The Second World War (35 page)

General Halder, having heard such conflicting reports on what was going on in North Africa, decided to send out Generalleutnant Friedrich Paulus, who had served in the same infantry regiment as Rommel in the First World War. Halder felt that Paulus was ‘
perhaps the only man
with enough personal influence to head off this soldier gone stark mad’. Paulus, a punctilious staff officer, could hardly have been more different from Rommel, the aggressive field commander. Their sole similarity lay in their comparatively humble birth. Paulus’s task was to convince Rommel that he could not count on massive reinforcements and to find out what he intended to do.

The answer was that Rommel refused to pull back his forward units on the Egyptian frontier, and with the newly arrived 15th Panzer Division he intended to attack Tobruk again. This took place on 30 April and was again repulsed with heavy losses, especially in tanks. Rommel’s forces were also very low on ammunition. Paulus, using his authority from the OKH, gave Rommel a written order on 2 May that the attacks could not be renewed unless the enemy was seen to withdraw. On his return, he reported to Halder that ‘
the crux of the problem
in North Africa’ was not Tobruk, but resupplying the Afrika Korps and Rommel’s character. Rommel simply refused to acknowledge the immense problem of transporting his supplies across the Mediterranean and unloading them in Tripoli.

Wavell was concerned after the losses in Greece and Cyrenaica about his lack of tanks to face the 15th Panzer Division. Churchill mounted Operation Tiger, the transport in early May of nearly 300 Crusader tanks and over fifty Hurricanes by convoy through the Mediterranean. With part of X Fliegerkorps still on Sicily it represented a serious risk, but thanks to bad visibility only one transport was sunk on the way.

An impatient Churchill pushed Wavell into an offensive on the frontier even before the new tanks arrived. But although Operation Brevity commanded by Brigadier ‘Strafer’ Gott began well on 15 May, it provoked a rapid flanking counter-attack by Rommel. The Indian and British troops
were forced back and the Germans eventually recaptured the Halfaya Pass. Once the new Crusader tanks arrived, Churchill again demanded action, in this case another offensive codenamed Operation Battleaxe. He did not want to hear that many of the unloaded tanks required work on them, nor that the 7th Armoured Division needed time for crews to familiarize themselves with the new equipment.

Wavell again found himself weighed down by conflicting demands from London. At the beginning of April, a pro-German faction, encouraged by British weakness in the Middle East, had taken power in Iraq. The chiefs of staff in London recommended that Britain should intervene. Churchill immediately agreed and troops from India landed at Basra. Rashid Ali al-Gailani, the leader of the new Iraqi government, sought help from Germany, but received no reply because of confusion in Berlin. On 2 May, fighting broke out after the Iraqi army besieged the British air base at Habbaniyah near Fallujah. Four days later the OKW decided to send Messerschmitt 110s and Heinkel 111 bombers via Syria to Mosul and Kirkuk in northern Iraq, but they were soon unserviceable mainly due to engines damaged by dust. Meanwhile, British imperial troops from India and Jordan advanced on Baghdad. Gailani’s government had no option but to accept the British demand on 31 May for the continued passage of troops across Iraqi territory.

Although the Iraq crisis did not deplete Wavell’s forces, he was ordered by Churchill to invade Lebanon and Syria, where the French Vichy forces had aided the Germans in the Luftwaffe’s ill-fated deployment to Mosul and Kirkuk. Churchill wrongly feared that the Germans would use Syria as a base for attacks on Palestine and Egypt. Admiral Darlan, Pétain’s deputy and Vichy’s minister of defence, asked the Germans to desist from provocative operations in the region while he sent French reinforcements to their colony to resist the British. On 21 May, the day after the invasion of Crete, a Vichy French fighter group landed in Greece on its way to Syria. ‘
The war is becoming ever
more bizarre,’ Richthofen noted in his diary. ‘We are supposed to supply them and
entertain
them.’

Operation Exporter, the Allied invasion of Vichy Lebanon and Syria, which included Free French troops, began on 8 June with an advance north from Palestine across the Litani River. The Vichy commander, General Henri Dentz, asked for Luftwaffe assistance as well as for reinforcements from other Vichy forces in North Africa and France. The Germans decided that they could not offer air cover, but allowed French troops with anti-tank guns to travel by train through the occupied Balkans to Salonika, and then by ship to Syria. But the British naval presence was too strong, and Turkey, not wanting to get involved, refused transit rights. The French Army of the Levant soon knew that it was doomed, but remained determined
to put up a strong resistance. Fighting continued until 12 July. After an armistice was signed at Acre, Syria was declared to be under the control of the Free French.

Wavell’s lack of enthusiasm for the Syrian campaign and his pessimism over the prospects of Operation Battleaxe put him on a collision course with the prime minister. Churchill’s impatience and his complete lack of appreciation of the problems in mounting two offensives at the same time brought Wavell close to despair. The prime minister, over-confident after the delivery of tanks in Operation Tiger, brushed aside Wavell’s warning about the effectiveness of German anti-tank guns. They, rather than the German panzers, were destroying the bulk of his armoured vehicles. The British army was unforgivably slow in developing a weapon comparable to the feared German 88mm gun. Its own two-pounder ‘pea-shooter’ was useless. And the conservatism of the British army prevented the adaptation of the 3.7 inch anti-aircraft gun as an anti-tank weapon.

On 15 June, Battleaxe began in a similar way to Brevity. Although the British retook the Halfaya Pass and had some other local successes, they were soon pushed back when Rommel brought forward all his panzers from the Tobruk encirclement. In three days of heavy fighting, the British were outflanked once more and again had to withdraw to the coastal plain, just managing to avoid encirclement. The Afrika Korps suffered higher casualties, but the British lost ninety-one tanks, mainly to anti-tank gunfire, while the Germans lost only a dozen. The RAF also lost many more aircraft than the Luftwaffe during the battle. German soldiers, with considerable exaggeration, claimed that they had destroyed 200 British tanks and won the ‘
greatest tank battle
of all time’.

On 21 June, Churchill replaced Wavell with General Sir Claude Auchinleck, universally known as ‘the Auk’. Wavell took over Auchinleck’s position of commander-in-chief India. Soon afterwards Hitler promoted Rommel to
General der Panzertruppe
, and to Halder’s dismay and disgust ensured that he would have even greater independence.

Churchill’s irritation with Wavell and the dejected leadership of the British army was fired by two imperatives. One was the need for aggressive action to keep up morale at home and prevent the country from slipping into a gloomy inertia. The other was to impress the United States and President Roosevelt. Above all, he needed to counter the partly justified impression that the British were waiting for the United States to enter the war and save the situation.

Roosevelt, to Churchill’s great relief, had been been re-elected president in November 1940. The British prime minister was further
encouraged when he heard of the strategic review prepared that month by the US Navy’s chief of operations. ‘Plan Dog’, as it was known, led to American–British staff talks at the end of January 1941. These discussions which took place in Washington under the codeword ABC-1 carried on until March. They formed the basis of Allied strategy when the United States entered the war. The policy of ‘Germany first’ was agreed as the basic principle. This accepted that, even with a war in the Pacific against Japan, the United States would first concentrate on the defeat of Nazi Germany, because without a major commitment of American forces to the European theatre the British were clearly incapable of winning on their own. If they lost, then the United States and its world trade would be in danger.

Roosevelt had recognized the threat posed by Nazi Germany even before the Munich agreement of 1938. Foreseeing the importance of air power in the coming war, he had rapidly inaugurated a programme to build 15,000 aircraft a year for the United States Army Air Force. The assistant chief of staff of the US Army, General George C. Marshall, was present at the meeting to discuss this. Marshall, while agreeing with the plan, took the President to task for overlooking the need to increase their pitifully small ground forces. With little more than 200,000 men, the United States Army had only nine under-strength divisions, a mere tenth of the German army’s order of battle. Roosevelt was impressed. Less than a year later, he backed Marshall’s appointment as chief of staff, which took place on the day Germany invaded Poland.

Marshall was a formal man of great integrity and a superb organizer. Under his direction, the US Army was to grow from 200,000 men to eight million in the course of the war. He always told Roosevelt exactly what he thought and remained impervious to the President’s charm. His greatest problem was Roosevelt’s frequent failure to keep him informed of discussions and decisions made with others, particularly those with Winston Churchill.

For Churchill, his relationship with Roosevelt was by far the most important element in British foreign policy. He devoted enormous energy, imagination and sometimes shameless flattery to win over Roosevelt and obtain what his virtually bankrupt country needed to survive. In a very long and detailed letter dated 8 December 1940, Churchill called for ‘
a decisive act of
constructive non-belligerency’ to prolong British resistance. This would include the use of US Navy warships to protect against the U-boat threat and three million tons of merchant shipping to maintain Britain’s Atlantic lifeline after the devastating losses–over two million gross tons–suffered so far. He also asked for 2,000 aircraft a month. ‘Last of all I come to the question of Finance,’ Churchill wrote. Britain’s dollar
credits would soon be exhausted; in fact the orders already placed or under negotiation ‘many times exceed the total exchange resources remaining at the disposal of Great Britain’. Never had such an important or dignified begging letter been written. It was almost exactly a year from the day when the United States would find itself at war.

Roosevelt received the letter when aboard the USS
Tuscaloosa
in the Caribbean. He pondered over the contents and the day after he returned he called a press conference. On 17 December, he made his famous but simplistic parable of a man whose house is on fire asking his neighbour for the loan of his hose. This was Roosevelt’s preparation of public opinion before the Lend–Lease Bill was presented to Congress. In the House of Commons, Churchill hailed it as ‘
the most unsordid
act in the history of any nation’. But privately the British government was shaken by the harsh
conditions attached to Lend–Lease
. The Americans had demanded an audit of all British assets, and insisted that there could be no subsidy until all foreign exchange and gold reserves had been used up. A US Navy warship was sent to Cape Town to take the last British gold stockpiled there. British-owned companies in the United States, most notably Courtaulds, Shell and Lever, had to be sold off at knock-down prices, and were then resold at a large profit. Churchill magnanimously attributed all this to Roosevelt’s need to wrongfoot the anti-British critics of Lend–Lease, many of whom harked back to the British and French default on debts from the First World War. The British as a whole underestimated how many Americans disliked them as imperialists, snobs and experts in the art of getting others to fight their wars for them.

But Britain was over a barrel and in no position to protest. Resentment at the terms would linger into the post-war years, if only because it had been the British cash payments of $4.5 billion for arms orders in 1940 which rescued the United States from the depression era and primed its wartime boom economy. Unlike the high-quality materiel which came later, the equipment bought in the desperate days of 1940 had not been impressive, nor did it make a great deal of difference. The fifty First World War destroyers provided in exchange for the British Virgin Islands in September 1940 had required a huge amount of work to make them seaworthy.

On 30 December, Roosevelt addressed the American people on the radio in a ‘fireside chat’ to defend the agreement. ‘We must be the great arsenal of Democracy,’ he declared. And so it came to be. On the night of 8 March 1941, the Lend–Lease Bill was passed by the Senate. Roosevelt’s assertive new policy included the declaration of a Pan-American security zone in the western Atlantic; the establishment of bases on Greenland; and the plan to replace British troops on Iceland, an important staging-post and
airbase, which finally took place in early July. British warships, beginning with the damaged aircraft carrier HMS
Illustrious
, could now be repaired in American ports, and RAF pilots started training at US Army Air Force bases. One of the most important developments was that the US Navy began to take on escort duties for British convoys as far as Iceland.

The German foreign office reacted to these developments by expressing the hope that Britain would be defeated before American armaments began to play a significant role, which it estimated would be in 1942. But Hitler was too preoccupied with Barbarossa to pay much attention. His main concern at this stage was that America should not be provoked into entering the war before he defeated the Soviet Union. He refused Gross-admiral Raeder’s request that his U-boats should operate in the western Atlantic right up to the three-mile zone of American coastal waters.

Churchill later said that the U-boat threat was the only thing that ever really frightened him during the war. At one stage he even considered seizing back the southern ports of neutral Ireland by force if necessary. The Royal Navy was desperately short of escort vessels for convoys. It had suffered heavy losses during the ill-fated intervention in Norway, and then destroyers had to be held back ready for a German invasion. During the ‘east coast rampage’, when U-boats attacked coastal shipping in the North Sea, Captain Ernst Kals in
U-173
received the Knight’s Cross for sinking nine ships in two weeks.