The World at War (23 page)

LIEUTENANT COLONEL BELCHEM

Although they greatly outnumbered us numerically and in other respects, our equipment was probably superior. Secondly their, training was very elementary: they were not trained for desert operations, the Italians, neither were they clever at night. Most importantly their morale, although apparently high, was a synthetic morale inspired by repetitive propaganda and one was very conscious that if they suffered a defeat this would probably peel off like a plastic wrapper, which in fact was the case. But they had, for example, no tanks worth paying much attention to and I speak with feeling for the Italian crews because I was myself with an Italian tank regiment in Italy for a period before the war. O'Connor undertook an operation that was due to last about four days, which was the limit for the available tanks, which were nearly worn out, and for our administration in terms of supplying water and fuel and ammunition. He achieved complete surprise, got behind
the
Italian positions at Sidi Barrani by a night march and in the morning Italian resistance collapsed. O'Connor's great achievement was that by using captured vehicles and captured dumps of water and supplies he was able to maintain this four-day battle into an offensive lasting over a period of weeks and resulted in taking him as far as Benghazi and indeed beyond to El Agheila.

LIEUTENANT PAOLO COLACICCHI

Italian Tenth Army

Your army in Egypt, although considerably smaller than ours in number, was certainly better trained, better equipped especially in transport and tanks and armoured cars, and also had at the top generals who were certainly more aggressively minded than ours, so of course morale sagged even more. The armoured car acting as an OP [Observation Post] for the artillery had a tremendous effect on our men because they couldn't see the enemy. We could just see something glistening on the horizon, which was the armoured car, and then you'd fire a few shots and it would move a couple of hundred yards and readjust the fire of your batteries and this shook very much our Libyan troops. We had two divisions of Libyan troops who had, some of them, fought very well in Ethiopia, but these men must see the enemy to fight well. You can't put them in a fort and say hold it, and all day keep them subject to artillery fire, which they can't see where it comes from. They turn to their white officer and say, 'What about it, why can't we fire back?' And you say, 'Well, we haven't got the guns,' and they say, 'Well, then, they're stronger and this is very bad.'

MAJOR GENERAL O'CONNOR

I wasn't really surprised. I thought we'd do it, I thought we'd surprise them. We dominated no man's land and so they really didn't get their patrols out in the way they ought to have. The relative difficulty was getting right this night march between the two camps, which were only twenty to twenty-five miles apart. But they didn't hear us: we had aeroplanes in the air to make a noise all the time so they never heard our movement and it came as a complete and absolute surprise to them.

ANTHONY EDEN

Many unkind things have been said about the Italians and I think some of them are unfair. There was a brigadier commanding an armoured brigade or support group in the line next to the Italians at Solum or somewhere whose name was 'Strafer' Gott. He afterwards became quite famous and had he not been killed would have had command of the Eighth Army. I'd known him for some time and he came in with the others to talk to us in the desert while I was there and said something which impressed me at the time. He said it's not fair or true to say that the Italians are not brave – what it is, is that they are not properly trained. And I should think that was right. Mussolini pushed these people out indifferently trained and they were expected to go and fight these battles in desert conditions for which you have to be trained.

MAJOR GENERAL O'CONNOR

We had a great disappointment because the morning after Sidi Barrani I received information that the 4th Indian Division was to be withdrawn and that the new division, the 6th Australian Division – which was very good, I must say, when it came – wouldn't be ready for action for another month. That meant that the impetus of our pursuit would vanish and the enemy would be alerted and it would no longer be possible to surprise him. In fact we were back to rather below square one, but we managed and we did take Bardia after a considerable fight and Tobruk after a lesser one and advanced our line to Derna and then we had to come to the great decision: whether we were going to follow the enemy up along the Benghazi road or go right across the El Akhdar desert, come right across the line of communication of the Italian Tenth Army and to stop them escaping. And this, after a very hard fight, we successfully did, thanks to the marvellous work of the 7th Armoured Division, and we really liquidated the whole
Italian Army.

ANTHONY EDEN

There was a school of thought which believed in the autumn of 1940 that during the winter Hitler would assemble, as he could have done no doubt, a formidable force with a view to launching an attack on this island in the spring. In the event he wasn't thinking of attacking us, he was thinking of attacking Russia, which opened up an entirely new perspective in the war. I don't pretend that after Wavell's victory we in London realised that there might soon be a Russo-German conflict – but we did think that if it were possible to bring certain Balkan countries into conflict with Hitler then the consequences might be really unforeseeable.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL FRANCIS DE GUINGAND

Joint Planning Staff, GHQ Cairo

O'Connor, who was commanding the Western Desert Force, had captured Tobruk and Benghazi, and his force had gone well south of Benghazi and at that moment Rommel and the Germans hadn't really started to come into North Africa. I was under the Joint Planning Staff in Cairo and always trying to look ahead and produce plans. We had to show that it was perfectly feasible, with the transport resources and air power and the Navy, that this desert force would get to Tripoli and mop up the remaining Italians. Army Headquarters produced similar studies and came to the same conclusion and O'Connor wanted to go ahead to Tripoli, he told me that himself. At that moment Churchill had a great idea of intervention in Greece because everyone knew the Germans were going to invade Greece at some time, and he wanted to offer a British expedition. The Prime Minister of Greece Ioannis Metaxas, a very strong character, and his Chief of the Armed Forces, Alexander Papagos, who was the hero of the Greek people after his victories over the Italians in Albania, but he would have nothing to do with it. And Papagos said the Allies clean up North Africa first and then we'll think about other operations. One of the reasons for intervention in Greece, Churchill had in mind, was to try to persuade Turkey to come in on our side, which would have been tremendous. Personalities change the course of events and Metaxas died, heart attack or something. And another Prime Minister took over, nothing like such a strong man, and Churchill got on to him and Wavell was told to denude the Western Desert and reduce the forces to the minimum and to prepare an expedition force to Greece.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL BELCHEM

The decision to go to
Greece was a political one and from the point of view of a professional it was a military nonsense. It may have been necessary for Great Britain to help our Greek allies at that time, even though the Greeks did not seem to be particularly enthusiastic about it, but militarily I can only express an opinion from a cold professional angle. Firstly, if you think of the position in the air we simply had not got any comparable Royal Air Force contingent to enable us to hope to succeed in Greece; whereas against us, limited only by the number of forward bases available, the Germans were able to concentrate the whole of the Luftwaffe. Under those conditions we couldn't hope to maintain our position alongside the Greeks, who were themselves very poorly and very sparsely equipped. Yet from the overall point of view of the Commander-in-Chief Middle East the military situation was that the diversion of resources to Greece included the 6th and 7th Australian divisions and the New Zealand Division and part of a Second Army division, taken away from General Wavell in Africa, virtually the whole of the fighting formations which were ready and equipped for operations. Therefore by going to Greece we endangered our entire position in the Middle East.

BRIGADIER HARDING

I was all against it. I thought it was a great strategic mistake and I think there was considerable misunderstanding between High Command in Cairo and government in London. What they were really intending to do in Greece, to me it was disastrous. The opportunity that was lost was really of holding Rommel right in the early part of his advance, preventing him from ever getting within striking distance of the Nile Delta.

MAJOR GENERAL O'CONNOR

I'm quite certain that if we had advanced immediately we could have pushed them out. We had good information that there were very few people in the way. I have this letter, an extract that I'm going to read, from Hitler to Mussolini at the time of the fall of Tobruk, when our own Eighth Army was in retreat. It reads as follows: 'If at this moment the British are not pursued to the last breath of each man, the same thing will happen as when the British were deprived of success when they had nearly reached Tripoli.' That seems to me a good-enough indication that we could have got there.

ANTHONY EDEN

With Greece the position had been complicated by two factors, the first that we gave Greece a guarantee, I think before the hostilities began, and the second was that although the Greeks superbly repelled the Italian attacks, they did ask for air help from us, and we had a number of squadrons and ground troops with them in Greece way back before there was any question of the Germans taking part in the Middle East. So in a sense we were largely committed. And the view of the War Cabinet and the Defence Committee at home and of the Chiefs of Staff was that we should, if the Greeks were going to defend themselves against the Germans, we should bring them what help we could. And Dill and I were sent out to Cairo to look into this business. We had appalling weather, we were badly held up and when we reached there in our flying boat I remember saying, 'What are we going to do, supposing Archie Wavell and the other Commanders-in-Chief think it's wrong to go to Greece?' I think Dill said, 'Well, let's jump that one when we get there.' We found Archie there at the landing stage and after a brief introduction he suddenly drew us to one side and said rather solemnly, 'You've been a long time coming,' and I said, 'We've been as quick as we could – it wasn't our fault.' He said, 'I hope you don't mind what I'm going to say, I don't think I ought to waste time and I've begun the movement of troops and the concentration to enable us to go to Greece.' We did all think the same.

BRIGADIER HARDING

I think Wavell allowed himself to be over-pressurised from London in launching operations before he was fully ready for them. I think he was also misled by the Intelligence appreciations at the time who underrated first of all the capability of the Germans to put down forces across the Mediterranean and across North Africa, and then they underrated again the power and strength of the German armoured formations and their anti-tank capabilities.

COLONEL SIEGFRIED WESTPHAL

Rommel's Operations Officer

The German troops who brought the order to go to the desert were very surprised and they had no time to prepare for this new war theatre, but I think they acted very reasonably; many of them did suffer homesickness but the fighting reaction was not influenced by it. Yes, the Germans are a continental people, and we never had in mind to fight outside Germany. I was, in the years between 1935 and 1938, in the first Operational Department of the German General Staff in Berlin. One day came to me a gentleman of another department to speak with me about the
maps we would take with us in wartime, and he proposed maps of North Africa and I said to him that is nonsense, we intend not to have warfare in North Africa and this map would not be very useful for the troops, and 1 declined. Later on when I came to the desert I had to suffer about very bad detailed maps and therefore we were very busy to get in our hands British maps, which were excellent. And Rommel always not with Italian or German maps, only British maps.

ANTHONY EDEN

Many things weren't as expected, but one result did come through – that was the Yugoslav coup d'état. In fact we were just on our way home thinking there was nothing more we could do. At Malta we got this message and we decided to go straight back to Athens to see what we could arrange for contacts with the Yugoslavs, and as we got into the flying boat came a message from Winston, 'Please go back to Athens at once' – minds with a single thought.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL DE GUINGAND

Churchill then sent Eden out to visit Athens and I was the Staff Officer appointed to produce what resources we had available, which we could send to Greece. It didn't look very impressive, however we all survived that and we had a momentous conference at the King of Greece's palace outside Athens, and the King of Greece sitting at the head of the table, with the Prime Minister one side and Papagos on the other. I was called in at the right moment to explain what forces and resources we could send to Greece, and I was actually there when Eden asked Wilson to inform the King of Greece and his Cabinet, his views as to whether we'd be successful if we intervened. Wilson got up and made a most optimistic statement, that he felt we could hold this line and northern Greece and prevent the Germans from getting deep into Greece. I was absolutely shattered because all our studies in ground-planning staff had shown that it wasn't possible – you'd never get the forces and sufficient strength there in time before the Germans would be there.

ANTHONY EDEN

There's the extraordinary thing about Stalin and his approach to the Yugoslavs immediately after the coup d'état: Stalin offered them a pact of mutual assurance. I was amazed because until that moment Russians had taken every precaution not to give Hitler any excuse for attacking them, and yet there they were deliberately flouting him. Hitler was furious at the Yugoslavs, he called it Operation Retribution and if I'd been Hitler at that moment I'd have said, 'Well, we know which side they're on.' Stalin's answer to me, when I asked him a year or more afterwards why he did it, he gave a double answer, he said, 'Because, in the first place, we knew by then that we were going to be attacked, and in the second place they were fellow Slavs and we wanted to encourage them.'