Churchill's ultimatum to Auchinleck

On 10 May 1942 Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent Cairo a telegram of a kind the British government rarely addressed to a commander in the field. For three months the Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Claude Auchinleck, had kept the Eighth Army on the defensive on the Gazala Line and kept putting back the date of his offensive. This time London neither asked nor tried to persuade. The telegram, sent on behalf of the War Cabinet, the Defence Committee and the Chiefs of Staff, set a final deadline for the battle and tied it to the fate of Malta. Writing after the war in The Hinge of Fate, Churchill recalled that it had been decided to send the general “definite orders which he must obey or be relieved”, adding that this was a most unusual procedure in British dealings with a senior military commander.

The road to the ultimatum

The dispute had been running since February. In March Auchinleck declined to come to London, and the Lord Privy Seal, Stafford Cripps, and the Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Archibald Nye, who were sent to Cairo instead, came back convinced that an offensive stood no chance before the middle of May. The Defence Committee reluctantly accepted that date, but on 2 April the commanders in Cairo made it clear that they could not guarantee it. In mid-April Churchill pressed Auchinleck through Cripps.

At the turn of April and May the situation grew worse. After the Japanese raid into the Indian Ocean, the Chiefs of Staff laid out a bleak picture of the threat to India on 23 April. Auchinleck concluded from it that he should go over to the defensive in Libya and send substantial forces east, and on 3 May he proposed this to London. Churchill replied on 5 May that the greatest help to the war as a whole would be to defeat the enemy on the Western front. On 6 May the Middle East commanders answered that the balance of armoured forces did not allow an attack before mid-June and that an earlier offensive might end in a serious defeat.

On 8 May Churchill passed on the view of the Chiefs of Staff, the Defence Committee and the War Cabinet. The loss of Malta would be “a disaster of the first magnitude to the British Empire” and would probably, in time, decide the defence of the Nile Valley. Auchinleck should therefore, despite the risks, fight a major battle, “if possible in May, and the sooner the better”. London took responsibility for these general directions. On 9 May the Middle East Defence Committee replied with a refusal. In Cairo’s view the fall of Malta need not endanger Egypt as long as the route across the Indian Ocean stayed open. A neutralised island did little damage to Axis convoys in any case, and capturing Cyrenaica would take at least two months. The weightiest argument concerned tanks: a premature offensive might lead to the almost complete destruction of the British armour, and without it no position in front of Egypt could be held.

The Chiefs of Staff – the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, Admiral Dudley Pound and Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal – briefly inclined towards postponing the attack until mid-June. In the end, however, they judged that Cairo was overestimating the danger to Egypt, and the War Cabinet agreed with them.

The telegram of 10 May

The text is known from Churchill’s memoirs and from the British official history (Playfair, vol. III). “We are determined that Malta shall not be allowed to fall without a battle being fought by your whole army for its retention,” the Prime Minister wrote. Starving out the fortress would mean the surrender of more than 30,000 soldiers and airmen and several hundred guns. In enemy hands the island would give him a free and secure bridge to Africa. Its loss would cut the air route by which aircraft were ferried to Egypt and India, and would wreck the plans for an offensive against Italy as well as Operations Acrobat (the advance into Tripolitania) and Gymnast (a landing in French North Africa, later Operation Torch). Compared with the certainty of these disasters, the telegram went on, the risks to the safety of Egypt that Auchinleck had pointed out were definitely smaller, and London accepted them.

The crucial sentence concerned the date. London repeated that the battle should be fought in May and added that “the latest date which we could approve” was one that would provide a diversion in time to help the June convoy to Malta through during the moonless nights. This was the double operation later named Harpoon (from Gibraltar) and Vigorous (from Alexandria). On the leg from Alexandria the convoy had to pass the Cyrenaican airfields, from which German and Italian aircraft could attack it. The Eighth Army’s offensive was meant to tie down those air forces and, ideally, to deprive them of the airfields.

The convoys are often described as sailing “in the dark phase of the moon in early June”. The telegram, however, gave neither the names of the operations nor an exact date. The new moon fell on 13–14 June, and both convoys put to sea on 11–12 June. The final deadline therefore fell in the first half of June rather than at its very beginning.

The official history states that in practice the telegram left Auchinleck to choose between obeying and resigning. Churchill recalled a fairly long pause during which London did not know what the general would do.

The reminder of 17 May and the reply of 19 May

For a week nothing came from Cairo. On 17 May the Prime Minister sent a short telegram saying that it was imperative for him to receive some account of Auchinleck’s general intentions in the light of their recent telegrams. In those same days Malta was passing through a turning point: Operation Bowery had delivered several dozen Spitfires to the island, and on 7 May Lord Gort had become its new governor. The island was still starving, however, and no convoy could reach it in May.

The reply came on 19 May. “My intention is to carry out the instructions contained in your telegram of May 10,” Auchinleck began. He immediately added that he understood them as follows: the aim of the offensive remained the destruction of the enemy forces and the occupation of Cyrenaica, not merely a diversion in support of the convoy. If he was mistaken he wished to know at once, since the plan for a major offensive was entirely different from a plan for a mere diversion. Three things would decide when to attack: the sailing date of the convoy, the enemy’s actions and the balance of strength in the air. Auchinleck also wrote of “strong indications” that the enemy intended to strike soon. If that happened, further steps would depend on the outcome of the battle. If not, the commander of the Eighth Army, General Neil Ritchie, would open the offensive on the day that best reconciled help for the convoy with the readiness of the troops. According to the official history, Auchinleck warned that with only a slight superiority on land and in the air, success was not certain and would certainly be neither quick nor spectacular.

This reply is sometimes summed up as a promise that the attack would be ready before the convoys sailed. That is accurate but incomplete. Auchinleck complied, but he gave no date and reserved the right to change his plans if the enemy attacked.

On 20 May Churchill confirmed this interpretation: the time had come for a trial of strength in Cyrenaica, and “there are no safe battles”. He suggested that Auchinleck take personal command in Libya, as he had been obliged to do at Sidi Rezegh in November 1941 during Operation Crusader. On 22 May the general replied that his task was now entirely clear, but that he would not take over the command, because as Commander-in-Chief he had to keep the whole of the Middle East in view, including the threatened northern flank.

Place in the war

There was no British offensive. The warning of 19 May proved accurate: on the evening of 26 May Erwin Rommel struck first at Gazala. The new American M3 Grant tanks could not make up for the mistakes of British command, which failed throughout the three weeks of the battle. Tobruk fell on 21 June, and on 25 June Auchinleck removed Ritchie and took command of the Eighth Army himself – doing what Churchill had asked, but too late. He stopped Rommel at El Alamein, and in August Churchill replaced him with General Harold Alexander. The June convoy the offensive had been meant to help received no cover from the land. The Vigorous convoy turned back to Alexandria, and only two ships of Harpoon reached Malta.

The dispute of May 1942 is still cited as an example of the tension between strategy and command in the field. Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff were right to see Malta as the key to the war in Africa. Auchinleck was right to fear the weakness of his armour, as the defeat at Gazala confirmed. The ultimatum of 10 May did not change the course of events in the desert, because Rommel forestalled both sides of the argument. It did show, however, that in 1942 Churchill was prepared to impose the date of a battle on a commander in the field and to make him choose between obedience and dismissal. The trust between the Prime Minister and Auchinleck, already strained in May, did not survive the defeats of the summer.