In January 1942, Keith Park was pulled out of Flying Training Command and sent to Egypt at a time of acute crisis for the British Empire, the Soviet Union and the United States. He was to be Air Defence Commander of the Delta Area, a position similar to that he had held at 11 Group: handling fighters (in darkness as well as daylight), anti-aircraft guns and searchlights, supported by a radar chain and ground observers. After six months there he was sent to Malta. Between Gibraltar and the incomplete defences at El Alamein – a distance of over 2,000 miles – Malta was the sole British base. This ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’, anchored a mere sixty miles south of Axis aerodromes in Sicily, had already suffered heavy air attack. On 2 July, the eve of Park’s transfer there, Churchill told Parliament that there was, at that moment, ‘a recession of our hopes and prospects in the Middle East and in the Mediterranean unequalled since the fall of France’.
Yet the very success of Rommel’s offensive averted Operation Hercules, a planned invasion of Malta. At Rommel’s request, it was postponed on 23 June and during the next few days he reached out for what seemed the available prizes of the Nile Delta and the Suez Canal. Had they fallen, the surrender of Malta would have followed without the need for a costly invasion. Hitler’s agreement to Rommel’s request proved to be one of the war’s most fateful decisions because Rommel was still outflanked along his lines of communication by naval and air power based on Malta. The failure to conquer that island led directly to Rommel’s defeat because half his supplies were destroyed by attacks launched from Malta.
Park’s conduct of offensive operations during the rest of 1942 earned him high praise from Portal who told him in November that he was to be knighted (KBE, personally invested by King George in June 1943). Soldiers also praised him. Archibald Nye (second in command of the British Army) wrote to Ronald Scobie (commanding Malta’s soldiers) in December: ‘If you read the English newspapers, you rather get the impression that Rommel was beaten solely by the brilliance of our generals. That, of course, is very good publicity, but it is very bad history!’
An American general, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was equally impressed by the efforts of Park and his men. In a telegram to Churchill on 5 December he wrote: ‘Daily reports show that Malta is straining every nerve to help us, and I have nothing but praise for the work Park has done.’
Middle East Air Command was a vast, almost square territory: from Gibraltar south to Takoradi on the coast of Ghana is nearly 2,000 miles, from Takoradi east to Aden in Yemen about 3,000, from Aden north to Habbaniya in Iraq 1,400 miles and from Habbaniya west to Gibraltar twice that distance.
Churchill had rejected Portal’s initial recommendation that Tedder be sent there as Longmore’s deputy, believing him to be a mere technician, ‘a man of nuts and bolts’; useful, but not for operational command, and unlikely to provide inspirational leadership in a war currently being lost. ‘It was not true,’ Churchill told Tedder in August 1942, making one of his rare apologies, ‘and I was not told the truth. I am sorry.’
Yet Tedder’s record up to December 1940 suggests that he was a man of pen and ink, if not of nuts and bolts, and Churchill therefore had good reason for rejecting him as a commander of fighting men. Opportunity, however, is the mother of greatness and 26 November 1940 (the day on which Tedder was appointed) marks the moment when an exceptional national and allied commander began to emerge. In Terraine’s opinion, he was ‘the outstanding airman of the war, with the largest view of its conduct’.
The war in the Mediterranean deeply concerned Churchill. It mattered a great deal to the men and women who served and suffered there under British command. Their defeats and victories have been the focus of intense attention by many postwar writers, especially in Britain, and yet they were sideshows in this most terrible of wars. Until 1942, only four British divisions – amply provided with American tanks and aircraft – fought against four of Germany’s 170 divisions. As for Italy, Mussolini believed, wrote Denis Mack Smith: ‘that British troops would be unable to fight in the heat of North Africa and hence there would be no difficulty about his conquest of Egypt. Tunisia would be another easy victim.’
He was mistaken. If Italy had remained neutral, the British would have had no opportunity to fight against a beatable enemy and like Franco and Salazar, Mussolini would probably have lived out his days in comfort and died in his bed. For Americans, despite the huge resources of men and material they eventually poured into the Mediterranean campaign, it was always an exasperating prelude to a direct assault on occupied Europe, one that mattered less to most of them than the war against Japan. As for Stalin, the Mediterranean campaigns were a distraction from the real war on the Eastern Front.
Although Allied efforts in the Mediterranean never came close to winning the war, Britons were elated in November 1940, at the height of the Blitz, to learn that torpedo bombers had sunk three of Italy’s six battleships. They had been anchored in Taranto, a major port in the Heel: safe, the Italians believed, from attack by sea or air. It was Britain’s first naval/air victory of the war and greatly eased the problems faced by her Mediterranean forces because next day all the seaworthy vessels left for Italy’s west coast, thereby reducing the threat to British convoys in the Mediterranean.
Britons, encouraged by Churchill, loved the sideshows. ‘Special forces absorbed a dismayingly high proportion of Britain’s most ardent warriors, volunteers attracted by the prospect of early independent action.’ They reflected Churchill’s belief, as Hastings wrote, that ‘war should, as far as possible, entertain its participants and showcase feats of daring to inspire the populace’. These ‘private armies’, eager to butcher and bolt, sometimes earned dramatic newspaper headlines (which always mattered to Churchill) and have left us entertaining memoirs, but the regular army was always short of good infantrymen in vital battles against well-trained and highly-motivated enemies. He was an amateur meddler saved from worse disasters primarily by Soviet and American resources in men and commanders, aided by those exceptional commanders in all three services who emerged during this cruel war. They had, in common, ways to resist, restrain or simply work round Churchill. At the same time, they benefitted hugely from the labours of civilian scientists and technicians whose names are barely known.
Meanwhile, in December 1940 Tedder took up his new command. Wiser than Boyd, he chose to examine a newly-established aircraft assembly base at Takoradi (on the coast of modern Ghana) en route to Cairo. He flew there at his ease, aboard a civilian flying boat. The flow of crated aircraft to Takoradi from Britain and from the United States was already important for all operations in the Middle East. These aircraft, assembled in Takoradi, then flew via several staging-posts across equatorial Africa to Khartoum and finally down the Nile to Cairo, a total distance of nearly 4,000 miles.
Tedder’s decision to visit Takoradi en route to Cairo was helpful to Portal, who was frequently quizzed by Churchill on the time it took to get these aircraft into combat. As always, problems seemed easy to solve in Churchill’s office, where he complained of ‘frightful congestion’ in North Africa, but Tedder was able to convince Portal – one of those necessary men capable of outfacing Churchill – that everything possible was being done with the limited resources available. The flow from Takoradi would become vital after Germany entered what had hitherto been an Italian preserve in February 1941 and made it more dangerous to send aircraft through the Mediterranean. It increased still further after Hitler declared war on the United States in December 1941 and American ships were permitted to carry aircraft across the Atlantic to Takoradi.
In a letter to his wife Rosalinde in February 1941, Tedder reflected on the purpose for which he was asking men to risk their lives. ‘The Nazi regime has literally inspired their younger generation with a creed – an incredibly evil one – but it is an inspiration.’ No-one on our side is saying anything more than we are fighting to win the war. This was because, he thought, ‘our noble leaders, our Winstons and our Beavers, are unadulterated materialists’. Churchill had no interest in the postwar world, Tedder believed, and took it for granted that the British Empire would be restored to its prewar grandeur. ‘Martial glory’ and ‘superb honours’ were what mattered to him: ‘it was not in his nature,’ as Hastings wrote, ‘to understand that most men cared more about their prospects in a future beyond war than about ribbons and laurels to be acquired during the fighting of it.’
Tedder found his own inspiration in Jan Christian Smuts, whom he met in March 1941 and from then until the day he died gave the same uncritical worship that so many of his British contemporaries lavished on Churchill during and after 1940. Smuts was a man of such overwhelming personality that he could silence even Churchill. He had helped to found the RAF and was now Prime Minister and head of South Africa’s armed forces. Reflecting on Smuts in the 1960s, Tedder wrote: ‘I thought him then, and still think him, incomparably the greatest man I have ever met, possessing Churchill’s versatility and vision without his vices.’
As Colville wrote, Smuts was highly regarded by all who knew him, service or civilian. If Churchill died during the war, Colville thought it would be a great ‘imperial idea’ if Smuts succeeded him as Prime Minister and put this idea to his mother (a close friend of Queen Mary’s) with the idea of it ‘filtering through’ to the king, who ‘can send for whomsoever he wishes’. So thought Colville, but in fact it seems likely that Anthony Eden (Foreign Secretary) would have succeeded.
In March 1941, Smuts supported the opinion of Eden, Dill (head of the British Army) and all three Middle East commanders that an attempt should be made to fulfill a promise made by Chamberlain in April 1939 to help Greece if Germany invaded. Churchill agreed, though claiming in his postwar memoirs that he did so only because he believed Wavell’s desert flank to be secure. Actually, he was eager to revive a desire formed during the Great War to form ‘a Balkan front’ against Germany that combined the powers of Greece, Yugoslavia and Turkey.
Wishful thinking about this front, as many British historians have written, animated Churchill in both world wars. His ‘Balkan front’ fantasy was strongly supported by Portal, even though they both knew that Britain lacked the aircraft, soldiers or seamen to resist German power in 1941 and they both knew from intelligence interception that the Germans were planning an assault.
Portal persuaded himself that the RAF could deter Soviet aggression in Romania by threatening to bomb her oil wells from Turkish bases. Francis de Guingand (then a senior planner at Wavell’s headquarters in Cairo) published his memoirs as early as January 1947 in which he revealed his opinion that the operation never had a chance of success.
By intervening in Greece, he wrote, ‘we brought about disaster in the Western Desert and threw away a chance of clearing up as far as Tripoli’. Cyril Falls, a thoughtful military historian, agreed. He published an account in 1948 of ‘a sorry tale of political and strategic frivolity’. Maurice Dean agreed. From an air point of view, the move to Greece made little sense because neither soldiers nor sailors could survive without air support. There were a few RAF squadrons in Greece, but their main logistic support was more than 400 miles away. Airfields in Greece or Crete were few or nonexistent. Communications by road, landline, radio or wireless were minimal. Viewed coldly, Dean concluded, ‘the operation was just not on’.
Many subsequent historians concur, some in even stronger language: such as John Terraine (‘a definite touch of madness’), Stephen Roskill (‘little short of lunacy’) and Tuvia Ben-Moshe (‘another Churchillian disaster’). Despite his early enthusiasm for air power, Churchill ‘counted unthinkingly,’ as A. J. P. Taylor wrote, ‘on the ability of British sea power to hold Crete’ and Donald Macintyre agreed: the fleet, thought Churchill, could operate ‘without air support in waters dominated by an enemy air force’; this after the disasters in Norway!
Eden claimed in a signal to Churchill on 7 March 1941 that if Longmore ‘can hold his own’, then ‘most of the dangers and difficulties of this enterprise [in Greece] will disappear’. But Longmore’s resources were entirely inadequate and no amount of exhortation in London or courage in Greece could increase them.
From a military point of view, Churchill’s decision exchanged one certainty for another: victory in North Africa became defeat in Greece, followed by defeat in Crete and in North Africa. Tripoli had been there for the taking in February. ‘With Tripoli gone,’ wrote Klaus Schmider (a German historian) in 1997, ‘an Axis return to the African continent would have required either a major amphibious operation or a détente of a fundamental nature between Germany and Vichy France.’ Both were unrealistic. The decision to halt the British advance at El Agheila on 12 February ‘must therefore rank as the most gratuitous and incomprehensible error of omission of the whole Second World War’.
Wavell was an enthusiastic advocate of the Greek adventure, but Bernard Freyberg, commander of the garrison, failed to set up a secure base and especially to keep a tight grip on Maleme airfield, in Crete. Driven out of Greece, the British forces were soon driven out of Crete as well. Wavell had Churchill understand that he had set up a strong defensive flank in the Western Desert when he had not. Crete became a costly disaster. Freyberg, chosen to command in Crete, was just the sort of brave warrior whom Churchill most admired, but more is required of high command than bravery. He had no understanding of the impact that aircraft had upon surface operations.
Like Churchill he had a high regard for his own reputation and ‘persuaded Churchill to assert in his postwar memoirs that the campaign had cost the Germans 15,000 casualties. The true figure, well known by that time, was 6,000, including 2,000 dead.’ From a German point of view, Malta would have been a far more useful conquest, from which to impede British operations in the Mediterranean.
After the war, Tedder was among those who argued that moral and political arguments justified what turned into a disastrous military campaign, one that lengthened the North African campaign by two years and left the Far East open to Japanese aggression. He thought that if Britain had failed to resist the German invasion, the United States might lose their faith in us and cut off supplies of munitions and aircraft.
It seems likely, however, that American opinion would have been more impressed by victory in North Africa than by defeat in Greece and Crete. Churchill told Colville on 28 September 1941: ‘So far the government had only made one error of judgment: Greece.’ His instinct, he then said, had been against the diversion: ‘We could and should have defended Crete and advised the Greek government to make the best terms it could.’ Colville was not convinced. ‘I seem to remember his influencing the decision in favour of an expedition and Dill being against it,’ but Churchill was adept at revising the past to suit current needs.
On 1 May 1941 Longmore was abruptly summoned to London. He had annoyed Portal and Churchill by complaining too often and at too great a length about his problems and shown too little gratitude for the efforts made to help him. He was replaced on the 4th by Tedder, who well understood that the Air Ministry had no magic wand. A month later, he got someone close to a magician when Air Vice-Marshal Grahame Dawson arrived in Cairo, charged to see what was actually being done behind the battle fronts.
Dawson knew Cairo: he had been chief technical officer there from 1920 to 1925 and was used to managing somehow with insufficient materials. He could improvise and knew about engines, airframes and supply lines; a tireless as well as highly-skilled man, he was just what Tedder needed for ‘receiving, modifying, distributing, salvaging, and repairing aircraft and supplies’ for the whole command.
Group Captain Henry Thorold’s men, recalled Tedder, achieved much in Takoradi, assembling and testing aircraft for the long haul to Egypt, ‘and Dawson’s men worked wonders in the Middle East. Without them I do not see how we could have mustered sufficient air strength to hold the Germans and Italians in 1941 and to defeat them in 1942 and 1943.’
Ernest Hives, responsible for the production of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, said that Dawson always took the ‘route one’ approach to problems, whether with aircraft or persons and made it work when it mattered most. Yet most accounts of the Desert War barely mention him or Thorold.
The Mokattam hills, outside Cairo, were honeycombed with caves left over from the builders of tombs, palaces and pyramids for the Pharaohs. Dawson had many of them turned into workshops and storage areas. Floors were cemented, walls whitewashed, power and water were laid on; not least, they were cool enough to permit working throughout the day. Air Ministry officials resisted this splendid initiative, but Portal backed Tedder and so Dawson got his way. Fully mobile and self-supporting salvage units were essential, given the time taken to ship out any materials from Britain or the United States. Thanks to Thorold, ‘my thorough Thorold’, said Tedder, numerous aircraft (with experienced crews) reached Cairo and thanks to Dawson, many of those that crashed in subsequent combat or training flights were collected from the desert, repaired, and flown again, or used as vital spares.
Unfortunately, discussion – let alone co-operation – with the naval commander (Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham) was difficult because he would rarely move from Alexandria, except to go to sea. In November 1938 he had declared that the Royal Navy ‘could not visualise any particular combined operation taking place and they were therefore not prepared to devote any considerable sum to equipment for combined training’. He was gradually weaned from such nonsense, but always remained a ship commander who disliked staff work and co-operated reluctantly with other services. He was by no means alone among senior officers in his disregard for services other than his own and Tedder was unusual in his emphasis on all three working together.
Tedder regarded Cunningham as ‘our old man of the sea... even more of an anachronism than Wavell’. As he told Freeman on 29 May 1941, it was ‘sheer lunacy’ that vital decisions concerning all three services had to be made at places more than 100 miles apart. Cunningham urged Churchill to increase the RAF’s strength in the Middle East, rightly believing that Fighter Command retained too much strength in Britain, especially after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, but he wanted naval control of any reinforcements. He never accepted the argument that it was the air commander’s responsibility to decide between army and navy appeals for support, still less the corollary: that the air commander’s judgement might be superior to his own.
Near Cape Matapan (Tainaron, the southernmost tip of mainland Greece) in March 1941, Ultra intelligence had enabled twenty-one Fairey Swordfish torpedo-armed biplanes of the Fleet Air Arm, launched by the carrier Illustrious, to strike three Italian cruisers and two destroyers. These losses gravely weakened Mussolini’s fleet and confirmed German disdain for their Italian allies. But Cunningham’s judgement in aviation matters was ‘beyond comprehension’ for Tedder. His aircraft carrier, Formidable, was put out of service for nine critical months as a result of aerial attacks suffered during an ill-conceived and ineptly-executed venture into the Aegean on 26 May 1941. Her absence enabled the Italians to recover control of the central Mediterranean and tied Cunningham to the east of that sea, within shore-based fighter cover.
Defeat can be an effective teacher. Gradually, during 1942, having suffered the loss of many ships, Cunningham’s mind broadened, or he learned to listen to his more intelligent staff officers. He accepted a need to co-operate with airmen, especially under the overall command of Eisenhower, an American soldier with a particular gift for persuading officers of all services, British and American, to work together. Another important reason for Cunningham’s improving relations with Tedder was their growing exasperation with Churchill, who they saw as a gifted politician, author and orator, who had in abundance the personality and energy to lead a nation in wartime, but who wrongly believed himself to be an authority in all military matters.
An opportunity to end British power in the Middle East and capture Iraqi oil fields was missed in April 1941 because Hitler, with his mind fully occupied by plans for Barbarossa, failed to give Rashid Ali of Iraq and his fellow thugs (the so-called ‘Golden Square’) strong enough backing when they attacked the RAF’s main base at Habbaniya, about fifty miles west of Baghdad. Only a handful of obsolete training aircraft stood in their way, but somehow they were hastily converted into bombers and fighters. Some modern aircraft and soldiers arrived to help, together with an absurd signal from Churchill: ‘If you have to strike, strike hard.’
These ramshackle forces overcame both Iraqis and a small German air force during April and May in the war’s most bizarre conflict. Yet it was a very important conflict, as both Tedder and Churchill recognised. ‘If the school had been overcome,’ wrote Tedder, ‘the Germans would have got a foothold in Iraq. If they had then created a bridgehead behind us, through Vichy-controlled Syria from Greece, our Middle East base could have been nipped out with German forces both to its east and west. We might then well have lost the war.’ Who can say? It does, however, seem that the Germans failed to take advantage of a clear opportunity to seize sources of precious oil in Iraq.
Operation Battleaxe, a hastily-planned assault by inexperienced British-led troops, poorly trained and equipped, began on 15 June 1941. They were sent against the carefully-prepared defences of General Erwin Rommel at Halfaya Pass, guarding access from Egypt into eastern Cyrenaica, where Australians held the besieged fortress of Tobruk. Wavell was worried, ‘because he is repeatedly told from home that we have strong numerical air superiority’, but Tedder told him that this was not so. The available fighter force should, however, be enough to secure and maintain ‘a reasonable degree’ of superiority.
Portal warned Tedder on the 11th that ‘political circles’ in London would be watching the RAF’s performance closely. Tedder replied at once: he quite understood that if Battleaxe failed, the army would blame the RAF, if possible. Battleaxe did fail. The fighting lasted for three terrible days, ending in a thorough defeat for British forces on the ground and in the air: thirty-six fighters and bombers were lost in exchange for only ten enemy aircraft.
‘Every single one of our plans has failed’, lamented Churchill on 21 June. As an enthusiast for military affairs, he should have understood that this particular battleaxe was blunt before it was swung: amateurs, no matter how bravely they fight, usually lose to professionals. Churchill – prince of amateurs – refused to accept that the precise knowledge he derived from Ultra about Rommel’s strategic situation was more than offset by his superiority on the battlefield.
British information about German dispositions and intentions was inadequate, whereas Rommel’s ground and air patrols, aided by intercepted wireless messages, gave an accurate picture of British dispositions and intentions. The Axis victory was not, however, properly exploited because Hitler began a massive invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June. Meanwhile, Wavell was at last sacked and Claude Auchinleck, an altogether superior soldier and commander, arrived from India to replace him in the struggle against Rommel, now regarded by friend and foe alike as a desert wizard.
Two high-powered civilians – one American, one British – reached Cairo in mid-1941 and began to bring inter-service squabbling under control. First was Averell Harriman, President Roosevelt’s special envoy, to sort out problems with the use and storage of American supplies. Two weeks later, on 5 July, Oliver Lyttelton arrived to take up a new appointment as Minister of State, with direct access to the War Cabinet. Both men gave excellent service to their masters in Washington and London, and to the commanders of the armed services.
Before he left England, Portal gave Lyttelton his written opinions on the situation in the Middle East and invited him to show them to Harriman. The great problem, wrote Portal (echoing the reports he received from Tedder), was to get all three services to recognise that ‘the war in the Mediterranean is one great combined operation in which constant collaboration and give-and-take between the Cs-in-C is indispensable’. There was an acute need for a combined headquarters, but as long as the general and the admiral ‘merely go their independent ways expecting air support to be given automatically on demand, we clearly cannot expect very good results’. Lyttelton duly formed a Middle East Defence Committee, comprising all three Cs-in-C, plus Ambassador Miles Lampson and an army officer in charge of supplies and administration behind the fighting areas.