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

Churchill described it as a ‘skirmish’. ⁸³ The high command of the German army might say in private that Rommel’s failure to take Tobruk showed that they had been right all along: he was an overrated Nazi stooge. The British, on the receiving end, could but notice the ferocity of his attacks. ⁸⁴ The Yugoslavs were suing for peace, as were parts of the Greek army. King Peter of Yugoslavia had already arrived in Athens, fleeing into exile. Whilst the Greek forces in the east cooperated with Wilson’s plan to hold the Germans at the Pass of Thermopylae, those on the west coast refused to withdraw to a new defensive line. The western officers maintained that the Italians were the enemy, the English were troublemakers and the Germans were potential friends. Hitler ruled that these ‘brave soldiers’ should be offered ‘honourable surrender’. The generals of the Army of Epirus were a ‘heaven-sent favour’ who would lead Greece into the New Order. ⁸⁵ Despairing of his country, the Greek Prime Minister committed suicide. In the confusion that followed the collapse of central authority in Athens, British officers, diplomats and secret agents all agreed that both the military and political will to resist had collapsed. Few Greek politicians viewed with favour a plan to carry on the fight from Crete. In the end the British stopped looking for a Greek leader to accompany the King into exile and found a Cretan banker, Emanuel Tsouderos, who might serve as politician. The British evacuated their second monarch, King George of the Hellenes, from Athens in a few days. ⁸⁶

      For German aircraft in the Aegean it was a happy, killing time. In one 24-hour period they sank well over twenty ships which were trying to evacuate British troops. Over the same period the bombardment of Tripoli, albeit shorn of its suicidal aspects, proved, as Cunningham had predicted, a damp squib. The only redeeming feature of the operation was that the German air force, so successfully deployed elsewhere, missed the opportunity to sink a British battleship. He had, Cunningham wrote, got away with it by dint of good luck. The cost had been to tie up the Mediterranean Fleet for five days, ‘at the expense of all other commitments and at a time when these commitments were at their most pressing’. ⁸⁷ You have to understand, he signalled London, that ‘the key which will decide the issue of our success or otherwise in holding the Mediterranean lies in air power’. Stop complaining, the reply came back; it was Cunningham’s duty to establish control of the Mediterranean, not to try and slough it off on the air force. ⁸⁸ In despair, Cunningham told Churchill that he understood nothing of what was happening in the Mediterranean. ⁸⁹ He was ‘blind to facts’. ⁹⁰ Churchill’s riposte was that he understood the failings of those in the Mediterranean only too well. He was providing the tools that they were too scared to use. It was he who had ordered a huge convoy of tanks to be sent from the UK to Egypt. It was he who had ordered Somerville to get the convoy through to Malta; it was he who had insisted that Cunningham pick it up on the other side and see it through to its destination. It was he who had overruled naval objections that ‘their chances of getting through the Mediterranean were remote’. ⁹¹ Once more, Cunningham complained, Churchill misrepresented the situation. He was all for the single-minded pursuit of an essential goal, however dangerous, but his actual orders were to divert forces from the convoy. London insisted on another pointless coastal bombardment, this time of Benghazi. ⁹²

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

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

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

      This luck soon ran out. At the end of April 1941 Hitler had agreed to a Luftwaffe plan to seize Crete, primarily through the use of air power and parachutists. ⁹⁷ This was to be the last operation in the Mediterranean before the invasion of Russia. Operation Merkur was an air-force plan, to be carried out by air-force generals. Unsurprisingly, the Luftwaffe generals took air superiority very seriously. Whilst Cunningham was still at sea with the tank convoy, his air-force opposite number took the decision to withdraw RAF squadrons from Crete. Before his enforced departure Longmore had always