Word: crete
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Parliament last week, Winston Churchill finessed rather than faced the hottest critical barrage of his Prime Ministership. Called for an accounting on the subjects of the loss of Crete and weaknesses in Britain's wartime economy, the foxy Prime Minister insisted that, since Parliament had forced the debate on him, he be allowed to speak last. His discombobolated, angry critics thereupon found themselves debating without any facts to debate about...
Replying to criticisms that during six months the British neither mined nor fortified Crete's airfields against German attack, Prime Minister Churchill said: "I could give answers to those questions, but I do not propose to discuss tactics here." Tart and testy, he suggested that any critic whose mind was focused on the small island of Crete was being very small-minded indeed. Crete, he declared, was "only one part of an important and complicated campaign being fought in the Middle East. To select one particular sector of our widely extended front for Parliamentary debate is a partial, lopsided...
...most of their weapons, including crated airplanes, around the Cape of Good Hope-thus keeping them "out of action for the best part of three months." Apparently the British command had judged it unwise to spare for so long a time many of the weapons which might have fortified Crete. There was little to cheer about in this revelation...
Although the Prime Minister said that airplanes had been and were being rushed to the Middle East as fast as possible, he also said that "a very great number of guns which might have usefully been employed in Crete" were being used on merchant ships in the Battle of the Atlantic. In other words, the British fought at Crete with the weapons they felt they could spare-and were overwhelmed...
Said Prime Minister Churchill: "We provided in Crete a deterrent to enemy attack sufficient to require a major effort on his part, but to attempt to be safe everywhere is to make sure of being strong nowhere. . . . Suppose we had never gone to Greece. And suppose we had never defended Crete. Where would the Germans be now? Suppose we had simply resigned territory and strategic points to them without a fight, might they not . . . already be masters of Syria and Iraq and preparing themselves for an advance into Persia...