A World at Arms (47 page)

Inspired by desperation, the British moved quickly. In a few days, their soldiers cleared the immediate area around Habbaniya .airfield, received reinforcements trucked as well as flown in from Palestine, and began an advance on Baghdad. Defeating the disintegrating Iraqi army along the way, they reached the outskirts of Baghdad on May 30. Key Iraqi leaders thereupon fled to Iran and those left behind surrendered. Rashid Ali himself eventually went to Germany, where he would spend the rest of the war hoping to return to Baghdad with German assistance.

That assistance had been rather scanty during the time when it might have been most effective. Given the internal dissension within the Iraqi military and the incompetence of its leadership, even greater help might not have made much difference, but there was in reality little that the Germans could do quickly. The same factor which made it so difficult for the British to send substantial forces–and which may have encouraged the Iraqi plotters to strike–also restrained the Germans. At the beginning of their campaign in Yugoslavia and Greece, they naturally wanted to concentrate on the immediate tasks at hand. From Berlin’s perspective, Rashid Ali had moved a month too soon, and throughout April the Germans urged caution even as they tried to figure out ways
to help. There were other problems, and these quickly surfaced as the German victories in the Balkan campaign enabled them to take some steps to give effect to their desire to help their new ally.

Since Turkey was reluctant to help transport supplies or troops,
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the Germans had to fly via the Italian island of Rhodes not only warplanes to intervene in the fighting but all supplies they could send across French Syria. They could also arrange to get some French military supplies already in Syria transported overland to Iraq,
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but this, as well as using air bases in the French mandate, required negotiations with Vichy and possible concessions to the latter. The Vichy leaders and their subordinates on the spot were willing to help–as has been explained, they would fight the British and other Frenchmen but not against Germans–but all such arrangements took time. There ensued new but inconclusive German-French negotiations. Darlan was prepared to provide assistance, but Hitler was as usual reluctant to make concessions to the French.
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The Germans did what they could under the circumstances, and by mid-May the first planes were participating in the fighting over Iraq; but the minimal forces and supplies sent made little difference in the outcome. In the planning of German strategy, Iraq (like Egypt) came
after,
not before, the campaign in the East, and it was assumed that a pro-Axis government under Rashid Ali would return to Baghdad in the wake of German tanks in the late fall of 1941.

Whatever efforts Germany might make were further complicated by the position and ambitions of Italy. The Germans at least nominally recognized Italy’s political hegemony in the Arab world.
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Most of the communications between the regime of Rashid Ali and Berlin had to go at first through the Italian legation in Baghdad because Italy, not Germany, had full diplomatic relations with Iraq.
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Since the British could read the Italian diplomatic code, they knew of Rashid Ali’s appeals to Germany and Italy from his first days in power. Furthermore, this Italian diplomatic presence reflected Italy’s imperial ambitions in the Middle East, ambitions to which Germany at least in theory deferred–but about which many Iraqis had their doubts. They may not have understood the nature of National Socialist Germany and that country’s attitude toward the independence of people it considered “inferior,” but they did have a clear idea that Mussolini saw himself as an empire–builder in the Mediterranean and Near East. And how all this could be harmonized with Axis dependence on the French, whose colonial rule in Syria was hardly popular with Arab nationalists, was beyond anyone’s resolution. Under these circumstances, it was probably easier for Rashid Ali to devise great plans for a German protectorate over Iraq in the capital of the Third Reich.
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The collapse of the pro-Axis regime in Baghdad, under circumstances which showed that for the moment Germany was not in a position to support an analogous coup and anti-British policy in Afghanistan, operated to restrain those elements within that country and among Afghan exiles in Europe who also thought that the triumph of Hitler would aid their cause. Like Rashid Ali, they too would have to await the moment when German forces could come effectively into the Near East.
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The very days that the fighting in Iraq was nearing its climax were also the days when the Germans won a spectacular but costly victory on Crete. The British had first sent forces there in the preceding November, but most of those who would defend the island were troops evacuated in late April from Greece. Not certain at first that Crete should and could be defended at all in the face of German air superiority, the British finally decided to try to do so. Placed in command was the New Zealander General Bernard C. Freyberg, a World War I hero whose support by Churchill and the New Zealand government could assure him reinforcements (and the removal of some non-combatants) but not the needed air support which was simply unavailable. The British could read German air force signals and therefore had a clear picture of what was brewing; they would let Freyberg and his men fight it out, a choice difficult to fault since the New Zealanders almost made it.
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The Germans had been thinking about a possible seizure of Crete for some time, Hitler having originally offered on October 28, 1940, to assist the Italian invasion of Greece from Albania by landing German airborne forces there. Mussolini, who still thought of himself as waging an independent and parallel war, declined this offer just as he refused a German armored division for North Africa. Italy would prove equally incapable in both theaters. The Germans became alarmed over the possibility of British use of airfields in Crete to bomb the Romanian oil fields, and of a naval base at Suda Bay on the north coast of the island to interrupt the tanker traffic from Romania to Italy which provided much of Italy’s oil supply. The possibility of including the seizure of Crete as part of the German campaign in the Balkans was therefore present from the early planning of that venture.

If a decision to seize Crete was not taken until quite late in the spring of 1941, this was in part due to the competition of another target for a German airborne landing: Malta. The British-held island in the Central Mediterranean had not been seized by the Italians in the first days of war and was repeatedly reinforced by British convoys and by planes flown from aircraft carriers approaching within range. As a British naval and air base, it obviously lay across Italian and German supply routes to North Africa. If the British ever did clear the Axis out of North Africa,
it would provide an excellent base for attacks on Sicily and the Italian mainland. In Axis hands, the island could not only protect the route to North Africa and the coast of Sicily but block the Central Mediterranean to the British navy.

The obvious way to seize Malta was by the sort of airborne landing which the Germans had tried out in Holland and Belgium in May of 1940, though the terrain and the walls dividing fields on the island made the use of gliders impractical and required dependence on parachutists. The high command of the armed forces (OKW) argued strongly for giving the seizure of Malta priority over Crete, but the navy argued for the reverse; Crete should be tried first to provide a basis for further offensive operations in the Eastern Mediterranean.
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In late April 1941, the German airborne forces expert, General Kurt Student, reinforced what appears to have been Hitler’s own inclination to seize Crete. In this decision, several factors appear to have played a role. The German air force commander, Göring, favored the project. The parachutists had, in Hitler’s eyes, proved their worth not only in the West but in the effort to seize the bridge over the Corinth Canal during the Greek campaign on April 25.
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Although his reasoning on this point may well have been faulty, the possibilities of air attacks on the Romanian oil fields from Crete appear to have weighed heavily. Turkey could be expected to take notice and either assist or remain quiet. Finally, the project has to be seen as an extension, but also as the final step, of the German effort to secure firmly and finally the southern flank of Eastern Europe before the attack on Russia. And certainly in the details of planning the landing on Crete, code-name doperation “Mercury” (
Merkur
), the timetable and other details were dominated by the need to move quickly and then shift the forces engaged to their assignments for the Russian campaign.
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For this invasion the Germans expected to have and did have the control of the air which the RAF had kept them from obtaining over England. Over 1200 German planes were to participate in the operation. Initially parachute and glider troops were to seize two airports and other footholds; then transport planes and a motley array of small boats would bring in reinforcements. While the British had extremely accurate knowledge of German intentions as a result of their break into German codes, the Germans grossly underestimated the strength of the British defenses on the island. On May 20 the first waves of German planes dropped parachutists and gliders on the northwestern part of Crete. In bitter fighting the New Zealand, British, and Greek troops inflicted heavy casualties on the invaders; but the New Zealand brigade commander during the night ordered his troops to pull back from Maleme airport,
which the Germans seized in part during the night and in part with the forces of their second wave the following day. Although very heavy fighting continued for several days, and the British navy destroyed one convoy of ships carrying reinforcements and turned back another, German possession of an airport sealed the outcome. Once an attempted New Zealand counter-attack on May 22 had failed to recapture Maleme field, a steady stream of German transport planes could bring in reinforcements and supplies while the German air force kept the British navy confined to night-time missions. On May 26 Freyberg requested and received approval to evacuate his troops, and the remaining days of fighting on the island covered the evacuation which ended on June 1.

At the end of the fighting, the British evacuated 16,000 men and lost an equal number, three-quarters of them prisoners captured in the last days of battle. Several thousand Greek soldiers were killed or captured. Right after the end of the fighting, Student ordered a massive destruction of Cretan villages and the slaughter of unnumbered civilians, allegedly as reprisals.
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The large-scale massacres of civilians which became the single most outstanding characteristics of German occupation in Southeast Europe in World War II began on the island that Hitler had marked out as the concluding episode in the campaign.

The most serious losses suffered by the British in this campaign were, however, at sea. The attempts of the Royal Navy to supply, assist, and eventually evacuate the garrison on Crete cost dearly. Two British battleships, an aircraft carrier and other warships were damaged, while three cruisers and six destroyers were sunk. It was once again obvious that warships could not operate in waters dominated by an enemy’s land-based planes, and British planning for future operations in the Mediterranean had to be accommodated to this hard reality.

German losses had been extraordinarily heavy. Several hundred planes had been destroyed or damaged, and the 4000 killed and 2500 wounded vastly outnumbered the casualties of the whole Yugoslavian and Greek campaigns. More important in the long run than the numbers themselves was the fact that this wrecked the German airborne forces for the time being and put an end to Hitler’s willingness to use them in that capacity forever after, even when they were reformed and increased later in the war. No large-scale airborne assault was ever attempted again by the Germans in World War II–it was the Allies who would carry out airborne operations.

The unsuccessful defense of Crete successfully defended Malta; the Germans had had the resources and the will to try once, and after their experience with Freyberg’s troops on Crete they would never try again. As for the eastern Mediterranean possibilities theoretically opened up
by the German seizure of Crete, these remained theoretical for two reasons. In the practical and the strategic sense, Crete was a dead-end for the Axis. Practically, the next step would have been Cyprus, but another airborne assault as this would have had to be was out of the question. Not only had the German airborne forces been mauled beyond recall for the time being, but Cyprus was at that time out of fighter range from Rhodes, the nearest Axis stronghold. And from the strategic point of view, the Russian theater had immediate priority; thereafter German forces could march and drive into the Near East. The Cretan experience only reinforced the belief of most Germans and especially Hitler that marching and driving was a great deal better than trying to swim or jump.

The reluctance of the Germans to make any moves into the Near East beyond Crete was quickly reinforced by developments in Syria. There had been a few Free French supporters in Syria but the elements who stuck with Vichy were in full control under Commissioner Henri Dentz. The enormous danger which this situation posed for Great Britain was dramatically exposed by Vichy support for the pro-Axis elements in Iraq-the same Frenchmen who could not fight the Germans had found weapons to deliver to Rashid Ali–as well as by the permission granted to German warplanes to land on Syrian airfields. The new figure in control of French politics under Pétain after the ouster of Laval was Admiral François Darlan, who hoped to be allowed to join Germany as an ally in the war against Britain, exchanging support for Germany in North Africa and the Near East for concessions from Berlin. He would be rebuffed by the Germans as already mentioned, but this the British did not know at the time. What they did know at least in part was that this Vichy leader hated them more than any other, was willing to support Rommel from Tunisia and was also prepared to provide the Germans a strong foothold in the Near East from which to bomb the critical oil refineries at Abadan or move against the Suez Canal through Palestine from the north.
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