill cabled Wavell: “I warned the country a week ago that they must not expect continuance of unbroken successes and take the rough with the smooth.” Therefore, he added, “be quite sure that we shall back you up in adversity even better than in good fortune.” He was true to his word, taking the great risk of running a convoy (code-named Tiger by Churchill) of six ships carrying almost three hundred new tanks straight through the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Alexandria, under the guns of the Luftwaffe. He called them his “tigercubs.” When one of the ships, approaching Malta, hit a mine and went down, Churchill lamented to Colville, “My tiger has lost a claw.” Though he harbored great hopes for his remaining cubs, they would not arrive in Alexandria until early May, at which time it was learned that because their gearboxes tended to jam and they lacked the proper filters to keep the desert sand from mucking up the works, the tanks could not be readied for action until late May at the earliest. Until then, Wavell would have to make do with what he had, which, with Rommel stripping away more each hour, was not enough.200
With Derna lost, Churchill concluded that Tobruk, one hundred miles to the east, held the key. From that city the British could swing out to meet Rommel’s advanced guard and then swing back north and west to pin the overextended Germans between the escarpment and the sea. “Bravo Tobruk!” Churchill cabled Wavell. “We feel it vital that Tobruk be regarded as sally-port, and not, please, as an ‘excrescence.’ ” The plan looked good on paper. Churchill encouraged Wavell: “Tobruk is your best offensive hook…. All our best information shows they are frightfully short of everything. It would be a fine thing to cop the lot.”201
Rommel, intending to cop Tobruk at his leisure, drove right past the city. By April 10, he had rolled up almost three hundred miles of British turf as if it were a throw rug.
Ten days earlier, on March 31, Churchill had told Colville that he was quite sure Germany would attack Yugoslavia before either Greece or Turkey. He was partially correct. On April 6 Hitler attacked both Yugoslavia and Greece.202
Belgrade was hit first, as punishment for its insolence. German bombers flying in relays from Romanian airfields cruised overhead all day on the sixth, unopposed but for ineffectual AA. They came on for the next two days, hundreds of bombers unleashing thousands of pounds of bombs, enough to bury more than 17,000 of the city’s residents under the rubble. CBS newsman Cecil Brown reported from the scene: “Belgrade one-quarter destroyed and thousands dead in a few hours… refugees streaming from Belgrade far across the fields for as far as the eye can see.” The terrorized animals at the Belgrade zoo escaped. A great bear, dazed and uncomprehending, shuffled past burning buildings, through the smoke, and down to the banks of the Danube. With Stalin in mind, Churchill later wrote, “The bear… was not the only bear who did not understand.”203
On its march from the Hungarian border to Belgrade, the Wehrmacht lost just 151 men killed to the Yugoslav’s untold thousands killed, wounded, missing, or captured. CBS’s Brown, arrested briefly by the Germans as a spy, saw firsthand “young murderers bent on wiping out the Serbian people.” The Nazis shot down Serbs “the way you would not shoot a dog, not even a mad dog.” The Yugoslavs fought on; they sent ammunition to the front on carts drawn by steers “moving at four miles an hour against twenty-two-ton Nazi tanks speeding into battle at forty miles an hour.” Brown watched in horror and in awe as the Serbians committed national “suicide by defying Hitler and the New Order.” It was not a battle, but a massacre.204
Once the Germans crushed Yugoslavia and poured through the Vardar Valley, the British, Anzac, and Greek forces arrayed to the south were doomed. Had the Germans attacked only by way of Bulgaria, the Greek and British lines would have been perfectly arrayed. But as the German attack came from both Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, the Allies found themselves cut off, east from west. For eighteen days, outflanked and outnumbered by more than four to one, the British fought a valiant and well-executed rearguard action, covering almost 250 miles from Salonika to Olympus, then to Larissa, to Thermopylae, and on to Thebes and Athens. All the while, German infantry, German tanks, and German planes ripped at their flanks.205
The rearguard action at Thermopylae, fought mostly by the Anzacs, was as heroic and futile a feat as the battle fought there in 480 BCE, when King Leonidas and his bodyguard of three hundred Spartans checked ten thousand Persians. The terrain had changed over the centuries, to the detriment of the British defenders. The pass in ancient times was only about a dozen yards wide, a strip of high ground between the mountains and the sea. The Spercheios River delta had since widened the pass by more than a mile in places. The Germans, as had the Persians, approached from the north. The British and Anzacs, as had the Spartans, dug in at the pass and on the slope of the hillside, which by virtue of its soil content and the oblique angle of the sun’s first light, glows bloodred at sunrise. The modern coast road to Athens approaches the pass but turns inland and cuts through a small valley before climbing above and skirting the ancient pass. The Germans came on, the rumble of the three armored divisions audible for miles, the seismic pounding of their approach enough to disturb the water in a canteen, or a man’s guts. To bring fire down on the modern road necessitated placing artillery and machine guns all the way up the slope
above the ancient pass. This the Anzacs did and, once dug in, for a short while checked the Germans. But the British left flank hung in the air. Wavell asked the Greeks if they could cover the naked flank.206
They could not. So rapid was the German advance that by the time Churchill fumed to Wavell that Jumbo Wilson was tardy in getting news out of Greece, the battle was over. On April 20, Churchill cabled Eden in Cairo to ask if Thermopylae might be held for three weeks in order to delay the Germans and allow the “Libyan situation to be stabilized.” Such a delay, Churchill wrote, would allow reinforcements to be sent from Egypt to Greece. He asked Ismay for a map of the Thermopylae Line.207