On 8 April 1941, the German 6th Mountain Division cracked the Metaxas Line in the most unlikely of places: the extremely mountainous far west of the line, after scaling the twin heights of Demir Kapou and Kale Bair. Both mountains were over 7000 ft (twice the height of Riva Ridge) and thought by the Greeks to be insurmountable. Nonetheless, the feat was almost in vain as just west, the 2nd Panzer Division blew through Yugoslavia and raced near unopposed toward Thessalonica. To the northwest, the advanced guard of the 1st SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Brigade, Hitler’s elite bodyguard, entered the northern end of the Monastir Pass, whose southern exit outflanked Gen Maitland Wilson’s Force W along the Halciamon Line.

Wilson knew of the German advances in near real time due to Ultra intelligence intercepts but couldn’t convince the Greeks to retreat. He couldn’t compromise the nature of his information, and in any case the Greeks were experiencing great success on the eastern end of the Metaxas Line, and were unwilling to disengage from a “winning” battle. Wilson dispatched an Australian brigade group to the southern end of the Monastir Gap, but even by force marching they barely made it there in time. Wilson essentially sacrificed them to save the rest of Force W. Wilson was only able to stay ahead of the Germans due to his Ultra intelligence. Force W, and any Greeks nearby, retreated first to the Mt Olympus Line, and then to the Thermopylae Line further south. But both would be outflanked, and two more brigades, Kiwis these times, would be sacrificed to slow down the advance so the rest of Force W could evacuate to Crete.

Even the brilliant victory off Cape Matapan couldn’t salvage Great Britain’s foreign policy in Balkans, Mid East, and Eastern Mediterranean. The Greek government was in chaos after the unexpected death of Ioannis Metaxas. Prince Paul of Yugoslavia was the personal guest of Adolf Hitler at the Eagle’s Nest and signed Tripartite Pact. German troops were openly preparing for the Invasion of Greece, and Gen Archibald Wavell, the CinC MidEast was already making plans to evacuate the British expeditionary force there. And even worse, Turkey, watching the complete rout of O’Conner’s troops in Libya (O’Conner was captured by Rommel on 4 April) was leaning dangerously towards siding with Germany, as they had 25 years before. Turkey was no longer “The Sick Man of Europe” and its large and professional army would spell disaster for the British in the Middle East. And unlike the First World War, there would be no “Arab uprising” by new Lawrences of Arabia. As it was, the British could barely contain the pro German and pro Italian sympathies of many Arabs, particularly in Iraq.

In 1932, the Kingdom of Iraq was granted independence but as part of the treaty Britain retained some petroleum, passage, and basing rights. However as 80% of the British Empire’s oil came from Iraq, Persia (Iran), and Kuwait, British diplomats continued to meddle in Iraqi affairs. On 1 April 1941, Rashid Ali, a former pro German prime minister, led a coup with the four top Iraqi army and air force generals aka “The Golden Square”, against the pro-British monarchy. The Prince Regent fled to the RAF airbase at Habbaniyah, halfway between the towns of Ramadi and Fallujah. Over the next few days, Rashid Ali had all pro-British supporters arrested and formed the National Defense Government. Wavell could nothing to stop the coup: he had but a single battalion in Mandate Palestine, and a reinforced battalion defending RAF Habbaniyah. All four divisions of the Royal Iraqi Army sided with Rashid.

Turkey was now surrounded on all sides by pro German countries: National Defense Iraq, a nominally pro German but neutral Persia, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, and Vichy French Syria. Only Greece and the small British expeditionary force there remained as a symbol of Allied power in the area.

In late March 1941, the British had the better part of three divisions in Greece and Crete, and supplying them required a steady stream of convoys from Egypt. Italian intelligence accessed that the British had just one battleship and no carriers in the Eastern Mediterranean, so Mussolini launched the pride of the Italian Navy, the ultra-modern battleship Vittorio Veneto (it was less than a year old), eight cruisers, and seventeen destroyers to raid convoys bound for Greece.

Italian intelligence was sorely mistaken. Admiral Cunnigham, the CinC of the British Mediterranean Fleet was reinforced by the ships that cleared the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea of Axis ships in February. He had three battleships, an aircraft carrier, seven cruisers, and seventeen destroyers, centered around his flagship, the First World War veteran HMS Warspite. Nevertheless, the Italian ships were faster, stronger, more heavily armed, and more modern. However, British intelligence could read the Italian enigma transmissions and knew exactly when the first raid would take place. Cunningham needed to get the Italians close, before the Vittorio Veneto’s higher speed, longer range and better fire control smashed the older British battlewagons.

Using a destroyer squadron as bait, Cunningham ambushed the Italians in the dark seas off of the tip of southern Greece’s Cape Matapan on 28 March 1941. All day Cunningham played a game of cat and mouse with the Italians with his destroyers and Swordfish torpedo planes. With the Italians suitably disorganized by dusk, and the VV slowed by multiple torpedo hits, Cunningham closed in for the kill that night. During the night fighting at point blank range the Italians’ more modern ships mattered little. Fearing the loss of the pride of Fascist Italy, the Italians broke off the fight before the heavily damaged Vittorio Veneto was sunk. The Italians lost three cruisers, three destroyers and nearly 2400 sailors. The British lost three sailors killed and two near obsolete torpedo bombers shot down.

For the rest of the war, the Mediterranean Sea was a British lake, especially with Malta still in Allied hands. Only with great difficulty and massive German air support could Rommel be supplied in North Africa.

By the third week of March, 1941, LtGen Richard O’Connor’s Western Desert Force had just two understrength divisions, the 9th Australian Infantry Division and the British 2nd Armoured Division (half of whose tanks were Italian). Churchill had withdrawn four divisions and sent them to reinforce Greece for the inevitable German attack. Gen Wavell, the British CinC Middle East, reluctantly agreed because he thought that the German forces arriving in Libya would be in no condition to attack before May. By then, he would have the tanks and planes in the “Tiger” Convoy which would completely refit the British 7th Armored Division (pulled back to Egypt), reinforce the RAF and infantry divisions, and modernize the ad hoc Polish and Free French units under his command.

But the commander of the German Afrika Korps, GeneralLeutnant Erwin Rommel didn’t wait for the entire corps to arrive. He formed the 5th Light “Afrika” Division around the newly arrived 5th Panzer Regiment and its supporting units and reorganized four Italian Divisions, the Bresca and Pavia Inf Divisions, the Trieste Motorized Div, and the Arieta Armoured Division. At 0600 24 March 1941 the fast eight wheeled Panzerspahwagens (armored cars) of the 5th Light raided the rear areas of the 2nd Armoured Division to open the offensive. Later that morning Rommel Attacks! (hehe) with all five divisions and seized El Alghelia that night.

The stunned British retreated to Benghazi and Rommel dogged them the entire way. He captured Ajedabia on 2 April, and audaciously split the Afrika Korps into three columns to out flank the British and Commonwealth forces (which ironically was exactly what O’Connor did two months before during Operation Compass, just from the east). One column continued up the coast road to Benghazi, one across the Cyrenaican plateau to Derna, and another across the base of the Cyrenaican Hump to Tobruk. When Rommel arrived outside Tobruk on 11 April, the British had barely escaped the trap, and then only by retreating along the coast road as fast as possible, ditching or destroying much needed supplies and equipment along the way.

Rommel wrote his wife,

“Dearest Lu,

We’ve been attacking since the 31st with dazzling success. I took the rise against all orders and instructions because the opportunity seemed favorable. The British are falling over each other to get away. Our casualties are small and our booty can’t be estimated. You have to understand: I can’t sleep for happiness…”

At no point during World War Two were the fluctuating fortunes of both the Allies and the Axis in the Battle of the Atlantic so fully on display as the first two weeks of March 1941.

-26 February: Battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau broke out into the Atlantic. They sink 22 ships around the Azores and Cape Verde Islands and returned on 14 Mar.

-1 March German pocket battleship Admiral Sheer broke out into South Atlantic, sinks six ships, returned on 27 March.

-2 March: U Boat wolfpack savaged fast Convoy HX-109. Convoy was found due to German expertise in radio signal direction finding which each U-boat was equipped. In all, 83 ships were sunk by U boats over these three weeks, an above average total.

-4 March: Operation Claymore. The first large scale commando raid of the war. Commandos raided the fish oil and glycerin factories of the Norwegian Loften Islands. Wildly successful, but even more so because the commandos captured four rotors of a German enigma machine which would allow the British to decode German naval signals traffic.

-6 March: In a reaction to estimates from the Home Office that Great Britain had just five months of essential supplies left, even with severe rationing, Winston Churchill issued guidance that the Battle of the Atlantic was the top priority of the British and Commonwealth armed forces.

-7 March: Germany’s #3 U boat captain and hero of the raid on Scapa Flow, Gunther Prien, was killed when his U boat was sunk in an attack on convoy OB-293.

-7 March: 12 German E- boats (PT boats) nearly destroyed convoys FN-426 and FS-429 off the English coast.

-11 March: the German cruiser Admiral Hipper sank 14 of 19 freighters in convoy HG-43 off the African coast near Sierra Leone.

-11 March: Lend-Lease.

-12 March: RAF bombers severely damaged the FW-220 factories near Bremen, and due to bureaucratic infighting they never recovered. The FW-220 “Condor” was Germany’s only four engine bomber. Allied convoys feared the big long range converted passenger plane because a sighting of one inevitably meant one or two sunk ships from bombs, and a wolfpack attack within 24 hours.

14 March: German auxiliary cruiser Atlantis sank or captured four ships in the south Atlantic. In all, the Atlantis and her sister ships, the most famous of whom were the Komoran and Pinguin, sank or captured 14 ships in these two weeks.

16 March: the German’s #1 and #2 U boat captains, Otto Ketchmer and Jochim Scepke were both killed separate wolfpack attacks in the North Atlantic. Scepke’s U-100 was the first U-boat lost while tracked by radar.

-16 March: German battleship Bismarck and cruiser Prinz Eugen began sea trials in the Baltic.

US President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized the global threat from National Socialist Germany and Imperial Japan long before most of America. Despite strong bipartisan isolationism in Congress (not to mention German –American was the largest ethnicity in America at the time), FDR managed to conclude the Destroyers for Bases Agreement on 2 Sept 1940 in which 50 near obsolete “four stacker” Wilkes and Clemson class destroyers were given to Great Britain for 99 year leases of British bases in the Caribbean and New Foundland. After securing victory in the 1940 election, FDR announced that the US would become the “Arsenal of Democracy” on 2 December 1940 with the knowledge that numerous secret State and War Department studies concluded that Great Britain after the Fall of France was “doomed without full economic and financial support from the United States”.

That winter, stories from the Luftwaffe Blitz and U boats in the North Atlantic shifted public opinion in the US. On 11 March 1941, Congress passed the Lend Lease Act and FDR signed it into law the same day. The Lend Lease Act provided military supplies to Great Britain, Free France, and other countries fighting Germany without “cash up front” for additional leases on Allied bases, most notably Danish Iceland. This was in direct contradiction to the Neutrality Acts which dominated US foreign policy for over a decade.

The Lend Lease Act would eventually provide over a quarter of Great Britain’s and the Commonwealth’s military supplies. In the short term it provided Canada with the ability to take over the convoy escort duties in the Western Atlantic (Canada by the end of the war would have the 3rd largest navy in the world after the US and GB). Additionally, the US would provide escorts for convoys in American territorial waters, an area that FDR would continue to extend farther and farther away from any American coast. Lend Lease dropped any pretense that America was going to stay neutral in the war in Europe.