The Moscow Option (25 page)

London

While serving as Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Wavell had noted down his reasons for believing that Germany would lose the war:

1. Oil, shipping, air power and sea power are the keys to this war, and they are interdependent.
Air power and naval power cannot function without oil.
Oil, except very limited quantities, cannot be brought to its destination without shipping.
Shipping requires the protection of naval power and air power.

2. We have access to practically all the world’s supply of oil.
We have most of the shipping.
We have naval power.
We are potentially the greatest air power, when fully developed.

Therefore we are bound to win the war.

Or so it seemed in 1940-1. But by the summer of 1942 the other side of the same coin was becoming equally apparent. In mid-July General Brooke noted in his diary:

All the motive-power at sea, on land, and in the air throughout the Middle East, Indian Ocean, and India was entirely dependent on the oil from Abadan. If we lost this supply, it could not be made good from American resources owing to shortage of tankers and continuous losses of these ships through submarine action. If we lost the Persian oil, we inevitably lost command of the Indian Ocean, and so endangered the whole India-Burma situation.

A report from the Oil Control Board confirmed Brooke’s realistic assessment. If Abadan and Bahrain were lost, the report concluded, nearly thirteen and a half million tons of oil would have to be found from the US and other sources. An additional 270 tankers would be needed to carry this oil, and they did not exist.

The British
had
to hold the Middle East against the strong enemy thrusts converging on the Persian Gulf from the north and the west. The defence of the Iraqi-Iranian-Gulf oilfields came second only to the defence of Britain and its Atlantic lifeline in the War Cabinet’s list of priorities. Certainly the prospect of losing these oilfields did a wonderful job in concentrating the British mind. One member of the War Cabinet noted that ‘the gravity of the situation is such that the PM has stopped pressing for his Norwegian project. This, I suppose, is some consolation.’

There was no such solace for Auchinleck. He had presided over the most humiliating series of reverses suffered by a British army in living memory. It mattered little that the responsibility was hardly his, that the interference from his superiors and the crushing superiority of the German force had rendered defeat inevitable. It mattered even less that his decision to evacuate Egypt and so save Eighth Army, rather than fight a glorious but hopeless battle in the Delta Region, would prove one of the most crucial decisions of the war. He had lost. The troops needed new leadership, a new source of confidence. Auchinleck had to go. On 6 June the relevant telegram arrived from Whitehall. General Alexander would take over the Middle East Command, General Montgomery, on Brooke’s insistence, the leadership of Eighth Army. General Wilson would remain in command of the ‘Northern Force’, comprising Ninth and Tenth Armies in Syria, Iraq and Iran.

Reinforcements were being assiduously sought for Alexander to pass on to his army commanders. There were three possible sources. General Wavell agreed to part with two divisions from India, on the grounds that a Japanese offensive in northern Burma could not take place before the monsoon ended in October and might not take place at all. A further three divisions were to arrive from England; one was already rounding the Cape, the others were to be shipped out in transport originally earmarked for either a cross-Channel or North-west Africa operation. The third source was the United States Army. Roosevelt had already offered three hundred Sherman tanks; now the deployment of American troops in the Middle East was being considered.

In the Indian Ocean the British were doing their utmost to ensure that all these reinforcements would reach their destination. The port of Diego Suarez in Madagascar had been occupied in May, and through the early summer Somerville’s Eastern Fleet was being reinforced as fast as was possible. The battleships
Renown
and
Duke of York
had both arrived in May, a third carrier,
Illustrious
, was expected in July. The British were not to know that this fleet would never be tested, that a combination of German discouragement and Yamamoto’s strategic preferences would inhibit renewed Japanese naval action in this area.

But perhaps the most important legacy of Egypt’s fall was the change in Bomber Command policy decreed by the War Cabinet. Bomber Command’s single-minded devotion to the strategic bombing of Germany was proving a luxury that Britain could no longer afford. A chorus of protest had started to grow when Malta succumbed to the Luftwaffe while the British bomber force was busy attacking the German railway system. With Egypt’s fall this chorus grew too loud to ignore, and it was decided to shift some of the strategic bombing force to the Middle East. New airfields in Iraq and Iran were prepared for their arrival.

All roads in the British Empire now led to the Middle East. And none towards France or North-west Africa. The War Cabinet realised that there could be no Second Front in 1942, nor probably in 1943. This realisation had to be passed on to Britain’s two major allies, both of whom saw the Second Front as the main priority of the moment. Churchill and Brooke would go to Washington to explain matters to their suspicious American counterparts; Cripps and Wavell would travel to Kuybyshev and break the bad news to Stalin.

Washington DC

In June 1942 the war had come home to America in a welter of anger and bitterness. Like its Pacific enemy the United States was not a country accustomed to setbacks, let alone defeats as crushing as that suffered at Midway. Now Hawaii was at risk. The whole western seaboard was at risk. The most powerful nation in the world had been humbled by the
Japanese
.

In the war councils of the American administration the ‘Germany first’ policy agreed in January was also at risk. The two service chiefs, General Marshall and Admiral King, were as aware as the British that the latter’s Middle Eastern reverses involved the indefinite postponement of a cross-Channel assault on the European mainland. However, they did not deduce from this that US forces should be committed in the Middle East. On the contrary, both men, and particularly King, saw in the postponement of European action a chance to commit more American forces in the Pacific. The American population shared their enthusiasm for a new ‘Japan first’ policy.

Roosevelt fortunately disagreed. He had committed the United States to assist the British against Germany, and the fall of Egypt made that more necessary, not less so. Naturally the security of American soil - Hawaii and the West Coast - had the highest priority, but that was a matter for the Navy. There would certainly have to be a temporary shift of naval forces from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but that was all.

Churchill and Brooke arrived to join in the argument on 19 June, splashing down on the Potomac in the sea-plane which had carried them across the Atlantic. Brooke was brought up to date by Dill before talking to Marshall and King, while Churchill retired to Roosevelt’s country residence at Hyde Park for a tête-a-tête with the President.

Both the British leaders reiterated the basics of the strategy agreed in earlier meetings. The two powers were to launch a counter-offensive against Germany in the West as soon as their ‘essential interests’ in other areas had been secured. These ‘essential interests’ included the Iraqi-Iranian oilfields, which was now threatened. Until such time as the threat receded ‘Sledgehammer’ was impossible. As Brooke put it: ‘Precious shipping and resources cannot be directed to one end of the Mediterranean when strength was needed to defend the other.’

His audience was not particularly appreciative. King sat silent, his face a study in obstinacy. He had already decided that American resources should be directed to the Pacific, not to either end of the Mediterranean. Marshall was more generous. He said that he recognised the difficulties of the British position, the immensity of the burden they were bearing. But he asked Brooke and Dill to take into account the strong desire of the American public for action against the Japanese.

At Hyde Park Roosevelt, who had probably done more for the American public than any President since Lincoln, listened diplomatically to Churchill and confirmed his personal commitment to the ‘Germany first’ policy. He hoped Churchill would share his view that the retention of Hawaii and the safeguarding of the US-Australia sea-route were also ‘essential interests’ of the Allied powers. He admitted to the British Prime Minister that he was under considerable pressure from his service chiefs to commit greater American forces in the Pacific. He would have to give them something, and that something would have to be naval forces, including the two US carriers currently in the Atlantic. He realised that this would place a strain on the Atlantic lifeline, but there were no alternatives.

Churchill concurred gratefully. He said that
Illustrious
, now en route to the Indian Ocean, could be recalled to the Atlantic to fill the gap. But what could the Americans offer the Middle East? An armoured division? Planes? Roosevelt admitted that he did not know what was available. They would have to ask Marshall the following day.

Next morning the two leaders returned to Washington by train. There they found that Marshall had been largely won over by a combination of Brooke’s persuasiveness and the knowledge that, for the moment, there was no way the US could commit most of its resources in a Japanese-held Pacific. Admiral King, though unrepentant, had admitted defeat. The British had got their way, and the rest of their visit was spent in sightseeing and hammering out the details of the US commitment in the Middle East. Several squadrons of US bombers would be flown out to Iran, and at least one of the armoured divisions previously earmarked for North-west Africa would be shipped to Basra as soon as possible. Churchill and Brooke left Washington on 27 June feeling more optimistic than they had eight days before.

Kuybyshev

The British party had arrived at Kuybyshev on 17 June. It was warmly welcomed, Molotov leading the soldiers and diplomats to a convenient hangar for a caviar and vodka lunch. This was the high-point of the visit.

That evening Cripps saw Stalin. The Soviet leader reluctantly conceded that there could be no Second Front that year, but then offended Cripps by accusing the Royal Navy of cowardice in stopping the Arctic convoys. He appeared ‘unruffled’ by the new German offensive, but refused to give any details of the Red Army’s strength. He doubted whether the Germans would reach the Volga. He was also afraid that the American failure in the Pacific might encourage the Japanese to attack the Soviet Union. It was all rather vague and, as far as Cripps was concerned, most unsatisfactory.

Wavell was receiving no more joy from Shaposhnikov. When asked whether he was confident that the Red Army would hold the Caucasus, the Soviet Chief of Staff could only reply that he ‘did not think’ the Germans would succeed in breaching the mountain barrier. Wavell found this ‘did not think’ profoundly disturbing, but could elicit no more detailed information. The Russians expressed interest in Tedder’s offer of British air support in the defence of the Baku area but were reluctant to reach any hard-and-fast agreements. Time would tell, they repeated over and over again.

Many Russian shrugs and glasses of vodka later the British departed for home. They were little the wiser for their visit. The Soviet Union was still in the war, its leaders seemed confident. But who could tell? Wavell told Alexander that ‘we shall only know for certain how strong the Red Army is in the Caucasus when we spot the first panzer column crossing the Persian border.’

Baghdad/Rafah

General Alexander arrived in Baghdad to take over the Middle East Command on 14 June. He had already played a large part in organising two relatively successful retreats, to Dunkirk and the Chindwin. It was hoped that he would not be organising a third, from Iraq.

Auchinleck had chosen Baghdad as the new Middle East Command HQ before his dismissal, and Alexander confirmed the choice. From the City of the Arabian Nights he expected to oversee both the maintenance of internal security in the British-occupied Middle East and the shifting of war material from the disembarkation port of Basra to the fighting fronts. Baghdad was of course a long way from the prospective front in Palestine, but Alexander was not a man who liked to interfere in the day-to-day running of the armies under his overall command. It was his job, as he and his commanders saw it, to funnel through the men, planes, motor transport and supplies to where they were needed most.

The maintenance of internal security was now clearly a military matter of some importance. It was also beset with growing difficulties. In the aftermath of Egypt’s fall the Middle East seemed to many like a dynamite dump with any number of fast-burning fuses. In Jerusalem, Haifa, Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran and other major cities the whispers of Arab and Persian rebellion were gathering themselves into a roar. Swastikas appeared on walls, thinly-disguised pro-Axis reports appeared in even the previously loyal newspapers. The reliability of the British-trained Arab units was no longer taken for granted. To the British the celebrated Fifth Column seemed truly ubiquitous.