The Scrap Iron Flotilla by Mike Carlton

Author:Mike Carlton [Carlton, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781760145484
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2022-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

This warning landed like a thunderbolt in Canberra but it was too late. The Australians and the New Zealanders had already begun to embark upon the ships that would carry them to Piraeus. To his credit, Menzies questioned Churchill again but was assured that the operation had ‘a reasonable chance of success’. Still uneasy but with nowhere to go, Menzies obtained a promise that if all went wrong, the Australians would be evacuated. Lamely putting the best possible gloss on it, he told his colleagues that Greece was a great risk in a good cause.

Others also had their doubts. At Alexandria, Andrew Cunningham feared that pulling the Australians out of Libya would undo their hard-fought achievements there, perhaps opening the way for the gathering German forces to counter-attack. As ever, he had more grasp of strategy in one fingernail than his prime minister could summon in his entire body, and he wrote later in his memoirs:

We were bound by treaty to help Greece if she were threatened, so there was no question at all that it was, politically, the right thing to do. On the other hand, we had serious misgivings if it was correct from the military point of view. We doubted very much if our naval, military and air resources were equal to it . . . We had no illusions that the help we could send the Greeks would enable them to stem a really serious German invasion. Indeed, when the decision to send the troops was finally taken, we started at once to think of how we should bring them out.24

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