The Bitter Sea: The Struggle for Mastery in the Mediterranean 1935–1949

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Ciano’s nascent Ufficio Spagna also fell greedily on the idea of a base in the western Mediterranean. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 gave the Fascists the chance to seize such a base. For the Italians the war was as much about bases in the Balearics as it was about Madrid.

(#litres_trial_promo) Months before any Italian armies went to Franco’s aid on the mainland, the Italians were already fighting a parallel war for the Balearic islands of Majorca, Minorca and Ibiza. A particularly brutal Black Shirt leader, Arconovaldo Bonaccorsi–known as the Conte Rossi because of his red hair and beard–was sent to Majorca, announcing that he was there to ensure ‘the triumph of Latin and Christian civilization, menaced by the international rabble at Moscow’s orders that want to bolshevize the peoples of the Mediterranean basin’. Rossi carried out a reign of terror, murdering about three thousand people during his occupation of the Balearics. ‘Daily radical cleansing of places and infected people is carried out,’ he boasted.

(#litres_trial_promo) Soon Rossi was reinforced by a small air force. The aircraft operated to such good effect that the Republicans were forced to withdraw at the beginning of September 1936.

For years, those who observed Fascist ambitions had suspected that Mussolini coveted the Balearics: now the Fascists were firmly in charge.

(#litres_trial_promo) Indeed Mussolini opened his November 1936 oration on the need for an expanded war in Spain with the cry, ‘the Balearics are in our hands’.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was only in the light of the triumph in the Balearics that Mussolini fully embraced Franco. The Duce ordered that Franco should receive both an Italian air force and army. One month later the Black Shirts surreptitiously set sail from the port of Gaeta, north of Naples. Within months nearly 50,000 Italian troops were fighting in Spain. Their first mission was to seize Spain’s Mediterranean coastline.

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Bruno Mussolini was sent to Majorca to command a squadron of bombers. ‘I envy them,’ Ciano wrote of his old colleagues from Abyssinia, ‘but I am, at least for the moment, nailed to this desk.’ Still, he could give them a satisfying mission since ‘we must seize the moment to terrorize the enemy’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Valencia, and even Barcelona, the heart of the most hardcore Catalan resistance to Franco, were within easy bombing range of Majorca. The aircraft had less than an hour’s flying time to their targets and could approach, unobserved, over the water.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Italian pilots boasted incessantly–and inaccurately–about the amount of damage they were doing. Mussolini was so delighted with the results that he doubled the bomber force on Majorca at the beginning of 1938.

(#litres_trial_promo) In March the aircraft were ‘unleashed’ on the civilian suburbs of Barcelona, causing many casualties. Regia Aeronautica chief Giuseppe Valle, the butt of the younger Mussolini’s taunt that he no longer had what it took to be a man in the cockpit, even flew a lone aircraft at night from Rome to bomb Barcelona.

(#litres_trial_promo) Whenever the world talked about bombing they did not get much beyond the Nazi Condor Legion’s devastating attack on the Basque town of Guernica in April 1937–an attack in which Italian bombers, unnoticed, took a minor part.

(#litres_trial_promo) Surely, the Italian ambassador in Berlin claimed with some satisfaction, ‘the whole world knew that those involved in the bombing attacks on harbour cities, especially Barcelona, had been Italian fliers’.

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Fascist propagandists lamented the fact that the Italian Empire, emasculated by ‘morbid parliamentarism, had not hitherto been regarded as ‘an immediate menace to the great imperial artery from Gibraltar to Port Said’.

(#litres_trial_promo) For the Italians too, the Mediterranean comprised a whole. To them, however, the proper orientation of the sea was not west to east but north to south. Their ambition to reorientate the Mediterranean had been constantly thwarted by Britain’s west–east stranglehold. As early as May 1919 Mussolini had travelled to Fiume, the heart of Italia irredenta, to tell his supporters that ‘the first thing to be done is to banish foreigners from the Mediterranean, beginning with the English’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Now that Fascism had ‘incalculably strengthened Italy’s spiritual, political and military efficiency’, Britain would discover that Italian possession of the north–south ‘trans-Mediterranean lines Sicily–Tripoli and Dodecanese–Tobruk’ rendered its own Mediterranean artery forfeit. Britain was hegemon of the Mediterranean, but that hegemony would be challenged. For anyone with a smattering of classical learning–and no account of the Mediterranean in the 1930s could resist extensive reference to ancient history–the implication was clear. Athens’s hegemony in the Aegean had–according to Thucydides–inevitably led to war with Sparta. The war had dragged on for decades, leaving Athens enfeebled. Italy was Sparta to Britain’s Athens.

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Britain was the hegemon of the Mediterranean; Fascist Italy was its would-be successor. At either end of the Mediterranean, however, lay two major powers each with claims to eminence in their own half of the sea, with some, albeit limited, ability to project power into the other half. Such an evaluation may seem unfair to the French who possessed a formidable Mediterranean Fleet docked on both shores of the Mediterranean. The French Fleet had naval bases at Marseilles and Toulon in France, Bizerta in Tunisia, and Oran in Algeria. In addition the French had a complex series of alliances with the smaller powers, not least, since 1927, Yugoslavia. It held the ‘mandates’ for Syria and Lebanon in the eastern Mediterranean. The further east one went, however, the less apparent was French power.

(#litres_trial_promo) Regretfully, the French themselves realized that their naval power made sense in the western Mediterranean only in conjunction with that of Britain, and operated in the east entirely on the sufferance of the English. Although the Marine did not like to admit it they were, for all their gleaming new warships and well-appointed ports, merely an escort force for the French Army. Their mundane task was to transport thousands of ‘black’ African troops across the Mediterranean to serve in Europe. If the French ever had to fight the Germans they intended to rerun the war of 1914–1918, this time bleeding Africa, rather than France, ‘white’. By the end of the first year of a European war, half a million Africans would be fighting for France, with millions more to come if necessary

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘If we use the base in Majorca, Mussolini assured Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim Ribbentrop, ‘not one negro will be able to cross from Africa to France by the Mediterranean route.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The head of the French navy, Admiral François Darlan, believed that Majorca was more important than Spain.

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The embarrassment, for some a humiliation, of the navy’s subordinate position made for a streak of vicious Anglophobia that ran through the Marine and other elements in French life. Many Britons, on the other hand, admired France’s Mediterranean empire. Winston Churchill, wintering in North Africa, remarked that ‘you would be staggered by what the French have done out here in twenty years…an extraordinary effort’. ‘The French are not at all infected with the apologetic diffidence that characterizes British administration,’ he assured the readers of the Daily Mail in February 1936, ‘they offer [indigenous] inhabitants logical, understanding modern solutions.’

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The Mediterranean’s other major power, Turkey, revived by the successful Kemalist revolution, had had its right to the Sea of Marmara–and to the city of Constantinople on its west shore–acknowledged by the other powers after it had gone to the brink of war with Britain in 1922. Turkey sat astride the third egress from the Mediterranean. The Straits, the Dardanelles running from the Mediterranean into the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosphorus running from the Sea of Marmara into the Black Sea, remained under international control. The Turks could not deploy a formidable navy, but their huge army lay at the heart of the Kemalist regime.

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Both the French and the Turks knew that for Italian ambitions to be realized, they themselves would need to be displaced. In 1926 the Duces brother, Arnaldo, was honest about family intentions. Italy would predate both the French and the Turks. Italian expansion had many avenues to pursue. ‘There’s the entire eastern basin of the Mediterranean, where the remnants of the old Turkish empire are to be found,’ Arnaldo wrote gleefully in the Popolo d'ltalia. ‘There’s also Syria, which France won’t even colonize because she has no excess population. Then there’s Smyrna which should belong to us. And finally there’s Adalia.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The French continually toyed with the idea of an alliance with Italy against the Germans in Europe, to the disadvantage of the British in the Mediterranean, but they could never bring themselves to trust a country whose ambitions ran so obviously counter to their own. In the autumn of 1933, for instance, the Army’s Deuxième Bureau reluctantly concluded that the destruction of France would be ‘a fundamental objective of Italian policy as long as France remains a Mediterranean power’.

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The Turks, unlike the French, never tried to convince themselves that the Italians were friends.

(#litres_trial_promo) Kemal Ataturk had a nice line in Mussolini appreciation: ‘the swollen bullfrog of the Pontine Marshes’. The Turks also had a cynical view of the Italian threat: ‘It is unlikely that there will be any serious trouble between Italy and Turkey,’ Ataturk commented in 1935, ‘madmen don’t as a rule fall foul of drunkards.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, the Turks adroitly turned the geopolitical obsessions of the other powers to their own advantage. With astonishingly little resistance they persuaded other countries to allow them to reoccupy the Straits. The signature of the Montreux Straits Convention in July 1936 was the signal for remarkable manifestations of joy throughout Turkey. Turkish troops were greeted on the Dardanelles with garlands and streamers, the Turkish Fleet was met by cheering crowds. In September 1936 King Edward VIII, travelling ‘incognito’ as the Duke of Lancaster, arrived off Turkey in his steam yacht; he and Ataturk paid each other carefully choreographed mutual visits. The Turkish Fleet steamed into the Mediterranean for the first time since the Great War. They were warmly received at Malta. British diplomats were delighted by their coup; the British military was not. British interest in the new situation and the assistance Britain would receive from it, they complained, could be summed up in one phrase: ‘very small’. ‘This country’, the military observed wearily,‘would give more than it receives.’

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Many post-war Italian historians have doubted the seriousness of Mussolini’s Mediterranean ambitions. Citing his undoubted tergiversations, they have questioned whether a master plan for Italian hegemony in the Mediterranean ever really existed. Their Mussolini is a restless opportunist, constantly searching for a status that Italy’s military and economic power did not deserve. This Mussolini was potentially as interested in the Danube and the Brenner Pass as in a new Roman Empire. He was a ‘Stresa’ Mussolini, as likely to make a deal with Britain against Germany in Europe as he was to make a pact with Germany against Britain in the Mediterranean. Refuting these unconvincing apologetics has made work for generations of counter-revisionists.

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Mussolini’s apologists were able to make a case because of the self-contradictions at the heart of Fascist plans for the Mediterranean. Mussolini contradicted himself about the purpose of a Mediterranean empire. Often he celebrated Italy’s Mediterranean destiny. He spoke of the Mediterranean as Italy’s natural space. Italy, Mussolini declared, was ‘an island which juts into the Mediterranean’. What was the Mediterranean to Italy, he asked: ‘it is life’. For the British, on the other hand, the Mediterranean was no more than ‘a short cut whereby the British empire reaches more rapidly its outlying territories’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He would, he boasted, recreate Mare Nostrum–‘our sea–as part of the great Fascist crusade to rebuild the Roman Empire. That empire had bound together the north and south of the Mediterranean; Italy and North Africa had been an organic whole.

(#litres_trial_promo) Now Fascism would rebuild ‘the fourth shore’, the empire in North Africa. It would be peopled by Italian colonists.

(#litres_trial_promo) One could only admire, wrote a British expert, ‘the courage of the Italian nation in boldly applying new methods to this old problem of colonization, and in setting examples which, if they succeed, will furnish models for others to follow’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Freed of land hunger the Italian population would increase exponentially. In decades to come the Mediterranean, purged of the British, would house an Italian population rivalling that of the British Empire, the United States or the Soviet Union.

At other moments Mussolini disdained the Mediterranean. Far from being a natural space, it was a prison. The Fascists could not confine themselves to repopulating the Fourth Shore. They needed to escape the Mediterranean altogether. In 1934 he told the Second Quinquennial Assembly of the Fascist Party that Italy would ‘find the keys of the Mediterranean in the Red Sea’. ‘The historical objectives of Italy have two names,’ he declared, ‘Asia and Africa.’

(#litres_trial_promo) In 1938 Mussolini had ‘The March to the Oceans’ included in the official record of the Fascist Grand Council. It claimed that Italy was imprisoned in the Mediterranean:

The bars of this prison are Corsica, Tunisia, Malta, and Cyprus. The guards of this prison are Gibraltar and Suez. Corsica is a pistol pointed at the heart of Italy; Tunisia at Sicily. Malta and Cyprus constitute a threat to all our positions in the eastern and western Mediterranean. Greece, Turkey, and Egypt have been ready to form a chain with Great Britain and to complete the politico-military encirclement of Italy. Thus Greece, Turkey, and Egypt must be considered vital enemies of Italy and of its expansion…Once the bars are broken, Italian policy can only have one motto–to March to the Oceans.

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What did Mussolini want? A Mediterranean Empire? Or was the Mediterranean merely a prison from which he must break free to achieve WeltmacM Whatever the answer, the first step was the same: Italy had to defeat the British.

The contradiction in Fascist goals was actually less important than the contradiction in Fascist methods. Whereas the difference between Mare Nostrum and the Prison was only intermittently debated, arguments within the Fascist elite about methods of expansion were constant. There were two main schools of thought. On one side were those who advocated mezzi insidiosi, ‘insidious methods’, the use of stealth and dissimulation to achieve long-term goals. The driving force behind Mediterranean expansion should be political warfare. Through subversion, propaganda and espionage the Fascists could undermine their rivals. Self-doubt and internal divisions would cause them to collapse. If military force was to be used, it should be limited and aimed at weak opponents. The most useful type of military power was provided by special forces. They would engage in asymmetric warfare, using a few men armed with innovative weapons to cause disproportionate amounts of damage to the enemy. The Italians were pioneers in special forces. The navy’s ‘Special Weapons Section’ was tasked with using explosive-filled motorboats and ‘human torpedoes’ to bring the British Mediterranean Fleet to its knees.

(#litres_trial_promo) Large conventional armed forces were also important but they were a ‘luxury fleet’, cowing and deterring potential enemies whilst the mezzi insidiosi took their toll. ‘Our fleet has no battleships; it has fast cruisers with little or no defences; it has good destroyers, good submarines. It is thus able to engage in little more than…guerrilla warfare at sea,’ the head of Italy’s armed forces, Pietro Badoglio, warned Mussolini in 1935.

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