The Bitter Sea: The Struggle for Mastery in the Mediterranean 1935–1949. Simon Ball

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      In the end Eden didn’t make it to Benghazi. Flying into a headwind his plane almost ran out of fuel. It landed on Malta in the middle of an air raid, diverted to Crete and finally touched down outside Cairo on 19 February 1941. ²⁴ Despite the difficult journey, Eden came down the steps ‘in his usual excellent form. He had every right to feel cheerful–his timing seemed impeccable. ²⁵

      As Churchill had suspected, the arrival of Eden in Cairo made it very difficult for the military commanders to object too vociferously to the idea of cashing in on the gains made in Cyrenaica. They signed up to the idea of projecting British power north across the Mediterranean. Wavell, Cunningham and Longmore each said a piece on the practical difficulties involved, but lodged no objection in principle. There was none of the outspokenness to which more junior visitors had been treated. When Channon had been in Cairo, Longmore had described Churchill as an adventurer, criticized his grasp of strategy and had ascribed their success up to that point to a mixture of luck and bluff. ²⁶ Eden, on the other hand, was able to report a remarkable degree of unity amongst all the political, diplomatic and military leaders gathered in Cairo. They agreed that they would look north instead of south-east, towards Abyssinia, or west, towards Tripoli. They agreed that if they were looking north it should be towards Greece rather than towards Turkey The dream of whipping up the Turks remained strong for some, but the consensus was that the Turks would do what they always did, make nice noises but play the sides off against one another. In any case there was a limit to the military aid that could be sent north and Greece, unlike Turkey, was under immediate threat. They signed up to the statement that if everything was thrown into assisting the Greeks as quickly as possible then there was a ‘fair chance’ of preventing the country being overrun. ²⁷

      Armed with this assessment Eden left Cairo for Athens. There was, however, a difference between what appeared in formal statements and the private thoughts of those involved. The Greek decision was in one sense easy to make. Eden provided a very firm political steer. It was thus ‘respectable’ to sign up. At the same time the bullish statements emanating from Cairo, and the impression that the men on the ground were gung-ho for intervention stilled any qualms that might be felt in London. In their heart of hearts, however, most of those who discussed the problem feared that ‘we must eventually be beaten there’. ²⁸ There was for the moment, however, a conspiracy of optimism. In Athens, Eden and his entourage gave no sign of any doubts they might have felt about the enterprise–even though they concluded whilst they were there that Yugoslavia was likely to side with the Germans and that Salonika–the Aegean terminus of the railway line that ran from central Europe to the Mediterranean–was indefensible.

      Immediately on his return from Athens, Eden flew out to Adana near Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, boarding a train for Ankara. He reached the Turkish capital on 26 February. The Turks reacted just as expected. They said they would on no account aid Greece. They would fight only if attacked. Yet Eden sent home ‘jaunty and self-satisfied’ telegrams that talked of the ‘frankness’ and ‘friendliness’ and the ‘realism’ of the Turks. Had, some wondered, his head been turned by the welcome choreographed by Ataturk’s heirs? As his train pulled into Ankara, Eden had stood in the transparent observation car at the end of the train. The huge crowd assembled to meet him had climbed onto the railway lines and thronged round the carriage trying to catch sight of the visitor, cheering his triumphal entry. ²⁹ The truth was that the Turks wouldn’t do ‘a damned thing’. ³⁰ Having completed his mission in Turkey to his own–if no one else’s–satisfaction, Eden returned to Athens on 2 March. There he presided over the signature of a formal military aid agreement by Dill and his Greek opposite number, Alexander Papagos. Whilst this document was finalized in Athens, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia was having a deeply disturbing meeting with Hitler in Austria. He was told that the day had come when he must openly ally with the Nazis.

      There can be little doubt that Eden’s mission in the Mediterranean achieved exactly what he and Churchill had intended from the outset. He had marshalled the military in such a way that no one could subsequently claim that either of them were dangerous adventurers–the charge of the 1930s, still heard sotto voce, amongst many Conservatives. He had ensured that Greece rather than Turkey would be the focus of British efforts on the northern shore. He had achieved a firm military agreement. All of this news was received with much tut-tutting in London. Eden had, it seemed, demonstrated that if you let a man off the leash in the Mediterranean, particularly in the east, he would soon be running his own show without regard for higher authority. In Greece as in Turkey, it was said, Eden’s head had been turned by the obsequies of his hosts. British policy had become a vanity. ‘He has’, the Cabinet agreed, ‘really run rather ahead of his instructions and agreed to things which the Greeks will take as commitments.’ ³¹

      At the beginning of March 1941 Churchill sent a rather disingenuous message to Eden, suggesting that he might have overreached himself. They had agreed their joint aims before Eden had left. Whilst he had been away, however, the situation had changed. The Germans had demonstrated that the Suez Canal was vulnerable. At the end of January 1941 their bombers had started flying long-range missions out of Rhodes. The advanced magnetic mines they dropped into the Canal closed it for weeks at a time. The Canal defences had been revealed as weak and ill prepared. ³² The crippled Illustrious barely managed to escape the Mediterranean by this route. The Germans gloated over their success. ³³ Projections based on the early success of the mining campaign suggested that less than half the supplies needed to keep the army in Africa active might arrive via this ‘safe’ route. With the southern windpipe constricted, it might not be wise to head north. The threat did not come from mainland Greece but from the Greek islands. Those islands had already yielded a warning about the dangers of a northern campaign. An attempt to seize the tiny island of Castelrizzo had been a farce, ‘a rotten business and reflected little credit on anyone’. The expedition’s naval commander had had a mental breakdown, and the troops landed proved incapable of defending themselves against the ‘unbelievably enterprising’ Italians. ³⁴

      Neither Yugoslavia nor Turkey would fight. The Yugoslavs had ‘sold their souls to the Devil’. All the Balkan peoples were ‘trash’. ³⁵ Vichyites and Francoists were hungrily eyeing British weakness. Franco and Mussolini had met, as had Franco and Pétain. Franco’s men were becoming more flagrant in the aid they gave to German submarines operating from Spanish ports. ³⁶ Somerville had complained that in seizing French ships his own men had been forced to kill ‘harmless’ civilians and children. ‘It seems to me’, he wrote, ‘that we are just as much of a dictator country as either Germany or Italy and one day the great British public will wake up and ask what we are fighting for.’ ³⁷ Darlan could hardly improve on Somerville’s formulation of the issue. He announced to the newly arrived American ambassador that he would ‘first use his propaganda system to explain to the French people that Mr Churchill is responsible for their lack of food, and second, he will use his Navy to convoy French merchant ships and sink any British ships that interfere’. He had repeated the threat in a carefully staged conference with the СКАЧАТЬ