planes

For the last few days there have been rumours everywhere, also hints in the papers, that “something is going to happen” in the Balkans, i.e. that we are going to send an expeditionary force to Greece.  If so, it must presumably be the army now in Libya, or the bulk of it.[1]  I had heard a month back that Metaxas [2] before he died asked us for 10 divisions and we offered him 4.  It seems a terribly dangerous thing to risk an army anywhere west of the Straits.  To have any worthwhile ideas about the strategy of such a campaign, one would have to know how many men Wavell disposes of and how many are needed to hold Libya, how the shipping position stands, what the communications from Bulgaria into Greece are like, how much of their mechanised stuff the Germans have managed to bring across Europe, and who effectively controls the sea between Sicily and Tripoli.  It would be an appalling disaster if while our own main force was bogged in Salonika the Germans managed to cross the sea from Sicily and win back all the Italians have lost.  Everyone who thinks of the matter is torn both ways.  To place an army in Greece is a tremendous risk and doesn’t offer much positive gain, except that once Turkey is involved our warships can enter the Black Sea: on the other hand if we let Greece down we have demonstrated once and for all that we can’t and won’t help any European nation to keep its independence.  The thing I fear most is half-hearted intervention and a ghastly failure, as in Norway.  I am in favour of putting all our eggs in one basket and risking a big defeat, because I don’t think any defeat or victory in the narrow military sense matters so much as demonstrating that we are the side of the weak against the strong.

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