CHAPTER 8
In 1940–41 events in the Balkans and North Africa were intimately linked. After the Fall of France the Italians concentrated their troops in Libya on the Egyptian border, and invaded British-held Egypt in September 1940, Beset by the logistical problems that were to prove a feature of desert war they advanced only as far as Sidi Barrani, where they dug in. In November the Greeks defeated an Italian invasion and drove it back deep into Albania. On 7 December 1940, under the overall command of C-in-C Middle East, General Sir Archibald Wavell, the Commander of Commonwealth Forces in Egypt, Lieutenant General Henry Maitland Wilson, launched Operation Compass. Major General Richard O'Connor's attack destroyed the advanced elements of the Italian Army at Sidi Barrani, and Wavell then withdrew the 4th Indian Division for service against the Italians in Ethiopia. The offensive continued: after capturing Tobruk on 22 January, O'Connor sent the 7th Armoured Division on an uncharted route across the bulge of Cyrenaica and on 7 February 1941 cut off the entire Italian force at Beda Fomm, compelling it to surrender. Shortly afterwards he was ordered to halt at El Agheila and Wilson was appointed to lead a Commonwealth Expeditionary Force, its troops taken from O'Connor, to reinforce the Greeks in anticipation of a German reaction to the defeat of their Italian ally. The pro-Axis government in neighbouring Yugoslavia was overthrown in late March, but in April the Germans raced through Yugoslavia. By the end of the month they had driven Wilson's force out of Greece to Crete, and they took Crete itself by airborne assault in May. Meanwhile Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel, who had made his reputation commanding a panzer division in France in 1940, had arrived in Tripoli with a small armoured force soon called the Afrika Korps. He defeated the British at El Agheila on 24 March; on 7 April he captured O'Connor and Wilson's replacement in Egypt, Lieutenant General Sir Philip Neame, and by 15 April had recovered all of Cyrenaica except Tobruk, which was besieged until 27 November 1941. The see-saw of war in North Africa had begun.
ANTHONY EDEN
British Secretary of State for War
Chief of the Imperial General Staff Field Marshal Sir John Dill and I had a meeting, I think it was early July, and we decided the only place we could fight the enemy was the North African desert; there was nothing else. We couldn't hope to make a landing in France in any foreseeable future, therefore couldn't injure the Germans that way. The two alternatives were bombing and fighting in the Middle East. As to aircraft you realise the difficulties – because the Germans and the Italians had the inner lines, they could shift their aircraft with the greatest of ease through the north of France down to Greece or anywhere. We, on the other hand, had to go all the way round the Cape with almost everything, with all the delay that entailed.
BRIGADIER JOHN HARDING
Chief of Staff to General O'Connor, Commander Western Desert Force
There had been no light at the end of the tunnel at all since the withdrawal from Dunkirk. I think for political and above all morale reasons – the morale of the people of this country and the standing of our positions round the world – it was terribly important from this point of view and indeed from everybody's point of view to show that we could hold the Germans.
PRIVATE BOB MASH
Engineer, Nile Army
We actually made dummy tanks, dummy guns, and from the air when reconnaissance planes came across it just looked as though we had a really good, strong army. I've known the time when we've blown up rubber tanks, put them in position, taken them down in the evening, taken them three or four miles further away, blown them up again and lay them there, and from the air it looked as though we had plenty of tanks. Just the same as on the Canal Zone anti-aircraft guns, every other anti-aircraft gun was a wooden one.
ANTHONY EDEN
What we needed for the battle to have any chance, according to Maitland Wilson, who was going to be in charge of the battle, was what were called 'I-' tanks in those days, infantry tanks, heavy, rather slow-moving animals, which would act as fortresses to move forward and to reduce Sidi Barrani. And Wavell, quite rightly, was tremendously security-conscious, a lot of gossip always in a place like Cairo, and he didn't want anybody to know anything. So I wasn't allowed to telegraph Winston, give any hint of what might happen until I got home. But at the same time Wavell did want these I-tanks and so I had to send a telegram, very masked and complicated, saying to Winston please don't ask questions and please don't argue or anything but please send us some I-tanks. Which I must say, grandly, he did at once. Because we didn't have too many of these things and they were very important. But apart from that, the battle was fought on Wavell's resources and brilliantly fought, there's no question of that.
LAWRENCE DURRELL
Press officer, Cairo
Wavell had an extraordinary weakness for poets and poetry and was in fact at that moment doing an anthology and a treatise on generalship, which is one of the more amusing and one of the most sensitive books I think ever written by a general. He was a frequent visitor to the Anglo-Egyptian Union. A side of him was withdrawn, not exactly morose but he had a wall eye, and wall-eyed people give a feeling of dryness and moroseness. A bit gentle, nice, we liked him very much. He was a great addition to the circle and he used to come down very modestly, and at the time he was, I suppose, deep in plans to mop up the Italians. It never showed and he always had an anthology of verse under his arm.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL RONALD BELCHEM
7th Armoured Division
General Wavell will go down in history as one of our most competent generals of the Second World War. Indeed it's known that Rommel told his son that General Wavell was a military genius. General Wavell, remember, was Commander-in-Chief of the Middle East, stretching from the Persian Gulf right across to Malta. And for this enormous responsibility the resources at his disposal were meagre indeed, not only on the ground but also in the air. Probably only the Navy was able to afford the scale of effort that the situation demanded. But working on interior lines General Wavell, who was a great strategist, managed with these meagre resources to liberate Ethiopia, to defeat the Italian forces there and in Somaliland.
ANTHONY EDEN
Churchill was delighted when success came along. It was a very trying time until it did because I could show him on the map what we hoped to do, but Wavell quite rightly never would be too optimistic in what he said. He'd always play it down to get more help for this or that, which was rather trying if you were at the London end hoping great things, wanting great victories for other purposes apart from the actual battle. But of course Churchill was delighted when the results came in and they were wonderful. If any of my listeners have military ambitions, I would strongly advise them to avoid holding a high military command in the first two years in the British Army. Better wait until the stuff begins to come along, which I am afraid in the last two experiences was after the third year or later.
MAJOR GENERAL RICHARD O'CONNOR
Commander Western Desert Force
We started out to do a five-day raid. My resources were only two divisions, the 4th Indian and the 7th Armoured divisions, whose morale was extremely high and they were very well trained. The enemy, on the other hand, had a vast numerical superiority, something in the nature of eight to one, but their morale was low and they had no interest or enthusiasm for the war at all. We therefore felt that we had to do something to knock him off balance and prevent him using that vast superiority against our small numbers. In this we were helped because his method of defence was this: he had a series of these fortified perimeter camps and we decided that we would attack one and one only. As they were so far apart we felt sure they would be unable to support each other and we would be able to deal with this one by itself. Therefore, in order to get a better result, we decided that by night we would move our main forces round between two of these camps until we came right to the rear and then to attack from the rear, which would be the last place he would expect to be attacked, and then the surprise would be complete.
BRIGADIER HARDING
General O'Connor's instructions were to inflict such heavy losses on the Italians to destroy their potential for the invasion of the Delta, and his tactics were to get in behind the camps in which the Italian forces had entrenched themselves and to take full advantage of their fortress-minded deployment and to knock off the camps one by one, at the same time inflicting very heavy losses on them. Eventually this opened the way to an advance which again he exploited to the full. He was a commander who was always looking for an opportunity for bigger and better things and he certainly saw this, appreciated it immediately and took advantage of it.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL BELCHEM
Although they greatly outnumbered us numerically and in other respects, our equipment was probably superior. Secondly their, training was very elementary: they were not trained for desert operations, the Italians, neither were they clever at night. Most importantly their morale, although apparently high, was a synthetic morale inspired by repetitive propaganda and one was very conscious that if they suffered a defeat this would probably peel off like a plastic wrapper, which in fact was the case. But they had, for example, no tanks worth paying much attention to and I speak with feeling for the Italian crews because I was myself with an Italian tank regiment in Italy for a period before the war. O'Connor undertook an operation that was due to last about four days, which was the limit for the available tanks, which were nearly worn out, and for our administration in terms of supplying water and fuel and ammunition. He achieved complete surprise, got behind the Italian positions at Sidi Barrani by a night march and in the morning Italian resistance collapsed. O'Connor's great achievement was that by using captured vehicles and captured dumps of water and supplies he was able to maintain this four-day battle into an offensive lasting over a period of weeks and resulted in taking him as far as Benghazi and indeed beyond to El Agheila.
LIEUTENANT PAOLO COLACICCHI
Italian Tenth Army
Your army in Egypt, although considerably smaller than ours in number, was certainly better trained, better equipped especially in transport and tanks and armoured cars, and also had at the top generals who were certainly more aggressively minded than ours, so of course morale sagged even more. The armoured car acting as an OP [Observation Post] for the artillery had a tremendous effect on our men because they couldn't see the enemy. We could just see something glistening on the horizon, which was the armoured car, and then you'd fire a few shots and it would move a couple of hundred yards and readjust the fire of your batteries and this shook very much our Libyan troops. We had two divisions of Libyan troops who had, some of them, fought very well in Ethiopia, but these men must see the enemy to fight well. You can't put them in a fort and say hold it, and all day keep them subject to artillery fire, which they can't see where it comes from. They turn to their white officer and say, 'What about it, why can't we fire back?' And you say, 'Well, we haven't got the guns,' and they say, 'Well, then, they're stronger and this is very bad.'
MAJOR GENERAL O'CONNOR
I wasn't really surprised. I thought we'd do it, I thought we'd surprise them. We dominated no man's land and so they really didn't get their patrols out in the way they ought to have. The relative difficulty was getting right this night march between the two camps, which were only twenty to twenty-five miles apart. But they didn't hear us: we had aeroplanes in the air to make a noise all the time so they never heard our movement and it came as a complete and absolute surprise to them.
ANTHONY EDEN
Many unkind things have been said about the Italians and I think some of them are unfair. There was a brigadier commanding an armoured brigade or support group in the line next to the Italians at Solum or somewhere whose name was 'Strafer' Gott. He afterwards became quite famous and had he not been killed would have had command of the Eighth Army. I'd known him for some time and he came in with the others to talk to us in the desert while I was there and said something which impressed me at the time. He said it's not fair or true to say that the Italians are not brave – what it is, is that they are not properly trained. And I should think that was right. Mussolini pushed these people out indifferently trained and they were expected to go and fight these battles in desert conditions for which you have to be trained.
MAJOR GENERAL O'CONNOR
We had a great disappointment because the morning after Sidi Barrani I received information that the 4th Indian Division was to be withdrawn and that the new division, the 6th Australian Division – which was very good, I must say, when it came – wouldn't be ready for action for another month. That meant that the impetus of our pursuit would vanish and the enemy would be alerted and it would no longer be possible to surprise him. In fact we were back to rather below square one, but we managed and we did take Bardia after a considerable fight and Tobruk after a lesser one and advanced our line to Derna and then we had to come to the great decision: whether we were going to follow the enemy up along the Benghazi road or go right across the El Akhdar desert, come right across the line of communication of the Italian Tenth Army and to stop them escaping. And this, after a very hard fight, we successfully did, thanks to the marvellous work of the 7th Armoured Division, and we really liquidated the whole Italian Army.
ANTHONY EDEN
There was a school of thought which believed in the autumn of 1940 that during the winter Hitler would assemble, as he could have done no doubt, a formidable force with a view to launching an attack on this island in the spring. In the event he wasn't thinking of attacking us, he was thinking of attacking Russia, which opened up an entirely new perspective in the war. I don't pretend that after Wavell's victory we in London realised that there might soon be a Russo-German conflict – but we did think that if it were possible to bring certain Balkan countries into conflict with Hitler then the consequences might be really unforeseeable.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL FRANCIS DE GUINGAND
Joint Planning Staff, GHQ Cairo
O'Connor, who was commanding the Western Desert Force, had captured Tobruk and Benghazi, and his force had gone well south of Benghazi and at that moment Rommel and the Germans hadn't really started to come into North Africa. I was under the Joint Planning Staff in Cairo and always trying to look ahead and produce plans. We had to show that it was perfectly feasible, with the transport resources and air power and the Navy, that this desert force would get to Tripoli and mop up the remaining Italians. Army Headquarters produced similar studies and came to the same conclusion and O'Connor wanted to go ahead to Tripoli, he told me that himself. At that moment Churchill had a great idea of intervention in Greece because everyone knew the Germans were going to invade Greece at some time, and he wanted to offer a British expedition. The Prime Minister of Greece Ioannis Metaxas, a very strong character, and his Chief of the Armed Forces, Alexander Papagos, who was the hero of the Greek people after his victories over the Italians in Albania, but he would have nothing to do with it. And Papagos said the Allies clean up North Africa first and then we'll think about other operations. One of the reasons for intervention in Greece, Churchill had in mind, was to try to persuade Turkey to come in on our side, which would have been tremendous. Personalities change the course of events and Metaxas died, heart attack or something. And another Prime Minister took over, nothing like such a strong man, and Churchill got on to him and Wavell was told to denude the Western Desert and reduce the forces to the minimum and to prepare an expedition force to Greece.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL BELCHEM
The decision to go to Greece was a political one and from the point of view of a professional it was a military nonsense. It may have been necessary for Great Britain to help our Greek allies at that time, even though the Greeks did not seem to be particularly enthusiastic about it, but militarily I can only express an opinion from a cold professional angle. Firstly, if you think of the position in the air we simply had not got any comparable Royal Air Force contingent to enable us to hope to succeed in Greece; whereas against us, limited only by the number of forward bases available, the Germans were able to concentrate the whole of the Luftwaffe. Under those conditions we couldn't hope to maintain our position alongside the Greeks, who were themselves very poorly and very sparsely equipped. Yet from the overall point of view of the Commander-in-Chief Middle East the military situation was that the diversion of resources to Greece included the 6th and 7th Australian divisions and the New Zealand Division and part of a Second Army division, taken away from General Wavell in Africa, virtually the whole of the fighting formations which were ready and equipped for operations. Therefore by going to Greece we endangered our entire position in the Middle East.
BRIGADIER HARDING
I was all against it. I thought it was a great strategic mistake and I think there was considerable misunderstanding between High Command in Cairo and government in London. What they were really intending to do in Greece, to me it was disastrous. The opportunity that was lost was really of holding Rommel right in the early part of his advance, preventing him from ever getting within striking distance of the Nile Delta.
MAJOR GENERAL O'CONNOR
I'm quite certain that if we had advanced immediately we could have pushed them out. We had good information that there were very few people in the way. I have this letter, an extract that I'm going to read, from Hitler to Mussolini at the time of the fall of Tobruk, when our own Eighth Army was in retreat. It reads as follows: 'If at this moment the British are not pursued to the last breath of each man, the same thing will happen as when the British were deprived of success when they had nearly reached Tripoli.' That seems to me a good-enough indication that we could have got there.
ANTHONY EDEN
With Greece the position had been complicated by two factors, the first that we gave Greece a guarantee, I think before the hostilities began, and the second was that although the Greeks superbly repelled the Italian attacks, they did ask for air help from us, and we had a number of squadrons and ground troops with them in Greece way back before there was any question of the Germans taking part in the Middle East. So in a sense we were largely committed. And the view of the War Cabinet and the Defence Committee at home and of the Chiefs of Staff was that we should, if the Greeks were going to defend themselves against the Germans, we should bring them what help we could. And Dill and I were sent out to Cairo to look into this business. We had appalling weather, we were badly held up and when we reached there in our flying boat I remember saying, 'What are we going to do, supposing Archie Wavell and the other Commanders-in-Chief think it's wrong to go to Greece?' I think Dill said, 'Well, let's jump that one when we get there.' We found Archie there at the landing stage and after a brief introduction he suddenly drew us to one side and said rather solemnly, 'You've been a long time coming,' and I said, 'We've been as quick as we could – it wasn't our fault.' He said, 'I hope you don't mind what I'm going to say, I don't think I ought to waste time and I've begun the movement of troops and the concentration to enable us to go to Greece.' We did all think the same.
BRIGADIER HARDING
I think Wavell allowed himself to be over-pressurised from London in launching operations before he was fully ready for them. I think he was also misled by the Intelligence appreciations at the time who underrated first of all the capability of the Germans to put down forces across the Mediterranean and across North Africa, and then they underrated again the power and strength of the German armoured formations and their anti-tank capabilities.
COLONEL SIEGFRIED WESTPHAL
Rommel's Operations Officer
The German troops who brought the order to go to the desert were very surprised and they had no time to prepare for this new war theatre, but I think they acted very reasonably; many of them did suffer homesickness but the fighting reaction was not influenced by it. Yes, the Germans are a continental people, and we never had in mind to fight outside Germany. I was, in the years between 1935 and 1938, in the first Operational Department of the German General Staff in Berlin. One day came to me a gentleman of another department to speak with me about the maps we would take with us in wartime, and he proposed maps of North Africa and I said to him that is nonsense, we intend not to have warfare in North Africa and this map would not be very useful for the troops, and 1 declined. Later on when I came to the desert I had to suffer about very bad detailed maps and therefore we were very busy to get in our hands British maps, which were excellent. And Rommel always not with Italian or German maps, only British maps.
ANTHONY EDEN
Many things weren't as expected, but one result did come through – that was the Yugoslav coup d'état. In fact we were just on our way home thinking there was nothing more we could do. At Malta we got this message and we decided to go straight back to Athens to see what we could arrange for contacts with the Yugoslavs, and as we got into the flying boat came a message from Winston, 'Please go back to Athens at once' – minds with a single thought.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL DE GUINGAND
Churchill then sent Eden out to visit Athens and I was the Staff Officer appointed to produce what resources we had available, which we could send to Greece. It didn't look very impressive, however we all survived that and we had a momentous conference at the King of Greece's palace outside Athens, and the King of Greece sitting at the head of the table, with the Prime Minister one side and Papagos on the other. I was called in at the right moment to explain what forces and resources we could send to Greece, and I was actually there when Eden asked Wilson to inform the King of Greece and his Cabinet, his views as to whether we'd be successful if we intervened. Wilson got up and made a most optimistic statement, that he felt we could hold this line and northern Greece and prevent the Germans from getting deep into Greece. I was absolutely shattered because all our studies in ground-planning staff had shown that it wasn't possible – you'd never get the forces and sufficient strength there in time before the Germans would be there.
ANTHONY EDEN
There's the extraordinary thing about Stalin and his approach to the Yugoslavs immediately after the coup d'état: Stalin offered them a pact of mutual assurance. I was amazed because until that moment Russians had taken every precaution not to give Hitler any excuse for attacking them, and yet there they were deliberately flouting him. Hitler was furious at the Yugoslavs, he called it Operation Retribution and if I'd been Hitler at that moment I'd have said, 'Well, we know which side they're on.' Stalin's answer to me, when I asked him a year or more afterwards why he did it, he gave a double answer, he said, 'Because, in the first place, we knew by then that we were going to be attacked, and in the second place they were fellow Slavs and we wanted to encourage them.'
CAPTAIN HANS-OTTO BEHRENDT
Intelligence Officer on Rommel's Staff
One of my favourite Rommel stories is when in the port of Tripoli in February–March 1941, Rommel told my friend Lieutenant Hundt, an engineer, 'Here you can build me a hundred and fifty tanks.' The man looked stupefied and Rommel told him, 'Don't you have timber here in the harbour and canvas of sails to make a hundred and fifty covers for Volkswagens? So you can give me a hundred and fifty tanks.' Those 'tanks' misled the British in the first campaign.
PRIVATE BOLZANO
Italian Army
One day I stood on the road near the sergeant of panzers and I ask him, 'Tell me the truth – how many working panzers you have now still?' And he said, 'This morning we report seven but the truth is,' he whispered in my ear, 'we have sixteen – but if Rommel knows that, he attacks immediately.'
CAPTAIN BEHRENDT
Rommel was much loved by the Italian simple soldiers because he cared more about them than anybody else in the desert and they called him 'Santo Rommel', I have heard them say this. Rommel himself once said they have other than military virtues and he liked the Italians because they admired and saluted him very nicely, whereas the Germans were not so ready to do this as the Italians. I think that Rommel's criticism of some Italian leaders was also decisive for this Italian esteem, the esteem of the simple soldier towards this German general.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL DE GUINGAND
During the meantime when we had denuded the desert, Rommel had landed in Tripoli, not very strong, but in accordance with his character dashed forward eastwards with the very meagre resources he had there. And absolute chaos reigned, our forces started tumbling back towards Tobruk and we were getting no news in Cairo whatsoever. Wavell sent for me and said, 'Will you go up with my personal liaison officer and try to find out what is happening and see O'Connor and persuade him to hold Tobruk?' I found an Australian division in absolute state of exhaustion and all lying around the place in Tobruk, had several days without sleep and I couldn't find O'Connor. After many hours I found Brigadier Harding who was absolutely magnificent; exhausted, he was holding the fort and he behaved in a simply amazing and wonderful way. He said certainly they would try and hold Tobruk.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL BELCHEM
Wavell's decision to hold Tobruk at the time of that retreat was the greatest single factor in enabling him to hold Rommel at the Egyptian frontier and the great risk created by the intervention in Greece was overcome.
MAJOR GENERAL O'CONNOR
It was a great shock to be captured. I never thought it would ever happen to me – very conceited, perhaps – but it was miles behind our own front and by a sheer bit of bad luck we drove into the one bit of desert in which the Germans had sent around a reconnaissance group and we went bang into the middle of them.
BRIGADIER HARDING
I was following behind O'Connor and Philip Neame when they got captured and I found myself with no general at all and joined forces with General Moorshead who was commanding the Australian division and together we tried to sort things out, but it was pretty chaotic. At the same time we sent out search and rescue parties to see if we could find out what had happened to O'Connor and Neame and the people who were with them, but it took us a little time to sort things out, and it wasn't until Wavell came up and came into Tobruk and brought with him General Lavarack, another Australian and two Staff Officers, and sorted the whole thing out and left General Lavarack in command, and we really got the situation under control again.
ANTHONY EDEN
Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Longmore, from the air point of view particularly, ruled out any further advances along the coast towards Tripoli because of the growth of the German air activity from Sicily, which would have been very formidable at that time if we'd gone beyond Benghazi – at least that was his view and of the other Chiefs of Staff.
MAJOR GENERAL O'CONNOR
It was a question, really, of whether or not we could go on and do both Tripoli and Greece, but Tripoli immediately. If we could do Tripoli immediately it still left all the options open for doing Greece if we wanted to. Some of my friends say, oh, yes, you could have got to Tripoli all right, but could you have stayed there, could you have stood up to the bombing that you would have got from Sicily? My answer is that Rommel stood up to the bombing by the British when his line was extended, his line of communication extended right the way from Tripoli to Alamein, and he was there for a number of months and stood up to it, and if he could do it so could we. The time to have done it was straight away, the same afternoon. That would have been the battle finished. We could have gone on: we had an Australian brigade ready that was coming in by vessel, and we could have used them. I entirely blame myself for not having done this. I think it was quite inexcusable – I ought to have.
BRIGADIER HARDING
It's always rash to hazard a guess but I think not very far off it. It would have taken tremendous time and resources to have driven Rommel out of North Africa, but certainly I think we could have driven him back to a point, to a position where it would have been difficult. With the increasing air power at the disposal of the Allies it would have been difficult for the Germans to phase a further offensive with any prospect of reaching the Delta.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL DE GUINGAND
When I got back from Greece I was absolutely convinced that evacuation would have to take place even if we got the forces there, and I discussed with the Joint Planning Staff plans for evacuation and I was told by Wavell to stop any work on that and not to mention the word. I felt so strongly that I saw the Naval and Air Commanders-in-Chief and put it to them and they said they felt that they would like us to go on planning the possibility of evacuation, which we did. I eventually went over to Greece to tie up with the Air Force and the Navy various details for evacuation, that is after we had sent the troops over.
ANTHONY EDEN
We had agreed with the Greeks for certain withdrawals, which they said they could make at our first meeting. In the event they couldn't withdraw troops from Macedonia and expose Salonika, and they didn't bring their troops back from Albania to the extent which we expected. That meant we were not strong enough on the Aliakmon Line. At any rate it didn't alter the balance sheet in the final result and I think the argument that, in war, you take action which you think may have some positive results, but you can't really see beyond a certain distance, and if you're likely to come a cropper.
JOHN COLVILLE
Assistant Private Secretary to the Prime Minister 1939–41
Wavell was one of the few soldiers who Churchill did not know personally but he had heard him spoken of with admiration on all sides, and so he persuaded Lord Roscbury to bring Wavell to Chequers and he made very little impression on Churchill because he was a shy man. Nevertheless Churchill had heard his praises sung so frequently that he took him on trust and Wavell then commanded the Middle East. This trust lasted for a time but Churchill lost faith in Wavell, first in the spring of 1941 when Rommel got as far as Alamein before Wavell's intelligence had even registered the fact the Germans were in Africa and they captured General O'Connor and two other high officers. Churchill thought it incredible. The second thing was Crete: he thought it important that Crete should be held at all costs; if we lost Crete we lost our bases in the eastern Mediterranean. And he kept telegraphing Wavell, 'Surely you can spare a dozen tanks for the defence of Maleme airfield,' and Wavell replied that he had no tanks: they were all having their tracks mended or having their engines greased and he couldn't spare even a dozen. Crete was lost, it was a great disaster, upset everybody in the House of Commons, the country – it was a low point for us in the war. Colonel Laycock who at this time was a comparatively unknown officer but was a friend of Churchill's social acquaintances was brought to Chequers for luncheon. And as he'd been to Crete, Churchill listened with great interest to what he had to say. And there came the moment when Laycock said, 'I really believe Crete could have been saved if only we could have kept the airfield – if we'd just had a dozen tanks we could have held the airfield from the Germans.' And Churchill's eyes opened wide and I felt as if I could hear a nail being hammered into Wavell's reputation and coffin.
ANTHONY EDEN
One has to admit that we didn't attain the objectives we'd hoped for. We weren't able to conduct, with the help of the Yugoslavs, any effective campaign in the Balkans. We lost Greece and many brave men, and more were captured, and we lost Crete too. So in that sense the balance sheet was much against us and it was a depressing time at home as well as for those responsible for the campaign.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL BELCHEM
The philosophy of combined operations between the Royal Air Force and the Army had not evolved and this was probably because there was not a sufficiency of Royal Air Force to prompt the evolution. But it's more difficult to understand in the case of armour. Manifestly at the battle of Tobruk the very heavy armoured losses we sustained indicated there was something wrong with the handling of the armour and perhaps one would have expected General Wavell to have summoned an armoured expert to be his right-hand man at that time.
ANTHONY EDEN
At the minimum, I think, you put the delay which the battle of Yugoslavia and the battle of Greece entailed on German plans, that was four weeks. You would certainly be in a very unpleasant situation if the Russians had had to stand another month of good weather at least before 'General Winter' came to their rescue.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL BELCHEM
General Auchinleck certainly had his problems.*24 Firstly he was manifestly unlucky in his choice of subordinates: General Cunningham had done very well in Ethiopia but conditions in the desert were very different; then General Ritchie afterwards justified himself in his operations in Normandy and elsewhere, but at the time that he assumed command of the Eighth Army he was completely unready and unprepared for such a responsibility. As a result, for the second time Auchinleck had to go up to the desert at a moment of utter crisis, had to relieve General Ritchie and again take personal command of the Eighth Army at a moment when we were in full retreat and when even Mussolini was already in Africa with a white horse, waiting to lead the Italian columns in a victory march through Cairo.