Operation Mercury (4 page)

On 8 February the Greek dictator's successor M. Koryzis requested further discussions on the size and nature of the British commitment. Wavell's cautious approach that the soundest policy was to continue naval and air support, while retaining Crete as a vital bastion but avoiding a large scale deployment, had been echoed by the Joint Planning Staff. The crushing weight of the British victory at Beda Fomm had reinforced Eden's enthusiasm for his Balkan Crusade.

If the Turks were to be the eastern bastion with the Yugoslavs to the north then it was essential that the Greeks, in the vulnerable centre, were speedily and substantially reinforced. A fresh mission to Athens would therefore be necessary, this time headed by Eden rather than Wavell or Sir John Dill, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff; a shift of emphasis from the purely military to the overtly political.

Even so Churchill, when writing to Wavell, intimated that if it was not possible to reach a working brief with the Greeks then all that could be done would be to salvage Crete and any other island bases which might be useful. When Eden met with Wavell, Dill, Longmore and Admiral Cunningham (Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet) in Cairo he once again found the General sceptical of the prospects for offensive military operations in the Balkan sector.

Eden was not easily dissuaded and wrung a concession from the C.-in-C. that a scheme for the defence of Salonika be devised and put to the Greeks. Cunningham later noted that both he and Dill saw little to offer in this but held their counsel.

Salonika, Greece's second city and her great northern port, one which had seen much Allied military activity in the Great War, was the pivot upon which the proposed Balkan alliance must turn; it was also the only harbour other than Piraeus that could provide a base for an expeditionary force. To hold the city however, the Greeks would have to base their defensive line on the northern chain of Macedonian passes. Wavell privately felt that this would be a good deal further than they would wish to extend and might, hopefully, allow the whole idea to founder.

He also expressed the clear need to have the Balkan allies on side before seeking a deployment around Salonika for, as matters stood, the Axis could invade long before any sufficient build up could be established and simply overrun the bridgehead. Wavell, who had already received a severe rebuff from Churchill, had also, even in the hour of his triumph in the desert, been subjected to a series of rather petty snubs and recurrent sniping. It was clear to him that he did not enjoy the Prime Minister's confidence and that his strategic assessments, invariably sound, were likely to be disregarded.

Eden, convinced the proposed intervention could be made real, did not feel constrained by such practical considerations. He conceded that the whole strategy constituted a ‘gamble' but the risk was justified by the paramount need to be seen to be doing something to assist the Greeks. So fired was the Foreign Secretary by the urgency of his mission that, as his delegation flew on to Athens, there was some hasty and disreputable shuffling of the resources Britain was able to commit.
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At the Tatoi Conference and, after some considerable haggling and a further inflation of the figures, a form of accord was attained, though, as it transpired the Greeks were as nimble as the British in overestimating numbers. General Papagos was in favour of holding the northern line and thus securing Salonika but this would require the disengagement of troops currently deployed in Albania; a difficult and uncertain matter.

Churchill, by 7 April, appeared to be having second thoughts and, seeking to curb his Foreign Secretary's enthusiasm, cautioned that there was nothing to be gained from encouraging the Greeks to a doomed struggle if we had only troops in penny packets to offer.

A further complication now arose in that some 80 per cent of the forces to be deployed in Greece were to be drawn from the Australian and New Zealand contingents but these were not directly under the orders of the C.-in-C. Middle East nor, for that matter, the War Cabinet. Acceptance of the strategic reasons for the deployment should, according to protocol, be sought beforehand from the Dominion governments.

In the event both Blamey and Freyberg were simply given their orders without reference to Canberra or Wellington. This highhandedness was to spark understandable resentment in the wake of the Greek and later the Cretan debacle. The official reasoning, outlined in a cable sent to the acting Prime Minister in Australia, was the need to form Eden's hoped for Balkan Front.

The Greek Expedition suffered from the outset from a confusion of objectives and a raft of heroic assumptions which largely proved untenable. Both Eden and Papagos had wildly overestimated the numbers which would be available; the entire scheme was based on the concept of a Balkan Alliance which did not even begin, at this stage, to exist and was put forward in the teeth of opposition from all of the commanders involved – army, navy and air force. The decision to assist Greece was, from the outset, political rather than military. In practical terms the ability of either Britain or Greece being able to deliver the resources needed was, at best, highly questionable.

The question of where best to stand on the defensive was discussed at the Tatoi Conference. Here the bland eloquence of political assurance began to founder against the harsh reality of the topography. The first position was a line drawn along the Bulgarian Frontier which would safeguard Salonika or a rearward position buttressed by the slopes of Mount Olympus and the Vermion range – the Aliakmon Line stronger but, being some forty miles behind the first, would mean the abandonment of Salonika. The Greeks, for understandable patriotic reasons, wished to hold the frontier and deny the Germans the soil for which they had already fought so hard.

But to hold this it was necessary to have the support of Yugoslavia, the second bastion of Eden's proposed alliance. Militarily the British generals favoured the Aliakmon Line as the advanced position could easily be outflanked if the Germans attacked through Serb territory; a real possibility as the attitude of the Belgrade Government had yet to be ascertained. Despite the apparent confidence some of those present at the conference (as Colonel de Guingand confirms) were by no means sanguine at the prospects of holding the Aliakmon Line:

One of the main weaknesses of the strategy determined at Tatoi was the reliance on the Yugoslavs at a time when the mood in Belgrade was unknown, as indeed was the view in Ankara, the third capital in Eden's three great pillars. The Turks, whilst conciliatory, were not easily drawn. They had no reason to invite German aggression and any vague assurances were clearly dependent upon them receiving quantities of aircraft and matériel which Britain was not placed to supply.

The situation in Yugoslavia was even more uncertain; the country was a political creation, born of the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary after 1918. The uneasy mix of peoples was dominated by the Serbs who leaned toward Britain, their ally from the First War. There was, however, in Croatia a substantial minority who leaned toward Germany and, in February 1941, Hitler had made it clear to the Yugoslavs that he expected them to ally themselves unequivocally with the Axis.

Prince Paul, the Regent, treading a delicate path between the two protagonists, was inclined to accept the German accord with the assurance that Italy would not benefit at his country's expense. He was cautious as he feared too overt a move toward the Axis could produce a backlash that would unseat his government.

The Germans were not minded to temporise – it was a question of whether the Regent preferred an alliance or an occupation. At the same time he was fending off repeated calls from Britain with the result that his country stood unhappily poised in a continuing dichotomy.

The net result of this feverish diplomacy was entirely negative. Sir Anthony Eden's dream of a buttressed Balkan coalition was exposed as a chimera and the viability of the British military expedition to Greece fatally undermined before the first shots were fired. In London the War Cabinet was becoming alarmed, Eden's initiatives had been launched on the Prime Minister's sole authority but the bulldog refused to be cornered.

Admitting that the expedition might prove a military blunder, Churchill challenged his colleagues with the need, imperative as he now saw it, to support the Greeks regardless of loss. The Cabinet backed off but with the important proviso that the expedition must receive the full endorsement of the Dominion governments.

In the event, on 26 February the New Zealand administration concurred, buoyed by assurances from General Freyberg. It may certainly be said that the facts, particularly the prospects for Yugoslav and Turkish involvement, may have been cast in a singularly optimistic light. R.G. Menzies, the Australian Prime Minister who had been present at the cabinet meeting, also urged agreement though he seems to have felt a greater degree of unease than this urging would suggest. He commented that the decision was being undertaken on the basis of assessment supplied from Middle East Command who had, in fact, expressed grave reservations about the whole scheme.

Some authors have argued that the concurrence of the Dominion governments was gained ‘by a combination of misunderstanding, misleading information, and straight untruth'.
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This may be unduly censorious and it is likely that Churchill adopted the same steamroller tactics as he did with his own colleagues. The Axis dictators had the considerable advantage of being accorded demigod status and were not troubled by having to cajole members drawn from an elected assembly and with differing political hues. Goering, in March 1941, observed with practised sycophancy that ‘The Führer is a unique leader, a gift of God. The rest of us can only fall in behind.'
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Churchill was a brilliant bully who was perfectly prepared to mislead or disregard in order to achieve his objectives. He was by no means infallible, great men seldom are, and, as Tony Simpson also mentions, the Dominion governments were perhaps still somewhat in awe of the mother parliament.

This is not to their discredit; the men who served from Australia and New Zealand were volunteers who believed in the truth of their cause and who were responding to a deep patriotism for Britain and the British way. This had perhaps been tarnished by Gallipoli and the subsequent bloody campaigns in France and in Flanders but it had not been extinguished. The Dominion governments responded because they saw the stark reality of Britain's peril and they therefore accepted that blood would be shed to secure freedom from Nazi tyranny in Europe. They may have been in part naive but they were not wrong.

By 13 December 1940 Hitler was outlining his plans for a Balkans campaign; this would begin in March 1941 and be expected to last no more than three weeks. Timing was everything for the divisions would soon be offered fresh employment elsewhere. The invasion of mainland Greece and the occupation of Bulgaria, codenamed ‘Marita' would be an exercise intended to secure the southern flank while the main issue was settled on the Russian Steppe. Even the deployment of General Rommel and his Afrika Korps expedition to Libya was merely intended to bolster the Italians and keep the British engaged rather than advance into Egypt and capture Suez. As Halder noted in February: ‘The war in Africa need not bother us very much … but we must not risk the internal collapse of Italy, Italy must be saved from that. It will be necessary to send some help.'
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A dramatic development occurred on 26 March 1941 when an army coup unseated the Yugoslav Regent, took control of the person of the young King Peter II and established a Serbian dominated military regime. This course of events had been in part instigated by Big Bill Donovan who had tapped into Serbian Nationalist, anti Axis sentiment in Belgrade and the key garrisons.

Although the junta leaned now toward the Allies, the generals were not so foolhardy as to hazard their tenuous grip on power by defying Germany. Although there were discussions with General Papagos early in April, these broke up in confusion but the die was already cast. Outraged at what he perceived as standard Balkan duplicity Hitler had, on 27 March, issued orders for the aptly named Operation Punishment.

It was now the turn of Yugoslavia to experience the full horrors of blitzkrieg with her air force shot to pieces on the ground and her capital subjected to a murderous aerial bombardment that left the city transformed into rubble and 17,000 of her citizens dead in the ruins. The Yugoslav army had disintegrated even before the panzers arrived and, on the morning of Sunday 6 April, five full armoured divisions under General von List crossed the Greek frontier, together with two motorised, three mountain, eight infantry and the
SS Adolf Hitler
divisions. There was no Balkan Alliance but there was now a Balkan War.