Oliver Stanley (Conservative M.P. for Westmorland) dined with me alone in a secluded corner of the Lansdowne Club. He asked me what I had thought of the Prime Minister's speech on the air on Sunday. I said that I thought he had done well in a very difficult situation and had heartened his hearers. Stanley said, "It may have gone down very well with the 99 per cent who know nothing, but the 1 per cent of us who do know, feel rather differently."

He then began a long tirade against the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, with whom I had said that I found my personal relations developing very satisfactorily, and that this was additionally important for smooth working, since he was so close to the Prime Minister. Stanley said he did not think he was the sort of man who ought to be close to the Prime Minister. He was, he added, vain, weak and unreliable. He had let down Stanley, Malcolm MacDonald and the rest at the time of his resignation. He had promised to consult them, and they had acted together as a group. They were on many points opposed to Chamberlain's Foreign Policy. Eden, however, chose a most frivolous pretext on which to resign, and gave Stanley and others no warning that he was going to do so. So much so that, at the Cabinet, on the proposal that we should begin again negotiations with Italy, Chamberlain had gone round the table, and got the acquiescence of all of them, and it was only then that Eden had quite suddenly said that he could not go on.

Stanley then proceeded to attack, with such mild vehemence as he could command, the terrible error, as he judged it, of sending anything beyond a small token force to Greece. This, he said, was a crowning blunder. It was the Prime Minister's fault. The decision had been taken against all military and naval advice. It should have been seen from the start that the adventure was quite hopeless. The only real way to help Greece was to win the war. Instead of that we might now lose; both Greece and Egypt. We had thrown away a most valuable Air Force in Greece. At least four squadrons of fighters and three squadrons of bombers had been destroyed. It was quite wrong for Eden to have gone to the Middle East and worst of all to go to Athens. There he had been cheered in the streets and smothered in roses. How in such surroundings could he keep his judgment clear. A Foreign Secretary should stay always in the Foreign Office protected by distance and his officials from such local impressions.

The War Cabinet had noted with concern the threat posed to Greece by the German presence in Rumania and Bulgaria. There was great sympathy in Britain for Greece, who was already at war with Italy and was therefore an ally. Before reaching a decision to render help, the War Cabinet sent Anthony Eden, Foreign Secretary, and Sir John Dill, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (GIGS), to Cairo to discuss with the three Commanders-in-Chief in the Middle East the feasibility of sending an expeditionary force.

After discussion with the Greek government in Athens, the decision to intervene was made. Eden seems to have been the prime mover, but his colleagues shared the responsibility. The decision was taken with full awareness that the expedition would be a gamble: the force was to consist of two infantry divisions plus an armoured brigade, whose tanks

were already in poor mechanical condition. This puny force was quite inadequate to hold the German horde, and one can only assume that the German speed of reaction was wholly underestimated, and that wishful thinking had descended into fantasy. According to Churchill, the invasion of southern Yugoslavia and Greece was entrusted to the

German Twelfth Army of fifteen divisions, of which four were armoured. The RAF would be outnumbered by ten to one, without even counting the Italian air force. The only charitable explanation is that this information was not available at the time, which means our Intelligence was very remiss. The impression remains that the honourable desire to aid Greece was so strong that an outsize gamble was thought worth the risk.