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

As Somerville himself admitted, his assumption that he would not have to fight–that the French would abandon their vessels if he opened fire–led him to botch the battle. Although the British gunfire hit the Dunkerque, it missed the Strasbourg entirely. She was able to cast off from the middle of the harbour, escape from the anchorage and head off east before Somerville could react. By the time Force H swung around and gave chase, one of the fastest battleships in the world had a 25-mile head start and was beyond recall. Strasbourg made her way, unmolested, across the Mediterranean to berth with the rest of the French fleet in Toulon. ‘I’m somewhat appalled by my apparent lack of foresight,’ Somerville confided in his wife,‘I never expected for one single moment that they would attempt to take their ships out of harbour under such conditions.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

The situation in Alexandria was very different. Cunningham had no intention of attacking his erstwhile allies. He and René Godfroy, the officer commanding Force X, had most cordial relations, Cunningham went so far as to describe them as ‘exceptionally friendly’. The French had accepted Cunninghams refusal to allow Force X to sail for Beirut with good grace.

(#litres_trial_promo) Cunningham even believed that he would be able to talk Godfroy away from his allegiance to Darlan.

(#litres_trial_promo) That hope soon faded but Godfroy had enough trust in Cunningham that, on the same day as Somerville was sinking his compatriots in Algeria, he was willing to pinnace across the harbour to the British flagship, Warspite, to continue their conversation.

(#litres_trial_promo) Their talks went on long into the night, as Cunningham tried to talk Godfroy into handing over his ships. Just past midnight on the day of Mers el-Kébir he conceded: ‘I have failed.’ Despite London’s demands for action, however, he stuck to the view that a battle should be avoided, ‘at almost any cost’.

(#litres_trial_promo) If Godfroy discharged all his fuel into the harbour, thus rendering his ships unable to leave, Cunningham gave his word that his ships would remain unmolested.

(#litres_trial_promo) Knowing that he could do no better, Godfroy accepted. It was a strange situation. The French squadron lay alongside the British, entirely reliant on them for water and provisions, but simmering with hostility. The officers adopted an attitude of super-patriotism. Each day the chaplains prayed for Pétain, equating him with the hammer of the English, Saint Joan. Officers prefaced all their remarks with reference to the Marshal’s sayings, as if that ended any argument. Only one senior member of Force X defected to the British.

(#litres_trial_promo)

The battle in the west, and the non-battle in the east, cast a pall over the Mediterranean for the rest of the year. Somerville’s judgement that ‘it was the biggest political blunder of modern times and I imagine will rouse the world against us’ was too tinged with emotion to be entirely convincing.

(#litres_trial_promo) The British action did, after all, win many admirers: Ciano and Cavagnari, for instance, were ‘disturbed’ at such proof that ‘the fighting spirit of the Royal Navy is quite alive, and still has the aggressive ruthlessness of the captains and pirates of the seventeenth century’.

(#litres_trial_promo)

The naval commanders in the Mediterranean had to be alive to the possibility that France could turn on them at any minute. In particular they feared that whilst they were engaged with the Italians, the French would run the Straits of Gibraltar. On 11 September 1940 their fears were realized when a French cruiser force sailed through the Straits heading for Casablanca.

(#litres_trial_promo) French aircraft bombed Gibraltar from their North African airfields. Darlan assembled naval officers in their newly established capital at Vichy to assure them that ‘a state of war exists with Britain’ and ‘this is not finished’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Mediterranean cruiser force turned an Anglo-Gaullist attempt to seize Dakar in West Africa into a fiasco. The air raids continued in response to each new British ‘outrage’. In September 1940 French bombers gave Force H ‘an absolute plastering’ in Gibraltar harbour.

(#litres_trial_promo) The result, Somerville recorded, was that British warships were steaming around the Mediterranean in ‘a ghastly muddle’. ‘We simply don’t know where we are or who we are supposed to be fighting.’ The Germans and Italians, he feared, ‘must be chuckling with joy.

(#litres_trial_promo)

The Germans were chuckling rather harder than the Italians. Mussolini had proved a master of twitting the British in peace time, but his skills were wasted in war. He had declared war on France expecting easy gains. None had been won on the battlefield–embarrassingly French troops had to maintain their supposed conquerors in the small area the Italians had occupied before the Armistice. The victorious Germans appeared to have a cosier relationship with their defeated enemies than their allies. If the French managed to slip into the ‘anti-British camp’, Italy might be ‘defrauded of our booty’. Four days after Mers el-Kébir, with the crisis still smouldering, Ciano hung up his bomber boots and headed for Berlin. It was not a successful visit. There was an odd atmosphere, jovial to the point of edginess, not least because Ciano knew that the Germans had captured documents from the French in which he personally had described them most unflatteringly Ciano spoke to Hitler, ‘as if the war was already definitively won’. The Italian press was full of officially planted stories of his expected success. This was the meeting in which Italy would finally claim absolute dominance in the Mediterranean basin, its rightful ‘living space’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Ciano’s demands tumbled out: ‘Nice, Corsica and Malta would be annexed to Italy, which would also have assumed a protectorate over Tunisia and the better part of Algeria’. The Germans around Hitler shifted between embarrassment and amusement at the Italian’s territorial incontinence. The Führer himself was simply unmoved; he ignored Ciano’s great speech. The Italians had missed the bus. Now it was too late to discuss anything before England was defeated. Afterwards, Ribbentrop sidled up to tell his opposite number that he should not have eyes bigger than his belly

(#litres_trial_promo)

Mussolini’s first gamble, that the war would be over within weeks, had failed. His second gamble, that Italy would be able to land a spectacular blow on Britain in the Mediterranean, failed whilst Ciano was still away. Mussolini’s declaration that half of Britain’s naval strength in the Mediterranean had been eliminated was a reflection of his political need, rather than military reality.

(#litres_trial_promo) The two fleets clashed at Punta Stilo, off the south-east coast of Italy, on 9 July 1940. Punta Stilo was the classic Mediterranean battle, entirely based on movement around the basins. Cunningham was at sea to rendezvous with Somerville so that they could pass a convoy from west to east.

(#litres_trial_promo) His Italian opposite number, Campioni, was at sea to prevent Cunningham intercepting a convoy that was swinging around the east of Sicily on its way from Naples to Benghazi. Both sides suspected that the other was there–they both had detailed signals intelligence–but the actual meeting was quite accidental’. The British were not too sure why the battle had occurred.

(#litres_trial_promo) Militarily, as Cunningham conceded, the Italians probably had the better of it. He admired their ‘impressive’ use of smoke to obscure the battle space, and the accuracy of their guns. On his own side he conceded that his flagship had been lucky to achieve any hits, whilst his torpedo-bombers couldn’t hit the side of a barn door, at least if it moved, which Italian battleships did, with rapidity. The Italian convoy reached Benghazi unscathed, whereas the British convoy suffered constant attack.

(#litres_trial_promo)

The British and Italians had quite different perceptions of the performance of the Regia Aeronautica. Upon his return Ciano was ‘incredulous’ to find that ‘the real controversy in naval affairs is not between us and the British but between our air force and our navy’. He was horrified to learn that ‘our air force was completely absent during the first phase of the encounter, but that when it finally came it was directed against our own ships, which for six hours withstood bombing from our [own aircraft]’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Cunningham on the other hand reported that his convoy had been bombed continuously from the Sicily coast, then from Cyrenaica, then from the Dodecanese, ‘literally we have had to fight our way back to Alexandria’. He feared that the Italian airmen would only improve with practice, that ‘the worst is yet to come’ and doubted whether he would be able to overcome this formidable air power.

(#litres_trial_promo) From the other side of the Sicilian Narrows, Somerville too concluded, that, ‘as a result of this, our first contact with the Italian air force,’ the risk to his capital ships was too great. He had turned them around and headed away to the west.

(#litres_trial_promo) Churchill was livid with his admirals, thundering that ‘warships are meant to go under fire’.

(#litres_trial_promo)

He was only mildly propitiated when an Australian cruiser intercepted an Italian cruiser on its way from Tripoli to Leros and sank her with an outstanding display of gunnery

(#litres_trial_promo) Conversely, Mussolini was ‘depressed on account of the loss of the Colleoni, not so much because of the sinking itself as because he feels the Italians did not fight well’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The battle of Cape Spada, as the sinking of the Colleoni was called, made more of an impression than Punta Stilo. It occasioned another round of mutual denunciations between the Regia Aeronautica and the Regia Marina–Italian aircraft responded to the Colleoni’s demands for assistance only when it was too late. They instead bombed the British destroyers which were trying to pick up Italian survivors, provoking Cunningham’s order that in future, ‘difficult and distasteful as it is’, shipwrecked sailors should be left to fend for themselves.

(#litres_trial_promo)

Failure made Mussolini and Churchill gamblers. There were striking parallels between them. They both met their advisers on the same day in August 1940. They both demanded a new approach to Mediterranean conflict. The difference was that Churchill, although dictatorial, was not a dictator. His military chiefs fought back against his demands. Mussolini was a tyrant: when his military advisers displeased him, he found others who would agree with him. Churchill’s gripe was the supposed impassability of the Mediterranean. In the debates of the 1930s he had been a partisan of battleships over aeroplanes. He was not minded to change his view. Somerville and Cunningham should stop pussyfooting around and force supplies through the central Mediterranean to Egypt.

(#litres_trial_promo) In particular Churchill was fascinated with the possibilities of large merchant vessels converted to carry tanks. If, Churchill believed, he could send a rapid supply of tanks through the Mediterranean, he could force a reluctant Wavell to attack Libya. The admirals were ‘unduly pessimistic’ about the risks. The ships could pass ‘without great difficulty’. The dangers of sending tank reinforcements to Egypt ‘had been exaggerated.’ It was lucky for Somerville and Cunningham–particularly lucky for Somerville who had sailed back to Britain to argue the case–that no one in the military hierarchy could be found to break ranks and endorse Churchill’s belief.

(#litres_trial_promo) In the end Churchill could not quite bring himself to overrule the admirals, generals and air marshals based solely on his own judgement–his political leadership would not have survived a slaughter in the central Mediterranean.

(#litres_trial_promo) What he wanted was a merchant convoy–what he got, after a great battle’, was ‘Hands Across the Sea, a mission to send major warship reinforcements east to Cunningham.

(#litres_trial_promo) Not that he conceded the point. Instead of congratulating Somerville and Cunningham for their excellent handling of the mission, he claimed that it showed that he had been right, they wrong.

(#litres_trial_promo)

Mussolini’s gamble was of a quite different order. Before the outbreak of war, troops had been rushed to Libya to defend it against the nonexistent British legions that Italian intelligence estimated were present in Egypt. When the weakness of the British became apparent, Mussolini demanded that his army should attack. Churchill firmly believed that his generals and admirals were deliberately smothering his plans–they were, he complained, ‘very wily when they don’t want to do anything’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Mussolini suspected the same. General Rodolfo Graziani, the chief of staff of the Army and the commander of forces in Libya, suggested that it was too hot to fight in Egypt and that it would be much better to wait until the next spring before any action was considered. He offered the poor compensation of a minor campaign, in the not notably cooler Somaliland instead.

(#litres_trial_promo) Graziani used every wile at his disposal to avoid attacking Egypt. British intelligence had every right to be confused. There seemed to be endless orders for Graziani to attack, British forces braced themselves and then nothing happened.

(#litres_trial_promo) Instead Graziani retired to his Mediterranean bungalow to be soothed by ‘escapades’. In the first week of September 1940, Mussolini finally lost patience: he gave Graziani an ultimatum. If after a weekend of contemplation he could not bring himself to do anything, then he was to come home in dishonour–not a pleasant experience in the Fascist regime.

(#litres_trial_promo) The fear of loss of emoluments, or worse, was too much for Graziani to bear.

(#litres_trial_promo) Mussolini had given the world’s most reluctant warrior little choice but to act. At the same time he consoled him with the thought that his campaign need be nothing more than a demonstration. It would be nice if he could sweep along the Mediterranean coast and capture the British fleet base at Alexandria. But Mussolini did not demand this. He did not even demand that Graziani should reach the first coastal town that the British held in strength. There were no ‘fixed territorial objectives’, he just had to do something.

(#litres_trial_promo)

Mussolini’s gamble was to twin his attack on Egypt with an attack on Greece. This was a course that the disgruntled viceroy of the Dodecanese, De Vecchi, had been urging almost since the war began. De Vecchi hated the Greeks–as indeed the Greeks hated him. From the beginning of the war Cunningham had gone ‘so far as to say that we shall never be able to control the Central Mediterranean’ until the fleet could operate from a base in the Greek islands. The location he desired above all others was Suda Bay on the north coast of Crete.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Greeks had no intention of giving it to him. Indeed the Greeks protested vigorously on each occasion they believed that the British had entered their territorial waters. Metaxas held no brief for the British war effort, victory in the Mediterranean meant little to him, only the safety offered by neutrality. That was the reality, but De Vecchi worked himself up into such a rage against the Greeks, he would never believe it was so. His reports to Rome were stridently insistent that the Greeks were allowing the British to operate from Suda, and that all the denials they issued were nothing more than dirty lies. De Vecchi was unapologetic about the indiscriminate bombing of Greek ships in their own waters–Greeks, British were all the same in his eyes. ‘To your fine diplomats who whine about me (who has had to amuse himself with Greeks here for four years),’ he scolded Ciano, ‘I can answer that in French “Greek” means “swindler”.’

(#litres_trial_promo)