The Dodecanese Campaign by Charles River Editors

Germany's North African defeat opened up the possibility of taking the war in the west to the European continent for the first time since France's lightning conquest by the Wehrmacht in 1940. The British and Americans debated the merits of landing in France directly in 1943, but they ultimately opted against it. The Soviets railed at the Westerners as "bastards of allies" - conveniently forgetting that they aided and abetted Hitler's violent expansionism in eastern Europe for over a year, starting in 1939 - but a 1943 "D-Day" style landing in France might have proven a strategic and logistical impossibility.

Complex reasons lay behind England's successful insistence on the Mediterranean theater rather than the French theater as the scene of the next western Allied strike against Nazi Germany. Chief among these remained Britain's determination to keep a postwar empire, one that Churchill and his cabinet hoped would include Iraq and Iran, the source of oil needed to ensure that England continued to "rule the waves" with a powerful modern navy. This strategic imperative, indeed, formed the backbone of the British choice of Sicily as the target for military operations in the summer of 1943.

Another major factor lay in Britain's deep (and, in the event, justified) distrust of the Soviets, and the perspicacious English assumption that the USSR would attempt to build a totalitarian empire in Eastern Europe following the war. Churchill and his generals hoped to engage in "peripheral warfare" with the Third Reich, defeating Germany in outlying territories until the Germans ousted Hitler and came to terms. The English leadership envisioned forming a quasi-alliance with the resultant German state to push the Soviets out of Eastern Europe and prevent an "Iron Curtain" scenario.

Thus, by mid-1943, British leaders, particularly Churchill, believed that while the defeat of Germany and Italy were important, victory should not be achieved at the expense of ceding control of post-war Europe to the Soviets. What went unsaid was that Churchill's goal was British control over the Mediterranean, and his insistence on using Allied resources in the Mediterranean and working to block Russian gains even while the war was still in progress caused some of the most vituperative exchanges between Britain and America. At one point, Churchill even began to actively consider pursuing the war in the Mediterranean independently and without American support. The Chief of the British Imperial General Staff General Sir Alan Brooke, normally one of Churchill's most ardent supporters, became concerned that his obsession with the Mediterranean was driving the prime minister beyond rational action: "I am slowly becoming convinced that in his old age Winston is becoming less and less well balanced!"

Nowhere were these differences more clearly exposed than during the Dodecanese Campaign, a British attempt to seize islands in the Aegean during the fall and winter of 1943. The campaign in the Aegean brought Anglo-American relations to their lowest point during the war, with the British feeling let down and perhaps even betrayed by their American allies, while the Americans believed the Aegean was relatively unimportant in the overall strategic context of the war and a potential drain on resources that would be better used elsewhere. The Dodecanese Campaign was the tragic outcome of the fundamental differences of opinion and approach between allies who otherwise worked closely and in harmony, and though nobody knew it at the time, it marked one of the last major victories for German forces who had been forced to retreat in every other theater of operations.

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