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

retreat. Then he had the authority to exploit the opportunity. As far as he could see, the British were fleeing. There were no armoured forces in front of him. Wavell was showing no appetite for the defence of Benghazi. It was his duty to chase him out of Cyrenaica. With Nelsonian arrogance Rommel seized for himself the triple initiative: over the British, over the Italians and over his own army high command. ⁶⁶ Eden had to get back to Cairo. The idea was growing that we cannot face the Germans and their appearance is enough to drive us back many score of miles’. Such a suspicion would ‘react most evilly throughout the Balkans’. ⁶⁷ As he prepared to fly south again, Italian troops–effectively under Rommel’s orders, whatever the formal command arrangements–occupied Benghazi. Rommel’s patron, Goebbels, immediately flooded the airwaves with read-backs of all the gloating statements the British had issued when Benghazi fell into their hands. It was ‘a dreadful humiliation for England’. ⁶⁸

      In truth, there was little for Eden to do in Cairo. The dispositions had been made around the Mediterranean, and there was little that the Mediterranean-hopping representative of Britain could do to affect the outcome. The one substantive decision made during his final stay in Egypt was that Tobruk should be reinforced by an Australian division and held for as long as possible. The Mediterranean commanders urged this decision. Eden and Dill added their imprimatur. Eden’s main task was to put a brave face on things, and to get his story straight for future consumption. When his Lockheed touched down at Heliopolis aerodrome on 5 April 1941, Eden himself cut a confident figure. His sartorial elegance had survived the journey, in contrast to his travelling companion who left the aircraft visibly ‘travel stained’. The jaunty air that had marked both Eden’s conversations and reports was still in place. This too was in contrast to the diplomats and officers who surrounded him. They were at the end of their tether, sunk in gloom at their repeated failures. A few hours in Cairo, however, was enough to bring Eden’s mood into line with that of everyone else. For the first time he started showing signs of ‘considerable emotion and agitation’. The atmosphere became one of ‘abysmal gloom’. As news from the battlefront trickled in, most notably that the British commanders in the Western Desert had been captured by the advancing Italo-Germans, there was a sense that people were cracking. They spent hours going over the same unprofitable ground, discussing ad nauseam how it had come to this. Out of these discussions came a ‘line’ about what had gone wrong. The whole scheme of sending assistance to Greece had been based on ‘the definite and positive assurance from the soldiers that they could easily hold the West’. It was the generals who were to blame for this misjudgement. Eden had been let down by the military. ⁶⁹

      Eden was certainly wise to prepare such a cover story before he departed, for a double-edged and doubly uncomfortable welcome was in preparation. ‘The great trip’, it was said in Whitehall, ‘has been a failure.’ Churchill was ‘saying he never wished to help Greece’. At the same time the Prime Minister declared of Eden that he wished ‘to exhibit him in triumph’. Whether he liked it or not, Eden was to be yoked to events in the Mediterranean and made to take responsibility for them. Eden delayed his departure long enough to hear the news that the Germans had invaded both Greece and Yugoslavia. ⁷⁰

      Thus ended Eden’s Mediterranean adventure. It took him three days to reach home. By that time the news was even worse than when he had left. The Greek army of the north-east, comprising 60,000 men–bigger than the entire British expeditionary force–had surrendered. The Germans had launched a second invasion of Yugoslavia from the southern Reich itself. Zagreb had fallen and the independent Ustasha republic of Croatia had been proclaimed. Rommel had captured Derna, prompting renewed Nazi gloating. ‘Wonderful! wonderful,’ declared Goebbels, ‘stunning blow for London; supplies excellent material for our propaganda. We are on top of the world.’ ⁷¹ The commanders in the Mediterranean agreed, in part, with what the German propaganda chief said. ⁷² Arthur Longmore, the RAF commander, was heard to say that ‘it really didn’t matter’ either way whether they held the Mediterranean. ‘All we had to do was to fall South [into Africa] and let the Mediterranean look after itself.’ ⁷³ Longmore made the further mistake–ultimately fatal to his career–of saying that Eden’s tour of the Mediterranean had been a disaster. ⁷⁴ Such statements played into the narrative that the commanders in the Mediterranean were ‘windy’, and it was only the unyielding will of London that kept them up to the task. ⁷⁵

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

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

      Although such victories were to prove the key to the future of Mediterranean warfare, at the time the battle of the Kerkenah Bank seemed