CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
The Interlude
Following the miraculous evacuation of the Royal Airborne Army from northern Denmark the war settled into a somewhat uneasy stalemate. While loathe to admit it, the Germans and Hungarians had seriously underestimated the tenacity of the Poles and Yugoslavians and had paid the price that every over confident aggressor must pay. In Poland, Warsaw was threatened, true, however the Wehrmacht forces driving into Poland had been battered while they drove the Poles back and had been forced to cease offensive operations until they were able to recoup the losses they had suffered, something that the British airborne invasion of Kiel had seriously disrupted, and thereby allowed Poland a slight reprieve. Yugoslavia, while unable to claim to have bloodied her foes on the field of battle, had been forced back by her encroaching enemies to the most mountainous and thus most defendable territories and had been able to bring the Germans and Hungarian offensives to a halt.
Seeing what was thought to be the tides of war going against the Western democracies, both Fascist Italy and Communist Russia began stirring as Germany marched about central Europe. Secure in the knowledge that the West would be unable to do more than make public denouncements, Soviet Premier Stalin ordered the Soviet Foreign Ministry to begin making land demands from all of the nations bordering the Soviet Union’s western frontier. With fairly thin veiled threats the Soviets, in a twist of logic that left many confused across the globe, demanded that the portions of Romania, Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia that were formerly provinces under Imperial Russia prior to the Revolution and subsequent Civil War be returned to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Concurrently with the Soviet diplomatic demands, Italy began signaling it’s apparent interest in expansion by calling up its reserves and sending troops to the Cyrenaica region of Libya and to the Italian colonies in the Horn of Africa. The Regia Marina was also active, conducting maritime patrols around Malta and the Levant and forcing their presence upon the Red Sea, in several instances coming very close to provoking a duplicate of the Devonshire-Trieste incident. It was abundantly clear that Italy was clearly casting eyes upon the British Empire’s East African possessions as well as the Empire’s lifeline to the Far East, the Suez Canal.
And as if the there were not enough worries to be placed upon the civilian and military leaders of the Alliance, Japan continued offensive operations in mainland China, sending armies toward not only the Sino-India border in the East, but also the Sino-French-Indochina border and the provinces surrounding Hong Kong and Macao.
However, in London, knowing that the Imperial forces in Hong Kong were sufficient to stay of any Japanese aggression for a sufficient timeframe, that there was the ability to trade space for time in northern India if Japan attempted to send troops over the inhospitable Tibetan highlands and that the Scandinavian nations were in a better position to handle the encroachment of Soviet Russia, it was determined that the Empire needed to maintain a preponderance of attention upon Europe and the Mediterranean.
The situation in the Mediterranean theater was clearly quite delicate as Foreign Secretary Eden and his diplomats of the Foreign Office were still diligently working to sway Italy away from the German-Hungarian sphere of influence. However, at the same time, the Crown could not allow itself to be ill-positioned in North Africa and the Horn if the efforts of the Foreign Office came to naught. Taking into account the seeming willingness of the Italians to allow themselves to be humiliated in another Devonshire-Trieste type incident, it was decided within the Privy Council that a strong message needed to be sent to the Italians, and a message that would not be confused in diplomatic language.
Accordingly, London ordered General Alan Brooke’s Army of North Africa to move west from Alexandria and Cairo to defense positions in the western desert of Egypt bordering Cyrenaica. The same dispatch instructed the Army of Sub-Sahara under General Auchinleck, General Newth’s Army of North Kenya, and the Army of Southern Kenya under General Pownall’s to move from their bivouacs and march toward the Horn of Africa. Auchinleck and his men would march south to the Sudan and take positions along the northern frontier of Italian East Africa, with the Army of North Kenya moving north west into the Sudan and guarding the western frontiers of the Italian colony and the Army of South Kenya marching toward Somalia and positions along the Italian colony’s southern border that could not help to make themselves quite noticeable to the Italians. make themselves noticed along the Italian colony’s southern border.
Engineers of the Army of North Africa sighting defensive positions
Army of Sub-Sahara marching from camp toward the Sudan
In order to make sure that the Italians understood that these marching orders were in clear response to movements of the Italian Army, the RAF’s Middle East Command, comprised of English, South African and Canadian tactical bomber squadrons commanded by Wing Commander Bottomley, and Wing Commander van Dieter’s South African Command, made up of two South African Spitfire wings, began air sorties above the frontiers of western Egypt and the Italian East Africa colony.
A light of South African piloted Spitfires on patrol near Mombassa in the Horn
The Admiralty also sent orders to the Mediterranean Fleet’s Admiral Cunningham advising that the Royal Navy would not allow the Regia Marina any further latitude in their actions, i.e. any provocations were to be answered at the discretion of the senior naval officer present and the Regia Marina were no longer allowed to sail about the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden without an escort from the Mediterranean Fleet.
HMS Renown looking for an Italian ship to escort
In Europe, was quite clear that for the British Empire, the withdrawal from Denmark and the failure of the French to launch an offensive into Germany caused a need for a change of strategy, not to mention a strong discussion of responsibilities upon the Alliance members. This discussion nearly created a fatal breakdown of the Alliance, a breakdown that would have spelt doom for all of Europe.
Calling for a series of high level meetings in London that would include the Foreign Ministries of the Allied nations and the majority of each country’s military high commands, the Empire called into question the lack of action by the French Army in the opening weeks of the war. With full Gallic élan, the French delegation defended their lack of offensive operations by claiming that as they had insufficient troop strength to ensure that any battle fought would not degenerate into a repeat of the murderous stalemate of the Great War. While many members of the military staffs attending the conferences nearly openly scoffed at the French assertion and openly expressed their disdain at the French use of that specter, the diplomats in attendance were able to prevent any open break within the Alliance by agreeing to send forces into France to assist the French Army with offensive operations. No sooner had the diplomats and military staff officers able to come to an agreement that the French military and civilian authorities demanded that any foreign forces fighting on French soil would be subordinate to the French Commander-in-Chief and said forces would be placed in positions to support the French Army. Needless to say, this demand was not meet very favorably by the British Imperial Staff, especially with the experiences of how the French had treated the Americans in the Great War. The firm response from London to Paris was that Paris itself would have to be threatened by German troops before such an agreement would be seriously considered by the British Empire.
Publicly claiming to be affronted by the British response, the French delegation stormed out of the meetings, reluctantly followed by the Swiss. For several days it appeared that the Alliance would break apart and with it the returning of Europe to the diplomatic climate of the Napoleonic era with individual powers treating with a common enemy at the expense of the common good.
The mood within the Allied capitals was bleak, and the populations of the British Empire and the Scandinavian countries were rife with anti-French feelings. With such turmoil within the ranks of the Alliance, it has been theorized that if Nazi Germany had made peace overtures to the Alliance at this time, the war in the West could have been brought to an end. However, such overtures never reached the Allied capitals. There have been rumors in past years, all publicly denied by the involved governments and privately ignored by those who would actually have knowledge of such occurrences, that Germany did in fact send several peace emissaries to France in this time period. According to these rumors, those emissaries never arrived in Paris due to their interception and elimination by agents of the S.O.E. of the British Empire. While it is entirely possible for such activities to have taken place, thanks in large part to the British infiltration of the German Abwehr, most scholars agree that with the feelings running in government circles of the Alliance, it is entirely more likely that the British would be encouraging the Germans to come to London instead of Paris. Whatever the truth may be over these rumors, the fact remains that the Alliance did not break apart and with Swiss assistance, the French were convinced to return to the Allied conferences and begin the work anew of creating a strategy to defeat Germany.
While the squabbling Allied powers bickered over the proper strategy to pursue, for the actual fighting men, the uneasy stalemate that had settled over the combatants in the middle weeks of October came to a blazing end in the azure skies of an England embraced by autumn.
Excerpt from The Death of Nations
By Edgar Bryce Fellows
Paris University Press, 1960
By Edgar Bryce Fellows
Paris University Press, 1960
Up Next: Part One of that blazing end... stay tuned!
