Operation Mercury Read Online Free Page A

over the skies of southern England. Mussolini was in high good humour as their talk ranged over a sweeping agenda. He might have been less jovial had he realised that the Führer had already taken the decision to beef up the German presence in Romania, to the extent that the whole country became an occupied territory; a key shift of policy he chose not to share. Some two weeks prior to the summit Hitler had issued a directive setting out the defined objectives:
    To the world their [the military mission’s] tasks will be to guide friendly Romania in organising and instructing her forces.
    The real tasks – which must not become apparent either to the Romanians or to our own troops – will be:
    To protect the oil district …
    To prepare for deployment from Romanian bases … in case a war with Soviet Russia is forced upon us. 15
    Il Duce roared with impotent rage when he finally learnt of the order and he blazed that he would behave in like manner – that Hitler would read of his projected invasion of Greece in the newspapers! He then gave orders for the invasion plans to be put in hand immediately.
    Consequently General Metaxas, de facto dictator, was awoken in the early hours of 29 October 1940 to be presented with an Italian ultimatum. He was accused by the ambassador, Count Grazzi, of aiding and abetting the British, Italy’s enemy – as quid pro quo Mussolini now demanded free access to and passage over Greece sovereign territory for his troops. Anything less than complete acquiescence would be considered an act of war. Inevitably, as anticipated, Metaxas refused to see his country so summarily shorn of nationhood. Within a couple of hours Italian troops had crossed the frontier.
    That same morning Hitler arrived for a further summit in Florence to be met by Mussolini who, grinning like a mountebank, promptly postured ‘Führer, we march.’
    It was at this point that the Battle for Crete most probably became inevitable.

Chapter 2
A New Thermopylae
    As Mr. Churchill stated in his review of the campaign, the military authorities considered that there was a line which, given certain circumstances, could be successfully defended. The Greek campaign was not undertaken as a hopeless or suicidal operation. It turned out to be a rearguard action only… 1
    Given certain circumstances; the Official History does not define what these circumstances might have been and there has, with the inestimable benefit of hindsight, been a common perception amongst historians that the Greek adventure was a hare-brained notion from the start:
    The decision to go to Greece was a political one, and from the point of view of a professional it was a military nonsense … the diversion of resources to Greece including 6th and 7th Australian divisions, the New Zealand division, and part of the 2nd Army took away from General Wavell in Africa practically the whole of the fighting formations which were ready and equipped for operations, and therefore by going to Greece we endangered our entire position in the Middle East. 2
    General Archibald Wavell, the Commander-in-Chief of British and Imperial forces in the Middle East, was far from sanguine about Allied prospects in Greece. He was rightly concerned that the Italian build up in Libya where Marshall Graziani’s huge army dwarfed his own, represented the major threat. The General was, whilst a consummate professional, not imbued with the gift for dealing with awkward political masters. He seems to have, unfairly, been held in low esteem by Churchill whose swashbuckling approach, often totally unrelated to logistical constraints, was at odds with Wavell’s caution and natural reserve.
    Under his command he had some 70,000 troops, rather ill assorted and, with two of his potentially best contingents, the Australians, under General Thomas Blamey and the New Zealanders, under General Bernard Freyberg, reporting to their national governments rather