Hindsight on Mediterranean war

Press, 4 March 1978, Page 17

Hindsight on Mediterranean war

Their Finest Hour. By Glen St.J. Barclay. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 192 pp. $12.50. (Reviewed by Michael Pugh) This provocative analysis of the dark days in the Mediterranean from June, 1940, to June, 1941, will be a delight to iconoclasts. More than a few eyebrows will twitch when New Zealanders read that General Freyberg “could usually be counted on to misunderstand a situation.” In particular the General is accused of tailing to warn his Government about the dangers of the Greek campaign. But he gets off lightly compared to others like Smuts, Churchill. Eden and Waved. Smuts, the “bushveldt Merlin,” was apparently “ready to provide the worst possible advice at the worst possible time.” Dr Barclay’s abuse is. legitimate up to a point. No-one, for instance, can

pretend to be happy about Churchill as a strategist. He treated his Admirals with quite unjustified contempt and many of his decisions, including Greece, were unsound. But it is too easy to condemn with the benefit of hindsight. This phase of the European war was, by nature, a series of dispersed and risky manoeuvres — by both sides. Territories were hastily mopped up to deny them to the enemy, and the inability of the British to move beyond this phase into the next — consolidating footholds such as North Africa instead of opening up new fronts such as the Balkans — was partly due to the belief that Germany was anxious to pounce on every scrap of Europe. Understandable; Hitler did disperse his forces in no less risky a fashion than the British dispersed theirs.

Unfortunately. Barclay equates the British dispersal to Greece with a “continental” strategy. First-class clanger it may have been, but continental strategy it was not. Although Greece was part of the European mainland, the campaign was nevertheless peripheral to the enemy’s heartland and relied for its success on long-range naval support and a small army. It was thus what is known as a “blue-water” strategy of which, ironically, the author is a tenacious adherent. A reader in history at Queensland University, Barclay write, from a blue-water colonial point of view and, one guesses, without the aid of an atlas. He talks of the “military viability” of the British Empire based on the Royal Navy as though it actually existed. In reality, imperial defence had been a sham since 1918. To build a strategy round a far-flung disintegrating empire from a declining metropolitan base was nonsense. The attempt to do so between the wars led precisely to the dispersal round the periphery of Europe which Barclay' deplores. Indeed a lingering imperial albatross hindered the earlier development of a true continental strategy involving a large fighter-bomber force and

enormous conscript army directed to the cockpit of Europe (France and Belgium) — the only possible place where a continental power such as Germany could be defeated. But Germany, so Barclay implies, should not have been defeated. Britain, he says, should have made peace with Hitler on the terms brought over by Hess. It is the kind of seedy notion that might have come from an appeaset sitting in the comparative safety of Ottawa or Canberra. But what price Britain’s continued survival at the mercy of a Nazified Europe — and what of Australia’s wool market then?

And' Barclay’s alternative to the disastrous dispersal to Greece? Dispersal to Singapore, a mere 7000 miles further on. Read this stimulating book by all means, but have an atlas with you.