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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the southern Reich itself. Zagreb had fallen and the independent Ustasha republic of Croatia had been proclaimed. Rommel had captured Derna, prompting renewed Nazi gloating. ‘Wonderful! wonderful,’ declared Goebbels, ‘stunning blow for London; supplies excellent material for our propaganda. We are on top of the world.’ ⁷¹ The commanders in the Mediterranean agreed, in part, with what the German propaganda chief said. ⁷² Arthur Longmore, the RAF commander, was heard to say that ‘it really didn’t matter’ either way whether they held the Mediterranean. ‘All we had to do was to fall South [into Africa] and let the Mediterranean look after itself.’ ⁷³ Longmore made the further mistake–ultimately fatal to his career–of saying that Eden’s tour of the Mediterranean had been a disaster. ⁷⁴ Such statements played into the narrative that the commanders in the Mediterranean were ‘windy’, and it was only the unyielding will of London that kept them up to the task. ⁷⁵

      In fact, those commanders had formulated a highly risky ‘island strategy’ for the Mediterranean. They would hold Crete, even though they doubted it was really defensible with the Greek mainland in Italo-German hands, and they would hold Tobruk despite the danger that it would become little more than a ‘beleaguered garrison’. ⁷⁶ They warned that Malta was already a ‘beleaguered garrison’. There was finally a sufficiency of antiaircraft guns. But by their very nature anti-aircraft guns were solely defensive. A few days previously Somerville’s Force H had managed to fly Hurricanes onto Malta from the west. But short-range fighters were also solely defensive. What was really needed was that Malta should be reactivated as an offensive base, and for that to happen a much greater effort was needed. Malta needed bombers, reconnaissance aircraft, cruisers, destroyers and submarines. But there was no point sending ships and aircraft if they could not survive German air attacks for more than a few days. The Governor reported that this was unlikely. The Germans had established a moral and physical superiority over the island. Any aircraft that arrived were rapidly destroyed. The morale of the pilots was so low that some of them were combat-ineffective. The RAF commander on the island was having a nervous breakdown. Nevertheless, as a first step, Cunningham ordered a destroyer flotilla to the island. ⁷⁷

      None of these ideas or actions saved the victor of Cape Matapan from the insistent insinuation that he was insufficiently bold. Just as Somerville had done previously, Cunningham argued that it was a misuse of naval power in the Mediterranean to take capital ships close inshore to bombard cities. The ships would be dangerously vulnerable to land-based aircraft. Whatever the psychological impact of their big guns, the bombardments produced few military results. At the moment of crisis it seemed to him futile to waste strength on high-risk, low-return adventures. He was told that this was simply not good enough. German reinforcements were arriving in Tripoli, he had to be seen to do something. ⁷⁸ The ‘whole situation’, Churchill declared, was ‘compromised’ by Cunningham’s inability or unwillingness ‘to close the passage from Italy to Libya, or to break up the port facilities of Tripoli’. ⁷⁹ What was required was a ‘suicide’ mission. ⁸⁰ Cunningham’s reputation was once again saved by another timely victory. He had consistently pointed out that Tripoli was not the only potential terminus for supply ships from Italy. Now that Darlan had thrown his lot in with the Nazis, there was always the possibility that a deal would be struck to allow the Germans to use Tunisian facilities. Already, the Axis convoys used the Tunisian coast as protection from the British. On 16 April 1941 the destroyers that Cunningham had sent to Malta were guided onto to a German convoy off the Tunisian port of Sfax by signals intelligence. The night-time interception combined elan with precise technical skill, winning universal praise. Five German transports were destroyed. ⁸¹

      Although such victories were to prove the key to the future of Mediterranean warfare, at the time the battle of the Kerkenah Bank seemed but a small ray of light. ⁸² Churchill described it as a ‘skirmish’. ⁸³ The high command of the German army might say in private that Rommel’s failure to take Tobruk showed that they had been right all along: he was an overrated Nazi stooge. The British, on the receiving end, could but notice the ferocity of his attacks. ⁸⁴ The Yugoslavs were suing for peace, as were parts of the Greek army. King Peter of Yugoslavia had already arrived in Athens, fleeing into exile. Whilst the Greek forces in the east cooperated with Wilson’s plan to hold the Germans at the Pass of Thermopylae, those on the west coast refused to withdraw to a new defensive line. The western officers maintained that the Italians were the enemy, the English were troublemakers and the Germans were potential friends. Hitler ruled that these ‘brave soldiers’ should be offered ‘honourable surrender’. The generals of the Army of Epirus were a ‘heaven-sent favour’ who would lead Greece into the New Order. ⁸⁵ Despairing of his country, the Greek Prime Minister committed suicide. In the confusion that followed the collapse of central authority in Athens, British officers, diplomats and secret agents all agreed that both the military and political will to resist had collapsed. Few Greek politicians viewed with favour a plan to carry on the fight from Crete. In the end the British stopped looking for a Greek leader to accompany the King into exile and found a Cretan banker, Emanuel Tsouderos, who might serve as politician. The British evacuated their second monarch, King George of the Hellenes, from Athens in a few days. ⁸⁶

      For German aircraft in the Aegean it was a happy, killing time. In one 24-hour period they sank well over twenty ships which were trying to evacuate British troops. Over the same period the bombardment of Tripoli, albeit shorn of its suicidal aspects, proved, as Cunningham had predicted, a damp squib. The only redeeming feature of the operation was that the German air force, so successfully deployed elsewhere, missed the opportunity to sink a British battleship. He had, Cunningham wrote, got away with it by dint of good luck. The cost had been to tie up the Mediterranean Fleet for five days, ‘at the expense of all other commitments and at a time when these commitments were at their most pressing’. ⁸⁷ You have to understand, he signalled London, that ‘the key which will decide the issue of our success or otherwise in holding the Mediterranean lies in air power’. Stop complaining, the reply came back; it was Cunningham’s duty to establish control of the Mediterranean, not to try and slough it off on the air force. ⁸⁸ In despair, Cunningham told Churchill that he understood nothing of what was happening in the Mediterranean. ⁸⁹ He was ‘blind to facts’. ⁹⁰ Churchill’s riposte was that he understood the failings of those in the Mediterranean only too well. He was providing the tools that they were too scared to use. It was he who had ordered a huge convoy of tanks to be sent from the UK to Egypt. It was he who had ordered Somerville to get the convoy through to Malta; it was he who had insisted that Cunningham pick it up on the other side and see it through to its destination. It was he who had overruled naval objections that ‘their chances of getting through the Mediterranean were remote’. ⁹¹ Once more, Cunningham complained, Churchill misrepresented the situation. He was all for the single-minded pursuit of an essential goal, however dangerous, but his actual orders were СКАЧАТЬ