Churchill presses Auchinleck

On 14 April 1942 Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent a telegram to Cairo addressed to the Lord Privy Seal, Sir Stafford Cripps. Cripps was flying home to England from India, where his mission had failed: he had left Delhi on 12 April after the Indian National Congress rejected the British proposals. On the way back he was passing through the Egyptian capital, the seat of Middle East Command, and Churchill wanted the minister to leave no one there under any illusion about the mood in London. The man in question was the Commander-in-Chief, General Claude Auchinleck, whose Eighth Army had been standing on the defensive on the Gazala line in Libya for two months.

The telegram of 14 April

Churchill quoted the text in the fourth volume of his war memoirs, The Hinge of Fate. He wrote that he did not want anyone to think that there was not “deep anxiety” in London at the prolonged inaction of the army in Libya. In his view it was quite possible that Rommel would grow stronger faster than the British. He gave two reasons. One submarine flotilla had had to leave the Mediterranean for the Indian Ocean, and the air raids on Malta made it impossible to keep bombers there, so the route from Italy to Tripoli would not be seriously threatened. On top of that, the Middle East air force would be drawn more and more into the “Indian danger”. The telegram ended with the words: it was no use pressing a general against his better judgement, but he wished Cripps to know that his own view and that of the Chiefs of Staff remained unchanged.

The telegram is sometimes summarised as a request for Cripps to put pressure on Auchinleck. The gist is right, although its tone was more cautious: Churchill did not instruct Cripps to take any steps, he simply wanted the minister passing through Cairo to know the opinion of the Prime Minister and the Chiefs of Staff and to convey it on the spot. In his memoirs he admitted that he had been “very dissatisfied” with the results of the talks Cripps had held in Cairo on his way out to India.

The dispute over the date of the offensive

The tension had been building since February. After Rommel’s second offensive, which in January and early February had pushed the British out of western Cyrenaica, Auchinleck announced another pause of several months to prepare a major battle. On 26 February Churchill asked him outright about his intentions, reminding him that according to London’s calculations Eighth Army had superiority in the air and in tanks. Auchinleck replied on 27 February with a lengthy appreciation: the Gazala–Tobruk–Bir Hakeim line was strong, but he would not achieve a clear numerical superiority before 1 June, and an earlier attack risked having his forces destroyed piecemeal and might endanger Egypt.

In London the Chiefs of Staff read this as a signal of inaction until June, perhaps even July. On 8 March Churchill summoned Auchinleck home for consultations, but he declined, explaining that he could not leave his command. On 15 March the Prime Minister wrote that it would be hard to bear that 635,000 men on the Middle East ration strength should stand idle while the Russians were expecting a great German blow, and announced that Cripps would stop in Cairo on his way to India to set out the War Cabinet’s position. He was accompanied by the Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Archibald Nye.

The talks on 20 and 21 March did not produce what the Prime Minister had hoped for. Cripps reported that the “prickly atmosphere” had gone, that he had no doubt of Auchinleck’s offensive spirit, and that his caution came from “Scottish prudence” and a reluctance to promise too much. Churchill replied bitterly in a telegram to Nye of 22 March: everything had been so pleasant because the envoys had accepted all of Cairo’s arguments, and London was left only to resign itself to the probable loss of Malta and the inaction of the army.

Malta and the Axis convoys

What had been a fear in March became fact in April. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s German Luftflotte 2 was bombing Malta with unprecedented force. The ships that until recently had been attacking Axis convoys were being lost in harbour: after the Second Battle of Sirte some of the supply ships were sunk in Grand Harbour, and on 8 April the last cruiser of Force K, the damaged Penelope, left for Gibraltar. In mid-April Malta’s most famous submarine, Upholder, was lost, and at the turn of April and May the 10th Submarine Flotilla left the island. According to Italian naval figures cited in the literature, almost 100 per cent of the cargo shipped from Italy reached North Africa in April – more than 150,000 tons. Just as Churchill had foreseen, Rommel was receiving everything that was sent to him.

At the same time the Middle East was losing forces to the war with Japan. At the beginning of April Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo’s carriers attacked Colombo and Trincomalee in Ceylon, and London feared for India and the Indian Ocean. Some of the aircraft and units intended for Egypt were diverted east. The day after the telegram to Cripps, Churchill thanked the Australian Prime Minister, John Curtin, for agreeing to let the Australian 9th Division remain in the Middle East – one of the few experienced divisions Auchinleck still had at his disposal.

From pressure to an order

The telegram of 14 April was one link in a chain that in May led to an almost unprecedented step. At the beginning of May Auchinleck proposed remaining on the defensive in Libya and sending substantial reinforcements to India. On 5 May Churchill rejected the idea: the greatest help to the war as a whole would be to defeat the enemy in the west, in Libya, by the date Auchinleck had earlier given Cripps. When the commander asked for a further delay, the Chiefs of Staff, the Defence Committee and the War Cabinet decided that he must be given a formal instruction. On 10 May Churchill informed Auchinleck that London would not allow Malta to fall without a battle fought by his whole army. The loss of the island would mean the surrender of more than 30,000 soldiers and airmen and would give the enemy a secure bridge to Africa. The latest acceptable date for the attack was to be one that would draw off Axis forces during the June convoy to Malta. Churchill wrote later that he did not know whether the general would comply or resign. On 19 May Auchinleck replied that he would carry out the instruction.

The dispute had two sides. Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff saw the war as a whole: Malta, the convoys, the Eastern Front, public opinion after the fall of Singapore. Auchinleck knew the state of his troops: British tanks were inferior to German ones, the handling of the armoured divisions was faltering, and the American Grant tanks and the new six-pounder anti-tank guns were arriving only in the spring. He also had to watch his northern flank in case the Germans broke through in the Caucasus. Historians still judge the dispute differently. Some agree with Churchill that the delay handed the initiative to Rommel; others side with Auchinleck in holding that a premature attack would have ended in defeat.

Place in the war

The British offensive never took place. On 26 May 1942 Rommel forestalled his opponent and opened the Battle of Gazala. General Neil Ritchie’s Eighth Army suffered a heavy defeat, Tobruk fell on 21 June, and Rommel entered Egypt. Auchinleck took personal command of Eighth Army and in July halted the Germans and Italians at El Alamein, but in August Churchill removed him. The June convoy to Malta, for whose sake London had demanded the attack, suffered heavy losses: of more than a dozen ships only two got through.

Paradoxically, Rommel’s victory saved the island. Instead of halting on the Egyptian frontier and releasing his air support for the planned landing on Malta, Rommel persuaded Hitler to let him press on, and the invasion was never carried out. The telegram of 14 April shows clearly the mechanism that governed the war in the Mediterranean throughout 1942: the fate of the army in Libya depended on whether Malta could sink Axis convoys, and the fate of Malta on whether the army could regain the airfields of Cyrenaica.