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

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 been sceptical about the military logic of a German airborne invasion of Greece. He doubted whether, given the scale of likely casualties, they would try it, and believed that if they did try, ground troops could defeat the effort. In the meantime, however, he argued that the weight of German air attack from captured Greek bases made Cretan airfields too vulnerable to justify the waste of his resources. Thus when the German parachutists started landing, the RAF had largely vacated the island. Its aircraft fought at the edge of their range from Egyptian bases.

Naval forces sent north of Crete to prevent the Germans reinforcing their airborne troops from the sea proved desperately vulnerable to air attack. Crete was the perfect arena for Stukawaffe. The Stukas were feared by ground troops. If anything they proved even more effective in anti-shipping operations. Their main base on the island of Scarpanto was separated from Crete by the narrow Kaso Strait. The short-range aircraft could thus operate with comfort to the east of Crete. Another base in the Peloponnese was equally well placed for the sea lanes to the west of the island. Even Cyrenaican Stukas could reach ships to the south of Crete. Effectively, Crete was a killing zone. British cruisers and destroyers in particular proved frighteningly vulnerable to attack.

After three days Cunningham had had enough. He made the unilateral decision to recall his fleet to prevent its slaughter by the Luftwaffe. There had been nothing short of a trial of strength between Mediterranean Fleet and the German air force’: the German air force had won. Not only was Cunningham losing ships, he was losing captains at an even quicker rate as they buckled under the accumulated strain of months of air fear’. ‘I am afraid’, Cunningham admitted, we have to admit defeat and accept the fact that losses are too great to justify us trying to prevent seaborne attacks on Crete. This is a melancholy conclusion but it must be faced.’ There was ‘no hiding the fact’ that ‘the future out here does not look too good for the Fleet’. He persuaded his fellow Mediterranean commanders to defy London again and halt the evacuation of the defeated imperial forces even from the south coast of the island. Crete proved, he could not resist pointing out, what he had been saying for months. His ships had survived only because of the foul Mediterranean winter weather. The glorious Mediterranean spring was a death-bringer. 98

SIX

Losing the Light

At the end of her semi-autobiographical novel Friends and Heroes, Olivia Manning tried to sum up what losing Greece meant for the British. She thought that they had lost the light. For refugees fleeing the débâcle, the play of light on the North African shore was ‘too white’. ‘They moved forward to look at the new land, reached thankfully if unwillingly.’ In ‘crossing the Mediterranean’, ‘they had life–a depleted fortune’. 1 That sense of survival–a life, but depleted fortune–permeated each of the Mediterranean powers. Britain, Italy, France, each survived but none could feel happy with their lot. All three wanted to fight for the Mediterranean, but their capacity to do so was sadly reduced. They could do little more than fall back on mezzi insidiosi, the Mediterranean guerrilla war that the Italians had feared might be their portion in the mid-1930s. The future of their reduced fortunes lay in German hands, and the Germans, established for the first time on the Mediterranean littoral as conquerors, were hard to read.

The Germans were such an unpredictable force in the Mediterranean world because of their own ambivalence. Combing through the records after the war, historians identified at least a dozen serious attempts by those gathered around Hitler to persuade him that the Mediterranean was the key to victory. Nothing in the Führer’s past conduct suggested that he believed them. His eyes were cast ever eastwards. 2 This judgement took lapidary form on 11 June 1941 when the dictator uttered his directive on the future of the Mittelmeer. The future of the Mediterranean lay on the steppes, it was–as geopolitics had always insisted–a mere appendage of the Heartland. 3 The conquest of Russia would change everything. Turkey would have its twin fears–the Soviets and the Germans–unified into one terror. They would not resist as the forces of the Reich moved through the Straits by sea and Anatolia by land. The Spanish were timid, Franco had squirmed his way out of an attack on Gibraltar. With further proof of the Reich’s invincibility, his courage would improve and the British would be swept off the Rock. The French would see that full collaboration was their only chance of survival: North Africa would be open to German forces. Then, the British Mediterranean would be choked to death, squeezed from east and west by what Hitler called a ‘concentric’ attack. 4

Concentricity implied a number of important ideas. First, the Mediterranean could wait months, if not years, before the final reckoning. Second, that it was the three gates to the sea, Gibraltar, Suez and the Straits, which were important, not the actual battle for the central Mediterranean. Hitler’s Mediterranean creatures were, in order of importance, Turkey, Spain and France. In the wider scheme of things, Italy was left out. Italy’s main importance was its weakness. If Mussolini’s regime collapsed before Germany had finished with Russia then the completion of the Mediterranean ‘anaconda’ would be much complicated. Hitler was quite prepared therefore to commit some resources to the Mediterranean, not least to fuel the efforts of his most photogenic general, Rommel.

The quality of Hitler’s strategic reasoning has proved fertile ground for the ‘what if school of history. The most popular theory remains the claim that Hitler was wasting his time in the Mediterranean, that the victorious campaigns just completed were, in fact, a disaster because they delayed the invasion of Russia, placing the Germans at the mercy of ‘general winter’. Running the argument the other way is almost as popular. The Germans squandered their Mediterranean victory–if only Hitler had listened to his Mediterraneanists and kept German power running at full blast after Crete then a world of opportunity would have opened up: the destruction of British power, the creation of a consolidated anti-Anglo-Saxon Euro-Asia, the benison of Arab oil. None of this, of course, is provable in any serious way. The Germans failed to break through Russia, so the Mediterranean anaconda was never attempted. What can be said for sure was that in the summer of 1941 Britain had more potential enemies in the Mediterranean than Germany. Few were confident enough to proclaim Germany as the new thalassocrat, but even fewer mourned British decline. As her representatives looked around for support they could expect vituperation from some, but silence from most. 5

The expansive ideas about the Mediterranean came from those far distant from the sea. Those at work in the sea had a very limited horizon, their main aim was survival. The best they thought they might achieve was some damage to their enemies. It was time to face facts, Cunningham wrote home. ‘We have lost our Northern flank and are unlikely to regain it.’ The ‘through Mediterranean route’ was now ‘virtually closed’. The Royal Navy could, with enormous effort, sail from Gibraltar to Malta but it couldn’t get any further. Whilst the west–east route ground to a halt, the north–south route was, by the same token, made so much safer, since ‘the attack on Libyan communications is made very hazardous’. Naturally, Cunningham did not countenance inaction but his proposals for remedy were modest. 6

The best that might be done was some kind of ground offensive in Africa. This offensive would have no grand aims. It just needed to make some progress along the Cyrenaican coast. Cunningham’s dream prize was the city of Derna. Cyrenaica’s second ‘city’ was a pleasant enough place. European visitors praised it for being like the ‘proper’ Mediterranean, reminding them of Crete, rather than sub-standard North Africa. Rommel had a seaside villa nearby. Derna was the only place in eastern Libya where one could grow bananas. Charming Derna was not that far to travel–less than 200 miles by ship. Its position on the bulge of the Libyan plateau which pushed out into the Mediterranean, gave it its strategic attraction: not only a short flight from the Narrows but in range of Greece and the Aegean. In Cunningham’s mind a string of airfields from Sollum to Derna could protect his fleet around Malta whilst attacking the northern shore. 7 Cunningham’s military opposite number, Wavell, doubted whether even this modest plan was achievable. As Cunningham committed his thoughts to paper in Alexandria, Wavell recorded his in Cairo: he did not believe he could even get his troops over the Egyptian-Libyan border. The newly appointed air commander, the RAF’s best Whitehall warrior, Arthur Tedder, used his own message home to gloat that ‘the air has come into its own with a vengeance in the Mediterranean’. ‘I need hardly say,’ he toasted his fellow aviators in the Luftwaffe, ‘I have refrained from saying, “I told you so”.’ 8

The limited ambitions of Britain’s Mediterranean leaders failed to take into account that enemies considerably less formidable than the Germans were now willing to twit them. Germany and France had agreed, even before the fall of Crete, that aid should flow to a pro-Nazi revolt in Iraq led by Rashid Ali. Rashid Ali had the enthusiastic assistance of Britain’s old friend, the Mufti. Darlan had even been allowed into Berchtesgaden to see Hitler in order to seal the deal. 9 As they spoke, the first German aircraft were landing in Syria. Within days, supply trains were running along the railway from Aleppo to Mosul. The French were running a calculated risk. Darlan knew that such an act of aggression could well provoke a British attack on Syria. In preparation for this eventuality he had replaced the High Commissioner in Syria with a tough Alsatian general, Henri Dentz. Dentz preferred subterfuge–sadly undermined by British decryption of Luftwaffe signals–or deterrence to avoid war, but he was quite willing to fight the British if they came. 10

If the British commanders in the Mediterranean had had their way, Darlan and Dentz’s gamble would have paid off. They had no intention of invading Syria. Indeed they sought to maintain cordial relations with Dentz. The gamble was undone by Churchill, reading the Enigma traffic in London and demanding revenge. ‘If the French Army in Syria will come over to us,’ Churchill wrote, ‘then Vichy would have a future as the colonial power in the Levant.’ If, as it seemed, ‘they are going against us, or maintaining an attitude of malevolent passivity’ then the British should look elsewhere. Their new friends would be the ‘Syrian Arabs’. ‘I am not sufficiently acquainted with Syrian affairs to be able to formulate a plan,’ the Prime Minister admitted, ‘but I cannot doubt that our Islamic experts can easily do so.’ 11

Churchill’s intelligence-fed take on Vichy was defensible enough, his faith in the ‘wisdom’ of Arab nationalism, or the competence of his own ‘Islamic experts’, less so. The leaders of Arab nationalism in Syria were most certainly looking for allies against the French, but had already found them elsewhere. One of the bargains Darlan made with Hitler was for the withdrawal of the Reich’s premier orientalist, von Hentig, from Syria. His sin was his success with indigenous politicians. Von Hentig’s successor, the equally dynamic Rudolf Rahn, was no less successful. It was not hard to see why. Despite the promises they had made in 1936, the French had delayed any transfer of power to indigenous politicians until the eve of war, when they suspended the constitution and appointed their own placemen to rule the country. The former Prime Minister, Jamil Mardam, was revealed, by the gleeful opening of the books by France’s new placemen, to be corrupt on an almost industrial scale. Although the French delighted in his discomfiture, they regarded corruption as a venial sin. That sin they attributed to Mardam’s rival Dr Shahbandar, with his anti-fascist and secular principles. Thus the French colluded with Mardam, first to have Shahbandar murdered as a British agent and an enemy of Islam, then to pervert his trial, and finally to whisk him across the border to a safe exile in Iraq. With Mardam having fled and Shahbandar dead, the field was left open for the other main leader of the National Bloc, Shukri al-Quwwatli, to emerge as the unchallenged spokesman of Syrian nationalism. Quwwatli used his new platform to celebrate openly the coming victory of the Axis and the great benefit to the Arabs thereof. 12 There was a notable increase in the number of German ‘tourists’ crossing into Syria from Turkey. The most visible Abwehr operative in the region, Paula Koch, was inevitably dubbed ‘the Mata Hari of the Levant’. Lebanon’s leading nationalist politician, Riad Solh, was closely linked to Koch. 13

The choice between definitely anti-British and possibly pro-Nazi Frenchmen, or definitely anti-French but possibly pro-Nazi nationalists, was hardly appetizing. The means by which Britain might subvert such alignments were not in good repair when the point of crisis arrived. The man supposedly coordinating policy for Wavell was Colonel Illtyd Clayton. Clayton, by virtue of family connections–his older brother had been Lawrence of Arabia’s boss–had spent his entire professional life enmeshed in the intrigues of the Arab world. He, if anyone, was the Islamic expert for whom Churchill sought. At the exact moment he was called upon, however, he was having little success in controlling the civil war that had broken out between the secret organizations in Cairo and the Levant. The long-time Middle East hand that he was, Clayton still preferred working with his old French contacts. ‘Time and time again,’ complained one SOE leader whom Clayton held in check, ‘we have asked’ to be allowed to to cooperate with anti-French heterodox sects, such as the Druze, disillusioned by Dentz’s open favour towards orthodox Sunnis. ‘The answer given by Clayton has always been’, his interlocutor reported, ‘“No; nothing must be done to upset Dentz; we can always get the Arabs when we want them; we are staking everything on Dentz swinging over entirely to our side; or at any rate resisting any attempt by the Germans to occupy Syria”.’ 14

In retrospect, it was clear that Clayton had misread Dentz, but he was not solely grasping for a shop-worn former amity. In his desire to bluff the British, Dentz had cast an indulgent eye on some cross-border contacts. Clayton and Dentz were fighting for the soul of Colonel Robert Collet. Collet’s soul had both material and symbolic value, for he was by far the most famous Frenchman in the Levant. Everyone had to have their own Lawrence of Arabia; von Hentig was Germany’s and Collet had been France’s. In the inter-war period French governments and news-reels had made a cult of Collet, leading his highly colourful Circassian cavalry who, the propagandists had their audience believe, were his ‘children’, looking up to him as a ‘father’ if not a demi-god. The Circassians were not just there for show, although their fair-skinned women were undoubtedly a favourite of orientalist pornography Collet’s men had shown an enormous aptitude and appetite for butchering their racial and religious rivals in the massacres that had done so much to cement French rule. Dentz, however, was far from trusting his glamorous subordinate. Word reached him that the Circassians openly mocked the French for their wretched military performance against the Germans and the British. He had them confined to their barracks, and resorted to the low trick of having the carburettors removed from their lorries so that they could not decamp en masse to Palestine. Yet neither did Dentz wish to drive Collet into British hands. A ludicrous game developed between them. Each weekend Collet would announce that he was ‘going to Beirut’, pile a few Circassians into his car and then drive in the opposite direction across the Palestinian border to Haifa. The Circassians could then desert in safety and Collet would sit down and talk to Clayton’s men. He would then drive to Beirut for the weekend, all under the eyes of Dentz’s spies, who reported each move. It was not until the end of May 1941, when Collet finally took the momentous decision to desert, that Dentz ordered him to Damascus and court martial. One might call this game of shadows a draw between Dentz and Clayton since, when Collet finally fled to Transjordan, about half of his original Circassians came with him to fight with the British. 15

Clayton viewed Arab politicians as tarts; they had been bought by the Nazis, but they would be happy to be bought by the British when the time came. It hardly helped the British cause that almost their only friends amongst the local population were ‘the Friends’. ‘The Friends’ was the rather arch terminology used for militant Jews recruited to the British cause. Churchill, a believer in the wisdom of arming Zionists, should have been happy with these recruits. Most authorities in the Levant thought they were poison. Clayton at GHQ, the government of Palestine and the commander of British troops in Palestine all ordered Adrian Bishop, the champion of their use, to break off contact. Like any good secret operative he simply took pains to conceal his activities more carefully.

His critics objected not only to the fact of Jewish recruitment but to the nature of the recruits. Bishop reasoned that it was no good having intellectuals and politicians on one’s side. Men of action were needed. He found such men, ‘toughs’, among the Irgun. This was dangerous ground. The Irgun were unreconstructed terrorists, tarred, not least, with the brush of murdering fellow Zionists. The Irgun had been responsible for blowing up a refugee ship in Haifa harbour, killing over two hundred civilians and a number of policemen. The military wing of the Revisionists, of which they were part, had in the mid-1930s been the clients of Mussolini. Then they had accepted supplies and training from the Fascists; now they were accepting them from the British. 16 It was only when the call went out for ‘special operations’ in Iraq and Syria that Bishop was able to reveal, triumphantly, that ‘it is perhaps extremely fortunate that we have a certain number of trained men at our disposal–trained, that is to say, against the wishes of all the authorities’. The first mission for which the ‘toughs’ were put up was the assassination of von Hentig, in which they refused to participate. 17 Instead they were sent to Iraq with orders to pose as Arab terrorists; their violence was to spread discord amongst supporters of the revolt and aid British intervention propaganda. However, the leader of the Irgun ‘was shot dead before they were able to function’. As SOE’s internal assessment concluded: ‘the whole of this undertaking was most dangerous and ill-conceived, and it is lucky that the Iraqis never discovered that we employed Palestinian Jews against them during their revolt’. 18

As planning for the Syrian operation got under way, Wavell cabled home that ‘all senior officers on my staff who have dealings with [special operations] are convinced that the organisation in the Mideast is a racket’. He had decided to bring all special operations firmly under military control through the creation of a ‘Jerusalem bureau’. 19 As British power teetered in the spring of 1941, many looked to the dark arts of propaganda to make right what had been lost on the battlefield. But those in charge of black propaganda turned their weapons on each other, rather than any external enemy; charges of sexual and financial misconduct rebounded around the Middle East. 20 As one of the officers sent in to clear up the mess remarked, ‘nobody who did not experience it can possibly imagine the atmosphere of jealousy, suspicion and intrigue that embittered the relations between the various secret and semi-secret departments in Cairo during the summer of 1941’. 21 In any case there was little to suggest that the secret departments had anything to offer in the way of expertise in manipulating Levantine politics to British advantage. They comprised a hotch-potch of military intelligence, Indian policemen, civilians who might speak Serbo-Croat, or were believed to be good at deception because they were, for example, lawyers. SOE’s chief ‘Islamic expert’ was Heyworth Dunne, a tarbush-wearing English Muslim with an Egyptian wife. Dunne devoted his time mainly to ‘astrologers, whom he used to prophesy the future and the outcome of the war’. 22 This is not what Churchill had in mind when he called for such experts to be consulted.

With so few friends, all that was left to Britain was the exercise of military power. Wavell was ordered to strike west along the Libyan littoral and north into Syria. He welcomed neither order, believing that he should be given more time to amass a critical weight of trained and equipped forces before taking on another major operation. Thus the stratagems emanating from Churchill’s fertile and information-rich mind were contested at the time and have remained controversial since. There has remained, however, an odd imbalance in these controversies. Wavell ordered his forces to fight a battle and a war in June 1941. The battle–on the Egyptian-Libyan frontier–lasted for two days and changed very little. The war–against France in Syria and Lebanon–lasted for five weeks and led to the occupation of the Levant and the definitive joining of the Near East to the Mediterranean. It took British forces towards the Turkish border at a particularly vital moment. The Turks, always good bellwethers of military fortune, chose the moment when both the Syrian campaign and Libyan battle were in the balance to sign a Friendship treaty with the Nazis. At the same time they colluded with the Italians to subvert the Montreux Convention that banned warships from passing through the Straits in wartime. Churchill himself claimed that the ‘prize is Turkey’. Yet the battle has been regarded as important, the war not. This imbalance was a product of propaganda as much as strategy. 23

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