Operation Mercury Page 4

  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.12

  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:

  We had a momentous conference at Tatoi, the King of Greece sitting at the head of the table with his prime minister on one side, and Papagos, his commander-in-chief on the other. And I was actually there when Eden asked Dill to inform the King of Greece and his cabinet his views as to whether we’d be successful if we intervened in Greece, and Dill got up and made a most optimistic statement that he felt we could hold the line in Northern Greece called the Aliakmon Line and prevent the Germans from getting deep into Greece. I remember I was absolutely shattered because all our own studies in the ground planning staff had shown that it wasn’t possible, you’d never get the forces in sufficient strength there in time before the Germans would be there, in sufficient strength to come right down into Greece.13

  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’.14 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.’15

  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.’16

  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.

  No one expected the Greek campaign to be anything but a disaster. Long before any official announcement was made it was known we had troops in Greece, and I could find no one of whatever kind who believed that the expedition would be successful; on the other hand nearly everyone felt it was our duty to intervene. It is generally recognised that as yet we can’t fight the Germans on the continent of Europe but at the same time ‘we couldn’t let the Greeks down’.17

  As Salonika was too exposed for disembarkation, the majority of British and Dominion troops came ashore at Piraeus or further north at Volos which was closer to the forward post at Larissa. In total the forces dispatched totalled some 58,000 men, of whom roughly 35,000 were front liners, with the rest support and administrative personnel. The Dominion divisions were between 10,000-15,000 strong at the outset and took with them their own divisional artillery, mainly the highly effective 25-pounder field gun and the considerably less useful 2-pounder anti-tank gun, obsolete and generally ineffective against panzers.

  The Kiwis had their mechanised battalion equipped with light tanks and Bren carriers – the ‘divisional cavalry regiment’. In addition to an anti-tank regiment the divisions were equipped with anti-tank rifles and Brens; the men carried .303 Lee-Enfield bolt action rifles as their personal weapons, together with a few Thompson sub-machine guns, the ubiquitous ‘tommy gun’, a .45 calibre weapon which was capable of firing in bursts. A large number of trucks was available and the single British armoured division of 3,000 - 4,000 soldiers had around 100 tanks, together with field artillery, anti-tank and engineer formations. It also possessed some anti-tank rifles and light mortars.

  Nominally the Greek army could dispose some fourteen divisions in Albania and three and a half on the Bulgarian border. Inevitably some of these formations existed more in name than reality, were poorly equipped and their morale had been sapped by losses and the intensity of the campaign fought in the freezing passes. They possessed little modern artillery, less tanks and only the most basic logistics; most supplies came on the backs of mules or donkeys. They were totally exposed to attack from the air. From the outset the Luftwaffe enjoyed an almost unchallenged superiority in the air.

  The lack of air cover was a constant nightmare for the hard-pressed and weary troops on the ground – much criticism was levelled at the RAF (‘Rare as Fairies’ and other epithets). This was not due to faintheartedness – the planes were simply not available; the crucial element for the success of any modern campaign, adequate air support, was lacking from the very start.

  We marched and groaned beneath our load,

  Whilst Jerry bombed us off the road,

  He chased us here, he chased us there,

  The bastards chased us everywhere.

  And whilst he dropped his load of death,

  We cursed the bloody RAF,

  And when we heard the wireless news,

  When portly Winston aired his views -

  The RAF was now in Greece

  Fighting hard to win the peace;

  We scratched our heads and said “Pig’s arse”,

  For this to us was just a farce,

  For if in Greece the air force be -

  Then where the bloody hell are we?18

  The initial Allied plan was that the three Greek divisions, under-equipped, under-strength and under-supplied, would be used as a blocking force to blunt the German onslaught. The remainder of the available Greek forces were enmeshed with the three Italian armies operating in Albania. This attempt at a holding action was never really a viable proposition and the blow launched on 6 April across the Bulgarian border and to the east of Salonika, was delivered in overwhelming force, with full and close air support.

  Paratroops were dropped behind the Greek lines guarding the Rupel Pass but this early deployment of airborne troops was not a success; most of the detachment of 150 were killed or captured as the Greeks fought back with considerable gallantry. Nonetheless Salonika fell within days.

  Greece was, to all intents and purposes, a country with a near medieval infrastructure. A single railway line wound from Athens to Salonika, a narrow and highly vulnerable ribbon that connected the two principal cities. Roads were little more than tracks, unsuitable for motor vehicles and impassable in bad weather. The Allied commander, General ‘Jumbo’ Wilson, was further hamstrung by the fact that, in order to satisfy the Greeks, still officially neutral, he was obliged to pretend he did not really exist, masquerading as a journalist!

  As war between Germany and Greece had not, prior to 6 April, been declared, the German legation in Athens was not troubled and the military observers were able to observe without interference. It was into this almost Ruritanian atmosphere that British and Dominion troops were disembarking:

  The Greeks hadn’t declared war on Germany – it was an amazing thing. The fellows from the German embassy were quite
openly walking about with us. There was a blackout in the town at night for aircraft and I remember going to the local night-spot a place called Maxime’s – a sort of night club. And the fellows from the German Embassy were all there in civvies, drinking and laughing at us. There was a bit of trouble because one of our blokes got into the German Embassy and stole a pair of very expensive pyjamas. Nothing ever came of it to my knowledge because the Greeks declared war on Germany shortly thereafter.19

  The situation had the makings of comic opera but the consequences of this extraordinary lax security were serious enough – by 9 March OKW in Berlin had a full and accurate assessment of Allied strength and intentions. If Wilson’s problems were not sufficient, he struggled to exercise any proper form of command structure beset by logistical difficulties imposed by an unhealthy mix of Balkan politics, difficult terrain, poor communications and muddled objectives. These problems were further exacerbated by a lack of standardisation and cooperation between the forces at his disposal, each clinging rigidly to its own pre-determined structure.

  Brigadier ‘Bruno’ Brunskill, to whom was passed the poisoned chalice of coordinating the logistical effort, found, initially, he was not able to move freely north of Larissa for fear of antagonising the Germans! His only reconnaissance was by air and he was obliged to rely on a single borrowed map, his efforts to blend Greek and Allied supply networks were doomed to failure.

  Ultimately he was forced to fall back on the tried expedient of heroic improvisation; the Wehrmacht was not labouring under such intense difficulties and in the finest blitzkrieg tradition had been able to concentrate its attacking forces, the Schwerpunkt, in overwhelming strength in the right place and fully supported from the air. No improvisation, however brilliant or inspired, can triumph against such deadly precision.