A World at Arms (46 page)

On the day of the coup in Yugoslavia, Hitler, as already mentioned, immediately decided to attack that country as well as Greece. He knew and was reassured by German diplomats that Yugoslavia had no intention of helping Greece; it was simply that many in Belgrade objected to joining the Axis and assisting an attack on their own southern neighbor which was certain to put them completely in Germany’s power. But the German leader felt relieved not to have to make even for a moment the concessions he had promised
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and was positively enthusiastic about the opportunity to crush Yugoslavia at a time when German forces were in any case concentrated for an operation in Southeast Europe.
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Plans for the invasion of Yugoslavia were made to coincide with the attack on Greece, scheduled for Sunday, April 6, 1941. Hitler wanted to make this a real spectacular: the opening would be a surprise massive bombing of Belgrade in the hope that what had worked at Rotterdam (but was not working in these same nights in Glasgow, Coventry, Birmingham, and Bristol), might terrorize the population of Yugoslavia and paralyze its government.
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If the latter purpose was accomplished to a considerable extent, the former, as subsequent developments showed, was not. Even unleashing the band of extreme Croatian nationalists, the Ustasha, out of the sewers of Europe to slaughter anybody and everybody they and the Germans did not like would prove incapable of “pacifying” a country which remained a center of resistance to Axis rule until 1945;
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but the formal resistance of the Yugoslav army was broken in a few days. German columns moved quickly to cut through and eventually round up an army that was too spread out to retreat southwards as it had in the fall of 1915.
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As in the case of the attack on Poland in 1939 and on France in 1940, Hitler summoned the vultures to speed up the destruction of his prey. The Italians, who had long cast hostile and covetous eyes on the South
Slav state, and who had been kept from attacking it the preceding year only by a timely German veto, hastened to repeat against Yugoslavia what they had unsuccessfully tried to do against France.
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With Yugoslavia falling apart, Italy could look forward to a substantial share of the booty, though necessarily deferring to Germany in the allocation of territory.

Hungary had refused German proposals to join in the war against Poland in 1939; such a declination did not recur. For years Berlin had been urging the leaders of Hungary to give up their demands on Yugoslavia, make their peace with that country, and turn revisionist aspirations in other directions. A reluctant Hungarian government had finally adopted such a course and had signed a treaty of “permanent peace and eternal friendship” with Yugoslavia on December 10, 1940. Now they were both to provide a base for German troops to attack Yugoslavia and to join in themselves.
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The government in Budapest decided to enter the war on Germany’s side and proceeded to do so in the face of the protesting suicide of Prime Minister Pal Teleki.
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Hungary obtained a portion of the territories it had hoped to acquire, but having hitched itself to the German war chariot would find the traces difficult to slip. Bulgaria was also invited to help itself to appropriate slices of Yugoslavia and happily did so.
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The delighted victors divided the stricken country among themselves. Germany annexed a large area in the north and held the old core of Serbia under military administration. The Italians received a substantial piece in the northwest, much of the coast, and an addition to their Albanian colony. A puppet state of Croatia was created which at one time Hitler thought to place under Hungarian influence, then agreed to put under Italian control, and eventually tried to have the Germans direct themselves. Hungary received a share in the northeast and Bulgaria in the south.
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Within this welter of conflicting claims, massive population transfers were begun immediately,
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and confusion between arming, supporting, and opposing various elements in the new rivalry between Germany and Italy in Croatia was also well started by May of 1941.
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The bloodbath that was World War II Yugoslavia had begun, not ended, with the few days of fighting that preceded the unconditional surrender of April 17.

On the same day that German planes opened the attack on Yugoslavia by the bombing of Belgrade, German troops invaded Greece. Temporarily held at the Greek-Bulgarian border, they quickly sliced behind these forces through the southeast corner of Yugoslavia to seize Salonika, cut off the Greek units to the east and thus obtain their surrender. Driving rapidly through the southwestern corner of Yugoslavia, the
Germans both separated the Greek forces in central Macedonia from the English units moving up to help them and broke into the rear of the main Greek army facing the Italians in Albania. The Greek army in Macedonia had to capitulate like that in the east; soon after the one on the Albanian front followed suit. The King of Greece, like the King of Yugoslavia, had to leave the country. Years of desperate hunger, oppression and resistance, civil war and endless suffering awaited the Greeks like their hapless northern neighbor.

The three British divisions, one Australian and one from New Zealand (plus an English armored brigade), were able to retreat to the coast of Attica from which most of the men were evacuated by April 29, five days after the final capitulation of Greece. While 2 18,000 Greek and 12,000 British soldiers followed 344,000 Yugoslav soldiers into German prisoner of war cages, the equipment of still another British expeditionary force had had to be destroyed or left behind for the Germans. Some 250 German soldiers had lost their lives in this campaign; once again quick and ruthless action by one side and division and indecision on the other had made possible a dramatic German victory at very low immediate cost.

In this fighting, German air superiority had played as significant a role as it had in the Blitzkrieg in Norway and Western Europe. The failure of the Allies was also due to the inability of the British to send to Greece the size forces and the quantities of supplies which they had anticipated providing. One of two important contributing factors in this has already been mentioned. Time and again German bombs and mines had closed the Suez Canal to shipping, a critical point ignored in many accounts.
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The other was the offensive Rommel launched as soon as he had even a minimal force gathered in North Africa.

The combination of a British deliberate halt in order to send forces to Greece and the beginnings of German intervention temporarily stabilized something resembling a front near El Agheila. As soon as Rommel had his first advance detachments in place, he wanted to attack before the British could bring in reinforcements and while they were busy in Southeast Europe. In conferences with Hitler and others in Germany on March 20 and 21 and with Mussolini and other Italian leaders on the following days he tried but failed to receive orders or even permission to attack. None of that restrained him. Rather than wait for the armored division scheduled to arrive in May, he decided to attack with the segments of the 5th Light Division already on the spot. Beginning his offensive on March 31, he drove his forces forward, relying heavily on the Italian units which were really not under his command, and in less than two weeks chased the British out of Cyrenaica.

This visually dramatic event opened the possibility of a new attack on
Egypt, this time with German forces alongside Italian ones. King Farouk of Egypt secretly contacted the Germans to explain his hopes for a German occupation of his country.
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The dangerous situation forced the British to reduce the strength of their expeditionary force destined for Greece. Wavell had to keep one of the Australian divisions scheduled to be shipped there in Egypt, redivert other resources to the desert, and press for the East African campaign to be finished promptly so that the units there would also be available for the North African campaign (from which some of them had come). The spectacular advance also catapulted Rommel into the public limelight and Hitler’s favor, and led some elements in Egypt to look to Germany for support; both King Farouk himself and some nationalist officers imagined that a German victory would help them.

On the other hand, the quick drive with limited resources made it impossible for Rommel to accomplish any greater purpose. As his forces advanced, the British pushed added strength into the advanced port of Tobruk and held it against the Germans. Unable to advance into Egypt without taking Tobruk and thereby opening both the land route along the coast and the harbor for supplies, and also being unable to concentrate all his forces on one push, Rommel insisted on a series of poorly planned and executed attacks on the Tobruk perimeter. These failed in bloody fighting from April 11–18; a subsequent limited British attack on the Germans at the Libyan-Egyptian border was warded off successfully, but a renewed German-Italian effort to seize Tobruk at the end of April also failed. Major reinforcements could not be sent to Rommel because German planning assumed that the main effort would be against the Soviet Union in 1941; a push into the Near East was to follow, not precede, the victory over Russia confidently expected by Berlin for the fall of 1941.

In spite of heroic efforts of the British to reinforce their army in Egypt with tanks and planes sent at great risk directly through the Mediterranean (rather than the safer but very much longer route around the Cape of Good Hope) in the second week of May, the new offensive “Battleaxe” in mid-June could not dislodge Rommel from the border area and relieve the siege of Tobruk. There will always be arguments over the causes of the British defeat in this battle, a defeat which led to the relief of General Wavell; but there can be no doubt about certain important contributing factors. The need for the British command in the Middle East to direct forces barely recovered from the disaster in Greece and the subsequent even bloodier defeat on Crete to campaigns first in Iraq and then in Syria-all of which will be discussed shortly–dramatically reduced the strength available for operations in the western desert. A
second factor was one which the British did not remedy for a very long time: faulty tactics in armored warfare which failed to take account of the strength of German anti-tank fire–especially the famous 8.8 cm anti-aircraft gun which could be and often was used in ground fighting. A third factor was a curious converse of the German command situation. While Rommel was wont to attack in spite of restraint from above and scant supplies on the spot, the British commanders in the field often found themselves harried into premature offensives by the ever-aggressive Churchill, who was as likely to disregard logistics as Rommel. And as the later Chief of the Imperial General Staff General Brooke so often and so eloquently lamented in his diary, the British higher officer corps was singularly lacking in talent, his explanation being that those who would have done best had been killed in World War I.
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In any case, the rapid reconquest of Cyrenaica, coming in the same days as the German invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece, dramatically altered not only the military situation in the Mediterranean but also saved for the time being the Fascist regime in Italy. No one was fooled by the insistence of Mussolini on a second surrender ceremony in Greece in which the Italians could join their German rescuers in lording it over the Greeks. Ironically the Germans proceeded to loot Greece of everything not nailed down and much that was and then turned most of the starving country over to the Italians to occupy and look after, so that in the end the Italians found themselves feeling sorry for the very people whom they had precipitated into the war. But the Italian public was quieted for a while.

Perhaps most important in all this was the postponement of an Allied victory in North Africa which would expose Italy to bombing and invasion. At one point in the flush of victory in the winter of 1940–41 the British had begun to make plans for such operations. These now had to go back into the drawer for a year. A few air raids were flown by the Royal Air Force against Italian cities, but the interminable debate over the bombing of Rome did not as yet have much real substance to it.
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Mussolini had been reprieved.
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Hitler believed that Mussolini had gotten about as much out of the Italians as possible,
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and that once Germany had crushed the Soviet Union there would be such vast German forces relieved for duty elsewhere that there would be no need to worry about the future course of events in the Mediterranean theater.

The German priority on plans for the campaign against the Soviet Union was especially obvious in the weeks immediately following upon the
completion of the campaign on the Greek mainland and Rommel’s reconquest of Cyrenaica, both effectively accomplished by mid-April. What looked for a moment like an opportunity for Germany to strike into the Middle East was in fact a process of closing down operations in that area so that German attention and resources could be assigned elsewhere.

On April 2, 1941, just before the German move into Yugoslavia and Greece, the pro-Axis elements in Iraq staged a coup which brought to power Rashid Ali al-Gaylani who hated the British and, like the IRA in Ireland and Bose in India, hoped that a German victory over Britain would solve the world’s and especially his country’s problems. For months Rashid Ali’s supporters in and out of the Iraqi government had been in touch with the Axis powers and expecting their victory; now looked like an ideal time to move. The British, who faced Rommel’s first offensive in Libya and were trying to move forces to Greece, had no troops to spare in the Middle East but began moving soldiers from India against the possibility of the new Iraqi government siding openly with the Axis. Indian troops landed at the base at Basra which was critical for the whole Middle East supply situation, and other soldiers began to reinforce the airfield at Habbaniya, some 55 miles west of Baghdad. The government of Rashid Ali protested, sought help from Germany and Italy, and surrounded the airfield. On May 2 hostilities started.
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