Archibald Sinclair, who loved nothing better than to shuffle senior air commanders from pillar to post, wished Tedder to replace Wilfrid Freeman as vice-CAS about the end of November 1942 and appoint Sholto Douglas – an officer whom he strongly favoured – as head of RAF Middle East. Tedder resisted this move, with the help of Richard Casey (an Australian appointed Minister of State in Cairo) and Churchill agreed to leave well alone. Awards were then handed out to recognise victory in The Battle of Egypt. A GCB for Alexander, whom Churchill admired inordinately for his Great War record, his command of the rearguard at Dunkirk and his cheerful personality; a KCB for Montgomery and promotion to full general; and a KCB for Coningham, but no promotion. However, Churchill spoke of him in the House of Commons as ‘no mere technician, but a redoubtable warrior’, and the British press thereupon praised him warmly.
Sinclair recommended Tedder for a GCB, but Churchill, at his pettiest, insisted that the award be made to mark his two years of ‘distinguished service’ in North Africa and must not be linked to any part he played in the battle of El Alamein.
More than two years later, on 21 February 1945, Harris wrote to Trenchard. ‘Tedder and his RAF saved the rout in North Africa and made the subsequent victory virtually a walkover for the army.’ This is too sweeping a claim, but Churchill’s action was certainly mean-spirited. It was Harris, never a man to step back, who had badgered Churchill at his own dinner table to get Tedder ‘a grudging and belated GCB, after the public have forgotten’. Since then, although he had gone on to yet greater achievements, growled Harris, ‘it has never, of course, entered the Air Ministry’s head to make Tedder a marshal’. As it happened, Tedder did reach that rank, but only automatically on elevation to CAS; he was then made a baron, but not, as Alexander and Montgomery (or Churchill’s friend Lindemann) a viscount. One doubts if the slight cost Tedder any sleepless nights.
Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of all Allied forces in North Africa, signalled the combined chiefs of staff (British and American) on 26 November to say that Tedder, Park (Malta’s air commander) and Brereton (commanding the 9th Air Force, embracing all US units in the Middle East) had arrived in Algiers to discuss air operations. The ground advance, he said, had been supported ‘in fine fashion’ by airmen, despite ‘difficulties encountered in rain-soaked landing fields, poor supply and lack of maintenance facilities’. Tedder emphasised these and other ‘difficulties’ in a long signal to Portal on the 28th. In particular, the most forward fighter airfield lay about 100 miles behind the most forward troops. Eisenhower had not yet recognised the importance of a combined headquarters and commanders, his ground and air troops, were widely scattered.
On the positive side, Admiral Andrew Cunningham (having escaped from Washington) was the overall naval commander and agreed with Tedder that there should be a single air commander. Although there was a great deal of muddle and inexperience among the Allies, they were greatly helped by Hitler’s foolish decision to pour strong forces into Tunisia. These forces naturally took full advantage of Allied muddle and inexperience, but only for a few months.
Overall, the Axis powers lost 506 ships and 2,257 aircraft during the Tunisian campaign. Given their control of the sea and the air, the Allies could only get stronger as they learned from experience, whereas the Axis forces were trapped as completely as their comrades at Stalingrad. Taken together, these enormous losses ensured that Hitler could no longer win the war. However stoutly his remaining forces resisted, they must eventually be beaten.
They had not been beaten in November 1942, however, and Churchill told the over-busy Sinclair on the 30th:
‘It seems to me quite impossible to remove Tedder from the Middle East at this time. No-one has his knowledge, connections or influence. In my opinion, he should act like Kesselring [commanding all Axis forces in the Middle East], combining the air effort both in the Libyan and Tunisian spheres.’
These were the words that not only saved Tedder from being returned, most unwillingly, to the Air Ministry as Portal’s vice-CAS in succession to Freeman, but also made it possible for him to become an outstanding Allied commander, in partnership with Eisenhower, for the rest of the war.
Portal signalled Tedder on 1 December to say that he and his fellow chiefs were about to suggest to Eisenhower that ‘you assume command of all air forces in Mediterranean forthwith’. Churchill was ‘favourably inclined’ and if Eisenhower agreed, would ask the combined chiefs and Roosevelt to approve. Portal again signalled Tedder: ‘Would you be prepared to move your Advanced HQ to Algiers immediately and take personal command?’
To no-one’s surprise, Tedder agreed at once. One of his first decisions was to bring Grahame Dawson (with some of his key assistants) to Algiers from Cairo to take charge of maintenance and supply for the whole command. As in Egypt, so now: Dawson insisted on damaged aircraft being collected, if at all possible, from wherever they had come down and repaired immediately. Wrecks were a prime source of spare parts and Dawson made it clear to everyone that these were times of crisis and therefore ‘managing somehow’ was the motto. Tedder thought he was ‘as vital an architect of victory as any commander in the desert’. One RAF officer recalled Montgomery saying ‘he had brought his army 2,000 miles; he wouldn’t have got 2,000 yards without Dawson’s aircraft, always ready in any number, serviceable for battle and that was what really counted’.
Sadly, Dawson would be killed on 14 November 1944 when a Liberator in which he was a passenger en route from Algiers to Paris crashed in very bad weather near Autun, about fifty miles south-west of Dijon in eastern France. It was the same storm which destroyed Leigh-Mallory’s York, at about the same time (noon), some fifteen miles east of Grenoble.
On 16 December Tedder told Portal that Eisenhower understood the need for a unified air command, but was uncertain about Washington’s reaction to putting Americans under British command. On the same day, Eisenhower told the British chiefs that Tedder greatly impressed him: ‘He is a top-flight soldier and has helped us immeasurably,’ but he preferred an American, Major-General Carl A. Spaatz, as air commander and wanted him to command air forces in both the Mediterranean and England. He had brought Spaatz to Algiers from England, where he was creating a bomber force that would one day cause immense destruction in Germany.
Spaatz was a most able officer, as he later proved, but at that time he was not ready for such elevation. He knew little enough about mounting operations in England and nothing whatsoever about the Mediterranean. In both theatres he would be opposed by enemy troops who were battle-hardened and he had yet to learn how to combine his efforts with those of other services.
Eisenhower nevertheless pressed for Spaatz to be appointed commander, Allied Air Force, and though both Churchill and Portal disapproved they agreed that any system of unified command was better than none, pending a final decision at a conference in Casablanca held between 13 and 24 January 1943. That conference, headed by Roosevelt, Churchill and a galaxy of civilian and military chiefs, was intended to work out a strategy for winning the war; no easy task, in the absence of Stalin, whose armies were doing most of the fighting. He had been invited, but refused to leave the Soviet Union.
As Tedder had long desired, it was decided at Casablanca that he would leave Cairo for Algiers and command everything with wings between Gibraltar and Palestine. He would be under the overall direction of Eisenhower, who signalled General Arnold in Washington to say that he and Spaatz were both ‘delighted with the prospect of getting Tedder into this headquarters, where we may profit constantly from his great experience and soldierly qualities’.
Churchill remained impressed by Coningham: ‘I saw Coningham’s hand in recent operations’, he wrote to Portal on 27 February. ‘No doubt his control and Tedder’s general organisation will bring about an improvement, but here is the place where we want to fight the Hun and where the Hun has to fight us in the air and every effort should be made by us, apart from the Americans, to bring the strongest forces constantly into action.’ Hitherto, he continued, Allied air operations in Tunisia had failed, but ‘I am counting on you to retrieve it, now that you have the best men on the spot and in the right places’.
Tenacious Axis resistance in Tunisia ended on 13 May and 250,000 Germans and Italians were captured. ‘All the shouting about the Tunisian campaign leaves me utterly cold’, wrote Eisenhower to the head of the US Army, General George C. Marshall, on that day. The Allies should have taken Tunis by mid-December, allowing Sicily to be conquered and the Italian mainland invaded months sooner. ‘Another error,’ thought Eisenhower, ‘was the initial decision not to unify our air forces under a single command.’ That mistake was remedied by Tedder and Spaatz, who ‘accomplished a practical perfection in the co-ordinated employment of the air forces of the two nations’.
Churchill arrived in Algiers at the end of May 1943 to discuss with British and American commanders plans for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. The air forces, said Tedder, ‘had been blasting Italian communications for weeks’ in an attempt to weaken Sicily, but now it was necessary to seize Pantelleria, ‘the Italian Gibraltar’ (according to Fascist rhetoric), a small island about sixty miles from the nearest Sicilian coast, provided with radar stations, observation posts, a submarine and torpedo-boat base, fuel and munitions dumps and a large airfield with an underground hangar. It was also a sitting duck, given Allied air superiority, and after twelve days of systematic bombardment the garrison of more than 11,000 men surrendered.
Pantelleria’s chief importance was that it introduced Tedder to Solly Zuckerman, with whom he would work closely for the rest of the war. Zuckerman was an eminent zoologist who got into war work by studying the effects of exploding bombs on humans and structures. He had arrived in Algiers on 15 March 1943 and his research immediately impressed both British and American air commanders and they promised to improve bombing performance. Tedder appointed him chief scientific officer and graded him as of group captain rank.
Operation Husky began on 10 July. ‘It is easy now’, recalled Tedder in his memoirs, to forget the scale of this enterprise: 160,000 men in the initial assault, with 14,000 vehicles, six hundred tanks and nearly 2,000 guns. They were transported to Sicily by an Allied armada of 2,600 vessels, under the command of Andrew Cunningham, who described Husky as ‘the most momentous enterprise of the war’ to that date.
Excluding coastal and transport aircraft, Tedder had, under his command, 2,500 serviceable fighters and bombers and the Axis – having sacrificed so much strength in Tunisia and Stalingrad – could muster fewer than 900 serviceable fighters and bombers in the whole of Sardinia, Sicily and Italy. Air superiority was therefore achieved and maintained, much to Cunningham’s relief. It seemed to him ‘almost magical that great fleets of ships could remain anchored on the enemy’s coast’. By 1943, Anglo-American air forces in the Mediterranean alone, as Alan Levine emphasised, outnumbered the whole Luftwaffe.
Portal, pressed by Churchill, asked Tedder on 23 July for a full report on the airborne operations. Distressing casualties had been suffered by American and British airborne troops by a lethal combination of inexperienced pilots (either carrying troops or towing gliders), poor navigation, high winds, darkness, enemy flak and searchlights, smokescreens and, not least, indiscriminate fire from Allied sailors and soldiers ashore. The result, wrote Sebastian Ritchie, was ‘one of the most depressing chapters in the troubled history of Second World War airborne operations’. Should there be a next time, Tedder reported, he advised prolonged prior training, the use of experienced pathfinders, greater concentration of flights and routes directed well away from ‘friendly’ ground forces or naval units. Gliders, he thought, were a better bet than parachute drops because troops could be landed close together with more and heavier weapons, ammunition, radios, food and even transport. Tragically, as Ritchie’s careful analysis of this and subsequent operations demonstrates only too clearly, airborne forces were costly, in resources and manpower, and achieved little.
On 22 July, with the Allies safely ashore in Sicily, Tedder arranged for Zuckerman to take technical assistants there and gather information about what bombing had actually achieved and which targets, in subsequent campaigns, should be aimed at. He concluded that attempting to destroy key points in a railway system – junctions, marshalling yards, repair facilities – and bombing airfields would greatly help ground forces. Enemy movement of troops, heavy weapons and supplies would be seriously impeded and air cover interrupted. Hitting trains on the move and breaking bridges had obvious value, but were more difficult targets. Together, Tedder and Zuckerman devised a bombing strategy of cutting enemy communications that proved highly successful during the rest of the European war, and yet it generated opposition of such intensity that neither man ever forgot or forgave those responsible.
Tedder was concerned that ground commanders were now expecting more than air support for their operations in Sicily, they wanted bombers to lead the way in blasting holes in enemy defences. Tedder and other airmen would increasingly demand that soldiers be readier to use their own weapons, but why should they, if bombers could do all that their over-vocal champions claimed? Both American and British generals were acutely aware that most of their soldiers were amateurs, quite without the resolution, discipline and aggression that were normal in German, Soviet and Japanese armies. Tedder was as reluctant as other air commanders, British or American, to admit that even so-called heavy or strategic bombers simply lacked the weight and accuracy to offer an effective substitute for ground troops and their weapons.
Harold Alexander, who had a gift for presenting any situation in the best possible light, signalled Churchill on 17 August that after only thirty-eight days of fighting the last enemy soldier had been ‘flung out’ of Sicily. Although more than half the Axis forces had escaped, Tedder was right to emphasise the fact that the Allies took over 160,000 prisoners and killed more than 3,000 German and Italian troops during the campaign. The much-trumpeted Axis was broken when the Italian king dismissed Mussolini on 25 July. It then seemed likely that Hitler, having already suffered heavy losses on the Eastern Front, in Tunisia and now in Sicily, might focus his attention on resisting a Soviet advance in the east and preparing to meet an Allied landing in the west.
In later years, it has been argued by some historians – sitting at their ease and overlooking the fact that most Anglo-American soldiers were by no means hardened warriors – that the Allies ought to have prevented the evacuation of 40,000 Germans, 10,000 vehicles (including guns and tanks) and 15,000 tons of equipment to the mainland. However, the official historians of British intelligence, with ample evidence before them and plenty of time to consider it, pronounced it still an ‘open question’ whether an evacuation could have been prevented. It has to be remembered that in August 1943, except on the Eastern Front, the sight of Germans moving backwards was still rare enough to exhilarate all Britons and Americans who had personal experience of their fierce and skilful resistance. However, one doubts whether, from a German point of view, a long and costly resistance in Italy was wise when the men and resources spent there were needed closer to home. As Dowding had argued in 1940: ‘What matters most?’ For him, the answer was ‘the British Isles’; for Hitler, it should have been ‘Germany and Austria’.
After Sicily, Italy was an obvious target. In Churchill’s opinion, it was ‘the soft underbelly’ of Axis power in Europe: not an opinion shared by anyone who actually fought in that long, hard campaign, as opposed to studying maps many miles away. Churchill, the military enthusiast, had overlooked Napoleon’s opinion: ‘Italy is like a boot. You must, like Hannibal, enter it from the top.’
Although the Calabrian toe was easier to occupy, Salerno Bay (in the shin) offered greater strategic value. That bay lay a long way from Sicily for troop transports and naval escorts, but just within the range of shore-based fighters. Should aircraft carriers – so useful, but so vulnerable – be risked within comfortable range of enemy airfields? Would Italy fight on without Mussolini? Would the Germans abandon their ally?
Tedder advised Portal on 26 July that Operation Avalanche (a landing at Salerno) was ‘practical’ from an air point of view, given a concentrated attack on Axis air forces for three weeks prior to the landings and a maximum effort, once ashore, to secure airfields. Montgomery (and therefore Alexander) preferred a safe, steady drive from the Calabrian toe. Operation Baytown (an unopposed crossing from Messina to Reggio) began on 3 September. It encouraged Italy’s post-Mussolini group of leaders to sign a secret surrender that day, publicly revealed by Eisenhower on the 8th.
Operation Avalanche began next morning and was stoutly opposed by the Germans. As a consequence of the decision to mount Baytown, the Avalanche forces were smaller and less experienced than they need have been. Disaster was only narrowly avoided during four critical days, 12-15 September. By the 18th, the British 8th Army and the Anglo-American 5th Army (under Mark Clark) had joined up and two weeks later the prime tasks of Baytown and Avalanche had been achieved. Three excellent ports – Naples, Bari and Taranto – were in Allied hands, together with well-equipped airfields around Foggia and Naples.
During ten days of savage fighting (9-18 September) the Germans suffered some 3,000 casualties (killed, wounded or missing), but the Allies lost more than twice as many. Consequently, Hitler backed the strategy advocated by Albert Kesselring (now commanding German forces in Italy) that every inch of ground should be contested. A ‘Gustav Line’ was constructed across the peninsula south of Rome.
During the last four months of 1943, everyone who fought on either side or studied the course of events in those months became acutely aware that an invasion of France would cost countless lives. George Marshall, wisest of the Allied strategists, thought Hitler made a great mistake in ordering Albert Kesselring to defend Italy. The men and materials lost in that campaign should have been reserved for the defence of Germany. The mistake was all the greater because Kesselring was an outstanding commander, much abler than any of the commanders on the Allied side in Italy.
During December 1943, it was decided that Lieutenant-General Ira C. Eaker be made first head of the newly-formed Mediterranean Allied Air Forces with his rear headquarters in Algiers and his advanced headquarters at La Marsa in Tunisia. Jack Slessor (late of Coastal Command) was appointed Eaker’s deputy and head of all RAF forces in the Mediterranean from a headquarters in Caserta Palace, near Naples. Park, strongly recommended by Portal, was promoted to air marshal and sent to Cairo in January 1944 as head of the RAF in the Middle East, under Slessor’s overall supervision. His responsibilities could not have been more widespread: combat operations in the eastern Mediterranean and in the Indian Ocean, and operational training in Egypt, Cyprus, Palestine and South Africa.
Slessor, however, immediately decided that Park was out of his depth in coping with the ‘semi-political problems’ of so vast a command, problems which he himself relished, as a man who was heart and soul a ‘Whitehall Warrior’. In particular, he complained to Portal, he feared ‘we shall lose our position in the Middle East and the control of policy will drift increasingly into the hands of the army’, because Park was ‘a very stupid man’. Fortunately, both Portal and Tedder were well aware of Slessor’s arrogant disdain for most officers in all services and his itch to meddle outside his service duties in sensitive regions which he knew only slightly and could rarely visit.
Portal and Tedder knew that Park would get to know the units under his command and co-operate willingly with other services and with allies wherever they could be found in the Middle East, South Africa and especially with the essential Americans. He had already done so in Malta and Sicily and would do so in Egypt during 1944 and later in the Far East.
As for Churchill, he – like Portal and Tedder – had taken the measure of both Park and Slessor. Brevity, which Churchill required of subordinates in their dealings with him, was not a word in Slessor’s vocabulary, written or spoken, and he was too free with advice on non-aviation matters. Churchill had confidence in Park and so too had men to whom Churchill listened (quite apart from Portal and Tedder): Smuts; Beaverbrook; Eisenhower and Eaker. Smuts expressed great pleasure at Park’s appointment to Cairo: ‘It is a most fitting honour and recognition for his great work in Malta.’
Despite his best efforts, Slessor found himself obliged, during 1944, to recognise Park’s authority. In the 1945 New Year’s Honours List this ‘very stupid man’, already knighted once (KBE), received the more prestigious KCB. Group Captain Tom Gleave, an official British historian of the Mediterranean campaigns in 1943-1944, summed up: ‘Keith Park was a first-rate candidate for Jack Slessor’s attention. Keith hated bumff. Jack Slessor revelled in it.’
As early as September 1942 Tedder and his fellow commanders in Cairo had considered whether it would be possible to recapture Crete and perhaps seize the Dodecanese Islands, especially Samos, Leros, Cos and the much larger Rhodes. They concluded that the attempt would consume men, materials and time required to make a success of Husky, that the islands would have little value once the Cyrenaican airfields were recovered and that garrisons there would be unable to resist a German attack mounted from Greece. Had these sensible conclusions continued to govern action in 1943, recorded Tedder in his memoirs, ‘we should have been spared much unnecessary loss and heart-burning’.
Unfortunately, Churchill’s authority over British – as opposed to Allied – actions remained strong. He urged the Middle East commanders on 27 July to plan an assault on Rhodes: ‘as I need this place as part of the diplomatic approach to Turkey’. Long after the war Tedder confided to Theodore McEvoy ‘with a vehemence surprising in so temperate a man’ that Churchill’s obsession with Turkey angered him deeply. His own service in Constantinople throughout the Chanak affair (1922-1923) and careful study of the Dardanelles campaign while at Staff College (1929-1931) gave him the knowledge to regard a third Aegean adventure in which Churchill had a hyperactive hand with grave suspicion.
Churchill hoped to generate a major campaign, Operation Accolade, in the Aegean, despite American objections that it would delay the assault on occupied France, Operation Overlord. Tedder’s unwavering support for American resistance to Accolade, condemned by an official British historian as ‘this rash experiment’, helped to ensure him a high place in Overlord. That would become the greatest campaign mounted by the Western Allies during the war, one in which American voices prevailed as never before; and those voices flatly refused to increase Mediterranean commitments.
Sholto Douglas, Tedder’s successor as air commander in Cairo, agreed wholeheartedly with Churchill about the possible advantages of an Aegean adventure. Although Alexander and Cunningham agreed with Tedder, Churchill had his way. In September, Samos, Leros and Cos were seized, but not Rhodes, and the escalation desired by Churchill began: ‘glittering prizes’, he declared, await those who ‘improvise and dare’. ‘This is a time to think of Clive and Peterborough,’ he wrote to Maitland Wilson, C-in-C Middle East in September, ‘and of Rooke’s men taking Gibraltar.’ Such silliness rolled off his tongue as readily as ever, but his influence on the conduct of operations had been waning since Casablanca in January 1943 and this disastrous Aegean adventure hastened its decline.
German reaction was prompt and severe. Churchill told Tedder on 3 October that ‘Cos is highly important and a reverse there would be most vexatious. I am sure I can rely upon you to turn on all your heat from every quarter, especially during this lull in Italy.’ Tedder, aware that Eisenhower’s opinions now mattered more than Churchill’s, replied coolly the next day: ‘You have no doubt heard from CAS that we are putting maximum effort against enemy in Greece. Anything further I find possible will be done.’ The Germans were recovering Cos as he wrote, the garrisons on Samos and Leros faced a bleak future and the German grip on Rhodes remained secure. Our main purpose, as Eisenhower, Tedder and all their sensible colleagues agreed, was to defeat the Germans in Italy.
Tedder warned Portal on 8 October that a proposed visit by Churchill to Tunis ‘would be most dangerous and might have a disastrous effect on Anglo-American relations’. Brooke, head of the British Army – who usually regarded Eisenhower and Tedder with contempt – noted in his diary on the 8th that:
‘Churchill has worked himself into a frenzy of excitement about the Rhodes attack, and has magnified its importance so that he can no longer see anything else. He has set his heart on capturing this one island even at the expense of endangering his relations with the President and the Americans and the future of the Italian campaign.’
On that same day, 8 October, Roosevelt replied sensibly to Churchill’s plea for his personal intervention. ‘Strategically, if we get the Aegean Islands, I ask myself where do we go from there? And, vice versa, where would the Germans go if for some time they retained possession of the islands?’ Churchill asked that a conference of high commanders be held at La Marsa to assess Accolade’s merits, but he himself was dissuaded from attending and the commanders rejected it. Douglas, however, clung to Churchill’s opinion and even Portal, usually the most level headed of men, told Tedder on 12 November that Leros was ‘more important at the moment than strategic objectives in southern France or north Italy’. Churchill added his voice to Portal’s on the 16th: ‘This is much the most important thing that is happening in the Mediterranean in the next few days.’ The days when his voice was decisive were over, but he would not give in.
In Cairo, on 24 November, he grabbed Marshall’s lapels and uttered one of his most foolish remarks: ‘Muskets must flame.’ Marshall was not impressed. The Leros garrison had already surrendered and British losses, in a campaign that achieved nothing, were heavy: twenty-six naval vessels, more than 100 aircraft and nearly 5,000 men killed, wounded or captured. Thousands of Italians, who had supported the British or failed to resist them, were murdered. Such a complete rout strengthened Turkey’s resolve, which had never weakened, to stay neutral.
This Aegean adventure, making no military and little political sense, puzzled Eisenhower. Six years after the war ended, he asked his friend, Sir Hastings Ismay (Churchill’s chief staff officer at the time) if he could explain it. Churchill, replied Ismay on 11 October 1951, ‘placed a wholly disproportionate emphasis in his memoirs on the importance of the islands in the Eastern Mediterranean’. There is, naturally, no admittance in those memoirs that his insistence achieved nothing except unnecessary casualties.
Slessor was closely involved in the first clash of what became the Cold War, born in Warsaw during August and September 1944. As one of Britain’s prewar planners, he felt ‘a sense of obligation’ to Poland, as well he might, for Britain gave a guarantee of independence to her ‘first ally’ that proved to be the deadest of dead letters as soon as the Germans invaded in September 1939. Later, he saw at first-hand how brave and skilful many Polish airmen and soldiers were and he also knew what an essential help Polish mathematicians had been, on the eve of war, in revealing Germany’s Ultra secrets to the French and British.
‘I was still guileless enough to believe’ in the middle of 1944, he wrote, that the Soviet Union would welcome Polish assistance in the overthrow of Hitler’s Germany. Most leaders of the poorly-armed Polish Home Army (AK, Armia Krajowa) agreed that they could only recover Warsaw with the help of the Red Army, rapidly approaching from the east.
On 1 August General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, head of the AK, ordered a rising in the capital. But Soviet forces did not join in and even refused landing rights to British and American aircraft attempting to bring in weapons, ammunition, medical supplies and food. What was left of the AK surrendered on 2 October. About 150,000 Polish men, women and children had been killed and most of the survivors were used as slave labour in Germany. Warsaw was systematically destroyed by the departing Germans, who suffered about 10,000 dead and 16,000 wounded: well-armed and experienced soldiers who would not be available for the defence of their homeland. Despite protests from Roosevelt and Churchill, Stalin imposed a long-lasting Communist regime on Poland.
The months of August and September, Slessor recalled, were the worst of his career. His airmen – Polish, British and South African – were faced with ‘the blackest-hearted, coldest-blooded treachery’ on the part of the Russians and some 200 of his most gallant airmen lost their lives while trying to supply the Poles fighting in Warsaw. Their ‘compassionate and selfless devotion to duty’, wrote Neil Orpen, has never since been forgotten. It was indeed one of the RAF’s many ‘finest hours’ in that terrible war. The dropping-zones lay up to 900 miles from Allied bases in Italy, a very long way over rugged country, with no help from ground radio stations and no weather information; country that was still held by a well-armed enemy.
Portal, narrowly focused as ever, was reluctant to help. In his mind, the bomber offensive over Germany ‘might prove decisive if we did not allow ourselves to be drawn away by less essential calls on our resources’. As for the special operations executive (SOE), just 150 tons of supplies were dropped on Poland during the critical months of 1944, while more than 3,400 tons were delivered to Yugoslavia. According to Norman Davies, the effort to help Warsaw is ‘one of the great unsung sagas of the Second World War’, although it failed. Very much more could have been done, but Soviet refusal to help was decisive. Churchill and Roosevelt did not insist on relief being given top priority and Slessor failed to explore these questions of strategy, politics and morality in his long, shallow memoirs.
For ruling circles (and many citizens) in Britain and the United States, ‘Uncle Joe’ was still a hero in 1944 because they were acutely aware that neither British nor American forces could destroy Hitler’s regime by their own efforts. Churchill and Roosevelt recognised that Poland lay within a Soviet ‘sphere of influence’ and they could do nothing to ensure her independence.
The last of Slessor’s many letters to The Times would be about the Poles. On 18 September 1976, he wrote: ‘A memorial is to be unveiled in London to some 14,000 Polish officers killed or missing in Russia during the Second World War, including over 4,000 murdered at Katyn.’ The British government refused to be officially involved in this tribute and Slessor raged in vain.