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

(#litres_trial_promo) The British could hardly do anything else but conclude that Italy was about to attack them. But even at his most belligerent Mussolini had inserted the caveat that ‘Germany must defeat France first’. It was only on 13 May 1940, with the Maginot Line breached, and the Anglo-Belgian-French armies in disarray that he decided that Italy would go to war.

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘What can you say’, he demanded of Ciano, ‘to someone who doesn’t dare risk a single soldier while his ally is winning a crushing victory, and that victory can give Italy back the remainder of its national territory and establish its supremacy in the Mediterranean?’

(#litres_trial_promo) Mussolini had talked himself into a war. ‘It’s all over because the madman wants to make war,’ a prescient Balbo warned his fellow Fascists, ‘there won’t enough lampposts to hang you all.’

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FOUR (#ulink_50e673b9-8450-5f98-9675-85f8d036005b)

Gog & Magog (#ulink_50e673b9-8450-5f98-9675-85f8d036005b)

The Mediterranean war lived up to the expectations of those who had planned it.

(#litres_trial_promo) This correlation between ideas and execution owed much to the cold dose of reality forced on the Mediterranean dreamers by the war scare of the summer of 1939. Much of the wild talk of earlier years had ceased before the shooting began.

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Cavagnari’s Regia Marina had abandoned grandiose plans for ruling the sea, much less sweeping out of it. They had instead set themselves realistic tasks on both the east–west and north–south axes. The Italians believed that they could erect a system of defence which would divide the Mediterranean into eastern and western basins. The lynchpin of that system was the central Mediterranean, and in particular the Sicilian Narrows. But they had no truck with the belief that the system of defence would be impermeable. With enough expenditure of effort it would still be possible, if difficult, for the British and the French to sail between the western and eastern basins.

(#litres_trial_promo) The first naval mission of the war was minelaying in the Sicilian Narrows.

(#litres_trial_promo) The British naval commander in the Mediterranean was soon to pay tribute to this Italian system of defence. Their arrangements were ‘very efficient’, ‘first class’ in fact. British submarine losses were so severe–nearly every boat that approached the Italian harbours was sunk–that they had to withdraw to safer waters.

(#litres_trial_promo) Contact mines proved to be ‘the primary menace in the Mediterranean’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Although relatively few surface ships were sunk by mines in the first months of the war–the first, the destroyer Hostile, exploded catastrophically off Cap Bon at the end of August 1940–the ‘constant anxiety [about] what is to be done with a damaged capital ship’ made ‘minable water’ virtually no-go areas ‘without some very good reason’.

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Equally the Regia Marina believed that it could carry out the limited task of escorting convoys from north to south, setting off from Naples and arriving in the unlading ports of Tripoli, Benghazi and Tobruk. Although the relatively short distance favoured the Italian sailors, they were far from sanguine, realizing that they would have to rely on expedients, such as the use of submarines and destroyers as well as merchant ships. They had providently transported the bulk of the troops in the weeks before the war began.

(#litres_trial_promo) Equally, the collapse of British enthusiasm for grand Mediterranean adventures, under the guiding hand of Dudley Pound, left the Royal Navy equally as sanguine as the Regia Marina. The British sailors believed that they could get through the Mediterranean, but with the greatest of difficulty. Heavily armed warships would have a chance; the average merchant was easy meat. The geography and distances were against them. Some officers even doubted whether the game was worth the candle. Such complete sceptics were, however, quickly shushed in both London and Alexandria.

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Even Mussolini might be given some credit for realism, on this issue at least. He had consistently railed against his Mediterranean prison, claiming that the British would stop up both ends and trap Italy within. And indeed that is exactly what the British did. Within weeks the Mediterranean had two gatekeepers, self-styled after the giant twin guardians of the underworld in English legend, Gog and Magog.

(#litres_trial_promo) Magog was James Somerville, sent from Britain with a fleet–known as Force H–to secure the western exit at Gibraltar.

(#litres_trial_promo) Gog was Andrew Cunningham who, on the eve of war, took the Mediterranean Fleet away from Malta and established it at the eastern exit, protecting the mouth of the Suez Canal from Alexandria. They were true naval twins, exact contemporaries, boys from the same class of the late-Victorian navy. Apart from that, the two gatekeepers were most unlike. Cunningham, the acknowledged star of the navy, was fierce to the point of over-confidence. Independent by temperament, now semi-marooned in the eastern basin, he felt himself to be the co-adjutor with London of the fate of the Mediterranean. Cunningham walked the fine line of insubordination–earning himself Churchill’s dislike–with the arrogance of irreplaceability Somerville was quite the opposite, a dug-out from the retired list, sent to Gibraltar mainly because of his immediate availability. In contrast to Cunninghams bursts of confidence, Somerville was perpetually gloomy, cavilling against, yet in thrall, to his masters, to whom he referred in terms of dread and contempt as Their Lordships. Somerville, unlike Cunningham, was kept on a tight leash, although that did not spare him Churchill’s similar dislike. His orders came directly from London; from London too–with a direct air link–came numerous senior officers enquiring into his conduct, some actively seeking his job.

The war developed much as the admirals had predicted. Indeed, the sea produced a conflict of curious symmetry. There were four major naval battles, two in the east, two in the west. There was one eastern and one western battle in July 1940, another eastern and another western battle in November 1940. None of these naval battles resembled the titanic and decisive fleet clashes that naval fantasists such as Churchill longed for. Two–Mers el-Kébir on 3 July 1940 and Taranto on 11 November 1940–comprised not engagements at sea at all but attacks by one fleet at sea upon another riding at anchor. Both fleets at anchor suffered significant damage, but neither was destroyed. In both cases battleships were able to leave the port under attack and sail to safer ports. In the two battles at sea–Punta Stilo on 9 July 1940 and Cape Spartivento on 27 November 1940–the two fleets followed engagement with evasion, privileging the survival of their ships. As a result, in neither battle were there heavy casualties. The fleets performed a delicate quadrille, living up to their own expectation that–barring disaster–the Mediterranean could be neither completely closed nor fully opened.

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If the hopes and fears of the cautious admirals, if not of their querulous masters, proved realistic, they did nevertheless suffer some unpleasant surprises. The Mediterranean lacked the wide expanses of the oceans, but it suddenly seemed a very empty sea. The opposing forces had great difficulty in finding each other. The Mediterranean in 1940 offered little proof that there had been a revolution in naval affairs. Cunningham saw the evidence of this within days. His newly installed naval interception service beautifully triangulated the Italian cruiser Garibaldi, lying off Derna, from stations at Alexandria, Malta and Gibraltar. No high-level codebreaking of the Ultra kind was involved, the location of the cruiser was derived from traffic analysis and call-sign recognition. It was a brilliant early achievement for communications intelligence. Cunningham had squadrons cruising off Tobruk, Benghazi and Crete. Garibaldi was neatly in the middle of a trap. Sadly, although the communications intelligence was a triumph, British communications were less so. Alexandria failed to raise Cunningham’s flagship in time. By the time ABC knew what was happening, the Garibaldi had escaped.

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If the British had their difficulties, so too did the Italians. Italy had a good intelligence system. It had been used in the years of peace, however, as the means by which Mussolini had pulled diplomatic rabbits out of the hat. Mussolini and Ciano were past masters at this kind of trick. With the onset of war and the removal of embassies, many of their best sources dried up. In any case the bullying or cajoling tactics of the Duce–his so-called animal instinct’–were hardly a good foundation on which to base the careful consideration of military intelligence.

(#litres_trial_promo) Nevertheless, Italian naval intelligence was certainly not without resources. Its crypt-analysts could read a fair proportion of Cunningham’s signals. The Italian fleet at Punta Stilo was particularly well informed on his activities.

(#litres_trial_promo) The listening war in the Mediterranean was roughly even in 1940, the successes and failures of each side mirroring each other. Both had a good idea of what the other was trying to achieve, both could read some signals traffic, neither had a complete enough picture to achieve a decisive advantage.

Both sides could hear each other, albeit fuzzily. They could see each other only intermittently. It was easy enough for the Italians to see Cunningham’s fleet leaving Alexandria. Thereafter he and Somerville were too often swallowed up by the sea. This was not how it was supposed to be. The aeroplane was supposed to solve such problems. Ciano, for one, thought everything would be simple, and indeed enjoyable. ‘I have tasted again in full the intoxication of being a flyer,’ he boasted to his wife. On the third day of the war he bombed Toulon–‘magnificent, soothing, indescribable we carried out a real slaughter’–and then on his way home, crossing the stretch of sea between Corsica and Italy, he spotted the British. ‘I saw a ship,’ he confided in Edda immediately upon landing, ‘I point my Zeiss: British flag. Imagine my orgasm.’ Ciano’s tumescence was perhaps premature. There is no proof that he actually saw anything. In any case he had no means of attacking a ship. Notably, other Italian pilots seemed to enjoy much less success than the multi-talented foreign minister.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Italians had about one hundred planes out looking for British ships but most of them were ‘incredibly antiquated’ ‘Gulls’, a type of wooden flying boat, best known for long cruises. Somerville remarked on how often such aircraft were victims of ‘summary destruction’ as soon as they approached concentrations of British warships.

(#litres_trial_promo) By the autumn of 1940, the Regia Marina and the Regia Aeronautica were involved in a vicious campaign of mutual discredit in the highest Fascist councils. The air force ‘made fun of the navy for failing ever to engage the British; the navy denounced the air force as liars, whose every claim to have found, much less damaged the British, was falsified.

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If Cavagnari did not rate the RAI’s attempts at maritime reconnaissance then neither did Cunningham admire the RAF’s. He devoted much of his prodigious energy to complaining about, or attempting to take over, RAF activity in the Mediterranean. At the very least, Cunningham argued, more use should be made of Malta. A silly idea, retorted his air-force opposite number, Arthur Longmore; it was only a matter of time before the Italians got their act together and bombed Malta into impotence. In autumn 1940 Cunningham finally won the argument: first flying boats and then, at the end of October 1940, land-based reconnaissance aircraft were sent to Malta. These aircraft of uncertain parentage–made by America for France, taken by Britain as stop-gap–enjoyed an immediate and brilliant success, spotting the Italian fleet at anchor in Taranto. But there was still a big difference between spotting a fleet at anchor–the Italians could spot the British in Alexandria–and finding one at sea. The flyers lost sight of the Italian battleships once they hauled anchor. The Royal Navy and the Regia Marina complained about the same thing–the failure of air reconnaissance–at exactly the same time.

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Whatever the details of Mediterranean operations, by far the most unpleasant surprise–at least for the British–was who was fighting whom. There were undoubtedly tensions between the British and the French in the Mediterranean, but few on either side had believed before June 1940 that they would end up killing each other. As it happened the bitterest naval conflict in the Mediterranean turned out to be Anglo-French, rather than Anglo-Italian. Because that conflict did not fit into the grand narrative of ‘total war’ it tended to be underplayed–Britain and France never declared war on each other–its main event, the sinking of a French fleet at Mers el-Kébir, becoming an incident rather than a battle. Yet at the time the shadow war against France was of equal importance to the ‘real’ war against Italy. Mussolini had often talked about ‘breaking out’ of the Mediterranean but there were never any realistic plans for Italy to fight anything other than a Mediterranean war. France too had had modest plans for the Mediterranean–the convoys between North Africa and the metropole–but it had the genuine potential to move in and out of the Mediterranean. France itself had both Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, but the Atlantic coast was occupied by the Germans in June 1940. French North Africa also had Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, all of which remained in French hands. The French were willing and able to transfer warships between the two coasts.

Like the British, the French had deployed two powerful battle squadrons in the Mediterranean by the summer of 1940. In the western basin the Force de Raid was based in the Oran naval complex, including Mers el-Kébir. In the eastern basin Force X had come alongside Cunninghams fleet in Alexandria. The purpose of Force X was unclear. The French regarded it as a favour to the British, who had demanded reinforcement; the British suspected that it was a vehicle for demonstrating French power in the eastern Mediterranean.

(#litres_trial_promo) What one can say for sure is that it completed only one mission in the entire war: the bombardment of the Libyan port of Bardia in June 1940.

Even before Force X sailed for Bardia, however, an Anglo-French froideur had set in. The pivotal figure was the great pre-war champion of the Mediterranean, Darlan. Not only was Darlan the head of the French navy by rank but he ran it through an informal closed shop, known as the friends of François, the ADF. Being Darlan’s enemy was not the road to success. The only admiral to defect to Free France, Muselier, had been declared unfit as an officer–admittedly not without cause–and chased out of the service by Darlan. Darlan was undoubtedly master of the Marine but, to his chagrin, the Marine had not always been at the heart of France. As the French government fled south, towards the sea, the navy achieved the importance for which Darlan had longed, a force untainted by failure, the final bulwark of the nation. A prize so precious caused inevitable discord. British emissaries, including Churchill himself, rushed to Bordeaux to urge the French to fight on and, above all, for the fleet to abandon France. Darlan was repulsed. ‘I was disgusted’, he wrote after a meeting with Dudley Pound, ‘by the attitude of these people who had no pity for defeated France and seemed to forget the heroic aid given them by the Marine’

(#litres_trial_promo) For Darlan, the fleet, alive in the empire, was the one bargaining chip that France had left, guaranteeing it against extinction. He understood British cupidity and loathed it. Darlan temporized, saying only that the fleet would never fall into enemy hands, German or British.

Promises given in bad faith fooled no one. The British ambassador to France dismissed Darlan’s words as pathetic assurances’.

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘In a matter so vital to the safety of the whole British Empire,’ in Churchill’s fatal judgement, we could not afford to rely on the word of Admiral Darlan.’

(#litres_trial_promo) By the time Churchill condemned Darlan, he had become much more than a mere admiral but rather the chief executive of the strong, if vague, will of France’s new leader, Marshal Pétain. France had surrendered, the next order of business was the fate of the ships in the Mediterranean.

The British conducted a rapid poll of the French admirals and found little hope. The Amiral Afrique in Casablanca wearily dismissed the envoys, France was defeated but North Africa would remain indivisible from France; he awaited his orders from Darlan, whatever they might be. The Amiral Atlantique, commanding the Force de Raid, dismissed the idea that North Africa would fight on with its exiguous resources. The Amiral Sud in Bizerta said that the fleet was resigned to capitulation but was at least willing to ask Darlan whether he should continue the fight.

(#litres_trial_promo) Darlan dismissed all such suggestions with contempt–those who asked were ‘living in a dream world’. His mind was filled with the phantoms of German power. She and her allies, he believed, would soon control the whole coastline of western and central Europe from the Cap Nord to Trieste. Equally the southern coastline of the Mediterranean from Spanish Morocco to Cyrenaica would be theirs. If France decided to resist there could be only one result: the ‘asphyxiation’–it is notable that he used Mussolini’s favourite word for complaining about Mediterranean–of North Africa. Darlan imagined Casablanca, Oran, Algiers and Bizerta–and the ships hiding in their harbours–each reduced to rubble by German bombs. All that would be left would be for the navy to flee the Mediterranean, to eke out an impoverished and declining existence far to the south on the Atlantic coast of Africa. It was pointless to place any trust in the British: their men were mediocre, their leaders were stupid. Germany was going to win.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Germans, too, believed that they would win with ‘restraint and insight’. The key, Hitler assured Mussolini, was to offer France lenient terms on the fleet; then, the Führer correctly perceived, Darlan would castrate his own navy.

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When Somerville set sail for Gibraltar, his putative mission was to secure the Mediterranean approaches against the Italians; his real mission was to take on the French. Cunningham, too, was ordered to take out Force X. There the similarity between the two cases ended. The twins, issued with the same orders, effected very different results. Whereas Somerville attacked Mers el-Kébir, Cunningham refused to attack the French in Alexandria. The French at Oran were in the French empire; any damage caused would be to French or Algerian lives and property. The French at Alexandria were deep within British ground; any damage caused would be to British or Egyptian lives. The Force de Raid was much more powerful than Force X. At its core lay two of the most impressive vessels in any navy, the fast battleships Dunkerque and Strasbourg. These modern, rakish vessels, completed only in the late 1930s, had claim to be the most powerful warships in the Mediterranean. The key variable, however, was that Cunningham was in a position to say no, whereas Somerville had little choice.

It would have been hard to find a more reluctant warrior than Somerville. Upon reaching Gibraltar, all the senior officers on the Rock convened to agree that they did not wish to engage the French. Somerville was forced to admit, however, that no such sentiments existed on the lower decks of his ships, the killing didn’t worry the sailors in the least, ‘as “they never ’ad no use for them French bastards” ’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The gloom of the senior officers was lightened only by their firm conviction that ‘the French collapse was so complete and the will to fight so entirely extinguished, that it seems highly improbable that the French would, in the last resort, resist by force’. In this ideal world the French would agree, if not to hand the ships over to Britain, then at least to flee to the West Indies or scuttle the things and have done with the whole affair. All that would be needed would be a British show of force off the coast of Algeria. The naval officers had seriously misread their new enemies. When Captain ‘Hooky’ Holland entered Mers el-Kébir harbour with British terms, he was barely able to persuade Amiral Atlantique to see him. His desperate pleas to avoid bloodshed were to no avail. His motorboat pulled away from the French flagship Dunkerque less than half an hour before the British opened fire and only thirty-two minutes before the old French battleship Bretagne exploded, killing nearly all the crew. Holland’s small boat was picked up bobbing outside the harbour after the battle.

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