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1 MUSSOLINI GAMBLES

At the outbreak of war in 1939, Hitler had no intention of waging war in the Mediterranean, and asserted his determination not to commit German resources there. It was his fellow dictator Benito Mussolini who yearned to create an Italian lake, and on his own initiative launched the offensives which brought conflict to the region. In the year after the fall of France in June 1940, only in the African and Balkan theatres did Allied and Axis armies clash. Even after Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, the Mediterranean remained for three more years the focus of the Western Allied military contribution to the struggle against Hitler. All this was the consequence of Mussolini’s decision to become a protagonist in a struggle for which his nation was pitifully ill-equipped.

Hitler possessed in the Wehrmacht a formidable instrument for pursuing his ambitions. The Duce, by contrast, sought to play the warlord with incompetent commanders, unwilling soldiers and inadequate weapons. Italy was relatively poor, with a GDP less than half the size of Britain’s, and barely one-third per capita; it produced only one-sixth as much steel. The nation mobilised its economy less effectively for the Second World War than for the First. Even in the sunshine days of Mussolini’s relationship with Hitler, such was the Nazis’ contempt for their ally that 350,000 Italian workers in Germany were treated little better than slaves; Rome’s ambassador in Berlin was obliged to devote most of his energies to pleading for some amelioration of their working conditions. While Hitler cherished an enduring personal loyalty to Mussolini, whom he had once seen as a mentor, most Germans mistrusted and mocked Italy’s leader. Berliners claimed that whenever the Duce met the Führer, barrel-organ grinders played the popular tune ‘Du Kannst nicht Treue sein’ – ‘You Cannot be Faithful’. In 1936, when a foolish woman at a party asked Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg who would win the next war, he is alleged to have answered, ‘Madam, I cannot tell you that. Only one thing I can say: whoever has Italy on his side is bound to lose.’ There was a contemptuous joke in Nazi Party circles of Hitler’s lackey Wilhelm Keitel reporting, ‘My Führer, Italy has entered the war!’ Hitler answers, ‘Send two divisions. That should be enough to finish them.’ Keitel says, ‘No, my Führer, not against us, but with us.’ Hitler says, ‘That’s different. Send ten divisions.’

In the early months of the war, there was a droll consensus between the Germans and British against initiating Middle Eastern operations. So weak was Britain’s global position that its chiefs of staff set their faces against committing forces there. Once Mussolini joined the Axis, the Mediterranean became valueless as a shipping route to the East, in the face of enemy air and naval dominance. The head of the British Army, Gen. Sir John Dill, preferred to dispatch to Asia such men and weapons as could be spared, to strengthen the Empire’s defences against the looming Japanese threat. Churchill, however, would have none of this: since it was impossible to give battle on the Continent, he determined to do so in Africa. In the summer of 1940 he shipped precious tanks to Britain’s Middle East C-in-C, Gen. Sir Archibald Wavell. Other precautionary measures were adopted: 16,000 Gibraltarians – all but 4,000 of the Rock’s civilian population – were evacuated first to North Africa, thence to England. It was likely that seizure of the fortress at the gates of the Mediterranean would become an Axis objective, perhaps with the collusion of Spain’s dictator, Gen. Francisco Franco.

The Royal Navy had a relatively large Mediterranean fleet, but its C-in-C, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, recognised its vulnerability when almost bereft of air cover – as Churchill did not. For more than two years after Italy entered the war and France left it, Cunningham’s forces remained grievously disadvantaged by shortage of both carriers and land bases from which to operate aircraft. Huge expanses of sea were beyond the range of British fighters flying from Gibraltar, Malta, Egypt or Palestine. The Axis, by contrast, could strike at will from an almost unlimited choice of airfields. It was remarkable that between 1940 and 1943 the Royal Navy asserted itself with some success in the Mediterranean, under such handicaps of means and strategic weakness. Cunningham and his warship captains displayed a skill, dash and courage which went far to compensate for the paper superiority of the Italian battlefleet.

Ashore, the war in the North African desert engaged only a handful of British and imperial divisions, while most of Churchill’s army stayed at home. This was partly to provide security against invasion, partly for lack of weapons and equipment, partly owing to shortage of shipping to move and supply troops overseas. The clashes between desert armies were little more significant in determining the outcome of the global conflict than the tournaments between bands of French and English knights which provided entr’actes during the Hundred Years War. But the North African contest caught the imagination of the Western world, and achieved immense symbolic significance in the minds of the British people.

Hostilities were conducted upon a narrow strip of sand along the Mediterranean littoral, seldom more than forty miles wide, which was navigable by tanks. For thirty-two months between September 1940 and May 1943, the rival armies struggled for mastery in a series of seesaw campaigns which eventually traversed more than 2,000 miles of coastal territory. Shifts of advantage were heavily influenced by the distances each side was obliged to move fuel, ammunition, food and water to its fighting units: the British fared best in 1941–42 when closest to their bases in the Nile Delta; Axis forces when nearer to Tripoli. It is foolish to romanticise any aspect of the war, given the universal reality that almost every participant would have preferred to be in his own home; that to die trapped in a blazing tank was no less terrible at Sollum or Benghazi than at Stalingrad. But the emptiness of desert battlefields, where there was neither much slaughter of innocents nor destruction of civilian property, rendered absent some of the horrors imposed by collateral damage in populated regions.

While campaigning in the desert was never comfortable, in the protracted intervals between battles it was preferable to winter Russia or monsoon Asia. It is sometimes suggested that in North Africa there was ‘war without hate’. This is an exaggeration, because there was certainly fear, which bred spasms of animosity; most men in the heat of action feel ill-will towards those seeking to kill them. But extremes of brutality, especially the murder of prisoners, were generally avoided by both sides. Italians and Germans, British, Indians, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans subsisted and fought in a wild and alien environment where none had any emotional stake. They engaged in a common struggle against sand, flies, heat and thirst, even before the enemy entered the reckoning.

In the autumn of 1940, Mussolini was impatient to the point of obsession to achieve some conspicuous Italian success to justify seizing a share of the booty from anticipated Axis victory. Though ignorant of both military and naval affairs, he craved foreign conquests to ennoble fascism and stiffen the frail spirit of his people at home. ‘The army has need of glory,’ he said. Libya, an Italian colony, adjoined British-controlled Egypt, where Wavell had a small imperial force of one British division, 7th Armoured, together with an Indian and a New Zealand formation, soon reinforced by two Australian divisions. Britain’s presence was anomalous to the verge of absurdity: Egypt was an independent sovereign state ruled by King Farouk, where the British supposedly exercised rights only to defend the Suez Canal. The Cairo government did not formally enter hostilities until February 1945. The sympathies of most Egyptians lay with the Axis, which they believed would liberate them from more than seventy years of British domination. Indeed, such views were widespread among Arab nationalists throughout the Middle East, and were stimulated by Hitler’s 1940 successes. That August, the secretary of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem visited Berlin to discuss fomenting a revolt in Iraq. In addition, he suggested, prospective rebels in Palestine and Transjordan might be armed with weapons provided by the Vichy French in Syria. The aspiring insurgents’ principal demand was that the Nazis should commit themselves to the future independence of the Arab states.

Yet in 1940 Germany’s leaders were not much interested in Muslim revolts, less still in Arab freedom. Moreover, at this stage they conceded to Italy the principal diplomatic role in the region. Mussolini’s ambitions for extending his African empire were wholly incompatible with local peoples’ aspirations: in pursuit of them, his generals had already massacred many thousands of Libyan and Abyssinian tribesmen. Only in 1941 did the Germans engage with Arab nationalists, notably in Iraq and Persia. Their attempted interventions there were late, half-hearted, and easily frustrated by forces dispatched to reassert British hegemony.

In Egypt in September 1939, Britain invoked a clause of its treaty with Farouk which obliged him, in the event of a war, to provide ‘all the facilities and assistance in his power, including the use of ports, aerodromes and means of communication’. Thereafter, the British treated the country as a colonial possession, governed through their ambassador Sir Miles Lampson. They based their Mediterranean fleet at Alexandria, and in February 1942 deployed troops in Cairo to stifle a nascent Egyptian rebellion. In the course of the war, desperate hunger among the peasantry caused several food riots; the plight of the Egyptian felaheen contrasted starkly with the sybaritic lifestyle of the British military colony centred upon Middle East headquarters, Shepheard’s Hotel, the Gezira Sporting Club and a nexus of barracks, supply and repair bases throughout the Nile Delta, where contempt for ‘the wogs’ was almost universal.

American visitors were dismayed by the lassitude and imperial condescension of the British in Egypt, who seemed to regard the conflict being waged in the western wilderness as a mere event in a sporting calendar. This perception was unjust to those doing the fighting and dying: it failed to recognise the British Army’s tradition of seeking to make war with a light heart. But a core of truth about the North African campaign was that the British role until late 1942 was characterised by an amateurishness that was occasionally inspired, but more often crippled its endeavours.

So large was the paper strength of Mussolini’s armies that in the summer of 1940 it seemed possible they would expel the British from northern and eastern Africa. There were 600,000 Italian and colonial troops in Libya and Abyssinia, confronting fewer than a hundred thousand men under Wavell’s orders in the Middle East, Kenya, Sudan and Somaliland. In August, to Churchill’s fury the Italians seized Somaliland almost bloodlessly. Mussolini’s people had little stomach for hard fighting, but a hearty appetite for victories. During the brief period when cheap African conquests seemed in prospect while the Luftwaffe’s efforts against Britain were visibly flagging, an Italian journalist wrote proudly, and with an earnestness that reflected his people’s genius for self-delusion: ‘We want to reach Suez with our own forces alone; perhaps we will win the war and not the Germans.’ But Mussolini’s operations were handicapped by his confusion about both means and purposes: at home, he demobilised part of his army to bring in the harvest. Ignoring the vital principle of concentration of force, he prepared to launch an invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece. He failed to exploit a critical window of opportunity to seize Malta. In North Africa, his commanders lacked equipment, skill and resolve. In September 1940, in a gesture symbolic of Italy’s generals’ insouciance about the struggle, the Ministry of War in Rome reverted to its peacetime practice of closing for business each day at 2 p.m.

An Italian diplomat vented his disgust on the mood he encountered during a visit to Milan: ‘Everyone thinks only of eating, enjoying themselves, making money and relaying witticisms about the great and powerful. Anyone who gets killed is a jerk…He who supplies the troops with cardboard shoes is considered a sort of hero.’ A young Italian officer wrote home from Libya: ‘We’re trying to fight this war as though it were a colonial war in Africa. But this is a European war…fought with European weapons against a European enemy. We take too little account of this in building our stone forts and equipping ourselves with such luxury.’

Mussolini dismissed Hitler’s offer of two armoured divisions for North Africa, which might have been decisive in securing a swift Axis victory: he was determined to keep the Germans out of his own jealously defined sphere of influence. A quarter of Italy’s combat aircraft were dispatched to join the Luftwaffe’s attack on Britain, leaving Italian troops in Libya almost without air support, while a large army in Albania – occupied by Mussolini in 1939 – was held in readiness to attack either Yugoslavia or Greece, as the Duce deemed expedient. The Italians made policy and strategy in the belief that they were participating in the residual military operations of a short war soon to conclude in Axis victory. Mussolini was fearful that the British might make terms with Hitler before he had achieved his own conquests. Instead, Italy would become the only nation whose strategic fortunes were decisively affected by events in Africa, where it lost progressively twenty-six divisions, half its air force and its entire tank inventory, together with any vestige of military credibility.

The British began operations in the summer of 1940 with a succession of raids across the Libyan border. Marshal Rodolfo Graziani deployed some 250,000 men against 36,000 British in Egypt and a further 27,000 – including a division of horsed yeomanry – in Palestine. Mussolini’s commander had made his reputation by destroying the Abyssinian army in 1935 with liberal infusions of poison gas. In 1940 he showed himself a resolute defeatist with no stomach for battle. Graziani advanced cautiously into Egypt in September until, unnerved by the British show of aggression and a gross overestimate of Wavell’s strength, he halted and dug in south and east of Sidi Barrani. One of his generals, Annibale Bergonzoli, christened ‘electric whiskers’ by the British, found some of his artillery officers so craven that during British air attacks he was obliged to hit and kick them back to their guns from the trenches where they had taken refuge. A three-month pause ensued, during which Mussolini chafed, still anxious that the war might come to an end before he had conquered Egypt; Churchill, meanwhile, was equally impatient at the delay before Wavell was ready to launch his counter-strokes.

On 19 January 1941, Maj. Gen. William Platt led a small army from Sudan into Eritrea, seizing the formidable fortress of Keren after heavy fighting on 27 March, at a cost of 536 killed, mostly Indian soldiers, and 3,229 wounded. Meanwhile in February, another British force under Gen. Alan Cunningham, brother of the admiral, advanced from Kenya into Somaliland, marched up the coast to Mogadishu, then turned north for a thrust 774 miles overland to Harar. By 6 April, Cunningham had taken Addis Ababa, Abyssinia’s capital, having suffered only 501 battle casualties. Fighting persisted for another six months against pockets of Italian resistance, but the Abyssinian campaign was crowned with British success, after some hard fighting on short commons. Though combat losses were few, 74,550 men succumbed to sickness or accidents and 744 of them died, as did 15,000 camels supporting the British advance. More than 300,000 Italians became prisoners.

But the most dramatic offensive took place in Egypt, where on 6 December 1940 Wavell unleashed Lt. Gen. Sir Richard O’Connor’s Operation Compass against Graziani. This began tentatively, with modest objectives, then expanded dramatically amid stunning success. Imperial forces swept into Libya, capturing Italians in tens of thousands. A British gunner described one of O’Connor’s racing columns, ‘loaded with the everyday paraphernalia for making war in the wilderness – rations, ammunition, petrol and that most precious of all requirements, 4-gallon flimsy aluminium containers of water, all carried in three-ton canvas-covered Bedfords. [There were] 5-cwt Morris Scout trucks with the section officer or battery captain standing up in the passenger seat, divisional pennants fluttering in the wind-stream; a couple of RHA 25-pounder guns, cylindrical water bowsers skittering on two wheels behind a 15-cwt. Sometimes a troop of Hussars’ light tanks, their tracks screeching and rattling and bouncing over the boulders, their long, slender wireless aerials bobbing and waving. The rolling convoy moved in unison, fanned out in open order, fifty yards separating each vehicle, sand streaming from the wheels like spray in heavy rain.’

The Italian defences crumbled with extraordinary speed. ‘They can’t take it,’ an Australian soldier wrote home contemptuously. ‘They can’t take pain (I saw hundreds of their wounded…all in tears), they can’t take shells (they flinch when one drops a hundred yards away), the sound of British tanks terrorised them and the sight of our bayonets was enough to make them throw up their hands. Fascism…pooh!’ Likewise an officer: ‘All Australians now know that one Aussie is still equal to…50 Italians – almost, anyway.’ Lt. Tom Bird employed a cricketing metaphor: ‘One can’t help feeling that it is a great bit of luck to have been able to have a practice over or two, so to speak, with the Italians. What more delightful people to fight could there be?’ Nothing went right for the Italian war effort. Mussolini’s propaganda department in Rome made a film designed to demonstrate the superiority of fascist manhood. To this end, a fight was staged between former world heavyweight champion Primo Carnera and Kay Masaki, a black South African taken prisoner in the desert. Masaki had never entered a boxing ring in his life, and was knocked down when the cameras began to roll. He picked himself up, however, and struck Carnera a blow that rendered him unconscious.

To the outside world, the relative insignificance of Britain’s desert triumphs was plain. Romanian Mihail Sebastian wrote on 7 February 1941: ‘It goes without saying that the whole of the war in Africa (however interesting and dramatic) is only a sideshow. The struggle is between the British and the Germans; that is where everything will be decided.’ He was right, of course, but in blitzed London there was rejoicing. By 9 February, O’Connor’s force had advanced five hundred miles and taken El Agheila; the road west towards Tripoli lay open. Thereafter, to the bewilderment of ordinary soldiers, the advance ended; deep in the sands of Mussolini’s colony they halted, and languished. ‘Every day was the same as the day before,’ gunner Doug Arthur wrote wearily. ‘Saturday could have been Monday, Friday could have been Tuesday, even Pancake Tuesday, for all we knew…we didn’t know what was really going on, where we were going or what faced us when we got there.’

They were going no further in Libya. Four of Wavell’s divisions, including the New Zealand division and much of the Australian contingent, were transferred to Greece to meet the anticipated German assault there. It was afterwards claimed that the Greek diversion cost the British a unique opportunity to clear the North African coast and regain control of the southern Mediterranean. This seems doubtful: Lt. Gen. Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps was already landing at Tripoli, to succour the faltering Italians and thereafter dominate the campaign; the British supply line was stretched to its limits; O’Connor’s tanks and vehicles were almost worn out. Fighting the Italians flattered the capabilities of Western Desert Force, while the simultaneous Abyssinian campaign was a heavy drain on imperial resources. Even if none of Wavell’s men had gone to Greece, it is unlikely that the British were strong enough to complete the conquest of North Africa.

During the three months before the British offensive in Libya petered out in February 1941, it achieved an important marginal impact, unrecognised at the time: Compass contributed to keeping Spain out of the war. Franco faced the same dilemmas as Mussolini, but reached different conclusions. He was ideologically enthusiastic towards the Axis and wished to share the spoils of Allied defeat. But he was cautious about exposing his country, ravaged by recent civil war, to the hazards of a new struggle until the British had been reduced to impotence. From 1939 onwards Spain was no neutral, but a belligerent-in-waiting: Spanish foreign minister Serrano Suner, in particular, was wholeheartedly committed to joining the Axis cause. The shrewd Portuguese ambassador in Madrid, Pedro Teotonio Pereira, reported to Lisbon on 27 May 1940: ‘Beyond doubt Spain continues to hate the Allies…German victories are received with joy.’ Pereira asserted that almost all Spaniards wanted Germany to triumph, and regretted only that the destitution of their country made it inopportune to commit themselves immediately to its cause: ‘They do not judge the war to be infamous, but themselves in a bad position to take part.’

Franco intended to fight, but only if Germany accepted his stiff tariff: ‘Spain cannot enter por gusto [for fun],’ he told Hitler during their meeting at Hendaye on the Franco–Spanish border in October 1940. A secret protocol to the Spanish–German accord, finally signed in November, declared Madrid’s readiness to join the Tripartite Pact: ‘In fulfilment of its obligations as an ally, Spain will intervene in the present war of the Axis Powers against England after they have provided it with the military support necessary for its preparedness…Germany will grant economic aid to Spain by supplying it with food and raw materials.’ The Economic Ministry in Madrid drew up a formidable shopping list: 400,000 tons of fuel, half a million tons of coal, 200,000 tons of wheat, 100,000 tons of cotton and vast consignments of fertiliser.

Franco’s military planners busied themselves preparing a possible takeover of Portugal as well as Gibraltar. Thereafter, however, relations with Germany soured. The Spanish dictator was galled when Hitler refused to concede to him French colonies in Africa, partly because Germany still hoped to enlist Vichy France as an active ally. Mussolini strongly opposed Spanish belligerence, partly because he was a competitor with Franco for the same French colonies, and also because he sought unreserved personal hegemony over the Mediterranean littoral. Hitler, in his turn, had his own shopping list, wishing to appropriate some of Franco’s colonies as German overseas bases: Spanish Equatorial Guinea, Fernando Po and one of the Canary Islands. The most intractable sticking point in negotiations was that the Spanish leader, like Mussolini, was unwilling to allow large numbers of German troops into his country. He admired Hitler vastly, and cherished illusions that the Führer would create a new European polity in which Spain, for so long an abused underdog, would be conceded its rightful place in the sun. But he had no intention of allowing his country to become a Nazi fiefdom.

Hitler’s key strategic objective was seizure of Gibraltar. Having scant faith in the Spanish army to accomplish this, he prepared plans for the Wehrmacht to do so. For Franco, however, in the words of historian Stanley Payne, ‘it was a point of both honor and national interest that Spanish forces carry out the operation’. An impasse developed: the Germans would not provide Spain with the weapons and supplies for Franco to make an attempt on Gibraltar, and Franco would not grant the Wehrmacht rights of passage for its own assault. He knew the Spanish people were unwilling to accept the sacrifices of a new war. His generals were hostile, not least because the British were paying them a fortune in secret bribes – $13 million in all – to keep their country neutral. As long as Britain remained undefeated, the Royal Navy could blockade Spain, with devastating economic consequences. Once again, British sea power exercised an important, though invisible, influence upon events.

British successes in Libya and Abyssinia further discouraged Franco from any hasty commitment to fight, at precisely the moment when Hitler was ready to dispatch tanks and troops to take Gibraltar. On 7 December 1940, the Abwehr’s chief Admiral Wilhelm Canaris met Franco in Madrid, to seek his agreement that German forces should start moving into Spain within a month. Franco refused. Canaris cabled Berlin on the 10th, saying that Spain would not move as long as the British maritime threat persisted. Hitler lost patience, and Operation Felix, the Gibraltar attack, was shelved. By February 1941, his attention had switched irrevocably eastwards. He needed every division for his intended invasion of Russia. His interest in Gibraltar waned, and with it Germany’s willingness to pay an extravagant price for Spanish belligerency. Spain remained an active friend of the Axis for almost two years thereafter, until the successful Allied invasion of North Africa made obvious the turn of the tide. Italian aircraft bombing Gibraltar refuelled at Spanish airfields; vital commodities including tungsten continued to flow from Spain to Germany; the country swarmed with Nazi diplomats and spies, who were provided with every facility to impede the Allied war effort. Franco sent a token division to assist Hitler’s invasion of Russia; Luftwaffe weather and reconnaissance aircraft flew from Spanish bases until 1945. But Spain maintained nominal neutrality. Gibraltar remained unconquered, and thus the gateway to the Mediterranean stayed open to Allied shipping.

If Franco had joined the war, the inevitable fall of Gibraltar would have doomed Malta. It would have been much harder – perhaps impossible – for the British to hold the Middle East. The damage to their prestige and confidence would have been immense, and Churchill might not have survived as prime minister. Franco deserved no gratitude from the Allies, because cautious Spanish diplomacy was driven by self-interest; he held back only because he overvalued his own worth to the Axis. But the outcome was much to the advantage of both Britain and Spain.

Rommel, who had made his reputation in the 1940 French campaign, arrived in Africa on 12 February 1941. His soldiers, flushed with victory in Europe, were in exuberant mood, perceiving their deployment as a romantic adventure. ‘We are all twenty-one years old and crazy,’ wrote panzergrenadier lieutenant Ralph Ringer. ‘Crazy, because we have volunteered of our own free will to go to Africa and have talked about nothing else for weeks…tropical nights, palm trees, sea breezes, natives, oases and tropical helmets. Also a little war, but how can we be anything but victorious?…Like madmen we jumped around and hugged each other, we really were going to Africa!’ Lt. Pietro Ostellino, one of the small minority of dedicated fascists in the Italian army, wrote exultantly to his wife on 3 March: ‘Here things are going very well and our reoccupation of Cyrenaica, which has been held by the enemy, is a matter of days or even hours away. We hasten to the front line for the honour of the Patria. You must be proud and offer your sufferings to the cause for which your husband is fighting with enthusiasm and passion.’ He added three days later: ‘Morale is very high, and in cooperation with our valiant allies we are getting ready to do great things…Ours is a holy cause and God is with us.’

Rommel launched his first offensive against the British in Libya on 24 March, easily capturing El Agheila at the base of the Gulf of Sirte. British tanks checked the Afrika Korps at Mersa Brega, but the weak forces now commanded by Lt. Gen. Philip Neame were obliged to withdraw. On 4 April, Rommel attacked again, forcing a new retreat by threatening Neame’s supply line. Many British tanks were disabled by mechanical failure, and the Germans had little difficulty in pushing on to Tobruk. The port was left to be defended by an Australian garrison, while the main imperial forces fell back across the Egyptian frontier, almost to the start line of their December offensive.

Wavell had impressed on Neame that it was more important to keep his army intact than to hold ground, but soldiers ignorant of this higher purpose were simply bewildered by their own headlong flight. Gunner Len Tutt described an action in which his 25-pounder battery held off panzers for some hours, then as darkness fell was suddenly ordered to withdraw: ‘The rot seemed to set in. We dropped into action a little way down the road but had hardly surveyed the position before we were ordered to withdraw again. There seemed no overall direction. Too many units were on the move at the same time, a mistake which contributed to a growing panic. We soon saw the danger signs: men abandoning a stalled truck and running to get on another vehicle, when possibly a few seconds under the bonnet would have kept it going. Others were abandoned because they had run out of petrol, and yet there were three-tonners loaded down with the stuff passing on either side.’ There was further seesaw fighting in which the Halfaya Pass and Fort Capuzzo changed hands several times, but at the end of May the Germans and Italians occupied the disputed ground.

Pietro Ostellino wrote on 13 May near Tobruk: ‘We are well advanced now and it is only a question of time. It is quite hot, but bearable, and I am in good health – brown as a salami, partly from the sun and also because we are covered in sand which sticks to our skin and with sweat forms a layer of mud. We have enough water, but fifteen minutes after washing we are back to what we were before.’ Soon afterwards, hearing news of the Axis advance into Greece, he wrote: ‘Yesterday I received a letter from Uncle Ottavio from Albania in which he talks of the great victory they have achieved there. We will soon be emulating them and will throw the English out of everywhere.’ Though the Australians held out in Tobruk even after the Afrika Korps raced past towards Egypt, strategic advantage lay firmly with Rommel. And meanwhile across the Mediterranean, as Ostellino noted, the British had suffered a further series of disasters.

2 A GREEK TRAGEDY

The struggle for the Balkans began with a black farce precipitated by Mussolini. Having dickered with a takeover of Yugoslavia, instead, on 28 October 1940 he launched 162,000 men into Greece from Albania, an operation only revealed to Marshal Graziani in North Africa by Rome Radio’s news broadcasts. Even Hitler was kept in the dark: the Duce was so nettled by Germany’s takeover of Romania – deemed part of Italy’s sphere of influence – without consultation with Rome that he determined to turn the tables by presenting Berlin with his own fait accompli in Greece. The pretext for war was mythical Greek support for British operations in the Mediterranean. A small country of seven million people was expected to offer no significant resistance; Greece’s defences faced Bulgaria, not Albania. The British were committed by treaty to support the Athens government, but initially offered only a few weapons and aircraft. Mussolini told his officers: ‘If anyone makes any difficulties about beating the Greeks, I shall resign from being an Italian.’ His foreign minister Ciano, sometimes dovish, favoured the invasion as offering easy pickings. He believed Athens would capitulate in the face of token bombing, and sought to ensure such an outcome by allocating millions of lire to bribe Greek politicians and generals. It remains uncertain whether this money was paid, or merely stolen by fascist intermediaries.

Rome was anyway denied its desired outcome. The Greek people, enraged by an Italian submarine’s sinking of the Greek cruiser Helli weeks before Mussolini’s declaration of war, responded to invasion with resolute defiance. Graffiti appeared: ‘Death to the spaghetti-eaters who sank our Helli’. Although grievously impoverished, Greece mobilised 209,000 men and 125,000 horses and mules. Its dictator General Ioannis Metaxas, whose rule had hitherto been divisive, wrote in his diary as tensions with Italy mounted: ‘Now everyone is with me.’ A peasant named Ahmet Tsapounis sent him a telegram: ‘Not having any money to contribute to the nation’s war effort, I give instead my field at Variko…which is 5.5 acres. I humbly ask you to accept this.’ On predominantly Greek-inhabited Cyprus, popular sentiment had hitherto been pro-Axis, because it was believed that a Nazi victory would free the island from British colonial rule. Now, however, a Cypriot wrote: ‘The supreme desire was for the defeat of the armies which had invaded Greek soil, to be followed by “the fruits of victory” – “freedom”, as promised by Churchill.’

To the astonishment of the world, not only did the Greek army repel the Italian invasion, but by November its forces had advanced deep into Albania. Italian general Ubaldo Soddu suggested asking the Greeks for an armistice. In Athens, Maris Markoyianni heard a small boy ask: ‘When we’ve beaten the Italians, what shall we do with Mussolini?’ Hitler was furious about the Greek fiasco. He had always opposed it, and emphatically so until after the November US elections: he feared that new Axis aggression must aid Roosevelt. He had urged Mussolini to secure Crete before attacking the mainland, to frustrate British intervention. In a letter from Vienna on 20 November, he expressed dismay about Italian blundering. The Duce, replying, blamed his setbacks on bad weather; Bulgarian assurances of neutrality, which allowed the Greeks to shift large forces westwards; and local Albanians’ unwillingness to aid the Axis. He told Hitler that he was preparing to launch thirty divisions ‘with which we shall utterly destroy Greece’. Those who supposed him a less brutal tyrant than Germany’s Führer were confounded by his directive to Badoglio, his chief of staff: ‘All [Greek] urban centres of over 10,000 population must be destroyed and razed to the ground. This is a direct order.’

He achieved nothing of the kind. Instead, through the months that followed the Greek and Italian armies remained stalemated in the Albanian mountains, amid the worst winter weather for half a century. Sergeant Diamantis Stafilakas from Chios wrote in his diary on 18 January 1941: ‘The door of our shelter will not open because of the snow. The fierce wind drives the snow up against it. Today it is raining again. We are soaked through. There is no chance of lighting a fire because the smoke chokes us. Our nights are spent in excruciating discomfort, so that I get up, go outside and walk around. I tried to build a new shelter, and managed to dig down twenty centimetres before the snow began again and I gave up.’

Frostbite inflicted thousands of casualties. Spyros Triantafillos grieved at abandoning his beloved grey horse after it broke down in a snowdrift: ‘Starving, soaked to the bone, tortured by endless movement on rocky ground, it was doomed to stay there. I emptied my saddlebags to follow the others on foot, then stroked the back of its neck a little and kissed it. It might be an animal, but it had been my comrade in war. We had faced death many times together, had lived through unforgettable days and nights. I saw it looking at me as I walked away. What a look that was, my friends. It revealed so much anguish, so much sadness. I wanted to cry, but the tears did not come. War leaves no time for such things. Momentarily I thought of killing it, but couldn’t bear to do so. I left it there, staring after me until I disappeared behind a rock.’

Hitler, exasperated, ignored Mussolini’s protestations that he could defeat the Greeks unaided. On 13 December, he issued Directive No. 20 for Operation Marita: ‘In the light of the threatening situation in Albania, it is doubly important to frustrate English efforts to establish, behind the protection of a Balkan front, an air base which would threaten Italy…and, incidentally, the Romanian oilfields.’ Following the installation of General Ion Antonescu as Romania’s prime minister on 12 October 1940, that country and its vital oil reserves fell under German control; most Romanians considered Germany an inescapable ally, when their country was threatened by the territorial ambitions of the Soviet Union.

By January, the Luftwaffe was attacking British shipping in the Mediterranean from Sicily. General Metaxas died suddenly on the 29th. In March, German diplomatic pressure persuaded Bulgaria to join the Axis; Yugoslavia likewise acceded, though a palace coup in Belgrade installed a short-lived pro-British regime. The morale of the Italian people slumped, as it became apparent that their leader’s ambitions had suffered humiliating frustration, with the consequence that they themselves must bow to German hegemony in the Mediterranean region. A police informant in Milan wrote: ‘Many, many pessimists see Italy as a protectorate of Germany, and conclude that if we endured three wars, the severe losses of the navy, the sacrifice of our raw materials and gold reserves…in order to achieve the loss of our political, economic and military independence, there is nothing to be proud of about the policies followed.’ The privations of the Italian people worsened through the winter, with prices soaring. The ration of pasta and rice was cut to two kilos per person per month, when the average worker consumed four hundred grams a day. Italian enthusiasm for the war, always brittle, never recovered from its slump following the 1940–41 defeats. Thereafter, most of Mussolini’s soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians were unhappy prisoners, chained to Hitler’s chariot wheels.

On 6 April, thirty-three German divisions, six of them armoured, swept into Yugoslavia, easily overwhelming its army. A Luftwaffe bomber attack on the capital killed 17,000 people, an appalling toll which reflected its citizens’ absolute unpreparedness for their fate. Six days later the invaders occupied the city, and on 17 April the Yugoslavs capitulated.

A 56,000-strong British-led force, mostly composed of Australians and New Zealanders, began to land in Greece in March, to deploy in the northeast. Churchill’s insistence on committing imperial troops at the discretion of British commanders provoked serious and understandable dismay among the leaders of the white dominions. In theory, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand formations could be deployed only with the express sanction of their home governments. But, especially in 1940–41 before dominion ministers dug in their heels against abuses of their constitutional rights, such approval was often sought only retrospectively. The Australian prime minister, Robert Menzies, attended the 24 February 1941 British War Cabinet meeting at which the decision was made to dispatch an army to Greece; but he and his fellow ministers were wilfully misled about the opinions and fears of commanders in the theatre, including their own most senior officers. Only after the first New Zealand soldiers had been in Greece for some weeks in December 1940 did their government in Auckland learn of the fact. Anzac rather than British forces were called upon to bear the chief burden of the most hazardous Allied military gamble of the Mediterranean campaign, serving under a British commander-in-chief. Australian politicians, in particular, were deeply dismayed.

Anzac soldiers, however, cherished more innocent sensations. The New Zealanders were voyaging towards their first battlefield; like most young men in such circumstances, they revelled in excited anticipation and exotic sensations, oblivious of peril. Lance-Bombardier Morry Cullen wrote home euphorically about the thrill of sailing the Mediterranean: ‘I have never seen such beautiful shades of blue, from a light sky shade to the deepest blue black and there was hardly a ripple on the water.’ Private Victor Ball wrote in his diary about Athens: ‘Best place we have been in and people very friendly. Had a look at the Acropolis, the old ruins of Athens…The brothel area is a lot cleaner than Cairo. We got very drunk but got home alright.’ Lt. Dan Davin reflected later: ‘We were all absolutely the picture of youth and health…There’s a sort of natural courage in people who’ve been fed all their lives on good meat.’ These dominion troops approached their first experience of war with a confidence and enthusiasm that persisted, in remarkable degree, through the ordeal which now began to unfold. Some of their officers, however, were more cynical: Gen. Sir Thomas Blamey, the seedy old reprobate commanding the Australian corps – ‘a coward and not a commander’, in the words of one of his staff officers – spent 26 March reconnoitring possible evacuation beaches in southern Greece.

The Germans invaded on 6 April 1941, simultaneously with their assault on Yugoslavia. They cited the British presence to justify their action: ‘The government of the Reich has consequently ordered its armed forces to expel British troops from the soil of Greece. All resistance will be ruthlessly crushed…It is emphasised that the German army does not come as an enemy of the Greek people, and it is not the desire of the German people to fight Greeks…The blow which Germany is obliged to strike on Greek soil is directed against England.’ British forces were spread far too thin to check the invaders. Where Germans met resistance – and there were some stubborn little stands – they merely pulled back and probed until they found a gap elsewhere.

New Zealander Victor Ball described the first stage of what became a long, painful withdrawal: ‘We were followed by shellfire the whole way, wherever we went they shelled us. One chap killed outright just alongside me – hit in the throat – and quite a few hit with bits of shale and stone. Planes coming over one at a time bombing and machine-gunning. Things sure get on your nerves when you can’t fight back.’ Russell Brickell, another New Zealander, reflected on the experience of being dive-bombed: ‘It’s a peculiar feeling, lying on one’s tummy in a trench or ditch listening to the scream of an approaching bomb, a second’s silence as it hits the ground, then the earth comes up and hits one in the face and there is a tremendous woomph! and bits whistle through the air.’

German forces were soon pouring through the Monastir Gap on the Yugoslavian border, threatening the rear of the Greek positions in Albania. Allied forces fell back southward in increasing disorder, outnumbered, outmanoeuvred, and naked against air attack. An Australian medical officer described how ‘the patter of feet, human and animal, could be heard all night long’ as the Greek retreat became a panic-stricken rout. Everywhere in the path of the Axis advance, communities were visited by scenes of horror. A column of Italian prisoners being marched under escort through a village was suddenly enveloped in mortar and artillery fire, which killed and wounded dozens. An old woman, who had lost her eldest son Stathi in Albania, began to sob. A café owner urged her now to check her tears for the Italians: ‘They were the ones who killed your son.’ She ignored him, and ran to a soldier torn open by shrapnel, who lay crying: ‘Bread, mother!’ The old woman tried to wash his wounds with a cloth dipped in raki, still sobbing and talking to the man: ‘Don’t cry, Stathi. Yes, I am your mother. Don’t cry. I’ve got both bread and milk.’

The Greek army had exhausted itself confronting the Italians through the winter. It lacked transport for rapid manoeuvre. The Germans ruthlessly exploited their dominance of the air, especially effective in a country with few roads. ‘During the afternoon we had our first look at the great Jerry Luftwaffe,’ wrote Australian Captain Charles Chrystal. ‘190 bombers came over and bombed…till there was not a thing left. They flew in close formation…and I can tell you we simply gasped in amazement and were absolutely spellbound to see such numbers.’ Although the Australians and New Zealanders conducted some determined little rearguard actions, on 28 April the first major naval evacuations began, from Rafina and Porto Rafti. The Germans fanned out across the Peloponnese, where the Royal Navy took off troops from Nauplia and Kalamata.

Citizens in uniform, until with time they grow the skins of soldiers, are shocked by the waste created by war. Among many Anzacs’ most vivid memories of the retreat from Greece was the colossal detritus of wrecked and abandoned vehicles, guns, stores, wirelesses, range-finders – millions of pounds’ worth of scarcely used equipment, ditched by the roadsides of the Peloponnese. Men boarding the Royal Navy’s ships were ordered to discard weapons, especially machine-guns and mortars, which they had stubbornly retained through the retreat. This policy had serious consequences for the defence of Crete a few weeks later. Most fugitives suffered a sense of shame about abandoning the local people, who embraced them even in defeat.

The Invasion of Greece

By April’s end, the Germans held Greece. Some 43,000 of Wavell’s troops had been evacuated, leaving behind a further 11,000 who became prisoners, together with all their transport and heavy equipment. Prime minister Alexandros Koryzis committed suicide. Greek soldiers trickled down from the hills, many having abandoned their arms. ‘At one moment,’ wrote an eyewitness, ‘I saw a captain mount a hillock and address thousands of men who were gathered around it. He shouted: “Men, alas our country has lost the war!” The audience responded with an eerie, nightmarish, perverse cry of “Zeto!” – “Hurrah!” “Zeto!” meant “We are alive!”’

Such deliverance provided only brief consolation to a nation which thereafter suffered appallingly under Nazi occupation. A Greek general told an air force officer, George Tzannetakis: ‘George, a black night descends on our country.’ In the capital on 27 April, a German officer, Georg von Stumme, addressed Greek Archbishop Ieronymos: ‘He began by saying that he had always wanted to visit Athens, of which he had learnt so much at school and Military Academy. At this point the Archbishop interrupted him and said: “Indeed, before the war Germany had many friends in Greece, among whom I was one.”’ Now, all that was over. A Greek wrote: ‘Von Stumme learnt that in Greece he might meet a few Quislings, but he would not find any friends.’

Three weeks later, on 20 May, the Germans launched a paratroop assault on Crete. British and New Zealand defenders along the island’s north coast fought staunchly on the first day, inflicting savage losses on the airborne invaders. But on the 21st the Germans secured Maleme airfield, opening the way for follow-up forces. British counter-attacks were frustrated, and in the succeeding six days the paratroopers progressively rolled up the defences, relieving their units isolated at Retimo and Heraklion. The British fell back. ‘Everyone was exhausted…and by this time morale was pretty low,’ said Ian Stewart, a battalion medical officer. ‘It cannot be said to have been a particularly restful trip…up the very high mountains, going mostly at night in a very slow tread and just the jingling of waterbottles and occasionally stumbling over people who had fallen out. Perhaps the most evocative thing was the dew on the flowers…the very aromatic scents of Crete are unforgettable.’ Another officer observed, ‘It was a journey that showed human nature at its Christian best but also at its ugly, selfish worst.’ Gen. Bernard Freyberg, the New Zealander commanding the defence, decided that evacuation was the only option. By the night of 30 May, when the Royal Navy was obliged to abandon its costly rescue efforts, 15,000 troops had been taken off; a further 11,370 became prisoners and 1,742 had been killed. A New Zealander heard the order given to those left behind to surrender. ‘Everything was dead quiet. You could have heard a pin drop. Every man was left to his own thoughts, that is if they could think. Now and again you would hear a shot ring out further down the waadi – some poor chap was taking his own life. Then later on I heard my first German’s words: “Alle man raus, schnell, schnell,” and I looked up and saw him standing there, rifle at the ready. We were marched back to Canaea like a mob of sheep.’

Crete cost Admiral Cunningham three cruisers and six destroyers sunk, seventeen other ships damaged – the navy’s heaviest losses of the war in a single operation. The Germans lost 6,000 killed, a price which dissuaded Hitler from ever again attempting a large-scale airborne operation. But the immediate outcome was that the invaders had defeated a larger Allied army, provided through Ultra intercepts with detailed foreknowledge of German intentions, plans and timetable.^* Freyberg, as commander, bore substantial responsibility for failure, but he was handicapped by lack of transport to shift men, and a dire shortage of radios. Once the battle began, he had neither a clear idea of what was happening, nor means to pass orders. The Luftwaffe exercised almost unchallenged command of the skies, taking a heavy toll on morale as well as men and ships. German energy, skill, tactics, determination and leadership at all levels surpassed those of most of the defenders, despite some fine local stands, especially by New Zealanders.

Hitler would have secured a much greater strategic gain by using his paratroops to seize Malta, as they could probably have done. The Germans profited little from accepting responsibility to sustain an occupation of Crete amid a bitterly hostile population. If Freyberg had held on, the Royal Navy would have faced immense difficulties in supplying the island in the face of enemy air superiority. Once Greece was lost, the outpost could have done the British little good. They lacked adequate aircraft to support the North African campaign, far less to exploit Crete as an air base for offensive operations, and were better without the place.

However, no such consolation was evident to the world and the British people in June 1941. A soldier at home, Len England, wrote on 29 May: ‘I think…the masses have for the first time considered the possibility of defeat. A general trend is this: “Every time we meet the Germans we get driven back. We’re even losing on the sea, and we’re supposed to have command of that.” The infallibility of the Germans is an idea that is rapidly gaining ground.’ Churchill had boldly declared Britain’s determination to hold Crete, yet its garrison had been defeated by smaller forces. Though the prime minister for years afterwards sustained his enthusiasm for resurrecting a Balkan front against Hitler and bringing Turkey into the war, this remained a fantasy. The Balkans were incorporated wholesale into the Axis empire, much to its own detriment. Italy initially accepted responsibility for occupying the region, committing half a million troops who would eventually suffer heavier losses there than in North Africa. The Germans, in their turn, came to find Greece and Yugoslavia a crushing burden. But all this was far away, in the bleak summer of 1941.

3 SANDSTORMS

The British achieved two modest successes to set against their eviction from the Balkans. Though Iraq had become an independent state in 1932, the British retained treaty and basing privileges there, to protect their important oil interests. Since the outbreak of war, rival factions in Baghdad had contested power and disputed the merits of supporting the Axis. In April 1941 the pro-Nazi nationalist Rashid Ali became prime minister following a military coup. Impressed by Hitler’s successes, and insufficiently mindful that Berlin was far away, he abrogated British military movement rights and sent troops to besiege the RAF base at Habbaniya. Luftwaffe planes began to shuttle aid to the Baghdad government through Syria. The Vichy French authorities in Damascus provided fighter escorts and some materiel to aid the Germans. Wavell, in Cairo, was reluctant to divert troops to Iraq, but Churchill insisted. An Indian Army relief column landed at Basra and drove inland, joined by 1,500 men of the Arab Legion from Transjordan. The Iraqi army offered only ineffectual resistance. Within a month Habbaniya was relieved and an armistice signed. A pro-British government was installed in Baghdad, which was eventually persuaded to declare war on the Axis.

Vichy’s meddling in Iraq, and a growing German presence in Syria, convinced Churchill that Britain could not risk Nazi dominance of the Levant. He ordered Wavell to dispatch another force to occupy Syria, ruled by France since 1920 as a League of Nations ‘mandated territory’ joined with Lebanon. Churchill and his commanders hoped that the defenders, outnumbered and outgunned, would offer only token resistance. Instead, however, in June 1941 Vichy forces fought hard. Their conduct highlighted the division and confusion of French loyalties, which had been apparent since the 1940 surrender, and persisted until 1944. During the ill-fated British and Gaullist attempt on Vichy Dakar in September 1940, the submarine Bévéziers torpedoed the British battleship Resolution, which suffered serious damage. Churchill enraged the French by insisting on the award of a DSO to Commander Bobby Bristowe, who led a volunteer naval party in a launch alongside the brand-new Vichy battleship Richelieu, laying four depth-charges below its hull. In retaliation for Dakar, Vichy aircraft bombed Gibraltar.

A farcical exchange took place when Hitler met Marshal Pétain at Montoire-sur-le-Loir on 24 October 1940. Germany’s Führer said: ‘I am happy to shake the hand of a Frenchman who is not responsible for this war.’ His words were not translated, and Pétain supposed that he was being asked a polite question about his journey. He responded: ‘Bien, bien, je vous remercie.’ Even if the marshal did not intend to sound so slavish, his regime pursued policies and adopted a propaganda line strongly hostile to the British. Admiral René Godfroy, commanding a French squadron interned at Alexandria which resolutely resisted the Royal Navy’s blandishments to join its struggle, wrote to the Mediterranean C-in-C on 26 June 1940: ‘For us Frenchmen the fact is that a government still exists in France, a government supported by a parliament established in non-occupied territory and which in consequence cannot be considered as irregular or deposed. The establishment elsewhere of another government, and all support for this other government, would clearly be rebellion.’

Frenchmen everywhere took sides, displaying bitter animosity towards those who made a different choice. Aboard the French mine-laying submarine Rubis a vote was held in which all but two of its forty-four crew opted to fight alongside the British. By contrast, in November 1940, 1,700 French naval officers and men exercised the right to repatriation which the British conferred on them. Their new friends the Germans responded uncharitably, torpedoing off the French coast the hospital ship carrying them home under the red cross. Four hundred drowned, but a survivor, Commander Paul Martin, wrote impenitently to a senior officer in Toulon: ‘Churchill’s policy makes me fear for a demagogic disaster. Thinking Englishmen fear for the future, being carried away as they are by democracy, international financiers and Jews. It is undeniable that the French corrective to this is envied.’

If this was an extreme view, French anti-Semitism ran deep. Vichy’s bureaucracy and enforcement agencies seized Jews and bearers of Free France’s symbolic Cross of Lorraine almost as readily as did the Germans. ‘My God, what is this country doing to me?’ Jewish writer Irène Némirovsky, who would later meet death in Auschwitz, wrote from her precarious French refuge in June 1941. ‘Since it is rejecting me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honour and its life.’ The Resistance until June 1944 engaged only a small minority of French people, and incurred the hostility of many more. After the liberation, service with de Gaulle became a badge of pride. Throughout the occupation, however, many French people treated his followers as troublemakers and traitors, and frequently betrayed them to the Vichy authorities or the Germans.

On 8 June 1941, Australian, British and Free French units advanced into Syria and Lebanon. British commandos landing on the coast met fierce resistance at the mouth of the Litani river, and suffered heavy casualties – forty-five dead including its commanding officer, and seventy-five wounded. Two French heavy destroyers bombarded the British positions, then turned their fire on a British destroyer flotilla, of which one ship was badly damaged. Vichy bombers joined the attack on the warships, and their escorting fighters shot down three Hurricanes. A defiant French NCO prisoner told war correspondent Alan Moorehead: ‘You thought we were yellow, didn’t you? You thought we couldn’t fight in France. You thought we were like the Italians. Well, we’ve shown you.’

It demanded courage for a man to separate himself from his country, home and family, to accept the status of a renegade in the eyes of his own people, in order to serve in the ranks of Free France. But many Poles made such a choice. Why did the French instead oppose Allied forces fighting their conquerors and occupiers? There was deep bitterness about France’s predicament, which demanded scapegoats. Many Frenchmen considered their country betrayed by the British in June 1940, a sentiment intensified by the Royal Navy’s destruction of French capital ships at Mers-el-Kébir. There was self-hatred, which bred anger. Overlaid upon centuries-old resentment of perfide Albion, there was now the fresh grievance that Churchill had fought on after Pétain succumbed. The German occupiers of France were disliked, but so too were the British across the Channel, especially by French professional soldiers, sailors and airmen.

‘France does not want to be liberated,’ former Vichy prime minister and prominent collaborator Pierre Laval told the New York Times. ‘She wants to settle her fate herself in collaboration with Germany.’ Many of his compatriots agreed: resistance became a significant force in France only in 1944, and made a negligible military contribution by comparison with the partisans of Russia and Yugoslavia. Few French defenders of Syria in 1941 found anything distasteful about killing British, Indian and Australian invaders. British troops advancing into Syria found graffiti on the wall of an abandoned fort: ‘Wait, dirty English bastards, until the Germans come. We run away now, and so will you soon.’

As the Allied forces advanced on Damascus, strafing Vichy fighters badly wounded one column’s senior Free French officer. On 16 June Fleet Air Arm Swordfish torpedo-bombers sank the super-destroyer Chevalier-Paul off Beirut, and a Vichy submarine was later torpedoed with the loss of fifty-five lives. At Mezze on the 19th, strong Vichy counter-attacks with armoured support prompted the surrender of two Indian battalions and a unit of the Royal Fusiliers. British gestures of chivalry and attempts to parley were treated with contempt. A flight of Hurricanes sent to attack a French airfield made their first low-level pass without firing when the pilots glimpsed on the ground Vichy airmen entertaining girlfriends to apéritifs beside their planes. In consequence, on a second pass heavy ground fire damaged several Hurricanes including that of Roald Dahl, later famous as a writer. The French brought in aircraft reinforcements from their North African colonies. Among the Roman ruins of Palmyra, a unit of the Foreign Legion halted a British thrust from the east for nine days, though some Spanish legionnaires in the Vichy camp decided that the ideological conflict was unacceptable, and surrendered without a fight.

By the time Vichy’s high commissioner General Henri Dentz bowed to the inevitable and signed an armistice on 14 July after five weeks’ fighting, his own forces had suffered over a thousand killed. Allied casualties were somewhat fewer, but the Australians lost 416 dead. Vichy hailed as heroic the feats of Pierre le Gloan of the French air force, an ace who shot down seven RAF aircraft during the campaign. There was intense British bitterness about the vigour of resistance, and the callousness and sometimes brutality with which Allied prisoners were treated. Roald Dahl wrote later: ‘I for one have never forgiven the Vichy French for the unnecessary slaughter they caused.’

Dentz, in a gesture of spite, shipped sixty-three British officer and NCO prisoners to Greece en route to POW camps in Germany, even while he was negotiating the armistice. Only British threats that he and his senior colleagues would be denied repatriation secured the captives’ return. Thereafter, 32,032 Vichy and colonial troops chose to sail with their commanders to occupied France, while 5,668 accepted service with de Gaulle. General Georges Catroux, condemned to death in absentia by the Pétain regime for his support of de Gaulle, became Free French plenipotentiary for the Levant. The Syrian people remained unenthusiastic about rule by Frenchmen of any hue, but the region was now safe from German dominance. Churchill’s boldness, amid the caution of his generals, was vindicated, even if the clumsy management of the little campaign promoted scant confidence in British military competence.

The Syrian venture ended in a useful strategic success. The achievement of securing Britain’s flank in the Middle East was more important than the loss of Crete. But across Europe, oppressed and threatened people struggled to find consolation amid so many conspicuous Allied defeats and failures. Mihail Sebastian wrote in Bucharest on 1 June 1941: ‘So long as Britain does not surrender, there is room for hope.’ But with Axis air power now dominant across most of the Mediterranean, the prestige of British arms lay low – and would fall lower yet.

On 15 June 1941 Wavell, reinforced by a consignment of tanks dispatched at great risk from Britain through the Mediterranean, launched a new offensive, Operation Battleaxe. Within two days, this foundered after Rommel’s 88mm guns inflicted heavy losses on the attackers. Failure cost the Middle East C-in-C his job. He was replaced by Gen. Sir Claude Auchinleck, who appointed Alan Cunningham, victor in Abyssinia, to command the newly-christened Eighth Army. To Churchill’s frustration, there followed a five-month lull in big battlefield operations. The British Army engaged in only minor actions in North Africa and elsewhere, though much was made of the Australian defence of beleaguered Tobruk.

The next desert offensive, Crusader, was launched on 18 November. Cunningham’s forces were much stronger than those of Rommel, who was slow to grasp the weight and identify the focus of the British assault. Eighth Army swept forward to relieve Tobruk after heavy fighting. Rommel’s counterstrokes failed: he was obliged to withdraw, having suffered 38,000 Italian and German casualties to 18,000 British, and lost three hundred tanks to Cunningham’s 278. By the last days of 1941, the Axis army was back at El Agheila, some five hundred miles from its furthest point of advance into Egypt. The British briefly supposed that they had turned the tide of the desert war; Churchill rejoiced in a rare success.

But most Axis soldiers saw their predicament as readily reversible. Lt. Pietro Ostellino wrote on 7 December: ‘I can only now take up this letter: before, the English wouldn’t let me! We were surrounded for two and a half days by forces who were a hundred times superior, with artillery that really hammered us. But we held out until reinforcements arrived, then put the enemy to flight. We captured prisoners and armoured vehicles. Of course, we too suffered painful losses. Please don’t worry if I don’t write to you so often at the moment: the post can’t operate every day.’

The pattern of the desert war was established. The Germans held at least marginal air superiority, because most of the RAF’s best aircraft remained in England, obliging its desert pilots to fight the Luftwaffe’s Bf 109s with inferior Tomahawks, Kittyhawks and Hurricanes. The British also lagged behind their enemies in developing techniques of air–ground cooperation, using planes in a tactical role as artillery. They had numerical superiority of men and armour, but this advantage was nullified by weaknesses of command, tactics and equipment. German tanks were better. Mechanical failure imposed a battlefield toll even more serious than enemy action, and the British tank recovery and repair system was weak; petrol cans leaked; Cunningham’s army did not match the Afrika Korps’ skill in mixing panzers, anti-tank guns and infantry. Again and again, British armour exposed itself unsupported – and was destroyed: during Crusader, for instance, 7th Armoured Brigade lost 113 of its 141 tanks.

‘We can learn from the Germans,’ wrote Australian John Butler during the siege of Tobruk. ‘Their battalions are a complete unit – with anti-tank guns, tanks, air force and field workshops and ack-ack defence and artillery – with us if we wanted support from the air force we must give 48 hours notice – a Gilbertian situation like writing a letter to the fire-brigade when one’s home catches alight.’ The institutional weakness of the British Army produced commanders at every level who lacked energy, imagination and flexibility; most units deployed in the desert were poorly led and trained. ‘In 1941 and early 1942 the morale of the British Army…was very low,’ wrote one of its officers, Lt. Michael Kerr. ‘The standard of infantry training was really quite terrible. Soldiers were unable to understand what they were meant to be doing and what everything was about.’

The scale of operations in North Africa was tiny by comparison with the war’s decisive confrontation in Russia: at that period the British seldom deployed more than six divisions against three German and five Italian formations. But Eighth Army’s doings commanded intense attention at home, because this was the only theatre in which Britain’s soldiers were fighting Germans. Rommel achieved celebrity on both sides, admired for flair, boldness, and dashing leadership. Less was known about his neglect of logistics, a critical factor in North Africa. The British chose to regard the Afrika Korps’ commander as a ‘good German’, ignoring the fact that he remained an impassioned supporter of Hitler until it became plain that Germany was losing the war. The Allies usually enjoyed a notable intelligence advantage through their breaking of Axis codes, but in 1941–42 Rommel was uniquely well-informed about British operations, thanks to his interception of the daily reports of the US Military Attaché in Cairo, Colonel Bonner Fellers. Rommel referred affectionately to these signals as his ‘little Fellers’, and they gave him an important edge until Fellers’ recall to Washington in July 1942. The chief influence on the battlefield, however, remained the superiority of the German army. This contributed more to Rommel’s successes, and his own generalship rather less, than the contemporary British media acknowledged and modern legend sometimes suggests.

There was a perceived romance about combat in the vast spaces of Libya, with headlong advances and retreats. Much anecdotage, sometimes reported in the British press, noted the Afrika Korps’ humane treatment of prisoners, and occasional truces between combatants for the recovery of wounded. ‘One enemy post was approached,’ wrote Australian Private Butler during the siege of Tobruk, ‘just in the act of drawing the pin [on a grenade] when a voice was heard from a sangar, “Stay Aussie – we have two wounded Diggers here”…The Aussies said the Germans had shot them and then went out at great personal risk, brought them in and dressed their wounds, gave them hot coffee and then sent for their medical assistance. Thank God there is chivalry.’ Likewise, a participant recorded a halt in fighting while both sides recovered their wounded: ‘Men of both armies stood up under an astonished sun. The absolute stillness almost tinkled with tension…It was the more incredible in contrast with the fury of the night…The truce was as if two armoured combatants had paused and raised their visors, and for a moment one had glimpsed the human faces behind the steel.’ After one failed German attack an Australian wrote: ‘We were sitting up on the parapet, waving and singing to them. There were shouts of “Heil Hitler.” “How would a pint of beer go, mate?” “Have another go tonight,” and many other remarks not so complimentary.’

As Sergeant Sam Bradshaw searched for the rest of his tank squadron during the shambles of Crusader, he glimpsed an enemy soldier limping beside the sandy track.

I drew alongside and called out, ‘Are you Italian?’ He replied, in very good English, ‘No, I’m not a bloody Italian, I’m a German,’ obviously annoyed at the suggestion. He was wounded, so I gave him a lift on the tank [and] a drink of water. He gave me a Capstan cigarette. ‘We got one of your supply columns,’ he said. We saw some German armoured cars about 1,000 yards away and he rolled off the tank and hobbled towards them. My gunner traversed on to him and I shouted on the intercom ‘Don’t fire – let him go.’ He turned around and saluted and called out cheekily, ‘I’ll see you in London.’ I called back, ‘Make it Berlin.’

There were disadvantages, however, to this ‘civilised’ approach to making war. Allied troops who regarded their tactical position as hopeless saw little risk and no shame in surrendering, rather than fight to the death or submit themselves to a waterless desert. British commanders, and their superiors in London, became increasingly dismayed by local capitulations and the allegedly excessive sporting spirit of the campaign.

Eighth Army comprised a remarkable range of national contingents. Its New Zealand division – later a corps – was recognised as outstanding, reflecting all its nation’s virtues of resolution and self-reliance. Two Australian divisions were also highly rated, especially after the legend was established of ‘the Diggers” stand at Tobruk. A German officer shouted indignantly at a prisoner: ‘You are an Australian and you come all the way over here to fight for the filthy, bloody English!’ War correspondent Alan Moorehead wrote of ‘men from the dockside of Sydney and the sheep-stations of the Riverina [who] presented such a picture of downright toughness with their gaunt dirty faces, huge boots, revolvers stuffed in their pockets, gripping their rifles with huge, shapeless hands, shouting and grinning – always grinning’. Notoriously ill-disciplined out of the line, and sometimes poorly officered, they deserved their formidable reputation, especially for night operations. ‘The Australians regarded themselves as the best fighters in the world,’ wrote a British officer. ‘They were.’ He added that their units were held together by ‘mateship’, almost always a stronger motivation for successful soldiers than any abstract cause.

Opinions about the South African component of Auchinleck’s army were more equivocal. On good days it was good, but on bad ones the division did not impress. The same might be said of Indian units: the Indian Army sometimes displayed remarkable courage and fighting skill, but its performance was uneven. The British justly esteemed the prowess of their beloved Gurkhas, but not every man or battalion excelled. For all white officers’ complacency about their men’s loyalty to the King Emperor, the Indian Army was a force of mercenaries. Among Eighth Army’s British formations, 7th Armoured Division – ‘the Desert Rats’ – was deemed an elite. The Germans regarded British artillery with unfailing respect. But the old cavalry regiments, now uneasily translated from horses to tanks, were prone to displays of mindless courage which evoked their worst traditions.

An important difficulty persisted until the late summer of 1942: Eighth Army’s fighting men had little confidence in their higher commanders. The colonial contingents, especially, believed that their lives were being risked, and sometimes sacrificed, in pursuit of ill-conceived plans and purposes. There was bitter resentment about the huge ‘tail’ of the army, indulging a privileged lifestyle in Egypt while fighting soldiers endured constant privation ‘up the desert’. A British gunner wrote sourly: ‘I came to realise that, for every man sweating it out in the muck and dust of the Western Desert, there were twenty bludging and skiving in the wine bars and restaurants, night-clubs and brothels and sporting clubs and racetracks of Cairo.’ Another cynical soldier wrote the song of this tribe:

We never went west of Gezira,

We never went north of the Nile,

We never went past the Pyramids

Out of sight of the Sphinx’s smile.

We fought the war in Shepheard’s and the Continental Bar,

We reserved our punch for the Turf Club lunch

And they gave us the Africa Star.

Britain’s prime minister shared that soldier’s disgust. An elaborate support system was essential to sustain Eighth Army in a country lacking its own industrial infrastructure. But Churchill fumed about the extravagant manpower committed to logistical and administrative rather than combat functions.

The men who fought the desert war suffered fewer hardships than those serving in Russia, Burma or the Pacific, but water shortage imposed chronic discomfort. ‘The flies plague us in millions from the first hour in the morning,’ wrote an Italian officer. ‘The sand always seems to be in our mouths, in our hair and in our clothes, and it is impossible to get cool.’ Armoured officer Pietro Ostellino wrote in August: ‘Even the climate has begun to make us lose hope. All day we suffer an infernal heat while the shade is rendered useless by a constant suffocating wind. It seems as though the valley has become a furnace. After eight in the evening the wind drops, but…we suffocate.’ In their tanks, the temperature often rose above 40 or 50 degrees Celsius. Opening hatches merely allowed sand and dust to swirl in.

British soldiers received a water ration of two pints a day, together with copious issues of tea brewed in old fuel tins on fires of mingled petrol and sand. They ate chiefly bully beef, biscuits and canned fruit. The Germans rejoiced in captures of Eighth Army rations, which they preferred to their own, especially the generous issues of cigarettes. ‘We…slowly make ourselves become Tommies,’ wrote Wolfgang Everth wryly during one of Rommel’s advances. ‘Our vehicles, petrol, rations and clothing were all English. I…breakfasted off two tins of milk, a tin of pineapple, biscuits and Ceylon tea.’

Men learned that the desert was perilously nuanced terrain on which to move and fight. ‘Smooth yellow sand, attractive to the uninitiated, was deadly,’ wrote a British officer. ‘Unless it was of short duration and taken at speed the truck would bog to the axles. Pebbly going was usually good, but sometimes it was a deceptive crust with soft sand underneath which only the experienced eye could detect at a distance. In some places the desert was smooth and firm as a race-track for miles on end and in every direction; in others it was treacherous as treacle.’ Both sides were sometimes confused by their enemies’ use of captured transport. Again and again, British troops received unwelcome surprises from approaching British vehicles and even tanks which proved to be driven by Rommel’s men. The Italian Bologna Division was panicked one day by the sight of a column of British trucks in their midst, until they discovered that it carried Germans.

Between offensives, there were long intervals of boredom, training and preparation. ‘The chief occupation of soldiers in wartime is hanging around doing nothing, though preferably purposefully,’ wrote a British soldier. Men dug incessantly, laid minefields, patrolled and conducted sniping duels. They suffered from desert sores, jaundice, dysentery. Both sides learned to curse khamsins, sandstorms that reduced vision to a few yards and drove yellow grit into every crevice of vehicles, equipment and human bodies. Italians called them ghibli. Pietro Ostellino wrote home: ‘You would think it impossible to take two and a half hours to cover the two hundred metres which separated the mess from my tent but that is the truth. I have never seen a night so dark: you stopped for a moment to clear your eyes and immediately lost your bearings. When finally I got to my tent I found everything under five centimetres of sand. At any moment, the canvas seemed likely to blow away.’

Even during long lulls between battles there were few diversions save the arrival of mail, every soldier’s obsession. Many men wrote home almost daily, because there was nothing else to do. The act of writing maintained a link with their other lives which became ever more precious as the passage of months extended into years. Eighth Army’s soldiers were granted occasional brief leaves in Cairo, a city they learned to hate. Olivia Manning, who later became famous as author of The Balkan Trilogy, arrived there as a refugee from Greece in April 1941: ‘The unreality had something to do with the light…It was too white. It flattened everything. It drained the colour out of everything. It lay on things like dust…we were shocked by the colourless summer delta. The squalor of the delta shocked us horribly – not only the squalor, the people’s contentment with squalor. For weeks we lived in a state of recoil.’

Having been abroad since 1939, Manning gazed curiously at the throng of British soldiers in the streets: ‘Sweat shining, hair bleached to sameness, the pink burn of English skin disguising differences; much of a size, not tall…Their worn, thin, washed-out khaki was wrinkled with heat. Dark patches of sweat showed between their shoulder blades and under their arms.’ Officers found consolations in the smart rendezvous of Egypt: ‘Groppi’s at Cairo and Pastroudi’s at Alexandria stay in the mind,’ wrote one. ‘There is a splendid decadence in having morning coffees and éclairs amid gilt mirrors and all the kitsch of affluence.’ Other ranks, however, knew only Cairo’s sordid bars and brothels, which inflicted alarming disease rates on Eighth Army.

For Mussolini’s soldiers, from the outset the North African campaign was a nightmare. The usual hazards of war were rendered almost unendurable by Italian shortages of food, ammunition, vehicles, medical supplies and belief in their cause. A transport driver, Vittorio Vallicella, kept a diary which is an unflagging tale of woe. The campaign was hopeless, he said, ‘not because of our incompetence or the enemy’s courage, but because the other side was so much better organised’. He added bitterly: ‘This is “the war of the poor” wished upon us by the Fascist hierarchy, comfortably ensconced in Rome’s Palazzo Venezia.’

Vallicella claimed to have seen only one Italian ambulance in all his time in Africa; he complained bitterly of lack of leadership at every level, from supreme headquarters in Rome down to his own unit’s officers: ‘How many times have we veterans saved their bacon. Our ally’s divisions are much more aggressive, with vastly superior fire power and manoeuvrability, led by officers who really lead. Many of our own officers have been sent home wounded or sick.’ Italian soldiers resented the disparity between their meagre rations – soup, bread, a little jam, the occasional lemon – and those of officers, who enjoyed wine and mineral water flown in from Italy. They cherished rare glimpses of home comforts, such as a visit from Red Cross girls bringing parcels sent by well-wishers at home: ‘After nearly twenty months it is wonderful to see these lovely women bringing useful gifts.’

Their best source of decent food, however, was the enemy: ‘For those lucky enough to return alive from a night patrol there was booty: jars of jam and fruit, packets of biscuits and tea, tins of corned beef, bottles of liqueurs, cigarettes, sugar, coffee, shirts, trousers, casual shoes, towels, lavatory paper, medicines like aspirin and quinine, condensed milk, jerseys made from real wool, compasses and every other kind of equipment under the sun. Such things never featured in our own supplies.’ When Vallicella caught malaria, he prayed that it might be something worse, to justify his repatriation to Italy – and was disappointed. Where most men thrilled to receive mail from home, he was dismayed to learn from his family letters that those at home knew little about ‘the hell we were in’. He was rash enough to voice aloud the view that without armour and rations it was impossible to fight, which caused him to be threatened with a firing squad. Only the intervention of his colonel saved his life.

Wavell began the Middle East war with 80,000 troops under his command. By the time Auchinleck, his successor, launched Operation Crusader in November 1941, he fielded 750,000, albeit most committed to garrison, logistical and support tasks across the theatre. After pushing Rommel back to El Agheila, the British anticipated a lull, and set about refitting their armoured units. But the Axis forces, having escaped destruction, regrouped with remarkable speed. When Pietro Ostellino emerged from the long and bloody Crusader mêlée, ‘I had the pleasant surprise of finding my kit, which I thought had fallen into English hands. It was aboard a truck which managed to escape the enemy encirclement. I finally got to sleep on my camp bed. I was in tatters after ten days without even washing my hands. I got rid of all the dirt as well as lice – some of these are still with me, but a little petrol should get rid of them. Clean, I feel a new man.’

Most of the Axis army shared Ostellino’s reinvigoration. On 21 January 1942, the British were rudely surprised when Rommel launched a new offensive, with devastating effect. Within three weeks he advanced almost three hundred miles eastwards before familiar logistical problems obliged him to halt. Neil Ritchie, now Eighth Army’s commander, set about creating strong defensive positions – the so-called Gazala Line, based upon brigade ‘boxes’ protected by mines and wire. He intended Rommel to dissipate his strength assaulting these, then to commit British armour, as usual superior in numbers, to press his advantage.

This gambit failed miserably: Ritchie had neglected to study his enemy’s commitment to deep penetration and flanking operations. When Rommel attacked on 26 May, Ritchie’s ‘boxes’ proved too widely separated to provide mutual support. For some days a Free French brigade staunchly defended the southernmost, at Bir Hacheim, but was then forced to withdraw. German armour manoeuvred with its usual skill: ‘We could never fire more than a couple of shots at any one tank before it was hidden by dust and the Germans were keeping just outside our range,’ wrote a frustrated British tank officer. Then his squadron was ordered to charge. ‘Ten to one we don’t make it,’ muttered a tank commander. He noted the look of disgust on his loader’s face as the man thrust another round into the smoking breech – he had been married a few weeks before leaving England. ‘I felt sorry for him.’ Then they began to fire: ‘Driver left-halt. Two-pounder traverse right – steady, on. Three hundred, fire!’ Within seconds of their own shot, in the words of the tank commander,

there was a tremendous crash. I felt a sharp pain in my right leg, heard the operator groaning, and said, ‘Driver, advance.’ Nothing happened. The shell, an 88mm, had exploded in his stomach…At the time I realised only that the engine had stopped, the Tannoy internal communication set had broken down, air was escaping from the high pressure pipes and clouds of acrid smoke were coming up from inside. It all happened in a moment. Then we were out of the tank and running towards another one. It was our squadron leader, who had stopped to rescue us; my gunner was already on the tank, the operator had disappeared on another, but I could only hobble because my leg wobbled uncontrollably beneath my weight. I was terrified they would go without me. The Germans shelled me as I ran. The ground opened up at my feet and I staggered as the blast struck me, but I was not hurt. I hurled myself onto the tank, dizzy and exhausted as we moved off to safety. The gunner was beside me smiling cheerfully though his right arm was smashed to bits below the elbow. Bones gleamed white through the blood and his fingers dangled on shreds of skin. He was bleeding badly so we fixed up a tourniquet and I gave him my syringe of morphia. We talked about going home.

At a field hospital, he recovered consciousness after an operation to hear falling bombs and the terrific din of Tobruk’s anti-aircraft guns. ‘There were so many wounded that the floor was covered with patients on stretchers, the reek of anaesthetic filled the air and people were groaning or shouting in delirium as they died. The heat and stuffiness were quite appalling. My right leg was in plaster to the hip, the other was smothered in dried blood. There were no sheets and the blankets scratched.’

Both sides suffered heavy tank losses in confused fighting around ‘the Cauldron’ in the centre of the British line, but by 30 May the Germans had gained a decisive advantage. The British were forced into headlong retreat. A South African and Indian force was left to defend Tobruk, while the remainder of Eighth Army fell back into Egypt. Rommel bypassed Tobruk, then on 20 June turned and assaulted its defences from the rear, where the line was weakest, and soon broke through. The South African commander, Maj. Gen. Hendrik Klopper, surrendered next morning. By nightfall on the 21st, all resistance had ended. More than 30,000 prisoners fell into Axis hands. Only a few units made good their escape to Eighth Army.

Vittorio Vallicella was among the first Axis troops to reach the port of Tobruk. ‘What a shock to find there hundreds of Senegalese [French colonial troops] who, at the sight of our little band, leap to their feet raising their hands in token of surrender,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘How extraordinary that they should do this to poorly armed men far fewer than themselves. With surprise but also respect, we gaze fascinated at these poor black soldiers who serve rich England, who have come from afar to take part in a war, when perhaps they don’t even know for whom or for what they are fighting.’ Exploring the town, the Italians were astonished by the comfort of the English quarters, with their showers, every officer’s bed with its mosquito net, and a surfeit of supplies. They delighted in the discovery of luxuries: tinned plums and boxes of what Vallicella at first took for dried grass. His sergeant explained that this was tea, a real treat. Some Arabs found plundering the dead were shot. Several men killed themselves by wandering into minefields. The Germans quickly placed guards on all the British food dumps, which the Italians interpreted as a slight on themselves: ‘Even here our allies want to lord it over us.’ For a brief period, victory at Tobruk raised Italian as well as German morale. ‘We hope this nightmare is at an end,’ wrote Vallicella. ‘We have only one thought: Alexandria, Cairo, the Nile, pyramids, palm trees and women.’

During early-summer operations, the Germans had suffered just 3,360 casualties, the British 50,000 – most of these taken prisoner. Much of Auchinleck’s armoured force had been destroyed. Churchill, in Washington to meet Roosevelt, was shocked and humiliated. The end of June 1942 found the British occupying a line at El Alamein, back inside Egypt. One of Auchinleck’s soldiers wrote: ‘The order came to us, “Last round, last man.” This was chilling. It was curious to see that this legendary phrase of heroic finality could still be used. Presumably it was intended to instil a steely resolve…But being interpreted, it meant that there was no hope for Tobruk and that we were being left to our fate – the very reverse of morale building…We were a downcast, defeated lot.’ Britain’s fortunes in the Middle East, and the global prestige of its army, had reached their lowest ebb. Churchill’s attempt to exploit Africa as a battlefield against the Axis had thus far served only to make Rommel a hero, and grievously to injure the morale and self-respect of the British people at home. It was fortunate indeed that the desert was not the cockpit of the war; that events elsewhere, on the Russian steppe, had drastically diminished the significance of British failure.