CHURCHILL'S FOLLY: The Battles for Kos and Leros 1943

Churchill's failures are less well known than his victories, but his obsession with the lands surrounding the Aegean Sea persisted throughout two world wars. In both wars the prize was Turkey's cooperation in opening up the Balkans, and in both wars this objective failed. In World War I it led to Churchill's resignation following the carnage of the Gallipoli campaign. In 1939 the Dodecanese complex of small islands was held by Italy, and when Italy joined the war in 1940, Hitler diverted troops from Norway to bolster Benito Mussolini in the Eastern Mediterranean. Spearheaded by the Long Range Desert Group and the Special Boat Squadron, British garrison troops were dispatched to the Aegean with the support of naval units, but with little or no air cover. Within three months German forces had seized nearly all of the Dodecanese, which would remain under occupation until the end of the war. An attack by British commandos supported by the Sherwood Foresters failed, and the Allies turned their attention to north Africa. By October 1942 the Eighth Army had put the German Afrika Korps into retreat. This was Churchill's chance to seize the Dodecanese and Rhodes, which he planned in tandem with the invasion of Sicily. The fight for the islands of Kos and Leros was bloody and ultimately doomed to failure, as the SBS commander Lord Jellicoe admits with hindsight in his Foreword to the book. When news of the Italian armistice broke, Churchill's plan had to be modified and it was decided that Jellicoe would parachute into Rhodes. He was met in a friendly manner by the governor Campioni, but as Jellicoe notes it is not easy to swap sides overnight in warfare, and Campioni was eventually executed. The author covers the subsequent invasion campaign day to day from original sources, following key fighters as they attempted to escape rather than be captured, for instance Colonel Prendergast's party, some wounded and with only a couple of tins of bully beef between them, who finally reached safety. Meanwhile Jellicoe struggled to Turkey by boat with 90 men. 288pp, paperback, maps, photos.