Mediterranean Front

Mediterranean Front The Desert War , #1 The Year of Wavell, 1940 -41 by Alan Moorehead, 1910-1983 Published: 1941 J J J J J I I I I I Table of Contents Preface & Chapter 1 … thru … Chapter 19 J J J J J I I I I I Preface THE WAR in Africa and the Middle East fell naturally into three phases, each lasting twelve months. At first General Wavell had command from 1940 to 1941, and that was the year of tremendous experiments, of thrusting about in the dark; the year of bluff and quick movement when nobody knew what was going to happen. Whole armies and fleets were flung about from one place to another, and in its frantic efforts to find a new equilibrium the Middle East erupted at half a dozen places at once. At one stage Wavell had five separate campaigns on his hands—the Western Desert, Greece, Crete, Italian East Africa and Syria—and there were other side- shows like Iraq and British Somaliland as well. Most of this was essentially colonial warfare carried out with small groups of men using weapons that would be regarded as obsolete now. Looking back, I see what a feeling of excitement and high adventure we had then when we went off on these little isolated expeditions. We did not quite realise the real grimness of war except at certain moments. The honours between the sides were fairly even. The Germans held Greece and Crete; we held Syria, Abyssinia and all Italian East Africa. The Axis and the British were balanced in the desert. Then General Auchinleck arrived to take command, and 1941–42 became the year of set battles and eventual retreat. It was no longer colonial warfare, but the war of modern European armies fighting out a decisive issue in Africa. This fighting was focused on the desert, and in that flat and limitless arena the war developed into a straight-out issue between man and man, tank and tank, army and army. There are a thousand considerations to be taken into account, but it will have to be admitted that the Germans had the better army. They had better weapons, more soundly trained men and better generalship than we had. Despite this stiffening and enlargement of the desert fighting, the war in the Middle East became something of a side issue through this year because Russia, Japan and America had now entered the war. Instead of being an isolated theatre, the Middle East was becoming part of world strategy. In that black summer of 1942 it even began to look as if the Germans would reach out from Stalingrad in Russia and from Alamein, Middle East, and eventually join hands with the Japanese in India. But Stalingrad and Alamein held, and that was the turning-point of the war. Then the final year, 1942–43, the year of Eisenhower, Alexander and Montgomery, the year of success. As Montgomery struck from the desert, the Anglo-American forces landed in North Africa. The tumultuous and victorious meeting of the Eighth and the First Armies in Tunisia must go down as one of the great military strokes of history. The Middle East was secured. The Mediterranean was reopened. And far off in the East the Japanese dynamic had at last expended itself on the borders of India. Practically the whole of the British and American Empires in the Far East had fallen, but for the moment the Japanese could do no more. And at Stalingrad the Russians had begun their great westward sweep. With Africa freed, we could at last look forward to the invasion of Europe. As each of these three separate years of battle ended in the Middle East I wrote a book describing the operations—Mediterranean Front , A Year of Battle and The End in Africa . These three are now combined in this volume. The text is essentially the same except that here and there I have made minor corrections and deletions. When I first began to put the three books together I planned to remove many of the personal references and shape the material into a more cohesive and historical form. But I soon found this quite impracticable. It is impossible to write a definitive history of the campaigns at this stage. Too many matters are still the subject of controversy, too much is secret, so much material remains to be gathered. The war diaries and the dispatches of the commanders have still to be published. And so these books must remain what they are—a rambling and personal story. I think every major happening is included, and I have tried to bind the sweep of these great events into a perspective. But it is essentially an intimate picture of the Mediterranean war from one man’s point of view. There are long digressions, such as the Indian chapters and the description of my journey round the world when I left Egypt in the summer, called at New York in the fall and London in the winter, and ended a little breathlessly in Tunisia in the spring. These journeys were essentially part of my search to obtain a wider and fuller knowledge of the war, and the digressions will be justified if they establish only this—that the struggle which began in the desert as a simple military issue became in the end a vast imbroglio of politics and warfare in which the whole world was concerned. Very little here has been suppressed through censorship: I have said almost all I wanted to say. Inevitably there are many mistakes. Since one is writing so close to events, one cannot weed out all the errors, and for those that remain, unknown to me, I apologise. I was present at most of the events described here, and very often I discussed them on the spot or shortly afterwards with the soldiers and their commanders and the politicians. But I must emphasise that one man can see very little of a battle, and the opinions expressed in that highly charged atmosphere are not always complete and balanced. Throughout these three years I was writing dispatches for my newspaper the London Daily Express, and here and there at perhaps half a dozen places I felt I could not improve on those messages, and I have threaded them into the narrative. I was also strongly tempted to add an account of the Sicilian and Italian campaigns. But these are not part of the pattern of this book; they belong not to Africa but to Europe, and the invasion of Europe is another story. Among all the many people who have helped this book to publication I must place first my wife. She shared in many of the adventures. Quite apart from the tedious business of handling the proofs, the results of her correction and suggestion are on every page. A great part of the book is hers. Next I must thank Lieutenant-Colonel J. O. Ewart, of the Intelligence staff, who has patiently combed through these many thousand words and given me his account of the battle of Alamein. I cannot easily repay my debt to Lord Wavell, for his encouragement to me through these years. At different times General Montgomery, General Auchinleck and many of their senior officers like the late General Gott discussed their battles with me and gave me access to certain documents and war diaries, and I am particularly grateful to them. I have also profited greatly from the conferences given to correspondents by General Eisenhower, General Alexander, Air Chief Marshal Tedder, Air Marshal Coningham, Admiral Cunningham and their British and American staff officers. The late Mr P. P. Howe, who was editor to my publisher Hamish Hamilton, did a great deal of work on these books. I must also thank the hundreds of correspondents and reviewers who have used me kindly in the past; and the companion of so many of my journeys, Alexander Clifford. Evelyn Montague of the Manchester Guardian has also checked many facts. And there is my editor, Mr Arthur Christiansen of the Daily Express , who has kindly consented to the publication of this volume. Beyond this there were the thousands of meetings I had in the field with the soldiers and sailors and airmen who are the actors of this story, and who unaffectedly and simply described to me what they had done. So many are dead now or wounded, my own colleagues among them. And this brings me to the only possible dedication of this book, which I set down here with much pride and, I hope, without presumption: To the men who fought . Alan Moorehead London, 1944 Chapter 1 Operations such as these begin with a phase in which each commander struggles, on the one hand, to obtain information, and on the other to deny it to his enemy. One of the few advantages that soldiers experience in having a desert for their theatre of war is that the auditorium is empty. —EXTRACT FROM A STATEMENT ISSUED BY G.H.Q., CAIRO, JUNE 19 TH , 1940. I REACHED Egypt by way of Greece. Nothing could disturb that timeless apathy in the eastern Mediterranean. In Athens the diplomats talked leisurely around the point of whether Greece would fight or not. They were rather agreed on the whole that she would not. They talked too, of course, the Greeks. They said that every Italian would be thrown into the sea. But they had been talking in that strain for a long time. Anyway, Metaxas had a Fascist régime. Anyway, he was friendly with the Germans who seemed to be arriving in steadily increasing numbers at Athens and Salonica.

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