CHAPTER THREE

An American Abroad

As long as I and great Odysseus soldiered there,

why, never once did we speak out at odds,

neither in open muster nor in royal council:

forever one in mind, in judgement balanced, shrewd,

we mapped our armies’ plans so things might turn out best

The Odyssey, 3. 141-45

The German bombers that attacked Hurst and his mates on the dusty road outside Benghazi were in Africa as part of Adolf Hitler’s efforts to rescue his friend and incompetent ally, Benito Mussolini. With the success of Operation Compass, and the failure of the Italian invasion of Greece, the complete defeat of Italy stared Hitler in the face — something sure to complicate his plans to invade the Soviet Union in the northern summer of 1941. To prop up the Italian dictator, German forces were hurriedly shifted into the Mediterranean in January and February 1941, beginning first with the Luftwaffe units that bombed Hurst and his colleagues, and then with the panzer regiments of the Afrika Korps, shortly to be famous under the command of Erwin Rommel.

The arrival of the Germans in the theatre posed Winston Churchill and his high command with one of the great strategic choices of the war: whether to push on and complete the conquest of the Italian empire in Africa, or divert forces to Greece to resume opposition to Hitler on the European mainland. For Churchill, the answer to that question lay in a still wider strategic imperative: what would most impress American political opinion, and thereby take him one step closer to the only sure salvation for Britain, the entry of the United States into the war?

Churchill was already a good way toward that goal, thanks to the re-election of Franklin Roosevelt in the American presidential election at the end of 1940. In a masterful political performance, Roosevelt — a declared opponent of fascism — had managed to both support Britain with arms and moral support through the great crisis of 1940, and yet avoid offending the strong body of opinion in the American electorate that opposed any entanglement in another European war.

Roosevelt’s re-election came not a moment too soon. Britain either got more American economic and military aid, or faced national bankruptcy. The Bank of England had run out of cold, hard cash to buy American supplies, without which Britain could not continue the war. In the last days of December 1940, the spectre of national insolvency was such that Churchill was reduced to cabling Roosevelt, begging him not to insist that a ship laden with Britain’s last gold reserves sail to the United States in payment for American goods, something that Churchill knew would be a public humiliation for the British war effort, and one certain to delight Hitler.1

Roosevelt spared British blushes with one of the most elegant pieces of policy in the history of twentieth-century international relations — Lend Lease. Britain would no longer have to buy American goods, or even take them on credit — they would be lent or leased, for eventual return at the end of the war. The idea was a triumph, but Roosevelt still had to get it through the American legislature: first the Congress, and then the Senate. To justify it, Churchill was acutely conscious of the need to be seen by the American public to be fighting Hitler, not preserving the British Empire, for which the ordinary American voter had little sympathy.

Seen in that light, getting a British army to Greece where they would be in combat against German troops was politically essential. Militarily, Britain would no doubt have been better paced to complete the defeat of the Italians in North Africa, but that would have counted for little in middle America if the valiant Greeks were overrun by Hitler while London stood back and settled things with Mussolini.

So Churchill’s decision to send troops to Greece undoubtedly made sense in the grand scheme of things. But whether Greek, Australian, and New Zealand interests were best served by a likely heavy defeat if Germany invaded the Balkans was an altogether different question. British planners from Churchill down were acutely aware of the fact, such that preparations for the campaign in Greece were laced with half-truths and even deceit — deliberate artifice that was necessary to get others to fight the battles that London needed to impress the United States.

On 30 December 1940, an American holding no formal office flew from England to the Mediterranean warzone. Colonel William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan was on the eve of his fifty-eighth birthday, and a man of achievement. He had won America’s highest battlefield decoration, the Medal of Honour, in the First World War, and gone on to a successful career in the law. But as a Republican, he was also a party opponent of Roosevelt, and as an Irish-American, no automatic fan of the British. So in another Roosevelt masterstroke, who better to ask to assess the vigour with which the British were fighting Hitler, and thus gather the eye-witness evidence needed to convince sceptical American public opinion that aiding the British was in the interests of the United States?

The British certainly appreciated the need to impress Donovan, in every way — he was sustained on his flight by a hamper personally arranged by Lord Louis Mountbatten, a great grandson of Queen Victoria, then an officer in the Royal Navy. It contained the nourishment thought necessary by the English aristocracy to sustain a gentleman on foreign service — three bottles of Moselle, a flask of hot turtle soup, fresh lobster, cold pheasant, Stilton cheese, and Bath Oliver biscuits.2

Donovan’s journey was the beginning of a two-month sojourn in the Mediterranean and the Balkans, in which he visited Greece, Yugoslavia, and Turkey, impressing on these countries that Roosevelt was not going to let Hitler win the war, and offering American assistance to any nation prepared to join Britain in fighting him. Best of all from Churchill’s perspective, Donovan ‘told everyone he met that Britain was fighting, that it would continue to fight, and that it could and would defeat the Germans as it had defeated the Italians, that America would support it to victory come what may, and that the American people were determined not to permit it to be defeated’.3

Stirring stuff, only this was the rhetoric of long-term salvation — the problem for the Greeks, and the still-neutral Yugoslavs and Turks, was that Hitler’s panzers were an immediate and nearby threat, and promises of American help in the future, which would have to come from far across the seas, would counter for little in the next few months. Churchill knew as much, too. While Donovan was spreading the gospel of British pluck, the prime minister had lunch with Harry Hopkins, another one of Roosevelt’s unofficial emissaries, on 10 January 1941, and freely admitted to the American that ‘Greece is lost.’ But typically of Churchill, he thought he could have everything at once, believing that the ‘debacle in Greece’ would be offset by the ‘sure defeat of the Italians in Africa’.4

Churchill knew that Greece was doomed, possibly along with any force he sent to aid the country, not least because his top military advisors had told him so. The British chiefs of staff committee, comprising the heads of the three armed services, concluded on 18 January 1941 that ‘if Germany does undertake large-scale operations against Greece, we could do no more than impose a small delay to their occupation of the country’.5

Few people volunteer for a hopeless cause, so the diplomatic and military task facing the British was to convince the Greeks — and the Australian and New Zealand governments, who would send the bulk of the troops — that effective resistance was indeed possible. For this, they needed a plausible marketing idea, and the one that London settled on had just the faintest ring of credibility: the mountainous terrain in Greece would so hamper Germany’s key military assets — tanks and airpower — that a British-led army had a sporting chance of holding up an invasion.

The wily Greek leader Metaxas, who had kept British troops out of Athens through the northern winter of 1940–41 to avoid antagonising Hitler, might not have fallen for this pitch, but his death on 29 January 1941 changed the dynamic of Anglo-Greek relations. His successor, Alexandros Koryzis, hitherto the governor of the Bank of Greece, and impressed by Donovan’s assurances of American help, believed that only the Western powers could save his country.

To advance staff discussions with the Greeks, the British despatched a delegation — 27 Military Mission — to Athens. When Greek scepticism about their prospects in the face of a German attack surfaced in the ensuing conferences, the defensive virtues of the Greek mountain ranges were soon in action. One of the British senior officers involved was Colonel Salisbury-Jones, and he was soon lecturing his Greek counterparts that the hills and mountains of central and northern Greece would not allow the German tanks to repeat their successes on the flat plains of northern France the year before: ‘It should be borne in mind,’ opined Salisbury-Jones, ‘that the mountainous nature of the Balkan theatre did not give the same scope to German mechanised forces as did the country in Western Europe’. To complete the sermon, Salisbury-Jones suggested that all the Greeks needed was a dose of British pluck, ‘drawing the attention of Colonel Kanelopoulos to the dangerous tendency of regarding the German army as invincible. Every effort should be made to eradicate this disease …’6

‘Wild Bill’ Donovan was not the only American in the Balkans at this time. Lincoln MacVeagh was the US ambassador in Athens. Childhood friends with the Roosevelt family — his letters to the president were on first-name terms — MacVeagh was a cultured product of the American east-coast liberal establishment: working as a publisher in New York before his diplomatic posting, MacVeagh occupied his time on the commuter train from Connecticut by reading Homer in the original, ancient Greek. A man of such learning was not easily convinced by sophistry, but Wavell and Wilson did their best. MacVeagh recorded Wavell’s comments that in the British general’s ‘considered opinion’, Greece could be held against the Germans.7 The uninspiring Henry Maitland Wilson held the view that the terrain evened up the military ledger. He assured MacVeagh that the Germans could not repeat their Polish and French successes in Greece on account of the terrain. Despite his lack of military credentials, the ambassador more realistically declined to share this sanguine outlook.8

Wavell and Wilson might have made little impression on MacVeagh, but they found a more impressionable, and politically probably more important, audience in Donovan. Wavell knew exactly what he had to do, namely to convince Roosevelt’s roaming emissary that Britain was fighting Hitler.9 To that end, Wavell indulged Donovan’s amateurish attempts at grand strategy. The American was, of course, a celebrated frontline soldier himself, but he had no experience of high command or the art of strategy. But Wavell let Donovan dream his own dreams, and helped him believe that they might come true. From the horrors of the Western Front in 1918, Donovan had acquired a life-long attachment to the ‘indirect approach’, the tactical principle that avoids costly frontal acts in preference to exploiting the line of least resistance. From this insight in the trenches, Donovan now applied the idea at a strategic level in the Mediterranean, seeing the theatre not as an east-west corridor between England and India, but as a north-south battleline, with the sea between Africa and Europe a kind of no-man’s-land. Wavell indulged Donovan in this sweeping conceptualisation, in which an expedition to Greece could be characterised as a forward lodgement, for later exploitation.10

How the very small army Wavell could get to Greece could be transformed into a force big enough to defeat the Wehrmacht the British general never explained, for this was political theatre, not military strategy. Through the combination of Metaxas’ death and Donovan’s barnstorming diplomacy through the Balkans, Churchill got what he craved: the opportunity to land troops on European soil, barely nine months after the British army had been ejected from France at Dunkirk. So, on 5 February, the defence committee of the British War Cabinet took the first step in getting troops to Greece. To broker the expedition with the Greeks, and hopefully bring Yugoslavia and Turkey into the war, the cabinet despatched foreign minister Anthony Eden and chief of the Imperial General Staff John Dill on a diplomatic offensive to the Middle East. Three days later, Greek prime minister Koryzis formally invited the British to begin talks on the despatch of an army to Athens. Churchill was delighted.

On 10 February, the key body in London formulating war strategy, the Defence Committee (Operations), chaired by Churchill himself, resolved in favour of despatching an expeditionary force to Greece. To ensure Eden and Dill had the strongest possible force with which to impress the Greeks, Churchill sent Wavell an unequivocal instruction on 12 February to suspend the victorious offensive against the Italians in North Africa. ‘Your major effort must now be to aid Greece and/or Turkey’, cabled the British prime minister, adding further that ‘we should try to get into a position to offer the Greeks … the fighting portion of the Army that has hitherto defended Egypt, and make every plan for sending and reinforcing it to the limit with men and material.’11

Richard O’Connor, the successful general leading the charge into Libya, was aghast at the suspension of an offensive he was sure would drive Axis forces out of Africa, and regretted not taking matters into his own hands by bringing his attack to a final conclusion.12 O’Connor was right to be mortified by the decision to halt, for it gave Germany the chance to send reinforcements to North Africa. Already, in January 1941, German dive-bombers had begun operations from Sicily, and quickly inflicted serious losses on British warships. German aircraft followed up by mining the Suez Canal on 30 January, and then sank a British gunboat off Benghazi, Libya, on 24 February.

These German interventions were an obvious prelude to the storm about to break over the British position in the Mediterranean. Yet with the decision to go to Greece, even the most fervent American isolationist could not say that Britain was in the war not just to survive, but to beat Hitler. And Churchill reaped an immediate reward from the momentum building towards a Greek campaign, the one he craved above all others. On 9 February 1941, the United States House of Representatives voted 260 to 165 in favour of Lend Lease.

Churchill had his prize, but the race to Greece remained to be run, and along the way, some inconvenient truths needed to be kept from view. On the same day that the War Cabinet sent Eden and Dill to the Mediterranean, MI3 (an intelligence section in the British War Office) concluded that Greece would fall within weeks to a German attack, and the addition of Yugoslavia to the Allied cause would only delay the inevitable for 4–6 weeks.13 This brief was circulated to all three British services, and to the British Foreign Office, but notably not to the Australian, Greek, or New Zealand governments.

The key problem was ammunition, or, more precisely, the inability of the British to provide the necessary raw materials — copper and brass — to keep the Greek munitions factories in production. Very little could be done about this: American supplies could not arrive in time, and the best alternative the British could think of was to convert the Greek army to standard British ammunition types, but this would require the provision of British arms that could not be spared.

The need to bend military reality to suit political interests then became obvious when the British chiefs of staff (the heads of each armed service) considered the MI3 appreciation. They concluded ‘that if the paper were put up to the Cabinet with the inevitable conclusion that there didn’t seem very much that can be done, the reaction of the Cabinet will inevitably be to ask the War Office why they can’t do anything’.14

Sometimes it is necessary in war for military leaders to tell politicians that there really is nothing that can be done; but, in this instance, to keep the pretence of effective aid alive, the British resorted to scouring South Africa and India for supplies of brass and copper, and pushed Wavell to get captured Italian weapons and ammunition to Greece with greater speed. Far from sounding the alarm, Wavell played his part in this extemporisation, assuring London that he was doing everything possible.15

So committed to the campaign were the British that when the realities of the venture pressed too closely, they resorted to what amounted to denial. The number of ships needed to get an army of any size from Egypt to Greece was obviously a key planning variable, but it was not until late February that a study was completed of what impact a campaign in Greece would have on Britain’s overall shipping position. When it did arrive, the findings of this study made dire reading, the chiefs of staff committee concluding that 500,000 gross tons of shipping were required to move a force of the one size anticipated. The reality of this figure then flowed on to the effect this would have on imports into Britain itself. The total loss of imports into Britain was calculated at 390,000 tons, with a continuing monthly reduction of 40,000 tons.16

With German U-boats threatening to throttle the Atlantic supply route, these results were most unwelcome. Faced with the obvious implication that the Greek expedition would threaten the very security of Great Britain, Churchill had to say something to make the problem go away. Accordingly, he issued an extraordinary instruction that, ‘It will be necessary to find the extra shipping’ required to support the Greek campaign, ‘from the pool of 2,200,000 tons now lying idle under repair’.17 To state the obvious, ships under repair are neither idle, nor available to transport men to a new battlefront or to evacuate them if things go wrong.

The more the British planners looked at the task, the more problems they found. In the War Office in London, the deputy director of military intelligence, P. G. Whitefourd, burst the romantic bubble that Greek mountains would stop German panzers. In analysing German capabilities, he saw no reason why a German advance in Greece could not move at the same rate as that achieved the year before in France. From the results achieved in 1940, Whitefourd calculated that German armour would average 25 miles a day in the Balkans. From this, he estimated that the Germans would have three motorised divisions and an armoured division on the Greek border, five days after they crossed the Danube to take up positions in Bulgaria (the deployment which all parties used as an indication that a German attack was imminent and, largely, inevitable).18

Related to the pace of the German advance was the size of the force that conducted it. It was not just the tactical obstruction the terrain would cause the Germans that gave the British hope — mountain passes and winding roads would ‘canalise’ the advance, by pushing the German columns into one long line, and thus limit the force they could deploy. This was important to Wavell because of the small size of the army he could put into the field himself. Even if it could be deployed in time, it would amount to only three divisions and one brigade of infantry, and a solitary armoured brigade.

This modest force had a key role to play, linking what were essentially two widely separated fronts. To the north-west, the Greeks needed to keep the greater part of their army to hold the Italians in Albania, while largely in isolation to the north-east were a handful of Greek divisions occupying a fortified position — the ‘Metaxas Line’ — to guard the still-neutral Bulgarians. Only the ‘British’ force could hold the gap in between, and if the Germans could deploy a larger force to match it, the whole viability of Wavell’s position would be in jeopardy.

Whitefourd’s appreciation suggested just that possibility, and Wavell greeted it with alarm, and much criticism. By D21 (that is, 21 days after crossing the Danube), Whitefourd concluded the Germans could have five divisions deep into Greece. This was a force only slightly larger than Wavell could field, but the British had no reinforcements or reserves of any kind available, whereas the Germans could be expected to gradually increase their strength as they improved supply and communication lines behind their advance.

Just as he was attempting to make the lack of raw materials for the Greek ammunition factories go away by scrounging scrap metal in India and South Africa, Wavell waved away the problem. Faced with Whitefourd’s unhelpful military logic, Wavell swung quickly into action, flatly telling London on 6 March: ‘Disagree with your calculations which we consider unduly optimistic from German point of view.’ While Whitefourd concluded the Germans could quickly get five divisions into central Greece, Wavell contended that such a force would slowly arrive on the Greek border, and even then only if ‘optimum conditions’ applied. These conditions were assumed to be complete freedom from interference by British air forces, and roads completely cleared of snow, and capable of sustaining heavy traffic for three days. Wavell optimistically concluded that, ‘we shall be surprised if such optimum conditions apply in the event’.19

While Wavell worked to keep the true state of affairs quiet, the British were also making plans to deal with reality; but, typically, they kept those arrangements very much to themselves. On 2 March, the British War Office cabled to Wavell instructions to begin preparations to destroy Greek infrastructure, including all ports, railways, oil stocks, and the Corinth Canal. This ‘scorched-earth’ policy was intended to deny the Germans anything of value, but it was a British secret — the War Office told Wavell ‘Greek authorities should not (repeat not) be consulted at this stage.’20

As the British planners spent February and early March grappling with, or denying, the host of problems involved in sending an army to Greece, their greatest challenge was diplomatic in nature: how to convince the Greeks themselves that British help offered real hope the Germans could be resisted, and how to keep the Australian and New Zealand governments ‘on side’ with the venture, when the ‘debacle’ that Churchill forecast in January might mean the total loss of all troops committed to it.

By coincidence, the Australian government was seemingly well placed to cast a critical and objective eye on things, because the diplomatic developments between Athens and London in early February coincided with the arrival in Egypt of the Australian prime minister. On his way to London for ministerial discussions, Robert Menzies had stopped in the Middle East to inspect Australian troops. Menzies embarked on this trip as an embattled figure: at the elections in September 1940, he had been returned to office only on the strength of support from two conservative independents, amid considerable criticism of his management of the war effort.21 He arrived in Egypt on 3 February, but diplomatic duties and bad weather prevented him from travelling west to visit the Australian troops until six days later. Menzies and his entourage congratulated themselves on the fine reception they received from the Australian units, although the view from the ranks was more cynical. Bob Slocombe was a member of one such parade, held outside Barce, Libya: his unit was under strict orders not to heckle the prime minister.22 Kevin Price of the 2/1st Anti-Tank Regiment was likewise unimpressed when Menzies visited his unit back in Egypt: he and his comrades were lined up in the desert sand, Menzies took a salute from the back of a railway carriage, and off chugged the train back to Alexandria.23 Phillip Worthem got closer to Menzies. On parade at the airfield at Barce, Menzies called for the men of his artillery regiment to break ranks and come forward to him. With a circle of men around him, Menzies explained the difficulties he had faced in flying many thousands of miles to be with the soldiers. ‘Well, Bob,’ said one unsympathetic soldier, ‘We bloody walked here.’24 From this and similar inspections, Menzies concluded that he had ‘worked like a nigger these last ten days’.25

Menzies actually spent 13 February, the last full day of his time in Egypt, touring the Cairo bazaars, shopping for gifts for his wife. Rather than haggling over trinkets, his time might have been better spent making inquiries as to the shape of British strategy in the Mediterranean. At his last meeting with Wavell, the British commander in chief advised Menzies that an expedition to ‘Salonika’ (Thessaloniki) was a possibility: Menzies made no enquiries of his own commander Blamey as to the wisdom of such a campaign. When Wavell finally briefed Blamey on the shift toward Greece on 18 February, Blamey correctly indicated he could only participate in the plan after it had been submitted to the Australian government.

At this point, Wavell’s political sophistication in managing the Australians became evident: having already spoken to Menzies, Wavell could assure Blamey that the Australian prime minister had been briefed, and that he concurred with the decision to despatch the Australians as part of a British army. Wavell had artfully succeeded in locking in Australian participation without Menzies and Blamey having spoken to each other on the topic, and without either referring the Greek campaign to the full Australian cabinet in Canberra. New Zealand’s contribution to the campaign was likewise secured without that country’s political and military leaders having conferred over its wisdom. Of his dealings with Wavell over the Greece campaign, Freyberg later wrote that he was not consulted, but merely received orders to move his unit in conformity with British plans. The prime minister, Peter Fraser, would later review with some disappointment Freyberg’s failure to keep Wellington fully informed.26

His shopping complete, Menzies left Egypt on 14 February, and thereby missed the Eden–Dill delegation heading in the opposite direction. Tall and debonair, Eden was a darling of the British Establishment, famous for his fashion sense (he popularised Homburg hats, which were named after him in the British vernacular). He came from a pure-bred family of aristocrats, and established his political credentials in 1938 when, as a young foreign secretary, he resigned from cabinet over Chamberlain’s appeasement policies. With this stroke, he was automatically allied with Winston Churchill, who was at the time famously and loudly deriding appeasement from the backbenches. Churchill honoured Eden’s position of principle when he became prime minister in May 1940, appointing the young blue-blood as secretary of state for war. Eden then moved back to the office of foreign secretary later in the year.

Eden and Dill reached Cairo on 19 February, and having picked up Wavell and a group of staff officers, went on to Athens three days later. Biographers of Churchill make much of the open-minded instructions the British prime minister gave to the Eden–Dill mission. These emphasised the ‘fact finding’ nature of the expedition, complete with an injunction that should a Greek campaign not be viable, Eden and Dill should recommend accordingly.27 However, some distance remained between the written word and the informal political dynamics within the British high command. After the disaster of Gallipoli in the First World War, a royal commission inquired into the debacle, and Churchill found his every move in the saga under minute scrutiny. From this experience, he evidently learnt the virtue of leaving space in formal orders that might provide a political line of retreat if later controversy required one. Thus, while giving Eden written authority to exercise discretion with the Greeks, Churchill demanded conformity with his plans in conversation. When Dill, who generally supported the Greek campaign, nevertheless expressed some technical doubts as to how it might be mounted, Churchill was furious, screaming that a ‘court martial and firing squad’ were required in Egypt to get the operation underway. It occurred to Dill later that he should have enquired ‘Who do you want to shoot?’28

History has dealt harshly with General Dill as a war leader, and with good reason, because what the British intended to send to Greece did not meet the fundamental standards of modern war. When he and Eden got to Athens on 22 February, they met a Greek delegation, led by King George II and Papagos. Their military offer to the Greeks seemed impressive: three infantry divisions (two Australian, one New Zealand) and a Polish brigade, a British armoured brigade, with the whole force to be equipped with 240 field guns, 202 anti-tank guns, 32 medium guns, 192 anti-aircraft guns, and 142 tanks. Yet to offer the armoured brigade, the British had to split in half their only other armoured division in Egypt (the 7th Armoured had been pulled back to refit after its exertions in the desert). In France in May 1940, the British fought without an armoured division, preferring to squander their available tanks in little groups throughout their infantry army. The sound organisation of British armour in Egypt bequeathed by Percy Hobart in the form of the 7th Armoured Division then pointed to success in Libya, but when it came time to contemplate an expedition to Greece, where inevitably the British would again meet German tanks in large numbers, Wavell and Wilson happily cut the 2nd Armoured Division in half, sending one brigade to Greece and leaving the other in the desert.29

When the size of the proposed British force was put to him at the conference on 22 February, Papagos was unimpressed: the Greek military feared the Germans above all else. He did not know it, but a number of the British officers present at the negotiations were aghast at the prospect of a Balkan campaign. Francis de Guingand served on O’Connor’s staff during the recent successful campaign in Libya, and he ended the war as one of the most capable planners and administrators in the British army, serving as Montgomery’s chief of staff at the Battle of El Alamein in 1942, and then again during the Normandy invasion. On preparation for the meeting with the Greeks, de Guingand was under pressure to gild the military lily:

My first manpower figures excluded such categories as pioneers, and in the gun totals I only produced artillery pieces. This was nothing like good enough for one of Mr Eden’s party who was preparing the brief. He asked that the figures should be swelled with what to my mind were doubtful values. I felt that this was hardly a fair do, and bordering upon dishonesty.30

de Guingand then had to endure Eden’s performance after the meeting:

I remained in the ante-room for a few minutes whilst the party dispersed. Eden came in looking buoyant. He strode over to the fire and warmed his hands, and then stood with his back to it dictating signals to his staff. They in turn looked nearly as triumphant as he did, and were positively oozing congratulations.31

Eden’s vain performance was prompted by his diplomatic success: the Greeks accepted the British offer of further military help, which the British in turn tied to a reorganisation of Greek dispositions in a way that best suited defence against a German attack from Bulgaria. This required Papagos to shift units from the Metaxas Line guarding the Bulgarian border to the so-called Vermion-Olympus line in central Greece, where the British thought a viable defensive position might be built.

The American ambassador, Lincoln MacVeagh, observed these proceedings, and was not impressed. MacVeagh was privy to several long conversations with Eden and senior British military leaders in Athens in February and March 1941, and reported on these to Roosevelt. Wilson, Wavell’s soulmate in the Mediterranean high command, told MacVeagh that the Germans could not repeat their Polish and French successes in Greece on account of the terrain. Eden was even more certain of success. MacVeagh reported that the British leader held the most startling and sanguine attitude to the diversion of British resources from North Africa to Greece: the British foreign secretary told the American that even if ‘the Germans occupy Greece it will be of no particular effect on the war since Britain by that time will be “sitting pretty” in Africa’. In another meeting with Eden, this time in the company of Air Commodore J. D’Albiac, shortly to be appointed head of the RAF units in Greece, the British leaders discounted the impact of stripping air cover from North Africa, because ‘opposition there, they both seemed to think, is just about ready to fold-up anyhow’. With more acuity than anyone on the British side could manage, MacVeagh advised Roosevelt that ‘we should not give way to wishful thinking’.32

But the wishful thinking went on, and in effort to bring it to life, de Guingand remained in Greece after the Athens conference, reconnoitring positions along the Aliakmon river north of Mount Olympus. Disguised as a press correspondent, de Guingand was moved by the hospitality of the Greek people — despite their ‘miserable’ poverty, ‘we could never have received greater kindness from the people amongst whom we mixed’.33 As if the wartime miseries of the Greeks were not sufficient, de Guingand stopped at Larisa in central Greece on his way back to Athens, and was caught there in an earthquake that flattened the town. Fortunately, his hotel was the only modern concrete building in Larisa, and he survived to help pick over the wreckage: ‘in the remains of a building in which we started work there were various limbs showing from out of the debris’.34 The only good fortune to befall the inhabitants was that many civilians had already left the town to escape the Italian bombing.

Anglo–Greek defence lines
Greece, 1940–41

The Athens agreement that propelled de Guingand through central Greece was considered at a meeting of the British War Cabinet on 24 February, which Menzies, newly arrived in London, attended. The War Cabinet endorsed the campaign: Menzies, who was caustic in his diary about what he thought to be the uncritical compliance of Churchill’s ministers, nevertheless also gave it his support, subject to the use of Australian forces being referred back to his own cabinet.

While the power brokers in London weighed up Eden’s diplomatic efforts, the foreign secretary himself was on his way to Turkey, hoping to add another parapet to the Balkan front. However, he and the rest of the British delegation found the Turks even less enthusiastic about Churchill’s fantasies. Displaying more realism than the British, the Italian ambassador to Turkey understood that the Turks were determined to keep out of the war: ‘The Turkish ideal is that the last German soldier should fall upon the last Russian corpse.’35 While they waited for that happy day, the Turks did everything they could to stay out of the fighting. When Eden and company arrived in Ankara on 26 February, they found the Turks utterly unwilling to give any commitments to joint operations against the Germans.

The diplomatic position for Britain deteriorated further on 1 March, with the news that German forces had entered Bulgaria. The obvious implication was that an attack on Greece would soon follow, and this development provoked a crisis among the Allies. The Greeks had not yet moved their troops to the Vermion-Olympus line in accordance with what the British thought had been firm undertakings to do so at the 19 February conference. After the war, Papagos pointed out that the Greek undertakings had been conditional on the British obtaining a definitive answer from Yugoslavia as to that country’s intentions, the issue being that if she joined the common cause, Salonika would have to be held, and the withdrawal from the Bulgarian frontier to the Vermion-Olympus line could not proceed.36

The British were of the understanding that no such condition attached to the movements agreed on 22 February, and were aghast when the Germans entered Bulgaria without the redeployment of Greek forces having been made. Post-war British accounts would rail against Papagos for this alleged perfidy; but in his own reports, Papagos gave a detailed account of what he believed had and had not been said.37 The delay in establishing the Vermion line provoked another round of whirlwind diplomacy. Wavell hurried back to Athens on 3 March, and at a meeting with George II and Papagos the following day, a compromise was reached — the Greek forces already allocated to the Metaxas Line would remain there, but what little was left of Papagos’ general reserve would be allocated to the British. The rationale here was that if Yugoslavia fought, a link could be made with that country through Salonika; and if she stayed neutral, a withdrawal from the Bulgarian frontier could still be made.

This compromise allowed the embarkation of British forces to begin on 5 March, with the first echelon arriving at Pireaus three days later. While the troops were on-board, the politicians responsible for their fate began to position themselves to avoid the consequences. The British War Cabinet, including the visiting Menzies, was despondent about the Greek failure to adhere to the scheme of 22 February, and Churchill cabled Eden (still in the Middle East) on 6 March. His choice of pronouns was instructive: ‘Grave Imperial issues are raised by committing New Zealand and Australian troops to an enterprise which, as you say, has become even more hazardous. We are bound to lay before the Dominions Governments your and Chiefs of Staff appreciation.’ (ital. added) 38

Churchill was not the only one ducking for political cover. From London, Menzies cabled the deputy prime minister in Canberra, Arthur Fadden, on 7 March. In this communication, Menzies indicated his displeasure at the British agreeing to changes in the campaign strategy without consultation, but assured the Australian cabinet that Blamey and Freyberg were agreeable to the changes that had been made as a result of Wavell’s latest mission to Athens. The Australian cabinet was therefore puzzled when Blamey himself cabled to Canberra, asking for permission to present his views on the campaign. Permission was duly granted, and the Australian ministers were dumbfounded when Blamey’s appreciation arrived on 10 March. Contrary to every assurance given by Menzies about Blamey’s satisfaction with the expedition, the Australian general made clear that, in his view, it had no prospect of success:

In view of the Germans’ much proclaimed intention to drive us off the continent wherever we appear, landing of this small British force would be most welcome to them as it gives good reason to attack … Military operation extremely hazardous in view of the disparity between opposing forces in number and training.39

Blamey left it to the Australian cabinet to evaluate whether political issues, such as neutral opinion, justified the campaign.

All this placed Menzies in a difficult position. On arrival in England in late February, the Australian prime minister was indulging in political games to test whether he could garner enough support from critics of Churchill from within the British Establishment to force his way permanently into the British War Cabinet, with the long-term aim of becoming British prime minister himself.40 Those critics revolved around David Lloyd George, the ‘Welsh Wizard’ who had led Britain as prime minister in the last years of the First World War. Unlike Churchill, who was committed to fighting Hitler until complete victory had been attained, no matter what the cost, Lloyd George and his cronies were open to a compromise peace — one that would leave the British Empire intact while allowing Hitler to keep his stranglehold on Europe. While strongly committed to the empire, like Lloyd George, Menzies at this time was struggling to see how Hitler could be beaten, an outlook that led him into the elderly Welshman’s orbit. Menzies’ problem was that while defeat in Greece might increase pressure on Churchill, it was also sure to cripple his own government back in Canberra.

In the meantime, Menzies was stuck with the support he had already given to the Greek expedition, notwithstanding the untimely criticisms of it by the head of the Australian army in the Mediterranean. Ultimately, Churchill’s political imperatives with the Americans would prevail over purely military merit. This was neatly summarised by the New Zealand cabinet in a cable to London on 9 March: to abandon the Greeks ‘would be to destroy the moral basis of our cause (and) invite results greater in their potential damage to us than any failure of the contemplated operation’.41 Churchill could hardly have put it better, particularly when, two days later, the US Senate voted the Lend Lease Bill into law.

Despite the lack of harmony between the British and Greeks over preparations to meet the Germans, events through the rest of March 1941 ran in favour of the allies, on both land and sea. In six days from 9 March, the Greeks defeated yet another large-scale Italian offensive. Keen to seek a victory before Germany intervened in the Balkans, the Italians committed 12 divisions to an attack between the Aoos and Apsos Rivers. The result for Mussolini was merely military repetition: the Greeks held fast, the Italian attacks were badly handled, and the front line scarcely moved.42

With the Greeks still holding firm in Albania, British hopes were bolstered still further, on the diplomatic front and also at sea. As they had with Turkey, the British attempted to recruit Yugoslavia to the Balkan Front. Wilson, fresh from his superfluous contribution to the Libyan offensive, was designated by his benefactor Wavell as the commander of the force to go to Greece, having been marketed to the Greeks as the inspiration behind the offensive in Cyrenaica: his presence would apparently reassure the Greek high command that Britain was ‘giving her best’ to the new campaign.43 Abandoning his uniform and, dressed as a civilian, Wilson met with an officer of the Yugoslav general staff to discuss possible co-operation. Perhaps the Yugoslavs found Wilson’s offers of assistance no more impressive than his code-name — Mr Watt. In any event, they declined British proposals for a defence pact. Instead, the Yugoslav regent, Prince Paul, met with the Germans at Vienna on 24 March, and signed a treaty of mutual co-operation.

What followed was one of the most hopelessly courageous acts of national self-sacrifice in the entire war. The Yugoslav officer corps, and much of the rest of the country, repudiated the pact with Germany. A coup followed, in which the prime minister, Dragisa Cvetkovic, was arrested, and a new cabinet installed, led by a Serbian air force general, Dusan Simovic. Having defied Hitler, the Yugoslavs could only prepare themselves for the inevitable onslaught; but for Churchill, it seemed his Balkan ambitions might yet be fulfilled.

British optimism was also inflated by the efforts of the Royal Navy. Moving the army to Greece was the responsibility of the commander of the British Mediterranean Fleet, Vice-Admiral Andrew Browne Cunningham. Short in stature, ‘with alert eyes, a high broad head, aggressive ears and jaw’, Cunningham had a keen sense of humour that did not extend to tolerating either fools or inefficiency.44

Known as ‘A.B.C.’ throughout the Mediterranean Fleet, Cunningham would end the war as one of the most accomplished figures in the British military. He had vast experience in Mediterranean waters, having worked alongside the first Anzacs at the Gallipoli landings 26 years before. Then a young destroyer captain, Cunningham had the galling experience of laying off the beaches watching troops being slaughtered by Turkish machine guns, unable to intervene because of orders not to fire on shore for fear of hitting friendly troops. Now in supreme command of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean, Cunningham had learnt from the Gallipoli experience, and invariably opted for decisive action at the critical moment. He feared for the Greek expedition right from the start, believing the campaign was a political gesture with little prospect of military success.

In transporting troops to Greece, Cunningham could at least adhere to the first principle of amphibious warfare — before such an operation can be attempted, those mounting it need command of the sea. Cunningham had already won that from the Italians months earlier. On the night of 11–12 November 1940, Cunningham mauled the Italian fleet as it lay at anchor in the port of Taranto. Aboard the modern aircraft carrier Illustrious, Cunningham had a handful of ancient Fairey Swordfish biplane bombers. Appropriately nicknamed ‘Stringbags’, these aircraft and their crews devastated Mussolini’s capital ships, sinking Italy’s equivalent of the Bismarck, the 35,000-ton Littorio, and two older battleships, the Conte di Cavour and Caio Duilio. Cunningham’s attack revolutionised naval warfare: from it, the Japanese learnt that torpedoes could be successfully dropped in the shallow waters of a port, a discovery that set them on the path to Pearl Harbour. But Italian ignominy that November night was not confined to Taranto. At the same time Cunningham was launching his air strike, another smaller British force, including the Australian cruiser Sydney, destroyed a convoy carrying reinforcements and supplies to the Italian army in Albania. Commanded by Captain John Collins, Sydney was already a famous ship, having emerged the victor in a duel with the Italian light cruiser Bartolomeo Colleoni on 19 July 1940, a classic single-ship action in the buccaneering tradition of the age of sail.

Having wrought such profound material and psychological damage on his enemy at Taranto, Cunningham could at least look to his own role in Greece with some confidence. To get the army safely to Greece, Cunningham used his battle fleet as heavy cover to the troop convoys, and this traffic provoked a decisive battle. Cunningham was soundly positioned for this action, thanks to British code-breakers. They had given Cunningham piecemeal radio intercepts that suggested an Italian sortie, and the Admiral’s staff did the rest with an operational appreciation that concentrated British forces near Crete. Cunningham returned convoys plying between Egypt and Greece to port on 26 March, and completed British preparations with an act of sang froid that would have done the bowls-playing Francis Drake proud as he waited for the Spanish Armada: Cunningham played golf with a junior officer, thereby hoping to put the snooping Japanese consul in Egypt off the scent of a major action. Cunningham’s playing partner had the good sense to allow the admiral to win the round. 45

Slipping out of Alexandria Harbour on the night of 27 March, Cunningham was in pursuit of the only operational Italian battleship Vittorio Veneto, sister to Littorio, which emerged from harbour to attempt to interfere with the British convoys to Greece. Once again, Cunningham adroitly used the long-range hitting power of carrier-borne airpower to telling effect. At 11.27am on 28 March, another attack by torpedo bombers, this time from the carrier Formidable, put a torpedo into Vittorio Veneto, slowing her and turning the action into a stern chase as the Italians fled back to port. A further air strike in the early evening hit the heavy cruiser Pola, and brought her to a stop.

Cunningham now accepted the dangers of a night action, and brought on his battleships Warspite, Barham, and Valiant. In one of the first naval battles using gun-laying radar, Cunningham surprised two other Italian heavy cruisers that had returned to help Pola. Not equipped with radar, the first the Italians knew of their danger was when the British ships turned on their searchlights, blinding the Italian crews. Engaging at ranges below 4,000 metres, the 15-inch guns of the British battleships smashed the Zara and Fiume into blazing wrecks within minutes. In the actions that swirled around the big ships was the Australian cruiser Perth. She was commanded by an English captain under exchange from the Royal Navy, Phillip Bowyer-Smith, but in the reverse, the British 10th Destroyer Flotilla was led H. M. L. Waller, skipper of the Australian destroyer Stuart. Waller, who would later lose his life captaining the Perth against the Japanese in March 1942, had gained a flotilla command after his successful operations along the Libyan coast during the recent offensive. It was British destroyers that found the Pola, still afloat, just before dawn. The trauma of the battle had resulted in discipline on-board breaking down: the British, taking off the crew before sending the Pola to the bottom, found many of the Italian sailors drunk.

The Battle of Matapan was another crushing British naval victory, in the Nelsonian tradition. Cruising over the waters of the action the next morning, British and Australian sailors found a ‘calm sea covered with a film of oil and strewn with rafts and wreckage, hundreds of Italian survivors and many floating corpses’.46

Matapan ensured that the flow of troops into Greece would go on without major interference from the Italian navy. Yet other threats to a safe passage for the Australians and New Zealanders sailing for Athens remained. At Rhodes off the coast of Turkey, and on Karpathos, an island east of Crete, the Italians had air bases that lay on the sea route between Egypt and Greece. Military doctrine, and common sense, required these enemy bases to be cleared to remove this obvious threat, and Operation Mandibles was ready for just that purpose. But the British lacked the shipping resources to get troops to Greece as well as to conquer the Italian bases in the Aegean, so they scrapped Mandibles. Karpathos, in particular, was a dangerous place to leave undisturbed — in effect, an unsinkable aircraft carrier barely 60 kilometres from Crete, and right beside the direct route from Egypt to Greece. Under cover of the victory at Matapan, the men of Force W sailed in peace to Athens. But should they need to return, a dormant serpent might yet rise up to strike them.