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

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      The mutual disillusion of Whitehall and Grey Pillars was the product of the collision of Cairo strategy with London politics. On the day that Force H sailed from Gibraltar with Churchill’s prized tank convoy, and the Mediterranean Fleet sailed from Alexandria heading west towards Malta, Eden had to give an account of his Mediterranean mission to the House of Commons. Eden’s explanation of the Mediterranean situation on 6 May 1941 was not a happy occasion. The speech was ‘appallingly bad’. He rose to a hostile silence, ‘gave a dim account of his travels and failures’ and sat down to an even more hostile silence. Eden’s enemies said that it was possibly the worst speech of the war. Everyone agreed that it was ‘a complete flop’. ⁹³ As Churchill had always intended, Eden carried the can for the crisis in the Mediterranean. The reviled Foreign Secretary stood as a bulwark for his leader. Churchill–taking a wider view of the war–was more warmly received, and the government survived a vote of confidence with ease. The Mediterranean had raised Eden up, the Mediterranean cast him down. But Eden could not be allowed to fall too far, lest the whole government be dragged down with him. The political strategy Eden had adumbrated in Cairo remained sound–blame the military. The fact had to be established that the government was ‘completely hamstrung’ by the ‘sensational ineptitude of our commanders’. ⁹⁴

      Wavell, holding out the hope of a counter-attack, was for the moment safe. Tobruk was a beacon of hope. Indeed in early May 1941 the German army high command had dispatched a mission to discipline Rommel for his failures in front of the town. ⁹⁵ Cunningham could utter bitter truths because of his glorious victories: Taranto, Matapan and Kerkenah Bank were his shield. Their comrade-in-arms, Arthur Longmore, was less fortunate. He had no such spoils to show. Many in the RAF murmured that he had been too willing to kow-tow to Cunningham, too willing to spread his forces thin in order to support the navy and the army. Instead of trying to make the best of the situation, it should have been his task to celebrate the supremacy of the aeroplane over the ship. Longmore should have forced Cunningham to admit that disaster in the Mediterranean was the navy’s fault. It was Cunningham, and before him Pound, who had padded their budgets with the ridiculous claim that warships could fight planes. If Longmore had few airmen friends, he had even fewer political allies. His pungently expressed pessimism had made him a marked man. Defeat in the Mediterranean was laid at his feet. He was the first Mediterranean commander-in-chief to be sacked.

      In the days immediately after the debate it appeared that a ‘very nervous’ Churchill had been right. Italo-German forces attacked the great tank convoy but ‘the scale was very much less than had been anticipated’. Indeed the attackers did not seem very good at their job. The formations were ill-coordinated, jettisoned their bombs too soon, or carried out brave but ineffective independent attacks. Only one of five big cargo ships was sunk. Observing, Somerville concluded that he had caught the Axis air forces by surprise. In addition, his forces were being helped by the heavy cloud over the Mediterranean. Full of praise for the skill of his captains and aircrews, Somerville concluded, nevertheless, that they had got through only because of the ‘luck of the gods’. The German bomber units had been involved in a complex series of exchanges between Sicily, North Africa and Greece. Their base at Trapani was in confusion. The specialist anti-shipping strike aircraft were away. Cunningham took the convoy off Somerville’s hands some fifty miles off Malta. Three days later he delivered its precious cargo into Alexandria. Like Somerville, Cunningham maintained that he too had been lucky. ‘We got through all right,’ he signalled London, ‘but it mainly due to the extraordinary thick weather experienced off Malta and the whole way to Alexandria.’ ⁹⁶

      This luck soon ran out. At the end of April 1941 Hitler had agreed to a Luftwaffe plan to seize Crete, primarily through the use of air power and parachutists. ⁹⁷ This was to be the last operation in the Mediterranean before the invasion of Russia. Operation Merkur was an air-force plan, to be carried out by air-force generals. Unsurprisingly, the Luftwaffe generals took air superiority very seriously. Whilst Cunningham was still at sea with the tank convoy, his air-force opposite number took the decision to withdraw RAF squadrons from Crete. Before his enforced departure Longmore had always been sceptical about the military logic of a German airborne invasion of Greece. He doubted whether, given the scale of likely casualties, they would try it, and believed that if they did try, ground troops could defeat the effort. In the meantime, however, he argued that the weight of German air attack from captured Greek bases made Cretan airfields too vulnerable to justify the waste of his resources. Thus when the German parachutists started landing, the RAF had largely vacated the island. Its aircraft fought at the edge of their range from Egyptian bases.

      Naval forces sent north of Crete to prevent the Germans reinforcing their airborne troops from the sea proved desperately vulnerable to air attack. Crete was the perfect arena for Stukawaffe. The Stukas were feared by ground troops. If anything they proved even more effective in anti-shipping operations. Their main base on the island of Scarpanto was separated from Crete by the narrow Kaso Strait. The short-range aircraft could thus operate with comfort to the east of Crete. Another base in the Peloponnese was equally well placed for the sea lanes to the west of the island. Even Cyrenaican Stukas could reach ships to the south of Crete. Effectively, Crete was a killing zone. British cruisers and destroyers in particular proved frighteningly vulnerable to attack.

      After three days Cunningham had had enough. He made the unilateral decision to recall his fleet to prevent its slaughter by the Luftwaffe. There had been nothing short of a trial of strength between Mediterranean Fleet and the German air force’: the German air force had won. Not only was Cunningham losing ships, he was losing captains at an even quicker rate as they buckled under the accumulated strain of months of air fear’. ‘I am afraid’, Cunningham admitted, we have to admit defeat and accept the fact that losses are too great to justify us trying to prevent seaborne attacks on Crete. This is a melancholy conclusion but it must be faced.’ There was ‘no hiding the fact’ that ‘the future out here does not look too good for the Fleet’. He persuaded his fellow Mediterranean commanders to defy London again and halt the evacuation of the defeated imperial forces even from the south coast of the island. Crete proved, he could not resist pointing out, what he had been saying for months. His ships had survived only because of the foul Mediterranean winter weather. The glorious Mediterranean spring was a death-bringer. ⁹⁸

       SIX

       Losing the Light

      At the end of her semi-autobiographical novel Friends and Heroes, Olivia Manning tried to sum up what losing Greece meant for the British. She thought that they had lost the light. For refugees fleeing the débâcle, the play of light on the North African shore was ‘too white’. ‘They moved forward to look at the new land, reached thankfully if unwillingly.’ In ‘crossing the Mediterranean’, ‘they had life–a depleted fortune’. ¹ That sense of survival–a life, but depleted fortune–permeated each of the Mediterranean powers. Britain, Italy, France, each survived but none could feel happy with their lot. All three wanted to fight for the Mediterranean, but their capacity to do so was sadly reduced. They could do little more than fall back on mezzi insidiosi, the Mediterranean guerrilla war that the Italians had feared might be their portion in the mid-1930s. The future of their reduced СКАЧАТЬ