Islands Under Fire

There is a particular fascination about island battles. Rather like besieged castles, fortified islands present unique tactical problems for defender and attacker alike. However simple or complex the operations required to seize them, the struggles for control of defended islands present relatively neat, self-contained engagements with clear-cut, unambiguous objectives: either the island falls or the attacker is repulsed. Almost always, the island falls; in which case, the fascination lies in studying the tenacity, resourcefulness, and sheer endurance of the defenders - the measure of their achievement lies not in the ultimate decision, which is seldom in doubt, but in the obstinacy of their resistance and the butcher's bill they compelled their attacker to pay.

As it happens, two of the better military history books I've read this year deal with island campaigns; both stories are intensely dramatic, and both resulted in decisive Allied defeats. One was fought in the crowded Dodecanese archipelago in the Aegean Sea, straddling the gulf between Greece and Turkey; the other was fought, literally, in the middle of nowhere, on a tiny coral atoll in the empty Pacific, 2,000 miles west of Pearl Harbor. The former was little reported-on at the time and has subsequently been relegated to a few paragraphs - or just a perfunctory footnote -- in the comprehensive histories of the Mediterranean campaign; the struggle for tiny Wake Island, however, was inflated into a shining legend even before the fighting had ended, because the heroic (and, for a brief time, successful) defense of this remote outpost gave the American people their first - and for many months only - flash of glory in an otherwise gloomy period of seemingly endless defeats and humiliations.

The British intervention in the Aegean was almost wholly the "inspiration" of Winston Churchill, whose enthusiasm for the adventure was motivated less by realistic military prospects than it was by political and strategic obsessions that were definitely not shared by his senior partners, Eisenhower and the American Joint Chiefs of Staff. Eisenhower, in particular, thought the entire scheme was hare-brained, impractical, and an irritating diversion of scarce resources from not only the Italian campaign, but the ultimate goal of launching Operation OVERLORD at the earliest practical moment.

Churchill's taste for launching sudden swashbuckling raids on the periphery of the Third Reich was a factor of his own romantic proclivities and served a noble purpose during the dark days when Great Britain stood alone against Hitler. The early pinprick commando raids, on Norway, the Channel Islands, Crete, and coastal France - culminating, of course, in the valorous but hopeless attack on Dieppe (August 19, 1942) - inflicted paltry damage and had absolutely no strategic effect, but they did capture public imagination. Proving, at least on a small scale, that England could strike offensive blows at the "Naw-zees", even while the home islands were being hammered brutally by the seemingly unstoppable Luftwaffe and the U-boats were slaughtering convoys almost at will.

Even after the United States came in and began calling the strategic shots - thanks to America's growing industrial might and vast manpower resources - Churchill retained his zest for unconventional attacks on the lightly defended periphery of the Third Reich. Eisenhower went along with the Prime Minister's obsessions to a certain extent, as long as the forces involved were primarily small, specialist units comprising UK personnel, aircraft, and ships. But by mid-1943, his tolerance for these sideshows had grown increasingly grudging. The Americans' overriding strategic goal was to massively assault mainland Europe at the earliest feasible time, and then drive straight on for Berlin. Any proposed military adventure that siphoned off resources needed for the build-up to OVERLORD tended to get short shrift - which is the main reason why Allied support for Tito's partisan army was primarily a British show from start to finish.

Eisenhower was not the most sophisticated student of Realpolitik, but his gut instinct proved surprisingly correct in this case. He saw the Balkans as a messy, unprofitable, tertiary theater, a snake-pit of vicious ethnic grudges, which could suck up Allied resources and manpower without yielding much in the way of concrete strategic advantage. While it was demonstrably true that Tito's insurrection tired down large numbers of Axis troops, it was also true that those troops were second and third-rate formations and that the whole region would ultimately end up being part of the Soviet sphere of post-war control, whether the Allies liked it or not. Eisenhower was totally focused on one goal: fighting and winning the war against Hitler. He was, quite rightly, suspicious that Churchill's proposed large-scale interventions in the Eastern Mediterranean were motivated as much by the Prime Minister's concern for the post-war resurgence of the British Empire as they were by his sincere but simplistic desire to "help the oppressed peoples" of the region.

One of the most striking elements in Winston Churchill's character, and in the eccentric, sometimes almost whimsical, nature of some of his schemes for military operations, was his utterly sincere ability to combine cold-blooded manipulation with genuine emotional empathy for the people he was manipulating! He worked out an intricate private calculus when making life-or-death decisions, which might simply have been a mechanism for minimizing the distracting burden of guilt when he was forced to confront situations in which admirable persons or causes might have to be sacrificed - or even betrayed - due to the changing exigencies of total war.

In their seemingly endless debates over Allied involvement in the Balkans, and the adjacent region of the Aegean islands, Eisenhower was willing to grant that Tito's activities provided a useful, marginal, distraction for the enemy. However, he did not for one moment succumb to Churchill's romantic notion that Tito embodied a new political phenomenon - one the Allies could profitably work with after the war: a "kinder, gentler", primarily nationalistic form of Communism. Even granting the charismatic partisan general the best intentions in the world, Ike confided to his staff that "the Russians won't let him get away with it" - they might keep their distance for a year or two because of Tito's popularity, but eventually Stalin would bring down the hammer.