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

This cannot be true Fascism, others objected. The practice of diplomacy, albeit laced with terrorism, hardly suited the needs of a regime whose claims to violent, masculine squadrismo were beginning to look distinctly middle-aged. The Second Quinquennium reminded everyone that Fascism had done nothing violent or heroic for at least ten years.

(#litres_trial_promo) Fascism would thrive on heroic conflict. The road to world power was paved by catalytic wars rather than sneaky subversion.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Italian armed forces should be expanded and re-equipped, most especially with the weapons of total war, the bomber and the battleship. These forces were far from a luxury. They were there to be used. If the democracies showed signs of coalescing to face the threat, then Italy too would need to seek congenial allies, most notably Nazi Germany.

Throughout the 1930s the dispute over methods was a closely fought battle. In 1936 Admiral Domenico Cavagnari, the professional head of the Italian navy, declared that mezzi insidiosi showed a lack of ambition. Responding to Badoglio’s scepticism, in August 1936 he ordered his officers to concentrate on building a battlefleet capable of attacking the British in conjunction with the Nazi Kriegsmarine.

(#litres_trial_promo) The predicted date for a war was 1942. The Duce formally proclaimed the Italian-German Axis on 1 November 1936 to an immense and enthusiastic crowd’ in a speech in the Piazza Duomo of Milan. His words were later broadcast in the major Mediterranean languages–English, French, Greek, Spanish and Arabic. He told Hitler’s personal representative that ‘our relations with London are very bad and cannot improve’. In return Hitler’s message was: ‘that we should know that he regards the Mediterranean as a purely Italian sea’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Mussolini’s ‘tragedy’ was that his regime was supremely well equipped for mezzi insidiosi whereas its lack of material resources hobbled its preparation for total war.

Mezzi insidiosi continued in full force despite the Axis. In August 1935, the Royal Navy had decided that its great base at Malta was too dangerous as a wartime berth for the Mediterranean Fleet. Whenever there was a crisis the Fleet would have to steam to Alexandria, its main harbour in Egypt. Unlike Malta, however, Alexandria was far from being an ideal anchorage. Although offering the charms of a cosmopolitan and well-stocked city to sailors, it had real military disadvantages. Alexandria did not have a dockyard that could repair any damaged ships. Any warship damaged by accident or enemy action would have to leave the Mediterranean altogether. And Alexandria’s harbour mouth was notoriously narrow. If a ship was sunk within it, the entire British fleet would be trapped. Indeed, days after war in Abyssinia was declared, the Italian liner Ausonia-‘the most luxurious steamer on the Europe–Egypt service’–mysteriously caught fire in the entrance to Alexandria Bay.

(#litres_trial_promo) British destroyers raced to the scene and, at considerable risk to themselves, nosed up to the Italian ship and pushed it out of the way. ‘British naval men’, remarked a journalist who reported the story, ‘have their own private opinion of the burning of this ship in this particular place.’

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A final flaw of Alexandria was created by its position on the Nile Delta. The outpouring of the Nile created complex eddies, currents and water densities. By developing a method–called sonar–of ‘pinging’ artificial bodies underwater with sound waves, and picking up the echo, the British possessed what they hoped was the decisive weapon against submarines. The hydrology of Alexandria, however, crippled this brilliant new British invention.

(#litres_trial_promo) Alexandria was the perfect laboratory for mezzi insidiosi. Italian submarines operated at the harbour mouth, shadowing British battleships whenever they left port.

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In the event, however, Italian submariners demonstrated the value of mezzi insidiosi elsewhere in the Mediterranean. In August 1937 Mussolini and Ciano ordered them to launch a ‘pirate war’ in the Mediterranean against Spanish and Soviet shipping.

(#litres_trial_promo) In Rome, they would maintain ‘plausible deniability’. Merchantmen would be sent to the bottom by desperadoes of unknown origin. Fifty-nine submarines fanned out through the Mediterranean. Some daring submariners made it as far as the Black Sea Straits where they attacked Soviet ships, proving that the Turks could not defend the Straits they had, with such fanfare, remilitarized. Cruisers and destroyers entered the Straits of Sicily, the choke point between eastern and western Mediterranean, attacking any Spanish ship that passed. Torpedo boats ranged along the North African coast doing the same.

(#litres_trial_promo) The operation also was not without its risks. At the end of August the submarine Iride attacked the Royal Navy ship HMS Havock in error. Up until that point British destroyer crews had largely enjoyed their posting in the western Mediterranean. Memorably, Miss Czechoslovakia had embarked on a warship during a stop-over at Palma by the First Destroyer Flotilla. The beauty queen had ‘enjoyed her passage enormously and even joined us in the water when we stopped and piped hands to bathe’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The contrast with a sudden attack was a shock. The enraged destroyer captain hunted the submarine for hours, although in the end neither vessel was sunk. Even Ciano admitted, we are in deep trouble’.

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The foreign ministers of the ‘Mediterranean powers’ assembled in the Swiss town of Nyon to discuss what should be done about the ‘piracy’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Nyon was an appeasers’ paradise. The fiction that attacks on merchant shipping in the Mediterranean was the fault of ‘pirates unknown’ was fully indulged. Italy was even invited to the meeting, although it declined to attend. Not one word of criticism of Mussolini was allowed to emerge. The Mediterranean powers agreed to set up anti-submarine patrols. Italy was invited to take part in these patrols, in effect allowing her destroyers to search for her own submarines. The Royal Navy accorded the Regia Marina equality of status in the Mediterranean.

(#litres_trial_promo) Nyon was hailed as a triumph of ‘collective security’. England: ‘a nation which thinks with its arse’, was Mussolini’s rather more robust verdict. ‘It is a great victory,’ chuckled Ciano, who only a fortnight before had been scared by the thought of British action, ‘from accused torpedoers to Mediterranean policemen, with the exclusion of the Russians, whose ships have been sunk.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Nyon preserved the naval status quo in the Mediterranean until the end of the Spanish Civil War: the Francoists received whatever they wanted, the Republicans got very little.

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Mezzi insidiosi rested on a clear understanding of the psychological weakness of enemies. Mussolini could look deep inside the British military, political and diplomatic establishment. The Italians had an outstanding intelligence network that fed Mussolini timely and accurate accounts of British deliberations about the Mediterranean. Mussolini often dressed up the sources of his information in picaresque stories; he ascribed his–accurate–information about ammunition shortages of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean to a letter from ‘a lady’ in London.

(#litres_trial_promo) In fact the intelligence-gathering was not fortuitous but the result of a professional and systematic effort. In 1924 Italian military intelligence–SIM–had introduced its first mole into the British Embassy in Rome. The treacherous Embassy servant was, in due course, succeeded by his brother, who kept Mussolini supplied with British diplomatic correspondence until Italy entered the Second World War in June 1940.

(#litres_trial_promo) At the post-war trial of the head of SIM, General Mario Roatta, it was claimed that his agency removed 16,000 documents a year from embassies in Rome. They also ran operations in other capitals. Italian employees of the Marconi company in Egypt, for instance, copied sensitive telegrams and fed them to Italian intelligence.

(#litres_trial_promo) When Galeazzo Ciano met Hitler on 24 October 1936 he was able to hand him a dossier of thirty-two British Foreign Office documents. ‘Today,’ Ciano recorded the Führer as saying, ‘England is governed merely by incompetents.’

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Hitler had a point: the damage caused by Italian espionage went far beyond diplomatic documents, however revealing of national policy. The haul from the British Embassy in Rome included diplomatic and consular codes, the naval attaché cipher, the India cipher and the interdepartmental cipher. Even without these windfalls the Italian cryptanalysts found communications between London and Athens, Belgrade, Rome and Addis Ababa easy to break. SIM could read British, French and Ethiopian diplomatic traffic. Naval codebreakers had similar successes. From the summer of 1935 they were reading signals from the Admiralty to Royal Navy units in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.

(#litres_trial_promo) The decrypts often reached Mussolini’s desk within twenty-four hours of interception. Ignorant of how compromised they were, even the British recognized that Mussolini knew a great deal about their military plans and dispositions, ‘for’, Sir Robert Vansittart, the professional head of the Foreign Office, conceded, ‘they have a decent Intelligence service.’

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TWO (#ulink_2ed71e0e-0c43-5bcb-995f-a68401b33179)

Death on the Nile (#ulink_2ed71e0e-0c43-5bcb-995f-a68401b33179)

In October 1937 another famous novelist paid tribute to the impact of mezzi insidiosi on the English imagination. ‘The best of the new autumn crop’ of thrillers was Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile. It told a story of theft and murder in Egypt, unravelled by Christie’s Cartesian alter ego, the mincing Belgian, Hercule Poirot. Death on the Nile proved an entertainment of such enduring charm that few noticed how timely was the central plot. A group of western tourists escape the cold of the western Mediterranean for Egypt, ‘real warmth, darling. Lazy golden sounds. The Nile.’ On board the steamer Karnak, Poirot encounters two characters whose politics intrude into the murderous private affairs of their fellow passengers. His old friend Colonel Race, ‘a man of unadvertised comings and goings…usually to be found in one of the outposts of empire where trouble was brewing’, was on the trail of those who sought to undermine British power. There had been ‘a good deal of trouble out here’. But it was not, the Colonel revealed, ‘the people who ostensibly led the rioters we’re after’. Race’s prey were the men who ‘very cleverly put the match to the gunpowder’. He was seeking one of the ‘cleverest paid agitators that ever existed…a man with five or six cold-blooded murders to his credit...bit of a mongrel’. That clever, murdering, mongrel turned out to be an Italian fellow passenger. There was something not right about Signor Guido Richetti, Archeologo. He used ‘hair lotions of a highly scented kind’ and carried a lady’s gun, the ‘Mauser automatic twenty-five’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Most damning was the discovery of Richetti’s telegraphed instructions from the Italian secret service in Rome. Once their code had been broken, it revealed that an innocent discussion of vegetables was something much more sinister, a plan for violent revolution, for ‘potatoes mean machine guns and artichokes are high explosives’.

Christie’s thriller was unusually well informed. At the time of publication official opinion had judged that the threat of subversion in Egypt was great enough to require the institution in Cairo of the ‘the only purely MI5 organisation in the area. The real-life counterpart to Colonel Race, Major Raymond Maunsell, was soon ‘deeply implicated in Egyptian politics’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Few informed observers doubted that, by 1937, Britain was faced by a serious crisis in the Muslim Mediterranean.

(#litres_trial_promo) After decades of toying with the Eastern Question the British had definitively displaced the Ottomans as the master race at the end of the First World War. Since then she had requited none of the hopes, bizarre and impractical as her officials saw them, invested in her rule. It was Britain which was seen as a tyrannical and destructive force. Many found her representatives arrogant and hateful. They longed to be done with the British. In 1937 it was hard to judge, however, the depth and importance of such malcontent. Some said that the problem went no further than members of the traditional elite, both secular and religious, disgruntled that the British insisted on a modicum of good governance. Others looked deeper and said that the maintenance of such traditions, especially the indulgence of corruption, was in the British interest. The pashas and notables might make spiteful complaint, plot and curse in private, but in the end they were no real threat. If politics ever took to the street, the masses would not thank Britons for their reforming efforts; rather they would string the unbelievers from the recently provided lampposts.

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The same informed observers were in little doubt that Britain’s enemies were fishing in these foetid waters. Propaganda, money and weapons flowed into the eastern Mediterranean. Signor Richettis aplenty plied their subversive and violent trade. In 1935 Captain Ugo Dadone, dashing traveller, explorer, journalist and zealous Fascist, set up a propaganda office in Cairo.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Italians financed the radical Young Egypt movement. Young Egypt organized its paramilitary Green Shirts to ape the Black Shirts. The Ministry of Propaganda, then headed by Galeazzo Ciano, set up a radio station, Radio Bari, to appeal directly to Arab malcontents. In the summer of 1935 it began daily broadcasts that proved wildly successful because ‘adapted to the average puerile Arab mind’. Bari declared that: ‘the Arab populations of the Levant must be freed from the yoke of their present masters’. It traded on the message that Arab patriots…all those not contaminated by British gold–know well the consequences of Britain’s rule, they know how much grief and bloodshed Britain has caused…that it is in the interest of Fascist Italy that the Arab nations of the Levant attain their freedom and independence’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The British soon noticed that Bari was ‘becoming increasingly popular in Arab cafes’. Arabs ‘sipped their coffee and swallowed Italian propaganda with every mouthful’. In 1937 it was calculated that over half of all the radios in Palestine were tuned into Bari.

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Mussolini made a spectacular appeal for a Fascist-Muslim alliance in March 1937. Marshal Italo Balbo, the Governor of Libya, had complained that the dreams of a Fourth Shore were far from realization. Not only was it actually hard to get to Libya from Italy, but it was virtually impossible to travel along the Mediterranean coast. The two halves of Libya, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, were bisected by the inhospitable Sirtean desert. If one wished to travel from the capital in Tripoli to Benghazi, Cyrenaica’s main port, all that was on offer was a weekly boat. He devised a grand plan, a road that would run the length of Libya’s Mediterranean coast, all the way from the Tunisian to the Egyptian border. The gleaming thousand-mile-long highway was completed at the beginning of 1937. An arch of triumph was erected in the middle of the desert. The road was so much Balbo’s project that it was nicknamed the Balbia. Though irritated by the name, Mussolini grasped the symbolic importance of Balbo’s achievement. Determined to claim the glory for this great monument of civilization, he agreed to preside over the festivities.

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A celebration of the civilizing mission, and the unveiling of plans for a mass influx of colonists from Italy, might have seemed an unlikely occasion for a celebration of Islamo-Fascist friendship. But in Balbo’s fertile mind he was to be the architect of pan-Mediterranean syncretism. Buildings, he decreed, were no longer to espouse European modernism but a ‘Mediterranean’ style. The minaret of the mosque and the tower of the Italian town were part of the same culture.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Islamic part of that heritage must be respected. The Governor funded religious schools and banned the sale of alcohol in Ramadan. What better place than Tripoli,‘the new pearl of the Mediterranean’, Balbo convinced Mussolini, as a centre for mezzi insidiosi.

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The fondouks of the old town of Tripoli were torn down to make way for the new Mediterranean metropolis. The city was subject to a phantasmagoria of lighting effects. Balbo’s palace, the Cathedral and long stretch of the embankment were floodlit. An immense Dux was laid out in powerful electric lights attached to the newly constructed grain silo. The motto ‘Believe, Obey, Fight’ was picked out in twelve-feet-high lighting on the customs warehouse. A steel tower was erected in the castle square with a huge searchlight mounted on top. The light beam was visible for thirty miles all around. When everything was ready, Balbo left Tripoli for Cyrenaica. At Benghazi, he proclaimed that Mussolini was the ‘Protector of Islam’. Two days later the Duce himself stepped ashore at Tobruk. Accompanying him to Libya was a cruise ship filled with 120 journalists. Each journalist was provided with a car and servants so that they might follow Mussolini along the Balbia from east to west. The journey, by car and aeroplane, took four days.

On the evening of 16 March 1937 Mussolini made a triumphal entrance into Tripoli. He was accompanied by a bodyguard of Arab cavalrymen. The route was lined by tens of thousands of Arabs brought in from the countryside. It was said that political officers had rounded up nearly the entire pastoral population. For weeks afterwards, ‘little columns of dust [would] betray the presence of nomads making the weary journey back’. Each group was equipped with banners to represent their particular Islamic religious society. The procession ended in the castle square. There, Mussolini was greeted by the dug-out son of the last Ottoman ruler of Tripoli and the Kadi, the head of the sharia courts. The Kadi in particular had a major role in driving home the point of the visit. The next afternoon he once more greeted Mussolini, at the mosque. ‘I take the opportunity presented by your presence among us’, the venerable judge intoned via a ‘slick Arabic interpreter’, ‘to express our profound gratefulness for the favour which Fascism has showered upon these our countries which enjoy the benefits of progress, well-being, justice and perfect respect for our Sharia courts.’ ‘We declare’, he continued, ‘that we are truly happy to lie under the shadow of the glorious Italian flag, under the Fascist regime. And how can we forget all that you have said and done in favour of Islam in such important circumstances of international politics, thus acquiring such lively sympathy among the 400 million of Moslem believers.’

Balbo and Mussolini were far from finished, however. On the next afternoon, yet another group of Muslims pledged their loyalty. Arab soldiers of the Italian colonial army were drawn up in mounted array. One of their number rode forward towards Mussolini. ‘In the name of the soldiers and Moslems of Libya,’ he bellowed, ‘I have the honour to offer to you, Victorious Duce, this well-tempered Islamic sword. The souls of the Moslems of all the shores of the Mediterranean…thrill with emotion at this moment, in sympathy with our own.’ Mussolini pulled the sword from its scabbard and ululated a war cry Then the mounted men made a second triumphal entrance into Tripoli, where Mussolini addressed the Muslim crowd from the saddle, his words followed by running translation in Arabic, each sentence being greeted in turn by cries of ‘Dushy, Dushy’.