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

³⁰ Having completed his mission in Turkey to his own–if no one else’s–satisfaction, Eden returned to Athens on 2 March. There he presided over the signature of a formal military aid agreement by Dill and his Greek opposite number, Alexander Papagos. Whilst this document was finalized in Athens, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia was having a deeply disturbing meeting with Hitler in Austria. He was told that the day had come when he must openly ally with the Nazis.

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

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

      Neither Yugoslavia nor Turkey would fight. The Yugoslavs had ‘sold their souls to the Devil’. All the Balkan peoples were ‘trash’. ³⁵ Vichyites and Francoists were hungrily eyeing British weakness. Franco and Mussolini had met, as had Franco and Pétain. Franco’s men were becoming more flagrant in the aid they gave to German submarines operating from Spanish ports. ³⁶ Somerville had complained that in seizing French ships his own men had been forced to kill ‘harmless’ civilians and children. ‘It seems to me’, he wrote, ‘that we are just as much of a dictator country as either Germany or Italy and one day the great British public will wake up and ask what we are fighting for.’ ³⁷ Darlan could hardly improve on Somerville’s formulation of the issue. He announced to the newly arrived American ambassador that he would ‘first use his propaganda system to explain to the French people that Mr Churchill is responsible for their lack of food, and second, he will use his Navy to convoy French merchant ships and sink any British ships that interfere’. He had repeated the threat in a carefully staged conference with the international press, with Pétain present. ³⁸ The management of the press was a triumph for the ‘ambitious crook’ Darlan. Churchill, fearful of his own reputation in America, effectively abandoned the blockade of French ports. ³⁹ The result, as he himself said, was, ‘convoys growing larger every day are passing in and out of the Straits…with only nominal escorts’. ⁴⁰ Hitler decreed that Darlan should be regarded as ‘trustworthy’. ⁴¹ These curs, Churchill wrote, would not act any more energetically merely because the Germans crushed the Greeks, but they would be emboldened if the Germans crushed the British in Greece. ⁴²

      These thoughts were of course no help to Eden for, as became clear when the full text of the Dill–Papagos agreement reached London, he had committed Britain ‘up to the hilt’ with no get-out clauses. On 6 March 1941 Churchill announced that Eden’s actions had settled the matter. ⁴³ He had achieved his goal, a commitment to go to Greece’s aid coupled with the ‘secret satisfaction that if things went really wrong there was a good scapegoat handy’. ⁴⁴ The next day British troops began arriving in the Piraeus. ⁴⁵

      Churchill was predictably delighted with this arrangement. His reputation as an adventurer was by no means ill-won. But the scars of Gallipoli, twenty-five years earlier, ran deep. He preferred adventures from which no blame could attach to him. Hence appeasement in the western Mediterranean, matched by wild advance in the east. He and his cronies agreed that it would be an excellent thing if Eden’s Mediterranean sojourn should be extended indefinitely. Eden and Greece must be completely synonymous in the public eye. ⁴⁶ No one in the Mediterranean could quite make up their minds whether they had been ‘had’. They were told that it was their enthusiasm for the operation that had swung the vote in London in favour of intervention. They were not told of Churchill’s private abusive outburst about their dithering. Their warning that, without reinforcement, disaster was likely was met with the rebuke that they had failed to ‘appreciate what is going on outside the Mediterranean’. ⁴⁷

      It was unclear who had talked whom into the Greek adventure. It seemed hard to criticize the decision on moral grounds. The Greeks had shown some ability at fighting; they were certainly under threat. The moral surety of the case might have seemed less secure if the British had been aware that, whilst British troops marched into the line with the Greek army in the north-east, the Greek army in the north-west was trying to cut a deal with the Germans. ⁴⁸ Eden did not know any of this, but he most definitely had an inkling of his difficult position. In Cairo he pondered the situation. He had done all he could in the Mediterranean, he did not want to stay any longer. ⁴⁹ The Greek decision had been made, the Yugoslavs had gone to the dark side: the only hope in Belgrade was the kind of deniable ‘special operation’ that Eden wanted nothing to do with. It was left to local diplomats and secret servicemen to ‘play this difficult hand’. ⁵⁰

      The only concession Eden would make was that he should have one more tilt at the Turkish problem. Perhaps it would be possible to pull a last-minute rabbit out of the hat. Wavell told him that this idea was pointless. There was little chance that the Turks might cooperate. If they did, it would be a disaster, yet another call on British resources to no military advantage. Eden was determined that his Mediterranean mission should end on a high note and persisted. Thus the penultimate leg of Eden’s Mediterranean travels was a flight to Cyprus, unaccompanied by any military advisers, for a last meeting with the Turks.