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

(#litres_trial_promo) A third school went even further and argued that military and civil rule in the Mediterranean should be integrated. Britain should create not merely short-term military expedients but political instruments devoted to the long-term maintenance of British power.

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These somewhat academic discussions were brought into focus by the embarrassing intelligence failure that was the Italian invasion of Albania. The Italian assault had come as such a complete surprise to the British that it found the capital ships of the Mediterranean Fleet paying courtesy calls in Italian ports, ‘lolling about in Italian harbours’, as Churchill put it, bitterly. Even if the British government had wanted to intervene, their own fleet was effectively hostage to good behaviour. The best the ships could do was to surreptitiously slip anchor and make their way back to Malta. By the time the Italian armada had sallied into the Adriatic from Brindisi, various British agencies had received upward of twenty warnings of Italian intentions. None had been taken seriously. It was all very well Chamberlain complaining that Mussolini had acted ‘like a sneak and a cad’, intelligence was supposed to spot the actions of those who were something less than gentlemen.

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Albania forced everyone to agree that it was no good limiting the ‘men on the spot’ to reporting back to London. There was finally agreement to create a self-contained regional intelligence organization.

(#litres_trial_promo) Agreement in principle did not, of course, mean agreement in practice. The new body was to be called the Middle East Intelligence Centre–although it was usually referred to, not always kindly, as ‘Mice’. The diplomats and spies refused to take part, in the hope that Mice would limit itself to military intelligence. The sailors and the airmen preferred to hand over as few resources to Mice as possible, the Royal Navy at one point saying rather insultingly that they couldn’t spare a real naval officer and would send a Royal Marine instead. But the Centre did begin operating in October 1939. Despite attempts from London to insist that Middle East really did mean Middle East, Mice gaily included the northern littoral of the Mediterranean in its remit.

(#litres_trial_promo) Although staffed almost wholly by soldiers, it was not deterred from offering political advice. The old-established bureaucracies in London suspected that once such agencies were created, they would slip away from central control; that suspicion was borne out in practice. Within months Wavell’s GHQ had grown from a few officers lodging with the British army in Egypt to over a thousand men establishing themselves at Grey Pillars, a modern office building in the south of Cairo’s Garden District. Slowly but surely, assets began to move eastwards. New pan-Mediterranean organizations began to burgeon around Grey Pillars.

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Those parts of the Mediterranean world not yet mortgaged to either side shifted uncomfortably. In the full spasm of their Mediterranean enthusiasm, the British courted the Turks. ‘On no occasion does it appear to have been realised’, they later chastised themselves, ‘that we needed Turks more than they required us.’

(#litres_trial_promo) A triple alliance was formed between Britain, France and Turkey.

(#litres_trial_promo) In the person of Maxime Weygand, France had grand plans for this alliance. It was they who paid the direct price of the alliance, slicing off much of the Mediterranean coast of Syria–known as the Sanjak of Alexandretta–and gifting it to the Turks.

(#litres_trial_promo) Appointed as commander of French forces in the eastern Mediterranean, Weygand imagined that he would lead a great expeditionary force into the Balkans from his base in Syria. The British demurred. They could find little appealing in the thought of Darlan harnessing British naval power and Weygand leading Britain’s armies. The French had led the British a merry dance into the Balkans in the Great War, tying down a huge expeditionary force in Salonika for no military gain. The British felt that to play the same trick again lacked something in Gallic subtlety. The Kemalist regime begged to differ. They fêted Weygand and snubbed his British companions, asking why they had failed to draw up such valiant plans. The Turks and the French had a shared interest in British aid, shorn of British direction. Yet whatever their outward show, the Kemalists were playing the French as well. They swallowed the Sanjak but offered little in return. They made this calculation. If Britain and France went to war with Italy in the Mediterranean, they were happy to join in. If Britain and France wanted to fight Germany in the Balkans then that was their problem. Turkey would pursue the strictest neutrality.

(#litres_trial_promo) Right at the beginning of negotiations, Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary, had noticed that the Turks always worded their commitments very, very carefully. They were willing to act only if a war started ‘in the Mediterranean’. If Germany launched a war elsewhere, if Italy joined in, thereby spreading the fighting to the Mediterranean, Turkey would be under no obligation to fight. He then declared that he could not believe that the Turks were so deceitful.

(#litres_trial_promo) Halifax should have heeded his inner voice. The Turks were that deceitful, and they had said exactly what they meant.

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Neutralism was equally popular at the other end of the Mediterranean. Recognizing the inevitable, Britain had acknowledged Franco as the legitimate ruler of Spain at the beginning of 1939. In the first flush of victory Franco had not been slow to declare that he was now one of the arbiters of the Mediterranean. Britain and France’s attempts to ‘reduce Spain to slavery in the Mediterranean’ would lead to war.

(#litres_trial_promo) He, Franco, now held the entrance to the sea. Such declarations did not, however, extend much beyond empty rhetoric. The performance of Italian forces in Spain had imbued the Spanish right with considerable scepticism about their goals and capabilities. Yet briefly, in the winter of 1939, Mussolini gained cult status in Spain. Not for reasons of which he would be proud, but for his hesitations and evasions. The Spanish admired his ability to run away from conflict, an ability that they hoped to emulate. Those suspected of wishing to entangle Spain in a new conflict, most notably the foreign minister and Franco’s brother-in-law, Serrano Súñer, could expect a chilly welcome even amongst the most ardently Fascist Spaniards. Among the sullen remnants of the defeated left, on the other hand, at their strongest in the Mediterranean port cities, many hoped that the despised Italians would declare war and suffer humiliating defeat.

(#litres_trial_promo) Franco had the intention of indulging neither his fire-breathing friends nor his hate-filled enemies. He would follow a policy of hábil prudencia–‘adroit prudence’.

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Each neutral was a study in ambivalence but the most ambivalent was undoubtedly Greece. Like Mussolini, its dictator, the so-called First Peasant, Ioannis Metaxas, co-habited contemptuously with a decrepit royal house. Greece was home to the classics beloved of the English; but those classics were no guarantee of a democratic temperament. The 1930s Mediterranean cocktail of sun, sea, classical literature and air travel was equally pleasing to others. Josef Goebbels’s dreams came true in the airspace over Mount Olympus. ‘Eternal Greece’ made him warm and happy, perhaps the happiest he had ever been. Greece, after all, was the very homeland of the Gods: Zeus, he thought, was a Norwegian. The ‘Fascist Frankenstein’, Metaxas, reciprocated Nazi warmth. Neither was the liaison confined to tours of the Acropolis and oiled Aryan bodies. The Greeks turned to the Germans for a modern army and arms industry. These new arms were turned, however, not against the degenerate democracies, but against Fascist Italy, the hated ruler of the Dodecanese, molester of Corfu and, latterly, threatened ravager of Epirus.

(#litres_trial_promo) Metaxas quite rightly feared that Mussolini would despoil Greece given half a chance. His fears had been exponentially increased by the Italian invasion of Albania. Metaxas found himself on the receiving end of a British promise of protection. He could hardly say no to such help–but it took him some days to say thank you, in the blandest terms possible.

(#litres_trial_promo) He assured his German friends that he had not colluded in the offer.

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Mediterranean war planning reached a crescendo in the spring and early summer of 1939. Then the bubble of expectations burst. Faced with the real possibility of a land war in Europe, the three Mediterranean naval powers reached a tacit agreement that they would rather not fight each other at sea. By May 1939 Backhouse had worked himself into an early grave. His successor as First Sea Lord, Dudley Pound, arrived at the Admiralty fresh from commanding the Mediterranean Fleet. From his headquarters in Malta, Pound, the practical ‘man on the spot’, had regarded the stream of scenarios for a ‘knock out’ blow against Italy that had flowed from London with something akin to contempt. His own elevation meant that they were dumped unceremoniously in a filing cabinet as so much waste paper. Drax was shown the door. The Royal Navy performed a volte-face.

(#litres_trial_promo) Darlan, bereft of further British support, was forced to abandon his own plans.

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A similar failure of minds to meet occurred between the Italians and the Germans. In late May 1939 Mussolini and Hitler consummated their formal alliance when the Duce travelled in pomp to Berlin in order to announce the Pact of Steel. At the heart of the alliance was Hitler’s declaration that ‘Mediterranean policy will be directed by Italy’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Admiral Cavagnari was dispatched to the headquarters of his German opposite number, Admiral Raeder, in a bid to turn rhetoric into reality. Although the Kriegsmarine was by far the most ‘Mediterranean-minded’ of the German services, Cavagnari found little support for Italian ambitions. The German naval war staff, too, had taken part in the great Mediterranean war planning orgy of 1938-9. They had taken Italian policy at face value and had assumed that the Kriegsmarine and the Regia Marina would fight together. Predictably, however, the German sailors regarded Italy’s struggle for the Mediterranean as merely a means to an end. If the Italians managed to close the Mediterranean, the British would have to use other oceanic’ routes and by so doing leave themselves vulnerable to sinking by German raiders.

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘We must see to it’, wrote the chief of the German naval operations division, that ‘Italy does not go running after all sorts of prestige targets such as the Suez Canal.’ Raeder wanted the Italians to fight a diversionary war. Cavagnari was horrified to find that the Germans had little aid to offer the Italians: they merely wished to use them as bait to draw out the British. What little enthusiasm he had had for war was snuffed out.

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On his return to Rome, Cavagnari told Mussolini, as baldly as one might in Fascist Italy, that his great plans were little more than a fantasy. Everyone had done much pointing at maps to demonstrate the absolute centrality of the Sicilian Narrows for mastery in the Mediterranean. Cavagnari did not want to fight for it. Naval communications were so poor that it was as much as he could do to speak to some of his ships some of the time. Combined naval-air operations were out of the question. He doubted whether Italian torpedoes worked well enough to sink any enemy ships. Attacks on the British and the French were entirely out of the question. At a pinch the navy might be able to run fast convoys between eastern Sicily and Libya, but he wasn’t promising any good results.

(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps, Cavagnari suggested, there was an alternative. If the Regia Marina stuck close to its old bases like Genoa it could hope for safety in numbers, with the Spanish and the Germans nearby and the French too interested in their own convoy routes to attack them.

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Here lay the irony of 1939. The British accepted that the Mediterranean would be a ‘closed sea at the very moment that the Italians realized that they could not close the sea. The British had shocked themselves into a new way of thinking. In September 1939 they had a European war forced on them. Hitler’s invasion of Poland made conflict in northern Europe inevitable. Despite the declaration of war on Germany, little in the way of immediate fighting in this theatre ensued. The Anglo-German war of 1939 was for the most part fought at sea. The most spectacular engagements were the sinking by a U-boat of the British battleship Royal Oak at Scapa Flow and the hunting to destruction of the German battleship Graf Spee off the coast of South America. In the Atlantic war zone the Germans formed the first wolf-packs, whilst the Royal Navy imposed a blockade on Germany. In the Mediterranean matters were quite different. Britain’s commitment to Italian neutrality became so intense that the navy was willing to turn a blind eye to Italian ships busily transporting materiel through the Mediterranean to feed the German war economy.

The short breathing space offered by Italian non-belligerence–it was clear even to casual observers–rested on a contest between Mussolini’s whim and his advisers’ totting up of military capacity.

(#litres_trial_promo) Mussolini had declared that Italy must never put itself in Serie B–a humiliation beyond contemplation for the dominant footballing nation of the 1930s. Stop complaining about lack of funds for the armed forces, he scolded the chiefs. It was an act of will to fight.

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Are we in a position to do it?’ demanded an agitated Ciano of the other major diarist of Italian Fascism, Giuseppe Bottai, on the last day of August 1939. ‘No, no, no,’ he screamed in answer to his own question. The head of the air force was ‘shouting that he doesn’t have fighters’–a recent inventory had shown only about ten per cent of Regia Aeronautica’s strength was fit for combat.

(#litres_trial_promo) Cavagnari was wailing that the only result of a war would be that the Franco-British fleet would sink the Italian navy. With armed forces like ours, Ciano lamented, ‘one can declare war only on Peru’.

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It is one of the great imponderables whether Mussolini would finally have acted in the Mediterranean if it had not been for Hitler’s victories in Europe. Those who observed him closely noticed his consistent inconsistency.

(#litres_trial_promo) Mussolini ordered the war machine to put into ‘top gear’–even if no one quite knew what top gear was–at the end of January 1940. In March 1940 he fell into a paroxysm of rage when the Royal Navy finally got around, however hesitantly, to intercepting contraband coal shipments to Italy.

(#litres_trial_promo) This act inspired his declaration that he was a ‘prisoner within the Mediterranean’. He was certainly willing to take a meeting with Hitler at the Brenner Pass. The Führer knew how to play on the Duces insecurities. ‘A German victory’, he whispered, ‘would be an Italian victory, but the defeat of Germany would also imply the end of the Italian empire.’ On his return to Rome, Mussolini committed himself to paper. Yet his plan of action’ revealed deep uncertainties. First, he wrote, that it was ‘very improbable’ that Germany would attack France. Then mulling over his conversation with Hitler he crossed out very. Now it was merely ‘improbable’. If the Germans did not go west soon, then the comfortable state of non-belligerence could be maintained as long as possible’, Mussolini underlining as long as possible.

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But what happened if the Germans did attack France, and looked like winning? Then ‘to believe that Italy can remain outside the conflict until its end is absurd and impossible’. If German victory was on the cards, Italy must launch a ‘parallel war’. What was a ‘parallel war’? Mussolini asked himself. His answer: it was Italy’s war for the possession of ‘the bars of its Mediterranean prison–Corsica, Bizerta, Malta and the walls of the same prison: Gibraltar and Suez’. The war would be a naval war, ‘an offensive right down the line of the Mediterranean and outside it’.

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At the point of decision, the tensions in Mussolini’s Mediterranean imagination were revealed more clearly than ever. That tension was visibly unhinging him. As Mussolini was writing his ‘plan of action’ others were writing character studies of him. ‘Physically, Mussolini is not the man he was,’ observed the British ambassador, Sir Percy Loraine, ‘he is beginning to go down the hill.’ He might boast endlessly about his running, riding, swimming, tennis, fencing, motoring, flying and, above all, his sexual athleticism. ‘But’, Sir Percy noted, ‘this self-justification is a well known sign of senescence.’ Mussolini was uneasy, fearing ‘that great events are happening and there is no heroic role for Mussolini’; he was irritated ‘that those muddle-headed English should have all the places of which Mussolini could make a really beautiful empire to the Greater Glory of Mussolini’. The ambassador concluded that what really drove Mussolini to distraction was that ‘his principal advisers, both political and military, not only expect the Allies to win, but actually wish them to win’.

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Loraine was fooling himself that Mussolini’s cronies were pro-British. He was right to believe that they were unenthused by Mussolini’s plan. But they were either Mussolini’s creatures or in the thrall of such creatures. If the Duce wanted a war they would never gainsay him: the only way to stop the dictator was to overthrow him, and they feared that conspiracy more than war. What they wanted to torpedo was his fantasy about fighting anywhere other than in the Mediterranean. They fell on the phrase an offensive right down the line of the Mediterranean and outside it’. There was no chance of the Regia Marina throwing itself against the Franco-British fleet, defeating them and then sailing elsewhere. What they would be doing would be waging a ‘guerre de course in the Mediterranean’, trying to hinder movement between the eastern and western basins. Mussolini had given the navy the right of the line in his parallel war’, but the man who had to lead it, Cavagnari, was almost beside himself with fear. Despite the prospect of the two new gleaming battleships he was about to commission into service, he did not believe that the naval balance had moved in Italy’s favour since September 1939. He knew what would happen: one enemy fleet would assemble at Gibraltar, the other at Alexandria. Far from breaking the bars of the Mediterranean, Italy and her fleet would ‘asphyxiate’ within it.

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On 12 April 1940 Mussolini ordered the fleet to prepare for war. He mobilized the organs of Fascist propaganda to prepare the people for an offensive against Britain’s ‘tyranny of the seas’. On 21 April 1940 the Ministry of Popular Culture–the politically correct term for the propaganda machine–announced: ‘the whole Mediterranean was under the control of Italy’s naval and air forces; and if Britain dared to fight she would at once be driven out’. The spokesman who made the announcement confided to his diary that evening that he knew it to be nonsense.