THE BITTER SEA

The Struggle for Mastery in the Mediterranean, 1935–1949

SIMON BALL

To Helen

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Maps

Introduction

1 The Dead Dog

2 Death on the Nile

3 Of Mice and Men

4 Gog & Magog

5 Mediterranean Eden

6 Losing the Light

7 Italy Victorious

8 The Last Summer

9 Of Worms and Frenchmen

10 The Deceivers

11 The Good Italians

12 The Last Supper

13 Mission Impossible

14 Goodbye Mediterranean

Conclusion

Notes and References

Index

Sources and Acknowledgements

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

MAPS

Map 1 The Mediterranean in 1938

Map 2 The Mediterranean and Middle East Theatre of War

Map 3 The Sicilian Narrows

Map 4 Malta and the Mediterranean in 1941

Map 5 Cyrenaica

Map 6 Greece and the Aegean

Map 7 The Partition of Yugoslavia in 1941

Map 8 Axis Sea and Air Transport Routes to North Africa, October 1942–May 1943

Map 9 TORCH landings in 1942

Map 10 Italy showing German defensive lines with dates of their fall

INTRODUCTION

In July 2008 the Libyan tyrant Muammar Gaddafi announced that he would boycott the inaugural meeting of the Union for the Mediterranean, or ‘Club Med’ as it was invariably known. The President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, had summoned forty-two Mediterranean leaders to Paris to create the Union. Newly elected, he wanted an alternative to the faltering ‘Barcelona process’ that, since 1995, had been a vehicle for transferring aid from the European Union to the Arab world. Something grander and more heroic was required to capture the imagination of Europe and the Middle East, Sarkozy believed. Gaddafi was appalled. The initial invitation to Club Med, issued in December 2007, was grandly entitled, in the worst possible taste, the ‘Appeal from Rome’. Libya had been created from the ashes of Mussolini’s Roman Empire. Sarkozy had flanked himself with the leaders of Spain and Italy, an echo of the unrealized Mediterranean Axis of 1940. ‘We shall have another Roman Empire and imperialist design,’ Gaddafi snarled from his palace in Tripoli. ‘There are imperialist maps and designs we have already rolled up. We should not have them again.’ ¹

This is a book about an idea and its time. The idea was that there was a place called the Mediterranean and that the Mediterranean was worth fighting for. The time was the mid-1930s to the late 1940s.

The existence of the Mediterranean is embedded in the modern imagination. ² Long before the aeroplane or the satellite created aerial pictures of the Mediterranean, the Victorian art critic John Ruskin urged his reader to rise with him higher than the birds. Together they would see ‘the Mediterranean lying beneath us like an irregular lake, and all its ancient promontories sleeping in the sun’. Beneath them were ‘Syria and Greece, Italy and Spain, laid like pieces of a golden pavement into the sea blue’. ³ This vision of the ‘golden pavement’ and ‘sea blue’ was endorsed by the most famous twentieth-century history of the Mediterranean. In The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, published in 1949, the French historian Fernand Braudel insisted that the Mediterranean was a unit of ‘creative space’: its amazing freedom of sea-routes and ‘complementary populations’ shaped human actions. Braudel’s putative subject was the sixteenth century, but few were in any doubt that he was addressing his own times. ⁴ As Braudel himself remarked, his view of the historical Mediterranean was formed by his years as a teacher in Algeria. He imagined a Mediterranean seen from the ‘other bank’, ‘upside down’. ⁵

Yet there were sceptics about ‘the Mediterranean’. What, writers from Mediterranean countries asked, did all this talk about ‘Mediterranean culture’ amount to, beyond chatter worked up into an intellectual system? The Mediterranean was not a good ‘unit of analysis’. The unity of its populations was illusory. National histories mattered more than an ill-defined Mediterranean identity. ⁶ The Mediterranean did not make much sense. A central tenet of ‘Mediterraneanness’ was that religious difference, though not religions, was essentially unimportant. As Braudel put it, the Islamic Mediterranean lived and breathed with the same rhythms as the Christian. Yet at the very moment he wrote, the whole concept of the ‘the Middle East’, a different, identifiable, Muslim, world incorporating eastern Mediterranean lands, had colonized the imagination of politicians and journalists. Efforts to halt or reverse the spread of the concept proved fruitless. Winston Churchill told cavillers: ‘a million or so Englishmen had fought, and many died, in what they knew as the Middle East, and the Middle East it was to remain!’ By the late 1940s the term Middle East was in universal circulation, and has retained its grip ever since. ⁷

One group able to write about the Mediterranean and the Middle East, without worrying too much about questions of identity, has been military historians. ⁸ For them the Mediterranean was not a culture area but a theatre. Rather than doubt the self-evident existence of the Mediterranean ‘theatre’, they instead gnawed away at the question of whether the Mediterranean was important to the outcome of the Second World War. The argument stretched back to Anglo-American disputes about strategy in the middle years of the war. ⁹ These arguments did not long remain private. Elliot Roosevelt, the officer in charge of the air-force photographic reconnaissance in the Mediterranean, but more prominently the son of the President of the USA, published a bilious caricature of foolish British Mediterraneanists and wise American Europeanists as early as 1946. ¹⁰ More in the same vein was to follow. The Americans claimed that arms and men had been wasted on a sideshow. The British retorted that American foot-dragging had prevented the exploitation of victory. The burgeoning literature on ‘total’ war dismissed the Mediterranean war as ‘second class’ because of its political and limited nature. ‘Mediterraneanists’ were left to argue that their theatre was of primary importance for short, but pivotal, periods. ¹¹

This book does not assume that the unity of the Mediterranean rested on deep structures. Rather it suggests that any such unity was fleeting. The Mediterranean was the product of competing notions of thalassocracy–‘rulership of the sea’. These ideas were ebbing away by the late 1940s. Whilst belief in the Mediterranean existed, however, there were genuine attempts to wield pan-Mediterranean authority. This is a history of the Mediterranean told from the point of view of those who attempted to rule it. Their Mediterranean was a crucible of modernity. The key features of the Mediterranean crisis–shifting coalitions held together by contingent loyalty, information warfare, the projection of air and sea power, civil war and terrorism–remained crucial long after the Mediterranean itself had become a fantasy of western tourist brochures.

ONE
The Dead Dog

Eyeless in Gaza, Aldous Huxley’s 1936 novel, opens with a metaphor for the Mediterranean: the lazy, ripe, sea-girt lands, beloved of travellers, and Mussolini’s hell-hole. Two sunbathers’ eyes are drawn to the west, to ‘a blue Mediterranean bay fringed with pale bone-like rocks and cupped between high hills, green on their lower slopes with vines, grey with olive trees, then pine-dark, earth-red, rock-white or rosy-brown with parched heath’. To the east they observe ‘the vineyards and the olive orchards mounted in terraces of red earth to a crest’. The ‘sunlight fell steep out of flawless sky’, and they dozed, until ‘a faint rustling caressed the half-conscious fringes of their torpor…and became at last a clattering roar that brutally insisted on attention’. Annoyed, they closed their eyes once more, ‘dazzled by the intense blue of the sky’. Suddenly, ‘with a violent but dull and muddy impact the thing struck the flat roof a yard or two from where they were lying’. ‘The drops of a sharply spurted liquid were warm for an instant on their skin, and then, as the breeze swelled up out of the west, startlingly cold.’ ‘In a red pool at their feet lay the almost shapeless carcass of a fox-terrier. The roar of the receding aeroplane had diminished to a raucous hum, and suddenly the ear found itself conscious once again of the shrill rasping of the cicadas.’ Eyeless in Gaza prophesies a Mediterranean war in 1940. ¹

Huxley’s aeroplane was indeed an apt metaphor for Italian Fascism. Sowing chaos from the air was central to Mussolini’s regime. ² Il Duces collected writings and speeches on the subject were published in March 1937. ³ Flying was dynastic aggrandizement for Mussolini. When he took flying lessons in the 1920s he took his sons, Vittorio and Bruno, to the aerodrome. In 1935 the Mussolini clan ‘volunteered’ to fly in the conquest of Abyssinia. Vittorio Mussolini was nineteen, Bruno only seventeen but worthy of bombing Abyssinians. Their cousin, Vito, son of Mussolini’s late brother, went as well. They were chaperoned by Galeazzo Ciano, the husband of Vittorio and Bruno’s sister, Edda. ‘We have carried out a slaughter,’ Ciano boasted. Vittorio’s shadowed autobiography was rushed out in celebration. He admitted to being a little disappointed by his first bombing raid; the Abyssinians’ feeble huts collapsed without any spectacular strewing of rubble. The Mussolini boys were not, however, good pilots: their true love was brothels rather than aerodromes. On their return from the front they lorded it around Rome, raping girls, crashing fast cars and treating the professional head of the Regia Aeronautica, Giuseppe Valle, like a flunkey. ⁴ Only Ciano stayed the course, returning to Abyssinia for the final victory in the spring of 1936. The fawning Italian press gave his exploits so much coverage that eventually he ordered them reined in lest he become a laughing stock at his golf club. ⁵ Nevertheless, Ciano, at the age of thirty-three, emerged from Abyssinia as the ‘hero’ of the dynasty. In the summer of 1936 Mussolini not only made him Italian foreign minister but put him in charge of the Fascist project for Mediterranean conquest. ⁶ Ciano was a monster: vain, corrupt and murderous. Nevertheless, most people liked his ‘winning ways’. ⁷ He was good-looking and fun to talk to. Ciano had a low, and usually accurate, opinion of his fellow man, Fascist, Nazi or democrat. He had a gift for self-reflection, as well as self-deceit. Both characteristics were reflected in a diary he began to keep, with Mussolini’s blessing, once he had firmly established himself at the foreign ministry.

Mussolini ‘dropped the dog’ on 3 October 1935 when Italy invaded Abyssinia. The Mediterranean may not have been a peaceful place in the decade before 1935: monarchy was overthrown in Spain, but preserved by a military dictatorship in Greece; the French ruthlessly suppressed colonial peoples in Morocco and Syria; terrorists murdered their ethnic enemies in Yugoslavia and Palestine. Its quarrels were, however, parochial. The Mediterranean itself played little part in these struggles beyond that of a means of departure and arrival. It was Mussolini’s challenge to Britain that plunged the Mediterranean as a whole into its fourteen-year crisis.

The British described their Mediterranean as an ‘artery’. ⁸ Armies and navies made the passage to the East through the artery, raw materials, tin, rubber, tea and, above all, oil, made their way west. On any given day in the mid-1930s the tonnage of British shipping in the Mediterranean was second only to that found in the North Atlantic. The Mediterranean was not, however, Britain’s only arterial route. Many of the same destinations could be reached by sailing the Atlantic–Indian Ocean route around Africa via the Cape of Good Hope. The Mediterranean’s chief attraction was speed. A ship steaming from the Port of London to Bombay would take a full fortnight longer, and travel nearly 4,500 miles more, to reach its destination if it did not pass through the Mediterranean.

The British artery had three main choke points: Gibraltar, Malta and Port Said. The first port of call for a ship entering the Mediterranean was Gibraltar. Seven million tons of commercial shipping called at Gibraltar every year. The Rock, a mere one-and-seven-eighths square miles in area, had been a British possession since the early eighteenth century. It housed a large naval base for the use of the Home Fleet. Nearly a thousand miles to the east, the small island of Malta lay at a point almost equidistant between Gibraltar and the entrance to the Suez Canal at Port Said in Egypt. It also sat astride the narrowest point in the Mediterranean, the Strait of Sicily. Valletta was one of the great harbours of the world, providing the main base of the Mediterranean Fleet, comprising, at the beginning of 1935, five battleships, eight cruisers and an aircraft-carrier. Apart from its strategic importance, the British dominance of Malta irritated Mussolini. In the early 1930s the British started a campaign to encourage the Maltese language to replace Italian in the schools and law courts. ⁹ Pro-Italian Maltese ‘traitors’ were imprisoned, and Italian diplomats were expelled from the island for indulging in subversion and espionage. Italian was expunged as a legitimate language. ¹⁰

A few ships left the main artery at Malta and headed into the northeastern Mediterranean, to the British possession of Cyprus, ‘off the main track of sea communications…unfortified and garrisoned only by native police, together with one company of British troops’. Unlike Gibraltar and Malta, Cyprus had a large land mass capable of supporting a substantial population–nearly 350,000 in 1935. Its coast was dotted with harbours but they were little more than ‘open roadsteads’ or ‘small and silted up’. The only substantial port was Famagusta on the east of the island. In the mid-1930s the British did consider turning Famagusta into a major naval base. ¹¹ In the end they decided that Cyprus was ‘out of the question for the immediate needs of the moment’. A base at Famagusta would have taken over a decade to complete. ¹²

Most ships did not divert to Cyprus. They travelled on for another thousand miles from Malta. At Port Said they entered the Suez Canal. A great feat of nineteenth-century engineering, the Canal ran for 101 miles through Egypt, providing a single-lane highway, with passing places to accommodate both north-and southbound traffic. A ship would take–on average–fifteen hours to pass through the Canal before debouching into the Red Sea at Port Suez.

Thus for the British the Mediterranean comprised a seamless whole. The sea was a journey from west to east, and the Mediterranean coast comprised the north and south banks of an eastward-flowing river. ¹³

By the time ‘major combat operations’ in Abyssinia ended on 9 May 1936, the British had been thoroughly spooked. ¹⁴ They could no longer ‘despise the Italians and believe they will never dare to put to and face us’, wrote Winston Churchill. ‘Mussolini’s Italy may be quite different to that of the Great War.’ ¹⁵ Major-General Robert Haining, the British army officer charged with assessing his Italian opposite numbers, described the campaign as a ‘masterpiece’. ‘There has been a great tendency in this country’, he warned, echoing Churchill, ‘to think that the Italian of today is still the Italian of Caporetto [whereas] the Italian, from what one has seen of him, is a very different individual to what he used to be.’ ¹⁶

The British response to the war was characterized by Sir Warren Fisher, the head of the civil service, as feeble. British officials had stood on the dockside at Port Said as Italian troop ships sailed through the Suez Canal carrying, by their estimation, nearly a quarter of a million men. ¹⁷ One in five ships that sailed through the Canal in 1936 were Italian. ¹⁸ Italy was able to send three hundred tons of poison gas through the Suez Canal on a refrigerated banana boat. Despite attempts to cover up the shipments, the British were well aware of the weapons of mass destruction passing under their noses. Abyssinia was a honeypot for ambitious writers hoping to make a name for themselves. The most famous, subsequently, of these writers, Evelyn Waugh, wrote to the wife of a British cabinet minister: ‘i have got to hate the ethiopians more each day goodness they are lousy & i hope the organmen gas them to buggery’. ¹⁹ The ‘organmen’ did Waugh proud. Sir Aldo Castellani, a prominent Harley Street surgeon and father-in-law of the British High Commissioner in Egypt, discredited British reports about gassing by claiming that the photographs of gas victims actually showed lepers. He admitted the truth, in private, to his English friends. ²⁰ ‘No country believes that we ever intended business,’ lamented Sir Warren, ‘and our parade of force in the Eastern Mediterranean, so far as impressing others, has merely made a laughing stock of ourselves. All that is now needed to complete the opera bouffe is a headline in the newspapers, “Italians Occupy Addis Ababa, British evacuate Eastern Med”.’ ²¹ Dino Grandi, the Italian ambassador in London, reported that although the British realized, ‘the Italian empire in Ethiopia was also the Italian Mediterranean empire’, they feared to act. ²²

The Fascists oriented their Mediterranean quite differently from that of the British: north–south rather than west–east. Apart from metropolitan Italy, the pre-Fascist Italy–stretching around the northern end of the Adriatic to Pola, a naval base, and the city of Zara in Dalmatia–had acquired colonies from the dying Ottoman Empire: the twin lands of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in North Africa, and the islands of the Dodecanese in the Aegean, chief amongst them Rhodes, Cos and Leros.

Mussolini developed this existing empire. In 1936 he sent Cesare Maria De Vecchi, one of the ‘heroes’ of the Fascist seizure of power, to govern the Dodecanese. De Vecchi built himself a huge palace on Rhodes and managed to alienate the native population through a combination of excess and incompetence. He pursued, for instance, assimilation–banning all newspapers in Greek–and segregation–banning intermarriage–at the same time. ²³ The Italians fortified the islands, building airfields and naval facilities. Leros had a deep-water harbour from which destroyers, torpedo boats and submarines could operate. ²⁴ The island became known as ‘the Malta of the Aegean’. The Turks called it the ‘gun’ pointing at Turkey. They suggested to anyone who listened that the base was the first link in the chain that would give Italy dominance in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean. ²⁵

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. ²⁶ 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. ²⁷ 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. ²⁸ 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’. ²⁹ 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. ³⁰

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’. ³¹ 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. ³² 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. ³³ 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. ³⁴ 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. ³⁵ 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’. ³⁶

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’. ³⁷ 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’. ³⁸ 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. ³⁹

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. ⁴⁰ 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 ⁴¹ ‘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.’ ⁴² The head of the French navy, Admiral François Darlan, believed that Majorca was more important than Spain. ⁴³

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.’ ⁴⁴

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. ⁴⁵

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.’ ⁴⁶ 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’. ⁴⁷

The Turks, unlike the French, never tried to convince themselves that the Italians were friends. ⁴⁸ 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.’ ⁴⁹ 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.’ ⁵⁰

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. ⁵¹

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’. ⁵² 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. ⁵³ Now Fascism would rebuild ‘the fourth shore’, the empire in North Africa. It would be peopled by Italian colonists. ⁵⁴ 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’. ⁵⁵ 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.’ ⁵⁶ 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. ⁵⁷

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. ⁵⁸ 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. ⁵⁹

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. ⁶⁰ Fascism would thrive on heroic conflict. The road to world power was paved by catalytic wars rather than sneaky subversion. ⁶¹ 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. ⁶² 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’. ⁶³ 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. ⁶⁴ 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.’ ⁶⁵

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. ⁶⁶ Alexandria was the perfect laboratory for mezzi insidiosi. Italian submarines operated at the harbour mouth, shadowing British battleships whenever they left port. ⁶⁷

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. ⁶⁸ 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. ⁶⁹ 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’. ⁷⁰ 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’. ⁷¹

The foreign ministers of the ‘Mediterranean powers’ assembled in the Swiss town of Nyon to discuss what should be done about the ‘piracy’. ⁷² 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. ⁷³ 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.’ ⁷⁴ 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. ⁷⁵

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. ⁷⁶ 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. ⁷⁷ 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. ⁷⁸ 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.’ ⁷⁹

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. ⁸⁰ 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.’ ⁸¹

TWO
Death on the Nile

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’. ¹ 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’. ² Few informed observers doubted that, by 1937, Britain was faced by a serious crisis in the Muslim Mediterranean. ³ 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. ⁴

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. ⁵ 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’. ⁶ 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. ⁷

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. ⁸

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. ⁹ 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. ¹⁰

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’. ¹¹

In the wake of Fascism’s victory over the Christians of Abyssinia, important Muslim leaders were ready to heed Mussolini’s appeal for an anti-British alliance. First amongst them was Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, leader of radical Islam in Palestine. The Mufti was an elusive character. People tended to see in him what they wanted. He was regarded by some as a charming moderate. Those who crossed him found that he was cruel, merciless and unbalanced: they would fear his assassins for the rest of their often shortened lives. The British High Commissioner in Palestine, Sir Arthur Wauchope, said of the Mufti that as time passed wicked Dr Jekyll became dominant over the more moderate Mr Hyde. It was a revealing slip: in Stevenson’s original story Mr Hyde is evil personified. Hitler refused to believe that the Mufti was a Semite at all. In the skewed vision of the Nazis he became a blond, blue-eyed Aryan, albeit one spoilt by miscegenation. The Grand Mufti was known to his Palestinian enemies as ‘the spider’ or ‘Rasputin’. ¹²

The Mufti had once been Britain’s favourite Muslim. The mandatory government had sponsored his rise during the 1920s as a traditional aristocrat willing to collaborate with them in crushing secular militants. In 1934 the Mufti’s power base, the Supreme Muslim Council of Palestine, was given an astonishingly generous financial settlement. The British congratulated themselves that the Mufti’s religious charisma gave him dominion over the peasantry, inoculating them against the dangers of extremism. The Mufti put it differently. He had always hated the English. His goal was their total overthrow, but it was foolish to launch a revolt unprepared. The best approach was to undermine British power covertly, whilst preparing the jihad. With British money the Mufti created cohorts of officials loyal to him. One of his relatives toured the villages around Jerusalem, as a member of the land settlement department, creating a jihadist organization, known as the Sacred Holy War. Sacred Holy War created training camps where members of the Palestine police and the Syrian army trained insurgents. ¹³ As the Mufti told a Nazi diplomat, the Muslims of Palestine hoped fervently for ‘the spread of fascist and anti-democratic leadership to other countries’. ¹⁴

Britain’s second foe was Ali Maher Pasha, minister of the royal household, éminence grise to the monarchs of Egypt. ¹⁵ Radio Bari blared that the English hypocrites took risks for infidel savages, the Abyssinians, but reduced civilized Muslims to slavery. Ali Maher’s mobs cheered Mussolini as a Copt killer–the Patriarch of the Abyssinian church being traditionally chosen from amongst the Coptic monks of Egypt. Unlike the Grand Mufti, Ali Maher’s espousal of violent Mohammedanism was not particularly sincere. His loathing of democracy, however, was just as real. In his view the ‘illiterate electorate’ should be no more than the attendees of disciplined rallies as in Fascist Italy. His main purpose was to recruit zealous thugs. Like the Italians he looked to the Green Shirts of Young Egypt as potential shock troops. His alliance with the sheikhs provided him with squads of embittered young men who found that their religious education was mocked by secular technocrats. Ali Maher could put violent gangs on the streets. He knew, however, that he had to bide his time.

The true mass movement in Egypt was the Wafd, ‘the Delegation’, the secular anti-royalist nationalist party created at the end of the First World War. The Wafd, too, was determined to make use of the Abyssinian War to its best advantage. Enemies of the Wafd charged that it was a Coptic conspiracy, its second-in-command and most outspoken radical, Makram Ubeid, was a Christian, reviled as ‘Master William’ by his Muslim opponents. Ubeid too, however, admired the Black Shirts. He raised his own paramilitary militia, the Blue Shirts. Egypt proved one of the most prolific creators of movements which looked to Fascist Black Shirt street violence as a model for emulation. Ciano’s agents had great success in recruiting genuine Black Shirts from amongst the Italian population in Egypt. When Ciano visited in 1936, twenty thousand Black Shirts greeted him. ¹⁶ The appeal of Fascist methods was potent. The Wafd leadership remained, however, Italophobes. They saw little advantage in swapping British imperialism for the Italian variety ¹⁷ After much thought, the leader of the Wafd, Nahas Pasha, denounced the Italian bogey. The Blue Shirts were turned upon the Green Shirts. Nahas and the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Miles Lampson, agreed that the best answer to ‘Italian intrigue’ was an Anglo-Egyptian treaty ¹⁸ The treaty would serve both their interests. The British could tell the world that they had secured untrammelled rights to bases around the Suez Canal. Nahas could tell the Egyptians that he had secured independence. ¹⁹

The tawdry insincerity of the Anglo-Egyptian negotiations provided fertile ground for Ali Maher and his Fascist allies to exploit. In Farouk, the boy-king of Egypt, Ali Maher saw the perfect blank canvas from which he could create an Islamo-Fascist monarchy. The Wafd’s elderly candidate for head of the royal household was discredited by his dalliance with a seventeen-year-old Austrian girl. With his competitor disposed of, Ali Maher became once again officially the King’s chief adviser. Farouk invited a circle of Italian Fascist advisers to the Palace. Chief amongst them was the ‘royal architect’. He did little design work. Instead he was a conduit for intelligence and influence to flow between Rome and Cairo. His influence was cemented by his equally important role of royal pander, supplying the young European girls so prized at Court. ²⁰

Fascists in the Palace were not Nahas’s only problem. The Wafd had won power by aping Fascist models of street violence. Yet it was unclear whether they controlled the power on the streets that they had unleashed. The gangs created in the image of the Black Shirts did not necessarily agree with their leader’s contention that the British, although repugnant, were better than the Italians. Although Nahas proclaimed himself‘supreme leader’ of the Blue Shirts, they increasingly appeared as much a threat as a boon. The government of Egypt had declared against the Italians but contained elements of Fascist decay within it. The Blue Shirts turned on their own corrupt pashadom. The Party had to use all the powers of the State to destroy its own mass movement, to the benefit of Ali Maher and the Palace.

Egyptian Islamo-Fascism emboldened others. ²¹ The Mufti of Jerusalem himself had never had much in common with his fellow Islamic militants in Egypt. Egyptian clerics dreaming of a Caliphate in Cairo distrusted their more charismatic Palestinian brother, who made no secret of his own ambition to lead Sunni Islam. The Egyptian Islamo-Fascist successes, however, egged on the Syrians. The Syrian National Bloc created its own paramilitaries on the Fascist model, the Steel Shirts. ²² The Syrian Emir Shakib Arslan, the best-known spokesman of militant Arab nationalism, whose anti-French, anti-British propaganda was financed in equal measure by Mussolini and Hitler, goaded the Mufti in the Palestinian press. ²³ The circumstances overrode the Mufti’s preference for mezzi insidiosi. ²⁴ The terrorist cells were activated. In April 1936 the Mufti himself arrived on the Mediterranean coast. Arabs started murdering Jews. The Mufti emerged as the head of the Arab Higher Committee. A general strike was declared. ²⁵ The priority of the strike was to close down Palestine’s modern commerce. The first target was the Mediterranean ports, and the railways which took imports inland. The struggle centred on Haifa, Palestine’s great hope for modernity. It contained a new port built by the British and the railway workshops, the largest industrial site in Palestine. ²⁶ Old Haifa was the base of the most notorious Islamic terrorists, the Black Hand. Modern Haifa was a heterogeneous place with many new immigrants. There, where the strike could have had most effect, its hold was patchy. On the other hand, the old Arab port of Jaffa was completely closed down. In order to solidify the strike in Haifa, and maintain it in Jaffa, the leaders of the revolt required a great deal of money. They needed to offer wavering Arab workers alternative incomes. Appeals to fellow Muslims raised very little. ²⁷

The Italians, on the other hand, were more than willing to provide the Mufti with ‘millions’. Both the Italians and the insurgents got what they wanted. British troops were transferred from the Egyptian-Libyan border to Palestine, where they struggled to deal with terrorism. At last it seemed that money and violence would close down Haifa. In extremis, the British Army acted decisively. It sent troops into Haifa to protect those who kept working. But British success in Haifa provoked even more violence. Insurgents took to the countryside. If they could not close the ports they would sabotage the economy inland. In the towns the paramilitaries forced shops to close, preventing what arrived at the ports from being sold. Foreign fighters arrived from around the Arab world. Those with military training were able to deploy heavier weapons such as machine guns, making the bands even more deadly.

The British response was hobbled by disagreement over the nature of the revolt. Sir John Dill, the officer dispatched from Britain to deal with the insurgents, argued that the surest and most effective way of crippling the uprising was to decapitate it. He wanted to eliminate the Mufti. The High Commissioner in Palestine, Sir Arthur Wauchope, however, remained the Mufti’s dupe. Wauchope’s own desire that Palestine should become a peaceful, multi-racial, multi-religious society, led him astray. ²⁸ The effect, one of his senior police officials remarked, was a policy of glossing things over’. ²⁹ In the autumn of 1936 London finally agreed to overrule Wauchope. He was ordered to extirpate the leaders of the revolt. Despite these orders Wauchope remained determined to subvert the ‘hard policy’. His first response was to wash his hands of his responsibilities, for he must remain ‘the Kindly Father’ of the Arabs. As the day of martial law drew near, he warned the Arab Higher Committee that he would soon be unable to protect them. The Mufti heeded Wauchope’s warning. Just before the Army moved in to arrest the leaders of the revolt, the Arab Higher Committee decreed that they had won and the strike would end. With his power intact the High Commissioner was able to override any plans to hunt down the insurgents. Foreign fighters merely crossed the border into Syria whilst home-grown terrorists returned unmolested to their day jobs. As Dill bitterly observed, a great proportion of the fighting power of the British army had been deployed to achieve a paper victory ³⁰

By the time Mussolini unsheathed the sword of Islam in Tripoli, the Mufti was planning an even greater uprising in Palestine. His Italian lire funded a meeting of militants at Bludan, well recorded since the ‘Colonel Race’ of Syria, Colonel MacKereth, managed to sneak in an agent disguised as an ice-seller. ³¹ Compromised, the Mufti fled. In the first of the escapes that added glamour to his sinister fame, he climbed down the walls of his Jerusalem mosque, sped to the Mediterranean coast by car and boarded a boat for Lebanon. Once safely in Beirut he declared Jihad against the British. It was launched on 26 September 1937. ³² In November 1937, when the British decided to send more troops to the eastern Mediterranean, the reinforcements went to Palestine. Far from deterring Mussolini, the so-called ‘Middle East strategic reserve’ was tied down by his Islamic allies in emergency counter-insurgency Twenty thousand troops, including eighteen infantry battalions, were deployed in the country ³³ Mussolini’s jihad even won the admiration of Hitler, who had previously dismissed the Arabs as lacquered apes. ³⁴

Ciano, famously, dismissed the efficacy of political mezzi insidiosi. ‘For years,’ he moaned to the German ambassador in Rome, ‘he had maintained constant relations with the Grand Mufti, of which his secret fund could tell a tale.’ Sadly, Ciano lamented, ‘the return of his gift of millions had not been exactly great’. Militarily, all he had got for his money was a few bands of Muslim insurgents willing to sabotage the oil pipeline that ran from northern Iraq to the Mediterranean coast at Haifa. But Ciano was speaking after Italy had declared war on Britain. Subversion was then of little importance to immediate military campaigns. ³⁵ As Otto von Hentig, the premier German expert on oriental subversion, pointed out, the erosion of British power in the Mediterranean would take years rather than months. In Egypt, Ali Maher was Prime Minister, although he was too wily to twit British power openly. With the greatest difficulty the British had been able to smother the second intifada. ³⁶ It was only in July 1939 that Britain, at last, managed to transfer troops from Palestine to the Egyptian-Libyan frontier. A remarkable amount had been achieved in only four years. Mussolini had acted as a beacon of hope for all those who hated the British. The tangible links between Islamic militancy and Fascism were actually less important than a vision of the future. The Italians had shown that British rule was not inescapable. ‘The old impression of invulnerability has gone,’ concluded one intelligence report, ‘and while there are many who believe that England can still hold her own in the Mediterranean, there are just as many who question her ability to do so.’ ³⁷ It was possible to plan, and fight for, the illiberal, undemocratic bright horizon. ³⁸

THREE
Of Mice and Men

In the spring of 1939 the great Mediterranean navies had a burst of enthusiasm for killing each other. The Royal Navy found release from its own problems in fantasizing about giving the despised ‘Itiy’ a good drubbing. ¹ The Regia Marina reached the height of its fervour for Fascist manliness. The most enthusiastic champion of a Mediterranean war was, however, the French Marine and in particular its charismatic leader Jean-François Darlan. Darlan had furiously politicked his way to the top. He cultivated an image as a ‘liberal’ ready to bring the navy out of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. His fellow admirals did not altogether trust him. Most of them respected or feared his skills. They knew he had the ear of their political masters. They realized that Darlan had sedulously placed his own allies in positions of influence during his rise to the top.

The royal republicans of the Marine understood that France’s best guarantee against Italian belligerence was the dominant power of Britain in the Mediterranean. This knowledge did not make them happy. France should have had a great role in the Mediterranean. She had a powerful fleet. That fleet had modern bases to both the north and the south: Toulon in metropolitan France, Oran in Algeria, Bizerta in Tunisia. Bizerta was the ‘key naval base of the Middle Mediterranean’, commanding the narrow seas between Sicily and Tunisia. Bizerta struck one British observer in the spring of 1939 as ‘the most magnificent harbour on the whole African coast’. The bay was large and deep enough to accommodate the entire French fleet. Unlike the main British naval base in the central Mediterranean, Malta, its Tunisian hinterland could provision and support that fleet even in time of war. ²

Unfortunately, however many great warships and magnificent facilities they possessed, at root the task of the French navy was to transport the French army from North Africa to southern France. This was hardly the glorious sea-spanning mission of a true battlefleet. But there was a golden scenario. If the Royal Navy was to fight Italy, it would seek an ally. French strength in the western Mediterranean would be indispensable; but so too would be France’s assets in the eastern Mediterranean. The British would invite the French to sail, not just north and south on their unglamorous supply route, but east to glory. The odds in a naval war between France and Italy were too close to take the risk; the odds in a Mediterranean conflict between a Franco-British alliance and Italy were quite excellent. At the end of the struggle the French navy would be victorious, it would have achieved gloire. Most importantly of all, the Marine would have inserted itself into the eastern Mediterranean whence it was doubtful whether its erstwhile allies could dislodge it. The thought of the British fighting France’s war to their own disadvantage was an appealing opportunity.

Darlan’s plan was a difficult concept to sell to his own countrymen, let alone the British. Most French army and air-force officers were fixated on the defence of France’s land frontiers, not ambitious naval operations far from home. Until the spring of 1939 the official position of the defence establishment was in favour of an alliance with Mussolini rather than for a war against him. ³ As the most enthusiastic military supporter of a campaign in the eastern Mediterranean, Maxime Weygand, put it: ‘if one’s range of vision were limited to distant horizons, one ran the risk of being like La Fontaine’s astrologer who, walking with his eyes fixed on the stars, fell into a well’. ⁴ Why couldn’t they see, Darlan demanded, that a war was coming in which France and Britain would be pitched against Germany, Italy, Japan and, he feared, Spain? That war would not be won by cowering behind the Maginot Line. War was about grand strategy, it was won by attack rather than defence and, Darlan maintained, the Mediterranean was the key to both. A great coalition war would not be a short affair. It would be a long struggle decided by which side was the most successful in mobilizing its resources. He argued that ‘a significant part of British and French supplies and, in particular, almost all the oil extracted from the French, British and Russian oil fields in the East depends on the mastery of the Mediterranean’. More importantly still, the Mediterranean offered the avenue by which Germany and Italy could be outflanked. Now, ‘above all,’ Darlan observed, ‘the Mediterranean constitutes the only communication line with our Central European allies’. The pivot of such a line would be the city of Salonika in north-east Greece. ⁵

Allied to his grand vision Darlan possessed a formidable talent for short-term political manipulation. Unable to convince the stolid military types, he appealed to worried politicians peering uncertainly into l’âbime. Rather nervously they agreed to consider his ideas. The political elite was far from endorsing Darlan’s scheme but they did allow him to insert the possibility of a Mediterranean war into the machinery of planning. ⁶

As ever it was Mussolini who transformed a dry debate about future possibilities into a pressing necessity for action. ⁷ At the end of November 1938, Mussolini ordered Ciano to terrify France. The Italian foreign minister presented himself in the Chamber of Deputies to espouse the ‘natural aspirations’ of the Italian nation. In response, the Deputies and those in the galleries erupted in chants of ‘Tunisia, Corsica, Nice, Savoy’. These chants, if taken literally, reflected a series of territorial demands that would have made Italy the dominant power in the western Mediterranean, not to mention dismembering metropolitan and colonial France. To agree to these demands would have finished France as a serious power and provoked an internal revolution. Even the hardiest of French appeasers found it impossible to imagine how a compromise might be reached if Ciano’s audience was a genuine sounding board for Italian ambitions–and Ciano affected to believe that he had ‘expressed their aspirations, which are those of the nation’. ⁸

One possible response was Nelsonian deafness. ‘According to some accounts,’ the British ambassador Lord Perth reported to London, the prolonged acclamations for Ciano, ‘included cries of “Tunis, Tunis”, though they were not distinguishable from the Diplomatic Gallery where I was seated.’ ⁹ Even the Fascist stage-managers appeared a little confused as to what they should be demanding. The gallery claque were supposed to cry for Tunis and Corsica, but not only was Nice added for good measure but a few enthusiastic souls shouted a demand for Morocco as well. ¹⁰ Mussolini told the Fascist Grand Council, swearing them to secrecy, that his actual programme was to seize Albania and ‘then, for our security needs in the Mediterranean which still constrains us, we need Tunis and Corsica’. ¹¹ Even the Duce acknowledged that plans to dismember metropolitan France were unrealistic. Mussolini’s real aim, he told Ciano, was to sow confusion in preparation for the invasion of Albania. The furore would ‘distract local attention, allowing us a convenient preparation without stirring up any fear, and in the end induce the French to accept our going into Tirana.’ ¹²

Within a few days even Mussolini was moved to admit that they might have overdone it, since ‘continuing at this rate cannon will have to be put to use and the time has not yet arrived’. ¹³ The damage, however, had already been done. ¹⁴ The French had no mean intelligence service working against the Italians: it was conservatively estimated that France had over one thousand agents in Italy by the late 1930s. The contents of Mussolini’s ‘March to the Oceans’ found their way into French hands. Darlan’s warnings about the inevitability of war against a German-Italian Axis were, even his detractors in the French army were moved to admit, appearing more and more prescient by the day. The French Prime Minister, Edouard Daladier, made a highly publicized trip to Tunis in January 1939 to emphasize French willingness to fight for its Mediterranean possessions. He approved extra spending to prepare Tunisia against Italian attack. ¹⁵

Darlan was by no means finished with his manoeuvres. German and Italian bellicosity had finally convinced the appeasement-minded governments of Chamberlain and Daladier that their respective armed forces should be allowed to talk to one another. Darlan hoped to use these talks as a means of achieving his long-term goal of levering France into the eastern Mediterranean. In the short term he intended to use the British to clear away the objections of his colleagues. He found a willing ally in his British opposite number, the newly appointed First Sea Lord, Sir Roger Backhouse. Backhouse, too, was trying to overcome what he regarded as pusillanimous diplomatic appeasers in an attempt to get to grips with Mussolini. If anything he was even more aggressive than Darlan and advocated going straight for the Italian mainland. In the autumn of 1938 he had commissioned his chief planner, the grandiloquently named Sir Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, to start work on that basis. The French found Drax’s plans rather strong meat.

Italian naval planners had also worked themselves into a lather, if not of aggression, at least of bellicosity. The planners pointed out that an unexpected surprise attack on the British, preceding the outbreak of a general war, might be the best way to achieve their goal. If no such ‘knockout blow’ was forthcoming then the Italians would wait until they had assembled a big enough army in Libya. The army would then advance eastwards towards Egypt and the Suez Canal to ‘to defeat the main enemy at a vital point and open one of the doors that close Italy off from free access to the oceans’. ¹⁶ The navy did, however, add one important caveat to these ambitious plans. Although the ‘system of defence’ that would divide the Mediterranean was plausible, and could be erected in fairly short order, the deployment of the main battlefleet was more problematic. There were only two harbours capable of handling the most modern battleships, both of them historic hangovers more suited for the coastal operations of an earlier age. Genoa was too exposed to attack. Indeed both Darlan and Backhouse had identified it as one of their first targets for naval bombardment. Venice and the Adriatic seaboard were too far from the central Mediterranean. The answer to this problem was a new naval base at Taranto in the far south of the Italian mainland; but it was not due to come into full operation before 1942.

The perceived caution of the naval planners prompted derision from the other services. Mutual inter-service mud-slinging offered an opportunity for Marshal Badoglio, the Chief of Supreme General Staff, who, for all his prestige, was usually kept away from real decision-making, to intervene. ¹⁷ Badoglio thought that the war talk was dangerous nonsense. Mussolini’s rhetoric, he assured the military chiefs, was just that. He himself had talked to Mussolini. He had assured Badoglio that Ciano’s speech and his own statements to the Fascist Grand Council were merely a blind for the limited operation in Albania. Badoglio’s timing was poor. On the day that the chiefs met, news arrived in Rome that Barcelona had fallen; victory in Spain, Mussolini said, bore only one name, his own. He had persevered when nay-sayers such as Badoglio had despaired. Mussolini always delighted in making the Marshal appear cowardly and foolish. The very next day the Duce contradicted his most distinguished soldier and declared that he was indeed intending to ‘wage war and defeat France destroying everything and levelling many cities’. ¹⁸

On 7 April 1939, Italian forces invaded Albania. The self-proclaimed king of the tiny Muslim nation on the Adriatic, Zog, had done his best to accommodate Italian demands down the years, telling his countrymen that we must make speedy and strong paces towards occidental culture and civilisation’. He had even sent his sisters into the mountain strongholds of Islamic fanaticism dressed in tight-fitting skirts to propagate the new Italian way ¹⁹ Despite Zog’s willingness to please, Galeazzo Ciano had concluded that it would be much more satisfactory if he, rather than ‘an Oriental’, should receive the homage of Albania’s feudal society Formally, his intention was to annex the ‘made up’ nation to the Italian crown. In reality Albania would become the private playground of the Fascist elite. There they could build their hunting lodges, change the names of whole regions and enrich themselves by the exploitation of Albania’s presumed oil reserves. ²⁰ Albania, Ciano said, was a ‘beautiful spectacle’, the Mediterranean ‘like a mirror’ giving way to green countryside and then the snow-crowned mountains. ²¹

Ciano’s original plan was to have Zog assassinated, his only qualm a lingering fondness for Zog’s wife, Queen Geraldine. ²² The assassination plot was discovered. In its place Ciano convinced Mussolini that a full-scale invasion could win the prize with minimum effort. Even the cautious Badoglio agreed that a war limited to Albania could be carried through without too much trouble. He merely insisted that an even larger body of troops should be used to be on the safe side. ²³ The Albanian ‘incident’ itself was over within forty-eight hours. Zog fled to Greece without putting up any resistance. Observers described a triumph: the British military attaché in Rome reported that ‘the invasion of Albania was an example of the great progress made by the Italian army in military organisation on a large scale’. ²⁴

Those closer to the action were less sure. One of Ciano’s aides commented that ‘if the Albanians had possessed a corps of well-trained firemen they would have thrown us into the Adriatic’. ²⁵ Ciano himself, who made the short flight to Albania’s Italian-built Mediterranean port Durazzo on the day of the invasion, was delighted. The situation in the country was ‘excellent’. As Britain’s senior diplomat in Tirana noted, ‘whatever the deeper feeling of various sections of the Albanian people as a whole, the broad fact remains that on the political side the Italians carried through with much greater ease than might have been expected’. ²⁶ What was even better, Ciano remarked, was that the ‘international reaction was almost non-existent’. ²⁷ But despite the cordiality of the Britons on the spot, he was wrong. ²⁸ The invasion marked the start of feverish attempts by Britain to redefine the Mediterranean. ²⁹ Before the spring of 1939 there was talk; between the summer of 1939 and the summer of 1940 there was, if not action, at least organization.

The very terminology used for Britain’s new Mediterranean paid testimony to the now overriding concept of a ‘closed sea–impassable to merchantmen and difficult even for warships unless in great strength. If the Mediterranean was severed at the Sicilian Narrows, then British forces could still reach it from the east, albeit with difficulty. Thus, the argument went, the Mediterranean and the Middle East was clearly one strategic problem’. In the 1930s the RAF had started using the generic term ‘Middle East’ to refer to Egypt as well as Iraq, leading in turn to the application of the phrase to all British forces deployed around the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Sadly no one could quite agree on the nature or geographical extent of that problem. ³⁰ The Army’s concept was to create a General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Middle East. But until the crisis of the summer of 1939, the generals were unwilling to act on their own concept. The army commanders in Egypt and Palestine objected to having a commander imposed on them when their main challenge was internal revolt. They saw themselves as vice-regents of the eastern Mediterranean, in uneasy partnership with their diplomatic and gubernatorial opposite numbers. So the Army parked its commander-in-chief-elect at the other end of the Mediterranean in Gibraltar, ready to be rushed to Cairo in an emergency. ³¹ It was only in June 1939 that the GOC-in-C was activated. General Archie Wavell was finally dispatched to Egypt in August 1939. At that time he controlled two pieces of the Mediterranean littoral–Egypt and Palestine–and a major island, Cyprus. He was instructed to make arrangements to fight alongside three Mediterranean powers, France, Turkey and Greece; ‘a bit hectic if we have a war’, he commented with some understatement. ³²

The RAF already had a Mediterranean Command of sorts, since the Air Officer Commanding Malta also controlled air forces on Gibraltar. Some flyers wanted to move the Mediterranean west rather than east, arguing that Malta was indefensible and that Cairo was too far away from the real action. They were overruled, not least because the Army was moving east. The RAF, too, created an Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Middle East to sit alongside his Army counterpart. ³³

It was the Royal Navy who stood out for a true Mediterranean command. They had a Mediterranean Fleet and a Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean. The sailors were purists. Their Mediterranean stretched from Gibraltar to Suez, with Malta as the half-way point. They would have no truck with ideas of a unified Middle East and Mediterranean. Anything south of the Suez Canal was in the Indian Ocean as far as they were concerned. ³⁴ The navy also disliked the AOC-in-C Middle East. They wanted the AOC Mediterranean to be part of their organization; the RAF wanted him firmly under the command of their man in Cairo. The final compromise reached through the ‘alembic’ of the Chiefs of Staff placed the AOC Mediterranean under the ‘command and general direction’ of the AOC-in-C Middle East but with the authority to deal directly with the C-in-C Mediterranean. ³⁵

When the three commanders-in-chief met for the first time on 18 August 1939 on board the battleship HMS Warspite in Alexandria harbour they still couldn’t agree exactly where the Mediterranean was, or where they were going to control it from. The Army and the RAF were busy setting up their headquarters in Cairo. The Royal Navy was still equivocating between Malta and Alexandria. The C-in-C Mediterranean, Andrew Cunningham, himself admitted that he was ‘rather remote’. ³⁶ Even when the time came to move ‘lock, stock and barrel to Alexandria in a hurry’, there would be real difficulties for the Mediterranean commanders in talking to each other. ³⁷ Following naval tradition, Cunningham insisted on sleeping on his flagship. He was often at sea. Quite often when a Commanders-in-Chief meeting was called he would be unreachable, leaving behind a harassed and unauthoritative staff officer.

In the wake of the commanders-in-chief came a plethora of subsidiary organizations all seeking their place in the sun. For some years it had been acknowledged that commanders might need to know what was happening in the vast area they were supposed to control; equally they would probably need to know what the enemy intended to do to them. No one was collating such information, however. At the time of the Munich crisis in the autumn of 1938, naval intelligence detected troop ships sailing from Italy to Libya, but no one told the GOC Egypt who was supposed to defend Egypt against a surprise attack from Libya. Agents in Libya observed the troop ships arriving, but they communicated the information to the Foreign Office in London, who failed to decipher the telegram. When the telegram was finally read it was passed along Whitehall from the Foreign Office to the War Office. The War Office then telegraphed Cairo. All the communications went via London, and no one in the Mediterranean seemed to talk to one another. ³⁸

There were three schools of thought on this issue. One maintained that all such high matters of state should be decided in London. The military could be given the information they needed and ordered to get on with whatever operations the government decided upon. ³⁹ A second school retorted that this model of central control was unrealistic. Although London and Cairo could talk to each other fairly easily by telegraph, and personnel could be moved to and fro on aircraft, the Mediterranean was really a semi-autonomous world that needed its own sources of information. ⁴⁰ 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. ⁴¹

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. ⁴²

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. ⁴³ 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. ⁴⁴ 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. ⁴⁵

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.’ ⁴⁶ A triple alliance was formed between Britain, France and Turkey. ⁴⁷ 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. ⁴⁸ 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. ⁴⁹ 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. ⁵⁰ Halifax should have heeded his inner voice. The Turks were that deceitful, and they had said exactly what they meant. ⁵¹

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. ⁵² 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. ⁵³ 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’. ⁵⁴

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. ⁵⁵ 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. ⁵⁶ He assured his German friends that he had not colluded in the offer. ⁵⁷

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. ⁵⁸ Darlan, bereft of further British support, was forced to abandon his own plans. ⁵⁹

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’. ⁶⁰ 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. ⁶¹ ‘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. ⁶²

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. ⁶³ 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. ⁶⁴

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. ⁶⁵ 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. ⁶⁶ ‘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. ⁶⁷ 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’. ⁶⁸

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. ⁶⁹ 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. ⁷⁰ 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. ⁷¹

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’. ⁷²

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’. ⁷³

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. ⁷⁴

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. ⁷⁵ 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. ⁷⁶ ‘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?’ ⁷⁷ 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.’ ⁷⁸

FOUR
Gog & Magog

The Mediterranean war lived up to the expectations of those who had planned it. ¹ 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. ²

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. ³ The first naval mission of the war was minelaying in the Sicilian Narrows. ⁴ 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. ⁵ Contact mines proved to be ‘the primary menace in the Mediterranean’. ⁶ 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’. ⁷

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. ⁸ 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. ⁹

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. ¹⁰ Magog was James Somerville, sent from Britain with a fleet–known as Force H–to secure the western exit at Gibraltar. ¹¹ 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. ¹²

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. ¹³

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. ¹⁴ 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. ¹⁵ 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. ¹⁶ 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. ¹⁷ 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. ¹⁸

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. ¹⁹

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. ²⁰ 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’ ²¹ 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’. ²² ‘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.’ ²³ 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. ²⁴ 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. ²⁵ 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. ²⁶

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” ’. ²⁷ 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. ²⁸

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.’ ²⁹

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. ³⁰ Cunningham even believed that he would be able to talk Godfroy away from his allegiance to Darlan. ³¹ 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. ³² 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’. ³³ 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. ³⁴ 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. ³⁵

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. ³⁶ 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’. ³⁷

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. ³⁸ 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’. ³⁹ 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. ⁴⁰ 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. ⁴¹

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’. ⁴² 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 ⁴³

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. ⁴⁴ 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. ⁴⁵ 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. ⁴⁶ 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. ⁴⁷

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]’. ⁴⁸ 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. ⁴⁹ 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. ⁵⁰ Churchill was livid with his admirals, thundering that ‘warships are meant to go under fire’. ⁵¹

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 ⁵² 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’. ⁵³ 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. ⁵⁴

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. ⁵⁵ 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. ⁵⁶ 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. ⁵⁷ 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. ⁵⁸ 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. ⁵⁹

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’. ⁶⁰ 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. ⁶¹ 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. ⁶² 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. ⁶³ The fear of loss of emoluments, or worse, was too much for Graziani to bear. ⁶⁴ 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. ⁶⁵

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. ⁶⁶ 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”.’ ⁶⁷

Project G, the attack on Greece, was hatched in August 1940, after only a few days’ discussion, with the hope of an easy victory. Its architects were Ciano and his henchmen in Albania. Their motives were opportunistic. Mussolini wanted something to happen. The Ciano équipe were sucking money out of Albania for their own enrichment and glory–Ciano had renamed an Albanian port Edda, after his wife. If Albania got bigger then there would be more money and fame to suck. They quickly cobbled together all the border disputes that existed between Albania and Greece in Epirus and claimed all the land for Albania. They threw in the island of Corsica for good measure. This done, Ciano wheeled his men in to see Mussolini. To Ciano’s delight Mussolini thought the plan a good one. The first stage was his long-preferred method of intimidation. The movement of troops to the border and the use of terrorism might make ‘the Greeks cave in’. If threats didn’t work he was willing ‘to go to the limit’. ⁶⁸

Mussolini may have thought the plan good; his military commanders were aghast. The happiest man was De Vecchi. If there was going to be a war, the Italians wanted a casus belli. De Vecchi already had the means of inflammation in his own hands. Mussolini and Ciano were mulling over a ‘pirate submarine’ campaign of the kind they had used against Spain. The very evening that the idea was suggested to De Vecchi, he ordered the submarine Delfino out of Rhodes. The captain was told that he was to strike the first blow in an inevitable, if undeclared, war. De Vecchi’s haste was dictated by local knowledge: the next day marked the Panayia, the great Cycladic religious festival held on the Lourdes of the Aegean, Tinos. Each 15 August since 1822, the wonder-working icon of Our Lady of Tinos had been paraded from her shrine. There to do her honour in 1940 was the Greek cruiser EM. Predictably, given the nature of the occasion, the crew had given more thought to their decorations–the ship was bedecked with bunting–than their antisubmarine precautions. The Delfino slipped into the bay and torpedoed the Elli before sailing away, entirely unnoticed. ⁶⁹

Despite this spectacular violence to one of the Mediterranean’s most famous festivals, Mussolini engaged in weeks of hand-wringing about his decision. Ships were loaded with stores at Brindisi and Bari, they were then unloaded and the stores dispersed. Men were mobilized for transfer to Albania, then the army high command rescinded the order and the men stood down. Then the men were remobilized on the proviso that when they reached Albania they were not to go to the Greek frontier until further consideration had been given to the issue. There the matter lay. Before Mussolini would do anything he wanted to know whether his instrument in Africa, Graziani, would act.

Graziani did not, in the end, disappoint. Given no option, he ordered his forces into Egypt. To say that he led them into Egypt would be too strong a statement. The Marshal had taken a great liking to the Greek tombs of Cyrene. Not because of their historical value, but because they gave excellent shelter from attacks by British aircraft. Nevertheless, in his own way, he conducted a model operation. Mussolini had given him no territorial objective, he himself had no wish to advance. The best answer was surely to advance for the shortest distance possible. Graziani took as his target not the first town across the frontier, Sollum, but the second town, Sidi Barrani, some twenty miles into Egypt. As an indefensible position that the British had no intention of holding, it couldn’t be bettered. Six days of confusion saw it seized for Fascism. The Italian flag at last flew over a piece of Egyptian real estate. Sidi Barrani was the final stop, travelling east–west, on the British coast road. Sidi Barrani thus had some claims of being a point of moderate importance on the Mediterranean coast. Before 1940 the traveller heading west ate a great deal of dust until he could reach the Balbia. Graziani’s men stopped and began the task of making the place habitable. They built themselves a proper road, ‘the Victory Way’, between Sollum and Sidi Barrani, considerably improving on previous British efforts. A tent city of most excellent quality was erected. History has not been kind to this operation, finding in it a means of mocking Italian martial virtues. But at the time it was enough. Mussolini was ‘radiant’ at the success of the operation. At last Italy had scored a ‘success in Egypt which gives her the glory she has sought in vain for three centuries’. ⁷⁰

The ‘triumph’ of Sidi Barrani was useful to Mussolini because he had before him a difficult set of manoeuvres. Hitler had set aside October 1940 as the month in which he would consult with his friends in the Mediterranean and decide on whom he wished to bestow his favour. Punta Stilo and Sidi Barrani do not measure up well to ‘total war’ but in the context of the autumn of 1940 they were rather more impressive than the abject defeat of France or the inglorious inaction of Spain. It was in Mussolini’s interest to belittle both. He had no reason to welcome a Hitler–Franco alliance, which would see the whole balance of the Mediterranean shift towards the struggle for Gibraltar. ⁷¹ Mussolini was confident, however, that Franco’s caution would keep him out of the war. He was much less sanguine about Pétain or his henchmen Darlan and Laval. On the surface it would be a good thing if the French acted on their hatred of the British; the Mediterranean would undoubtedly become the centre of the war, ‘which is good for us’. Looking deeper, however, Mussolini saw the French only as a problem. French arrogance would simply lead to one thing, ‘a bill’. What was the point of fighting the British if, at the end of it all, an equally noxious French power would wax in the south ?72 An alliance with France was ‘a cup of hemlock’. ⁷³

Mussolini and Hitler met twice in October 1940, on the Brenner at the beginning of the month and in Florence at the end. Mussolini had some difficulty in reading Hitler’s mind. The Führer and his minions were studies in ambivalence. Historians have had little more success in deciding for certain on Hitler’s intentions, even with access to diaries, documents and memoirs. Later writers divide into two schools of thought. Some believe that Hitler was content to let Mussolini fight a ‘parallel war’ in the Mediterranean–and strictly in the Mediterranean–and that there was a genuine alliance, if not of equals, then of partners. Others prefer the image of a ‘brutal friendship’ in which Hitler always intended to predate the Italians. The Germans certainly explored both options. The best that can be said is that Hitler himself had not made up his mind. He was awaiting events on his whistlestop tour of the minor railway stations and major railway tunnels of Europe. ⁷⁴ Waiting for Hitler to reveal his plans irked Mussolini, the twenty-four days between their two meetings being marked by fits of pique at not being privy to the Germans’ plans. Mussolini talked of paying back Hitler ‘in his own coin’; he could ‘find out from the papers that I have occupied Greece’. ⁷⁵

Franco certainly lived up to Mussolini’s billing. Hitler’s intelligence chief and Spanish expert, Wilhelm Canaris, warned him that when he arrived at the pleasant French railway station of Hendaye he would find ‘not a hero but a little pipsqueak’. So indeed it proved: the Führer was irritated by the Caudillo’s ‘monotonous sing-song reminiscent of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer’. He told Mussolini: ‘rather than go through that again, I would prefer to have three or four teeth taken out’. Doubtless, the fat little Spanish dictator was without charm. At root, however, the Hendaye fiasco–reinforcing racial stereotypes, Franco’s train was late, whereas Hitler’s super-express, Amerika, was bang on time–was about the universal greed of the Fascists. Franco wanted something for nothing, massive German subsidies and a Mediterranean empire. Amerika had come from another small French station, Montoire, where Pierre Laval had been the guest, and shuttled back there the next day so that Hitler could interview Pétain. The Frenchmen both said the same thing, protect us from Spain. There was no grand Mediterranean alliance for the Germans to stitch together. ⁷⁶ Britain’s enemies, whether in Madrid or Vichy, each wanted to ‘displace England from the Mediterranean’, but would act only if Hitler gave them terms mutually damaging each to the other. ⁷⁷

On this note, Hitler and Mussolini greeted each other in Florence. That morning Italian forces crossed the Albanian border into Greece. Hitler warmly congratulated the Duce on his bold action. Unlike the scratchy meetings at Hendaye and Montoire, Florence was a triumph of Axis amity. ‘German solidarity has not failed us,’ declared a triumphant and relieved Ciano. ⁷⁸ Mussolini had his ‘parallel war’; he had sprung a surprise–although the preparations, if not the exact timing, of the invasion were apparent to the Germans.

28 October 1940 was Mussolini’s best day in the Mediterranean. His armies were firmly encamped in Egypt, and on the move in Epirus. His ally was full of encouragement and compliments, his Mediterranean rivals had shown their weakness, the British were confused. In hindsight, of course, no one had much good to say for the day. It presaged an Italian military disaster. The only people who remembered the date with any warmth were the Greeks. It gave them a rare opportunity for military glory, magnified years later when the victor of 1940, the army’s commander-in-chief, Alexander Papagos, became dictator.

For a few hours it seemed that all would be well for the Italians. The Albanian-Greek border was divided into two sectors, and the Italians allocated an army to each. Epirus, the more southerly front, ran down to the Adriatic. The Italian goal in Epirus was the coastal city of Prevesa. Across a narrow seaway from Prevesa lay Corfu, Italy’s key Mediterranean claim on Greece. The more northerly Pindus front was wholly inland. Both frontiers were mountainous, offering few goat tracks and even fewer roads. The Greeks recoiled at the first Italian assault, more so in the Pindus. For a moment it seemed that the Italian commander had achieved the holy grail of operational art, the encirclement battle, his army in the south pinning the Greeks, whilst his northern army swept behind them for a rear attack. Within days, however, the Greeks launched a counter-attack and did the unthinkable: they pushed all Italian troops off their soil and invaded Albania. ⁷⁹ Prevesa and the Adriatic coast became a distant dream. Italian troops in Epirus may have been fighting mere tens of miles from the Mediterranean but they were in a different world. That difference was summed up by the fate of the Siena Division, comprising recruits from southern Italy. Tortured by blizzards and severe cold, slain as much by frostbite as by the Greeks, the Siena broke and fled before an exploratory mortar attack from Greek reconnaissance troops. ⁸⁰

The Greek campaign set in motion changes around the Mediterranean basin. Badoglio had been the Cassandra of the Greek operation. His constant predictions of disaster had irritated Mussolini and had allowed his enemies to deride his cowardice. Few had listened to his specific suggestions and warnings. In his last conversation with Ciano before the invasion, Italy’s senior military leader had pointed out that if the British were operating freely from Greek waters then the fleet at Taranto would no longer be safe’. ⁸¹ No one listened to Badoglio. Taranto offered the huge sheltered expanse of the Mar Grande. As soon as the fleet sallied out of Taranto it was in the right place. The port had hummed with activity throughout 1940 as, one by one, Caio Duilio, Vittorio Veneto, Andrea Doria, Italy’s battleships were completed or completed modernization there. Along with the Littorio, the Cavour and the Giulio Cesare they comprised Italy’s entire battleship fleet. When the invasion of Greece still seemed a glorious triumph, the fleet at Taranto was blessed with a visit from Mussolini and Ciano. It was a shining symbol of Italian power and modernity. ⁸²

Cunningham had harboured a plan to attack Taranto for months but it barely seemed practicable, ‘the bridge between planning and execution’ being a wide one’. ⁸³ Five factors improved the chances of success in the autumn of 1940: the arrival of the modern aircraft-carrier Illustrious via the Suez Canal, the invention of long-range fuel tanks for the elderly torpedo-bombers used by the British, the upgraded detonation systems for British torpedoes, reconnaissance aircraft on Malta, and unseasonably good weather. ⁸⁴ The operation was still a long shot. It was also a sideshow. ⁸⁵ The main event was a combined Mediterranean Fleet and Force H operation to bridge the Mediterranean gap by passing a battleship, Barham, from west to east. The secondary objective was to run a major convoy from the eastern Mediterranean into Malta. The tertiary objective was linked with the Greek campaign. With Suda Bay now open to him, Cunningham intended to escort ships marooned in Malta out to Crete. It was only once he had achieved his central goal of temporarily opening the Mediterranean that Cunningham could afford to give his offensive instincts rein. Even then Taranto was but one of two subsidiary attacks. The other was a dash by cruisers and destroyers through the Straits of Otranto, between Italy and Greece, so that they might attack Italian supply convoys plying between Brindisi and Albania. Doubtless, this daring operation, which after all constituted the main element of the ‘not very much’ aid to Greece, would have attracted more attention if it had not got caught in the lee of Taranto.

The Illustrious and her escorts left the fleet after the main mission was completed on the evening of 11 November 1940, and sailed to Cephalonia, 170 miles away from Taranto. Twenty-one aircraft torpedo-bombers, bombers and flare-droppers, curved round to hit the Mar Grande in two waves from the west. Success was instantaneous: the lead aircraft of ‘Hooch’ Williamson and ‘Blood’ Scarlett, coming in so low that its wings touched the sea, scored the best hit–its torpedo sank the battleship Cavour. By the time both waves had passed through the harbour, three more torpedoes had hit the Littorio, the most powerful ship in the Italian fleet. Perhaps even more remarkably, the surviving aircraft were able to fly back to the Illustrious which in turn rejoined the Mediterranean Fleet. It was hard to know whether the Italians or the British were more surprised by their success. Early press reports attributed the attack to the RAF rather than the Fleet Air Arm; Cunningham was thought mealy-mouthed for not thinking to put Williamson up for the VC.

No one knew what effect Taranto would truly have. ⁸⁶ The Italians had lost two battleships–but it was unclear for how long. Those assessing the raid were right to be cautious because despite the three holes in its hull, the Littorio did not sink; it was rapidly repaired. Even worse, the remaining battleships had fled Taranto. They headed for Naples. No aircraft spotted them, no intercepts revealed their whereabouts. A still formidable battlefleet was at sea and the British had no idea where it was or what it was doing. Somerville was cautious; faced with the possibility of the Italian fleet emerging unexpectedly from any fog bank, he argued that nothing had changed. ⁸⁷

Taranto momentarily divided the Cunningham–Somerville alliance in the Mediterranean. Having had time to consider his own triumph, Cunningham declared that it had opened the Mediterranean. ⁸⁸ The time had come to embrace what they had both hitherto branded as madness: Churchill’s plan to take a convoy, not only of warships, but slow-moving tank ships all the way through the Mediterranean, west to east from Gibraltar to Alexandria. ⁸⁹

Somerville had no hope of competing with a Churchill–Cunningham alliance. He was an unwilling cog in an inexorable post-Taranto wheel. The tank ships were to go from Gibraltar to Alexandria, the battleship Ramillies was to pass in the opposite direction back to Gibraltar, escort ships were to sail from the western to the eastern basin, convoys too would sail into Malta from both east and west. The Mediterranean would be free for the British to do as they wished. Somerville was far from convinced. The obvious strategy for the Italians, he believed, was to strike back against their setback in the eastern basin with an offensive in the west. What was he supposed to do, he enquired, if wallowing around south of Sardinia with a battleship, an aircraft-carrier useless at short range, a few light cruisers, and a convoy of slow supply ships, he was ambushed by all those battleships and heavy cruisers evicted from Taranto? He was told to stop complaining. ⁹⁰

Since the 1930s two opposing concepts of the Italian threat in the Mediterranean had butted up against each other in British thinking. Should one respect the modern ships, the concentration of the fleet, the good bases, the fine seamanship, or should one dismiss all these advantages because of an ill-defined but powerful feeling that the Italians were not ‘up for it’? It was a big gamble to take, since nearly everyone who had argued for the superiority of morale over firepower in modern warfare had been proved catastrophically wrong. The battle of Cape Spartivento on 27 November 1940 resolved none of these arguments. ⁹¹

It was a close-run thing. Somerville rendezvoused with his convoy just after half-past nine on the morning of 27 November 1940. He was in the ‘danger zone’ south of Sardinia that he had identified before sailing. Three-quarters of an hour later, a spotter aircraft landed on Ark Royal. Its report led to the conclusion that the Italian fleet was nearby. Further aircraft were flown off; they were able to report the Italian fleet turning south towards Somerville. ⁹² Force H was facing Admiral Campioni with the battleships Vittorio Veneto and Giulio Cesare escorted by a powerful cruiser force. For one and a quarter hours, Somerville was convinced he was in for a desperate capital-ship battle against superior forces. He, rightly, had no confidence that his torpedo-bombers, whatever their recently proved excellence against ships at anchor, could hit fast warships at sea. ⁹³ His saving grace was the appearance of Ramillies, heading west as planned. Although the Ramillies was an old and slow warship, two battleships against two evened up the odds. That was most certainly Campioni’s view: he turned his battleships round and they ‘ran like stags’ up the east coast of Sardinia. ⁹⁴ Somerville gave chase but in less than half an hour, ‘in view of our rapid approach to the enemy coast, now 30 miles distant, I had to decide whether a continuation of the chase justified’. In his view from the bridge, it was not. His primary mission was to escort the convoy, not to chance his warships. He turned away from Sardinia and headed back to the south. ⁹⁵ Somerville’s choice was undoubtedly correct: taking capital ships within easy range of a militarized enemy coast was potentially suicidal. The enemy would have had to have been Lilliputian rather than Italian. Not that he received any thanks for his good sense. Cunningham’s lustre dimmed his own. The flags that met him in Gibraltar were quickly pulled down, Churchill accused him of cowardice; dismissal from the service was mooted. In the end Cunningham’s support saved him. ⁹⁶

It was Cavagnari and Campioni who lost their jobs. De Vecchi and Badoglio too, were dismissed. In order to protect its leader, the revolution began to eat itself. ⁹⁷ Days later, further humiliation was heaped on the Italians. Wavell, well equipped with supplies delivered from both the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, ordered an attack in North Africa. Wavell’s idea was to secure Egypt by the recapture of Sidi Barrani. He did not believe that he was launching a great offensive, indeed his intention was to shift the main direction of operations against Mussolini’s swollen east African empire, once he had secured the Libyan position. This was not quite what Churchill had in mind: that the Italians should be ‘ripped off the African shore. Wavell’s operation was more in the nature of a raid. Whilst a diversionary force made its way along the coast road from Mersa Matruh towards Sidi Barrani, the main ‘Western Desert Force’ swung through the desert to the south. Their targets were the huge camps that Graziani had been happily building around Sidi Barrani. As the troops reached the target, they peeled off to the left and right, each unit taking its assigned camp. Although the movement of British forces was spotted by Italian aircraft, surprise was almost complete. The camp-dwellers either surrendered or fled back down the coast.

Within a few days all the settlements along the Egyptian coast were back in British hands. Sollum, ‘the most distinctive spot in the Western Desert’, where immense 600-foot-high cliffs falling from the desert plateau clipped the Mediterranean coast, was recaptured on 16 December 1940. From upper Sollum, the British once more surveyed the great curve of the bay to the Libyan frontier. They were as impressed by the Italian improvements to the comfort of life as they were disparaging about Italian efforts at fighting. Emboldened by this success Wavell met with Cunningham and Arthur Longmore in Cairo. They agreed that they could move part of the way with Churchill’s demand for ‘ripping the shore’. An advance into Cyrenaica would be possible in the New Year, its target Mediterranean ports, first Bardia, but ultimately Tobruk. ⁹⁸

On the day Sollum fell, Churchill lamented that the future was quite unclear. Hitler might involve himself with the Balkans, but Churchill thought that this was unlikely. He might take over the Italian war effort, unlikelier still since ‘that would not be a victory for him’. Churchill’s best guess was that the Germans would come to the Mediterranean to take over French North Africa. ⁹⁹ In fact Hitler’s mind was elsewhere: he was busy issuing the order for ‘Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. ¹⁰⁰ Two days after the Barbarossa decision Mussolini reluctantly admitted to his confederates that, sooner or later, they were going to have to ask for Germany’s help. ¹⁰¹

FIVE
Mediterranean Eden

The Mediterranean image of early 1941 was columns of marching men. They wore Italian uniform and they were walking towards Egypt in great snakes of humanity. They did not come as victors but as the defeated. Hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers trudged towards captivity, their journey immortalized by eager pressmen. Wavell’s ‘raid’ just kept heading west. On 4 January 1941 Wavell’s forces captured Bardia. Eighteen days later they reached Tobruk. Wavell had given his field commander, General O’Connor, two divisions for the campaign. They faced up to ten Italian divisions. The numbers of tanks possessed by each side was more even. Indeed the British and Italian tank forces were roughly equivalent both in terms of numbers and quality. The Italian tanks were grouped together in the elite Brigata Corazzata Speciale commanded by General Babini. At Tobruk O’Connor split his forces, sending the 7th Armoured Division towards Mechili, inland, where he believed that the main body of Italian tanks was deployed. His Australian infantry carried on along the coast towards the town of Derna. On 24 January 1941 the two tank forces ran into each other near Mechili. The battle itself was indecisive. The Italians lost nine tanks, the British seven. Some of the Italian tankers believed that they had done enough damage to start a counter-attack. Graziani, however, would not hear of it. The battle was no more than a delaying action. On 3 February he withdrew from Benghazi. He told Mussolini that they would have to abandon Cyrenaica altogether. His aim was to send his forces to the end of the Balbia. They would hold the Sirtean desert as the forward defence line for Tripoli. There were rumours of much greater (and non-existent) British tank forces on the way.

Accordingly, Babini disengaged his force and retreated to the west. He and O’Connor still had equal numbers of ‘cruiser’ tanks. It was thus with some trepidation that O’Connor put forward a daring plan for the next stage of the advance. Instead of reuniting his forces he would send the armoured division south-west on a short-cut across the desert. They would try to cut the Balbia far to the south of Benghazi, rather than following the coast, taking each town in turn. Wavell and O’Connor met at Tmimi on the road to Derna on 4 February 1941: Wavell approved the plan. Thereafter events moved with great speed.

The reconnaissance elements of the 7th Armoured Division spotted Graziani’s 25,000-strong force retreating along the Balbia on 5 February. By the evening the tank forces themselves had reached the road near the small settlement of Beda Fomm. From a small hill by the roadside, known as ‘the Pimple’, they could survey a fourteen-mile stretch of road. They had reached ‘the Pimple’ before the Italians and thus cut off their line of retreat. It was up to Babini’s tanks to force a way through. The Italian tank force advanced with elan only to run into the dug-in British tanks. The Italians took heavy casualties. Nevertheless, about thirty tanks managed to force their way onto the road south of ‘the Pimple’. The Italian force was thus split. Most of the troops were stuck north of ‘the Pimple’. A powerful independent force of tanks was to the south of the hill, their escape route blocked only by a battalion of the Rifle Brigade supported by a battery of the Royal Horse Artillery. The next day the Italian tanks tried to make their breakthrough. The British gunners held firm, however, continuing to fire until the last of the desperate tanks stopped short of their line. By nine o’clock in the morning of 7 February 1941 it was all over. The Italian main force, deprived of its tanks, and with the Australians coming up behind them on the Balbia, surrendered. ‘Fox killed in the open,’ the triumphant British field commander signalled Wavell. ¹

In Rome they could barely believe what was happening to the ‘fourth shore’. The intelligence system that had once proved so adept at extracting juicy morsels from diplomats, failed to keep pace with the battle. The Fascist elite was reduced to listening to BBC radio broadcasts. First, news would arrive of defeat. Then garbled accounts of brave resistance would take its place. Mussolini made the final arrangements for his tryst with Hitler only when he had convinced himself that the defence of Bardia would restore honour to Italian arms. Surely, he would wail to his advisers, the generals would stop the English. The ‘heroic infantryman’ or the ‘king of artillery’ would find a way If not the generals, then the fortifications would delay the advance. If the fortifications failed, then the very land would provide succour. The British could not fight their way through desert and along coast. The task of working up and down the cliffs would prove too much. Finally, the full scale of defeat would become clear and recrimination would follow. At that moment news would arrive of yet another humiliating defeat by the Greeks. ²

To make matters worse, the British could not help crowing over their victories. It was not their fault that they were useless, Churchill told his Italian listeners. The disasters they were now enduring were the responsibility of one man, the Duce. ³ He had ‘ranged the Italian people in deadly struggle against the British empire’. He alone had created defeat; if he were to be removed then the Italians would be absolved both of crime and cowardice. ‘There stands’, they should cry, ‘the criminal who has brought the deed of folly on our land.’ The message was in a sense well judged–there were plenty in Mussolini’s own intimate circle who heard Churchill and agreed with him. ⁴ The cost of such barbs was nevertheless high. For years afterwards Churchill’s words would provide the constant alibi for Fascists and their friends. Yet at the time there were no Italians with either the will or the power to overthrow Mussolini. The threat itself put Mussolini on his guard. It also resonated with Churchill’s avid listeners in Germany. The idea that Mussolini must be ‘saved’ from the Italians entered the Führer’s table talk. ⁵

He had, Hitler told his courtiers at Berchtesgaden, reconsidered the situation. The previous month he had ordered the Luftwaffe to teach the Mediterranean Fleet a lesson. ⁶ At the beginning of January 1941 the first Stukas had touched down in western Sicily. As Hitler addressed his generals they were going into action for the first time. The Mediterranean Fleet played into German hands with a display of the very arrogance that Hitler was determined to humble. The victor of Taranto, Illustrious, was sent through the Sicilian Narrows so that it might cover a convoy bringing crated fighters from Gibraltar to Malta. Many officers had a bad feeling about the operation, but Cunningham waved aside their objections. Illustrious was the talisman of the fleet, everyone felt better when she was around. She proved, however, the perfect target for German bombs. The Italians, too, played their part. ⁷ Even though they had but a few days to prepare, the two air forces choreographed a complex aerial ruse. Italian torpedo-bombers flew a decoy mission to draw off the Illustrious’s fighters. Once she was denuded of protection the dive-bombers attacked. ‘The dive bombing attacks’, Cunningham ruefully admitted, were most efficiently performed and came as a most unpleasant surprise.’ The carrier was hit six times. The only consolation for the British was that there was no killer blow. The crippled ship was able to get into Malta harbour without being sunk. She brought with her the first concentrated German air raids over the island, as for days afterwards the Stuka crews tried to finish off their prey. As Cunningham said, a ‘potent new factor in Mediterranean war’ had arrived. No one doubted what had happened. Large British ships had been chased from the waters surrounding Sicily and Malta. ⁸ The passage of even smaller ships had become deeply problematic. ⁹

The battle prompted another Mussolinian mood swing. This example of the two air forces working in such close harmony had cheered him to the extent that he was looking forward to his own visit to Berchtesgaden. ¹⁰ He would have been less cheerful if he could have heard what those already there were saying. The Italians had shown ‘matchless amateurism’ according to Hitler. ¹¹ The war in Libya was a piddling and unimportant affair, but the Führer took seriously Churchill’s words. Italy must be saved from itself. A small armoured force sent to Tripoli should do the trick. ¹² The Italo-German effort on Sicily, the offer of forces for Tripoli, and Hitler’s promise that the pesky Greeks would be humbled come the spring yielded a surprisingly cordial meeting of the two dictators. They toasted the ‘absolute solidarity between the countries of the Axis’. It was time for them to ‘march together’. Of course, many at the time and since doubted this togetherness. Italian diplomats warned that the Germans intended to displace Italian power rather than come to its aid. The contrast between the confident swagger of the German generals around Hitler and the cowed mien of Italian officers, small of stature and sporting hair dyed jet black, was palpable. Mussolini had come to Hitler as a supplicant and had left a client. Nevertheless, a deal of sorts was done that allowed for cooperation against mutual enemies over the next few months. ¹³

Churchill might boom his voice in the Mediterranean, but in the inner councils of the British war machine he complained that no one seemed inclined to do much to counter this new threat. A formal decision was made in London to aid Greece against a new Italo-German invasion. The view from Alexandria, however, was that the Sicilian Narrows were now closed and that opening them, whilst defending Malta, should have the highest priority. The view from Cairo was that if any aggressive military operations were to take place in the Mediterranean–other than in Libya–they would best be directed against ill-defended small Italian islands in the far east of the Sea. No one appeared to be responding to the Prime Minister’s ideas and demands. Each of the military commanders, Wavell, Cunningham and Longmore, had become used to the semi-independence granted by difficult communications. There was no instrument on the spot capable of enforcing Churchill’s will. ¹⁴

There was, as it happened, a member of Churchill’s government travelling around the Mediterranean at the very moment of decision. But he was a man whom one would least like to see hove over the horizon in such circumstances. ‘I adore Cairo,’ Chips Channon wrote upon his arrival, ‘it is everything I like, easy, elegant, pleasure-loving, trivial, worldly; me, in fact.’ ¹⁵ The private secretary to the under-secretary of state was at the very bottom of the Foreign Office food chain. He had arrived in Cairo on a ‘secret’ mission in which no one in London had any faith. Chips’s dearest friend, from their idyllic days as undergraduates, was Prince Paul of Yugoslavia. Since Mussolini had arranged the assassination of King Alexander in 1934, Paul had acted as Regent to his young nephew Peter. Mussolini had long wished to predate the Yugoslavians. As Hitler’s interest in Greece rose, their role became pivotal. The Yugoslavs might join the Greeks as victims. Just as likely they could join with the Germans against the Greeks in return for territorial gain and protection from the Italians. ¹⁶ The lure of a Serbo-German alliance warred with Paul’s natural Anglophilia.

In his moment of crisis Paul called out for Chips, and Chips came. As Hitler plotted in the Berchtesgaden, Chips crossed the Mediterranean from Cairo to Athens. He dropped in on another dear friend, King George of Greece. Paul and George, royal cousins, had last met at Chips’s opulent house in Belgrave Square. Now they phoned each other each night, mainly it seemed to complain about the iniquities of their English friends. George warned Chips that beastliness was afoot. It was grim up north. ‘I am already against the Balkans,’ Chips lamented, ‘and long for Cairo.’ ¹⁷ Next day he hopped on the train from Athens to Belgrade, surrounded by kissing Greeks celebrating their victory over the Italians at Klisura. ¹⁸

Chips’s welcome in Belgrade was everything he might have wished. His familiar bedroom in the Palace of Beli Dvor awaited him. He was surrounded by the many precious bibelots with which he had showered the beloved Prince down the years. Then they were together, half-dressed, and Yugoslav prince and British politician cast aside the cares of office and ‘fell into each other’s arms’. Their joy was short lived. Barely had Paul had time to curse the entire German race, explain that no one gave the British any credence whilst they were so weak, and beg Chips to ensure that no aid should be sent to Greece, when the true voice of British officialdom arrived to inform the reunited friends that Chips had already been superseded. Wavell had been ordered to take time away from garnering victories in Africa to visit Athens. There he would exhort ‘First Peasant’ Metaxas to prepare to fight the Germans with British aid. ‘Treachery and foolishness,’ cried the two friends. ¹⁹

Poor Paul, Chips had never had anything to offer other than love and diamond-encrusted knick-knacks. The British government had ignored his Mediterranean progress and had then brushed it aside. Chips’s very pointlessness was not, however, without ultimate effect. ‘This stinks’, the Regent had shouted in a moment of rage, ‘of Anthony.’ The name of the villain that rang around the Palace was not Churchill but his newly appointed Foreign Secretary, their old undergraduate sparring partner Anthony Eden. Many in the Mediterranean attributed to Eden more power than perhaps he ever possessed. Eden was not unhappy to play upon this impression. He wanted to make a splash as soon as possible. Churchill was keen that his choice should have a chance to show his quality, and what better stage than the Mediterranean. Nothing could be achieved with an effete nobody like Chips, but perhaps an effete somebody could transform the situation. Eden, it was agreed, should not just issue instructions to the Mediterranean but should take himself there for as long as was necessary to enforce the government’s will.

The mission was attractive. Eden would be greeted with the bouquets of victory. Somerville was ordered to take Force H and bombard the Italian mainland. He laid a bet. If the mission was a success Churchill and Eden would take the credit, if the Italians sunk one of his capital ships the fiasco would be blamed on the incompetence of the navy in the Mediterranean. It was a win-win bet. His unseen approach on Genoa was a masterpiece of naval operational art. The bombardment of the city was indeed claimed as triumph of political daring in London. ²⁰ The impression was not much different in Rome and Berlin. The general whom Hitler had dispatched to lead his forces in Tripoli, Erwin Rommel, arrived in Rome as the British shells hit Genoa. ²¹ ‘The Duce’s popularity is approaching zero level,’ went back the word to Germany. ²²

At the same time as the navy landed a direct blow on Italy, the army maintained their extraordinary progress along the coast of Cyrenaica. Tobruk, Derna, Benghazi: in each of the fortified Italian coastal towns the pattern was the same. Imperial troops would breast a rise to see a neatly whitewashed settlement set against the sea. They would admire the skill of the Italian artillerists who opposed them, then the defence would crumble. Within the day the town would be in their hands, albeit thoroughly looted by the indigenous population. It was thus settled that Eden would ‘stop at Benghazi and run over to the Balkans’. What he would do when he reached the Balkans was less clear. Some, such as his travelling companion, the CIGS, Sir John Dill, thought his mission was to persuade Turkey into the war. Others argued that the mission was all about Greece. The dictator Metaxas had listened sceptically to Wavell’s blandishments but had then unexpectedly keeled over, dead. Greece’s confused politicians might now be biddable. Eden was told to fly in, scout out the situation and try and make the best of it. ²³

In the end Eden didn’t make it to Benghazi. Flying into a headwind his plane almost ran out of fuel. It landed on Malta in the middle of an air raid, diverted to Crete and finally touched down outside Cairo on 19 February 1941. ²⁴ Despite the difficult journey, Eden came down the steps ‘in his usual excellent form. He had every right to feel cheerful–his timing seemed impeccable. ²⁵

As Churchill had suspected, the arrival of Eden in Cairo made it very difficult for the military commanders to object too vociferously to the idea of cashing in on the gains made in Cyrenaica. They signed up to the idea of projecting British power north across the Mediterranean. Wavell, Cunningham and Longmore each said a piece on the practical difficulties involved, but lodged no objection in principle. There was none of the outspokenness to which more junior visitors had been treated. When Channon had been in Cairo, Longmore had described Churchill as an adventurer, criticized his grasp of strategy and had ascribed their success up to that point to a mixture of luck and bluff. ²⁶ Eden, on the other hand, was able to report a remarkable degree of unity amongst all the political, diplomatic and military leaders gathered in Cairo. They agreed that they would look north instead of south-east, towards Abyssinia, or west, towards Tripoli. They agreed that if they were looking north it should be towards Greece rather than towards Turkey The dream of whipping up the Turks remained strong for some, but the consensus was that the Turks would do what they always did, make nice noises but play the sides off against one another. In any case there was a limit to the military aid that could be sent north and Greece, unlike Turkey, was under immediate threat. They signed up to the statement that if everything was thrown into assisting the Greeks as quickly as possible then there was a ‘fair chance’ of preventing the country being overrun. ²⁷

Armed with this assessment Eden left Cairo for Athens. There was, however, a difference between what appeared in formal statements and the private thoughts of those involved. The Greek decision was in one sense easy to make. Eden provided a very firm political steer. It was thus ‘respectable’ to sign up. At the same time the bullish statements emanating from Cairo, and the impression that the men on the ground were gung-ho for intervention stilled any qualms that might be felt in London. In their heart of hearts, however, most of those who discussed the problem feared that ‘we must eventually be beaten there’. ²⁸ There was for the moment, however, a conspiracy of optimism. In Athens, Eden and his entourage gave no sign of any doubts they might have felt about the enterprise–even though they concluded whilst they were there that Yugoslavia was likely to side with the Germans and that Salonika–the Aegean terminus of the railway line that ran from central Europe to the Mediterranean–was indefensible.

Immediately on his return from Athens, Eden flew out to Adana near Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, boarding a train for Ankara. He reached the Turkish capital on 26 February. The Turks reacted just as expected. They said they would on no account aid Greece. They would fight only if attacked. Yet Eden sent home ‘jaunty and self-satisfied’ telegrams that talked of the ‘frankness’ and ‘friendliness’ and the ‘realism’ of the Turks. Had, some wondered, his head been turned by the welcome choreographed by Ataturk’s heirs? As his train pulled into Ankara, Eden had stood in the transparent observation car at the end of the train. The huge crowd assembled to meet him had climbed onto the railway lines and thronged round the carriage trying to catch sight of the visitor, cheering his triumphal entry. ²⁹ The truth was that the Turks wouldn’t do ‘a damned thing’. ³⁰ Having completed his mission in Turkey to his own–if no one else’s–satisfaction, Eden returned to Athens on 2 March. There he presided over the signature of a formal military aid agreement by Dill and his Greek opposite number, Alexander Papagos. Whilst this document was finalized in Athens, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia was having a deeply disturbing meeting with Hitler in Austria. He was told that the day had come when he must openly ally with the Nazis.

There can be little doubt that Eden’s mission in the Mediterranean achieved exactly what he and Churchill had intended from the outset. He had marshalled the military in such a way that no one could subsequently claim that either of them were dangerous adventurers–the charge of the 1930s, still heard sotto voce, amongst many Conservatives. He had ensured that Greece rather than Turkey would be the focus of British efforts on the northern shore. He had achieved a firm military agreement. All of this news was received with much tut-tutting in London. Eden had, it seemed, demonstrated that if you let a man off the leash in the Mediterranean, particularly in the east, he would soon be running his own show without regard for higher authority. In Greece as in Turkey, it was said, Eden’s head had been turned by the obsequies of his hosts. British policy had become a vanity. ‘He has’, the Cabinet agreed, ‘really run rather ahead of his instructions and agreed to things which the Greeks will take as commitments.’ ³¹

At the beginning of March 1941 Churchill sent a rather disingenuous message to Eden, suggesting that he might have overreached himself. They had agreed their joint aims before Eden had left. Whilst he had been away, however, the situation had changed. The Germans had demonstrated that the Suez Canal was vulnerable. At the end of January 1941 their bombers had started flying long-range missions out of Rhodes. The advanced magnetic mines they dropped into the Canal closed it for weeks at a time. The Canal defences had been revealed as weak and ill prepared. ³² The crippled Illustrious barely managed to escape the Mediterranean by this route. The Germans gloated over their success. ³³ Projections based on the early success of the mining campaign suggested that less than half the supplies needed to keep the army in Africa active might arrive via this ‘safe’ route. With the southern windpipe constricted, it might not be wise to head north. The threat did not come from mainland Greece but from the Greek islands. Those islands had already yielded a warning about the dangers of a northern campaign. An attempt to seize the tiny island of Castelrizzo had been a farce, ‘a rotten business and reflected little credit on anyone’. The expedition’s naval commander had had a mental breakdown, and the troops landed proved incapable of defending themselves against the ‘unbelievably enterprising’ Italians. ³⁴

Neither Yugoslavia nor Turkey would fight. The Yugoslavs had ‘sold their souls to the Devil’. All the Balkan peoples were ‘trash’. ³⁵ Vichyites and Francoists were hungrily eyeing British weakness. Franco and Mussolini had met, as had Franco and Pétain. Franco’s men were becoming more flagrant in the aid they gave to German submarines operating from Spanish ports. ³⁶ Somerville had complained that in seizing French ships his own men had been forced to kill ‘harmless’ civilians and children. ‘It seems to me’, he wrote, ‘that we are just as much of a dictator country as either Germany or Italy and one day the great British public will wake up and ask what we are fighting for.’ ³⁷ Darlan could hardly improve on Somerville’s formulation of the issue. He announced to the newly arrived American ambassador that he would ‘first use his propaganda system to explain to the French people that Mr Churchill is responsible for their lack of food, and second, he will use his Navy to convoy French merchant ships and sink any British ships that interfere’. He had repeated the threat in a carefully staged conference with the international press, with Pétain present. ³⁸ The management of the press was a triumph for the ‘ambitious crook’ Darlan. Churchill, fearful of his own reputation in America, effectively abandoned the blockade of French ports. ³⁹ The result, as he himself said, was, ‘convoys growing larger every day are passing in and out of the Straits…with only nominal escorts’. ⁴⁰ Hitler decreed that Darlan should be regarded as ‘trustworthy’. ⁴¹ These curs, Churchill wrote, would not act any more energetically merely because the Germans crushed the Greeks, but they would be emboldened if the Germans crushed the British in Greece. ⁴²

These thoughts were of course no help to Eden for, as became clear when the full text of the Dill–Papagos agreement reached London, he had committed Britain ‘up to the hilt’ with no get-out clauses. On 6 March 1941 Churchill announced that Eden’s actions had settled the matter. ⁴³ He had achieved his goal, a commitment to go to Greece’s aid coupled with the ‘secret satisfaction that if things went really wrong there was a good scapegoat handy’. ⁴⁴ The next day British troops began arriving in the Piraeus. ⁴⁵

Churchill was predictably delighted with this arrangement. His reputation as an adventurer was by no means ill-won. But the scars of Gallipoli, twenty-five years earlier, ran deep. He preferred adventures from which no blame could attach to him. Hence appeasement in the western Mediterranean, matched by wild advance in the east. He and his cronies agreed that it would be an excellent thing if Eden’s Mediterranean sojourn should be extended indefinitely. Eden and Greece must be completely synonymous in the public eye. ⁴⁶ No one in the Mediterranean could quite make up their minds whether they had been ‘had’. They were told that it was their enthusiasm for the operation that had swung the vote in London in favour of intervention. They were not told of Churchill’s private abusive outburst about their dithering. Their warning that, without reinforcement, disaster was likely was met with the rebuke that they had failed to ‘appreciate what is going on outside the Mediterranean’. ⁴⁷

It was unclear who had talked whom into the Greek adventure. It seemed hard to criticize the decision on moral grounds. The Greeks had shown some ability at fighting; they were certainly under threat. The moral surety of the case might have seemed less secure if the British had been aware that, whilst British troops marched into the line with the Greek army in the north-east, the Greek army in the north-west was trying to cut a deal with the Germans. ⁴⁸ Eden did not know any of this, but he most definitely had an inkling of his difficult position. In Cairo he pondered the situation. He had done all he could in the Mediterranean, he did not want to stay any longer. ⁴⁹ The Greek decision had been made, the Yugoslavs had gone to the dark side: the only hope in Belgrade was the kind of deniable ‘special operation’ that Eden wanted nothing to do with. It was left to local diplomats and secret servicemen to ‘play this difficult hand’. ⁵⁰

The only concession Eden would make was that he should have one more tilt at the Turkish problem. Perhaps it would be possible to pull a last-minute rabbit out of the hat. Wavell told him that this idea was pointless. There was little chance that the Turks might cooperate. If they did, it would be a disaster, yet another call on British resources to no military advantage. Eden was determined that his Mediterranean mission should end on a high note and persisted. Thus the penultimate leg of Eden’s Mediterranean travels was a flight to Cyprus, unaccompanied by any military advisers, for a last meeting with the Turks. ⁵¹ Eden’s encounter with his Turkish opposite number, Saracoglu, on 18 March 1941 proved a fitting postscript to the whole business. It caused a flurry of excitement but meant nothing. The Turkish foreign minister, convinced that it was advisable to encourage Eden more than his own colleagues thought wise, was unexpectedly accommodating about the idea of a last-minute appeal to Yugoslavia to stand up to the Germans. Eden reported home about his success, but when Saracoglu returned to Ankara the proposal was immediately buried.

In the event, weather delayed Eden in the Mediterranean long enough for the events to unfold in his presence. Whilst Eden had been making his way to Cyprus, Hitler had issued the final order for an attack on Greece. The aim, he said, was to conquer the entire country, and thus force the British permanently out of the Aegean. At the same time as Eden and Saracoglu were negotiating, Hitler was meeting Rommel to discuss his plans for operations on the southern shore. Rommel made a most favourable impression on the Nazi leadership. They lapped up the story that this ‘magnificent officer’ told. The German war machine was operating brilliantly. Any problems were the fault of the Italians. In the background Rommel’s own colleagues grumbled about his inability to grasp either strategy or logistics. Regretfully, Hitler denied Rommel’s request to be allowed to launch an all-out attack to recover Cyrenaica. That would have to wait a few months until victory over Russia. Rommel might make a limited advance to the first major Cyrenaican crossroads of the Balbia at Agedabia, but he could go no further. Rommel picked up the undertow in these conversations, however. He was a true Nazi hero, undervalued by his own colleagues in the Wehrmacht. If he could conjure something spectacular with existing resources it would not go ill for him. After all, the Führer himself had assured him that he would not turn away from Africa ‘under any circumstances’. Immediately upon his return he ordered his one completed armoured division to lead the Italians forward. He would see how far they could take him. ⁵²

News of the first German probes filtered back to Cairo. Wavell hoped that they meant little. He had ordered his armoured forces back to Egypt to refit. He was ‘anxious’, but buoyed by the thought that the Germans had so few men in Africa. They could not, he guessed, do anything serious for another month. More immediately eye-catching was the announcement on 25 March 1941 that, in Hitler’s presence in Vienna, the Yugoslavs had paid formal deference to the Nazis. On this rather sour note, Eden reached Malta.

Suddenly, however, the tide seemed to be turning. British cryptanalysts deciphered Luftwaffe signals that talked about some kind of Italian naval activity south of Crete. They could offer no real clue to its purpose. The Italians might be thinking of attacking the ships bringing troops and supplies to Greece, they could be reinforcing the Italian garrisons in the eastern Aegean; more worryingly still, it was possible that an Italo-German expeditionary force was at sea, heading for Greece, Libya or even Malta. Cunningham was ‘therefore faced with the problem of meeting a threat which he knew to exist, but whose nature he could not foretell’. He launched the Mediterranean Fleet into the unknown to try and find the Italians. The same fog that was keeping Eden trapped in the Mediterranean, helped Cunningham. Both sides had decrypts from the other and knew that their ships were heading towards a confrontation. Both sides had aircraft out looking and each spotted the other. Crucially, Admiral Iachino thought he was hunting a force of British cruisers with his battleships. Instead, on 28 March 1941, he found the full Mediterranean Fleet. Although the fast Italian battleships were able to outrun Cunningham’s rustbuckets with ease, the unwary Italian cruiser division blundered into the British pursuit, to be destroyed by the heavy guns of the British battleships. The Mediterranean Fleet had been under a cloud for months and Cunningham’s bravery had been questioned at the highest levels. With the one flourish off Cape Matapan the slate was wiped clean. ⁵³

Yugoslavia yielded an even more surprising turn of events. A coup carried out by elements of the Serbian military overthrew the government of the despised Prince ‘Palsy’ and proclaimed that they would govern in the name of King Peter. No one was sure whether the ‘hidden hand’ of the British was behind the coup. ⁵⁴ Even the British themselves could not be quite sure of the role that they had played. At least three British intelligence agencies had had links with potential coup plotters. All had expressed enthusiasm for the demise of Paul. The long-time SIS resident in Belgrade, whose friends in the air force took a leading part in the final denouement, was nearest to events. The British were, however, by and large, spectators of a power struggle within the Serb elite. ⁵⁵

What the coup did not achieve was the emergence of a pro-British regime. As soon as they possibly could, the plotters were on the phone to Germany offering friendly relations. They were too late. A frothing Hitler had already gathered his generals and told them that the upstarts must be crushed. ⁵⁶ Indeed he wanted Yugoslavia and its bastard multinationalism erased. ‘This fair-weather nation will have to pay for its provocations against the Reich with its life,’ Hitler decreed. It was essential that the civilian population of Belgrade should be bombed viciously and constantly. ⁵⁷ Once destroyed, Yugoslavia would be replaced by a series of ethnically cleansed regimes. The Serbs would be purged of their leaders. As for the Croats, it was time to ‘stroke them!’ ⁵⁸ The Ustasha–Insurgents–Croatian terrorists whom the Italians had financed and maintained in exile for many years were assembled at Pistoia. ⁵⁹ Their leader Ante Pavelic was received by Mussolini with the promise of a new Fascist Croatia. The band was then dispatched to Trieste to await events. ⁶⁰

The potential fall-out of the coup held Eden in the Mediterranean. Churchill suggested that he return to Cairo to take control. In the end Eden chose to fly to Athens, passing directly over the battle of Cape Matapan. ⁶¹ From Athens there were hopes of moving on to Belgrade. Perhaps the north-east Mediterranean alliance that had eluded him for so many months was now in his grasp. It would then be possible to say when he finally does return to London’ that he did so with ‘“Serbia in the bag” for which he has striven so tirelessly’. ⁶² Watching his progress, Hitler commented that ‘the travelling warmonger’ might be in Athens, ‘but his activities are no longer a problem so far as his plans are concerned’. ⁶³ Indeed, Eden soon found that the Yugoslavs had no desire for his presence. ‘Belgrade is denying Eden’s presence,’ recorded Goebbels with satisfaction, ‘he has not been invited and would not be received, even if he came privately. Strong words and dramatic evidence of the Jew-boy funk.’ ⁶⁴ Dill and the commander of the British forces in Greece, Jumbo Wilson, did hold secret meetings with the Yugoslav military, but they achieved nothing. The nearest that Eden got was a train journey to Florina at the end of March, where a Yugoslav general furtively crossed the border to meet him. ⁶⁵ The Greeks and Yugoslavs refused to cooperate with each other in order to defeat the Germans.

By then it was clear that Eden had made a mistake by heading north. The German threat in the south revealed itself more clearly with each passing day. On 2 April 1941 Rommel’s armoured forces took Agedabia, the limit of his authorized advance. On the same day, Bletchley Park reported that another German armoured division was in Sicily in the process of embarking for Tripoli. The intelligence intercepts still suggested that the German build-up would take over a month. The orders flowing from Germany to the battlefront did not give any real hint of reckless advance. Yet something was afoot. Rommel had little intention of obeying those orders.

The day after the fall of Agedabia, he browbeat his Italian opposite number, General Gariboldi, into submission. Gariboldi demanded that Rommel should halt the advance. Rommel replied that his orders were not to advance unless the British were in headlong retreat. Then he had the authority to exploit the opportunity. As far as he could see, the British were fleeing. There were no armoured forces in front of him. Wavell was showing no appetite for the defence of Benghazi. It was his duty to chase him out of Cyrenaica. With Nelsonian arrogance Rommel seized for himself the triple initiative: over the British, over the Italians and over his own army high command. ⁶⁶ Eden had to get back to Cairo. The idea was growing that we cannot face the Germans and their appearance is enough to drive us back many score of miles’. Such a suspicion would ‘react most evilly throughout the Balkans’. ⁶⁷ As he prepared to fly south again, Italian troops–effectively under Rommel’s orders, whatever the formal command arrangements–occupied Benghazi. Rommel’s patron, Goebbels, immediately flooded the airwaves with read-backs of all the gloating statements the British had issued when Benghazi fell into their hands. It was ‘a dreadful humiliation for England’. ⁶⁸

In truth, there was little for Eden to do in Cairo. The dispositions had been made around the Mediterranean, and there was little that the Mediterranean-hopping representative of Britain could do to affect the outcome. The one substantive decision made during his final stay in Egypt was that Tobruk should be reinforced by an Australian division and held for as long as possible. The Mediterranean commanders urged this decision. Eden and Dill added their imprimatur. Eden’s main task was to put a brave face on things, and to get his story straight for future consumption. When his Lockheed touched down at Heliopolis aerodrome on 5 April 1941, Eden himself cut a confident figure. His sartorial elegance had survived the journey, in contrast to his travelling companion who left the aircraft visibly ‘travel stained’. The jaunty air that had marked both Eden’s conversations and reports was still in place. This too was in contrast to the diplomats and officers who surrounded him. They were at the end of their tether, sunk in gloom at their repeated failures. A few hours in Cairo, however, was enough to bring Eden’s mood into line with that of everyone else. For the first time he started showing signs of ‘considerable emotion and agitation’. The atmosphere became one of ‘abysmal gloom’. As news from the battlefront trickled in, most notably that the British commanders in the Western Desert had been captured by the advancing Italo-Germans, there was a sense that people were cracking. They spent hours going over the same unprofitable ground, discussing ad nauseam how it had come to this. Out of these discussions came a ‘line’ about what had gone wrong. The whole scheme of sending assistance to Greece had been based on ‘the definite and positive assurance from the soldiers that they could easily hold the West’. It was the generals who were to blame for this misjudgement. Eden had been let down by the military. ⁶⁹

Eden was certainly wise to prepare such a cover story before he departed, for a double-edged and doubly uncomfortable welcome was in preparation. ‘The great trip’, it was said in Whitehall, ‘has been a failure.’ Churchill was ‘saying he never wished to help Greece’. At the same time the Prime Minister declared of Eden that he wished ‘to exhibit him in triumph’. Whether he liked it or not, Eden was to be yoked to events in the Mediterranean and made to take responsibility for them. Eden delayed his departure long enough to hear the news that the Germans had invaded both Greece and Yugoslavia. ⁷⁰

Thus ended Eden’s Mediterranean adventure. It took him three days to reach home. By that time the news was even worse than when he had left. The Greek army of the north-east, comprising 60,000 men–bigger than the entire British expeditionary force–had surrendered. The Germans had launched a second invasion of Yugoslavia from the southern Reich itself. Zagreb had fallen and the independent Ustasha republic of Croatia had been proclaimed. Rommel had captured Derna, prompting renewed Nazi gloating. ‘Wonderful! wonderful,’ declared Goebbels, ‘stunning blow for London; supplies excellent material for our propaganda. We are on top of the world.’ ⁷¹ The commanders in the Mediterranean agreed, in part, with what the German propaganda chief said. ⁷² Arthur Longmore, the RAF commander, was heard to say that ‘it really didn’t matter’ either way whether they held the Mediterranean. ‘All we had to do was to fall South [into Africa] and let the Mediterranean look after itself.’ ⁷³ Longmore made the further mistake–ultimately fatal to his career–of saying that Eden’s tour of the Mediterranean had been a disaster. ⁷⁴ Such statements played into the narrative that the commanders in the Mediterranean were ‘windy’, and it was only the unyielding will of London that kept them up to the task. ⁷⁵

In fact, those commanders had formulated a highly risky ‘island strategy’ for the Mediterranean. They would hold Crete, even though they doubted it was really defensible with the Greek mainland in Italo-German hands, and they would hold Tobruk despite the danger that it would become little more than a ‘beleaguered garrison’. ⁷⁶ They warned that Malta was already a ‘beleaguered garrison’. There was finally a sufficiency of antiaircraft guns. But by their very nature anti-aircraft guns were solely defensive. A few days previously Somerville’s Force H had managed to fly Hurricanes onto Malta from the west. But short-range fighters were also solely defensive. What was really needed was that Malta should be reactivated as an offensive base, and for that to happen a much greater effort was needed. Malta needed bombers, reconnaissance aircraft, cruisers, destroyers and submarines. But there was no point sending ships and aircraft if they could not survive German air attacks for more than a few days. The Governor reported that this was unlikely. The Germans had established a moral and physical superiority over the island. Any aircraft that arrived were rapidly destroyed. The morale of the pilots was so low that some of them were combat-ineffective. The RAF commander on the island was having a nervous breakdown. Nevertheless, as a first step, Cunningham ordered a destroyer flotilla to the island. ⁷⁷

None of these ideas or actions saved the victor of Cape Matapan from the insistent insinuation that he was insufficiently bold. Just as Somerville had done previously, Cunningham argued that it was a misuse of naval power in the Mediterranean to take capital ships close inshore to bombard cities. The ships would be dangerously vulnerable to land-based aircraft. Whatever the psychological impact of their big guns, the bombardments produced few military results. At the moment of crisis it seemed to him futile to waste strength on high-risk, low-return adventures. He was told that this was simply not good enough. German reinforcements were arriving in Tripoli, he had to be seen to do something. ⁷⁸ The ‘whole situation’, Churchill declared, was ‘compromised’ by Cunningham’s inability or unwillingness ‘to close the passage from Italy to Libya, or to break up the port facilities of Tripoli’. ⁷⁹ What was required was a ‘suicide’ mission. ⁸⁰ Cunningham’s reputation was once again saved by another timely victory. He had consistently pointed out that Tripoli was not the only potential terminus for supply ships from Italy. Now that Darlan had thrown his lot in with the Nazis, there was always the possibility that a deal would be struck to allow the Germans to use Tunisian facilities. Already, the Axis convoys used the Tunisian coast as protection from the British. On 16 April 1941 the destroyers that Cunningham had sent to Malta were guided onto to a German convoy off the Tunisian port of Sfax by signals intelligence. The night-time interception combined elan with precise technical skill, winning universal praise. Five German transports were destroyed. ⁸¹

Although such victories were to prove the key to the future of Mediterranean warfare, at the time the battle of the Kerkenah Bank seemed but a small ray of light. ⁸² Churchill described it as a ‘skirmish’. ⁸³ The high command of the German army might say in private that Rommel’s failure to take Tobruk showed that they had been right all along: he was an overrated Nazi stooge. The British, on the receiving end, could but notice the ferocity of his attacks. ⁸⁴ The Yugoslavs were suing for peace, as were parts of the Greek army. King Peter of Yugoslavia had already arrived in Athens, fleeing into exile. Whilst the Greek forces in the east cooperated with Wilson’s plan to hold the Germans at the Pass of Thermopylae, those on the west coast refused to withdraw to a new defensive line. The western officers maintained that the Italians were the enemy, the English were troublemakers and the Germans were potential friends. Hitler ruled that these ‘brave soldiers’ should be offered ‘honourable surrender’. The generals of the Army of Epirus were a ‘heaven-sent favour’ who would lead Greece into the New Order. ⁸⁵ Despairing of his country, the Greek Prime Minister committed suicide. In the confusion that followed the collapse of central authority in Athens, British officers, diplomats and secret agents all agreed that both the military and political will to resist had collapsed. Few Greek politicians viewed with favour a plan to carry on the fight from Crete. In the end the British stopped looking for a Greek leader to accompany the King into exile and found a Cretan banker, Emanuel Tsouderos, who might serve as politician. The British evacuated their second monarch, King George of the Hellenes, from Athens in a few days. ⁸⁶

For German aircraft in the Aegean it was a happy, killing time. In one 24-hour period they sank well over twenty ships which were trying to evacuate British troops. Over the same period the bombardment of Tripoli, albeit shorn of its suicidal aspects, proved, as Cunningham had predicted, a damp squib. The only redeeming feature of the operation was that the German air force, so successfully deployed elsewhere, missed the opportunity to sink a British battleship. He had, Cunningham wrote, got away with it by dint of good luck. The cost had been to tie up the Mediterranean Fleet for five days, ‘at the expense of all other commitments and at a time when these commitments were at their most pressing’. ⁸⁷ You have to understand, he signalled London, that ‘the key which will decide the issue of our success or otherwise in holding the Mediterranean lies in air power’. Stop complaining, the reply came back; it was Cunningham’s duty to establish control of the Mediterranean, not to try and slough it off on the air force. ⁸⁸ In despair, Cunningham told Churchill that he understood nothing of what was happening in the Mediterranean. ⁸⁹ He was ‘blind to facts’. ⁹⁰ Churchill’s riposte was that he understood the failings of those in the Mediterranean only too well. He was providing the tools that they were too scared to use. It was he who had ordered a huge convoy of tanks to be sent from the UK to Egypt. It was he who had ordered Somerville to get the convoy through to Malta; it was he who had insisted that Cunningham pick it up on the other side and see it through to its destination. It was he who had overruled naval objections that ‘their chances of getting through the Mediterranean were remote’. ⁹¹ Once more, Cunningham complained, Churchill misrepresented the situation. He was all for the single-minded pursuit of an essential goal, however dangerous, but his actual orders were to divert forces from the convoy. London insisted on another pointless coastal bombardment, this time of Benghazi. ⁹²

The mutual disillusion of Whitehall and Grey Pillars was the product of the collision of Cairo strategy with London politics. On the day that Force H sailed from Gibraltar with Churchill’s prized tank convoy, and the Mediterranean Fleet sailed from Alexandria heading west towards Malta, Eden had to give an account of his Mediterranean mission to the House of Commons. Eden’s explanation of the Mediterranean situation on 6 May 1941 was not a happy occasion. The speech was ‘appallingly bad’. He rose to a hostile silence, ‘gave a dim account of his travels and failures’ and sat down to an even more hostile silence. Eden’s enemies said that it was possibly the worst speech of the war. Everyone agreed that it was ‘a complete flop’. ⁹³ As Churchill had always intended, Eden carried the can for the crisis in the Mediterranean. The reviled Foreign Secretary stood as a bulwark for his leader. Churchill–taking a wider view of the war–was more warmly received, and the government survived a vote of confidence with ease. The Mediterranean had raised Eden up, the Mediterranean cast him down. But Eden could not be allowed to fall too far, lest the whole government be dragged down with him. The political strategy Eden had adumbrated in Cairo remained sound–blame the military. The fact had to be established that the government was ‘completely hamstrung’ by the ‘sensational ineptitude of our commanders’. ⁹⁴

Wavell, holding out the hope of a counter-attack, was for the moment safe. Tobruk was a beacon of hope. Indeed in early May 1941 the German army high command had dispatched a mission to discipline Rommel for his failures in front of the town. ⁹⁵ Cunningham could utter bitter truths because of his glorious victories: Taranto, Matapan and Kerkenah Bank were his shield. Their comrade-in-arms, Arthur Longmore, was less fortunate. He had no such spoils to show. Many in the RAF murmured that he had been too willing to kow-tow to Cunningham, too willing to spread his forces thin in order to support the navy and the army. Instead of trying to make the best of the situation, it should have been his task to celebrate the supremacy of the aeroplane over the ship. Longmore should have forced Cunningham to admit that disaster in the Mediterranean was the navy’s fault. It was Cunningham, and before him Pound, who had padded their budgets with the ridiculous claim that warships could fight planes. If Longmore had few airmen friends, he had even fewer political allies. His pungently expressed pessimism had made him a marked man. Defeat in the Mediterranean was laid at his feet. He was the first Mediterranean commander-in-chief to be sacked.

In the days immediately after the debate it appeared that a ‘very nervous’ Churchill had been right. Italo-German forces attacked the great tank convoy but ‘the scale was very much less than had been anticipated’. Indeed the attackers did not seem very good at their job. The formations were ill-coordinated, jettisoned their bombs too soon, or carried out brave but ineffective independent attacks. Only one of five big cargo ships was sunk. Observing, Somerville concluded that he had caught the Axis air forces by surprise. In addition, his forces were being helped by the heavy cloud over the Mediterranean. Full of praise for the skill of his captains and aircrews, Somerville concluded, nevertheless, that they had got through only because of the ‘luck of the gods’. The German bomber units had been involved in a complex series of exchanges between Sicily, North Africa and Greece. Their base at Trapani was in confusion. The specialist anti-shipping strike aircraft were away. Cunningham took the convoy off Somerville’s hands some fifty miles off Malta. Three days later he delivered its precious cargo into Alexandria. Like Somerville, Cunningham maintained that he too had been lucky. ‘We got through all right,’ he signalled London, ‘but it mainly due to the extraordinary thick weather experienced off Malta and the whole way to Alexandria.’ ⁹⁶

This luck soon ran out. At the end of April 1941 Hitler had agreed to a Luftwaffe plan to seize Crete, primarily through the use of air power and parachutists. ⁹⁷ This was to be the last operation in the Mediterranean before the invasion of Russia. Operation Merkur was an air-force plan, to be carried out by air-force generals. Unsurprisingly, the Luftwaffe generals took air superiority very seriously. Whilst Cunningham was still at sea with the tank convoy, his air-force opposite number took the decision to withdraw RAF squadrons from Crete. Before his enforced departure Longmore had always been sceptical about the military logic of a German airborne invasion of Greece. He doubted whether, given the scale of likely casualties, they would try it, and believed that if they did try, ground troops could defeat the effort. In the meantime, however, he argued that the weight of German air attack from captured Greek bases made Cretan airfields too vulnerable to justify the waste of his resources. Thus when the German parachutists started landing, the RAF had largely vacated the island. Its aircraft fought at the edge of their range from Egyptian bases.

Naval forces sent north of Crete to prevent the Germans reinforcing their airborne troops from the sea proved desperately vulnerable to air attack. Crete was the perfect arena for Stukawaffe. The Stukas were feared by ground troops. If anything they proved even more effective in anti-shipping operations. Their main base on the island of Scarpanto was separated from Crete by the narrow Kaso Strait. The short-range aircraft could thus operate with comfort to the east of Crete. Another base in the Peloponnese was equally well placed for the sea lanes to the west of the island. Even Cyrenaican Stukas could reach ships to the south of Crete. Effectively, Crete was a killing zone. British cruisers and destroyers in particular proved frighteningly vulnerable to attack.

After three days Cunningham had had enough. He made the unilateral decision to recall his fleet to prevent its slaughter by the Luftwaffe. There had been nothing short of a trial of strength between Mediterranean Fleet and the German air force’: the German air force had won. Not only was Cunningham losing ships, he was losing captains at an even quicker rate as they buckled under the accumulated strain of months of air fear’. ‘I am afraid’, Cunningham admitted, we have to admit defeat and accept the fact that losses are too great to justify us trying to prevent seaborne attacks on Crete. This is a melancholy conclusion but it must be faced.’ There was ‘no hiding the fact’ that ‘the future out here does not look too good for the Fleet’. He persuaded his fellow Mediterranean commanders to defy London again and halt the evacuation of the defeated imperial forces even from the south coast of the island. Crete proved, he could not resist pointing out, what he had been saying for months. His ships had survived only because of the foul Mediterranean winter weather. The glorious Mediterranean spring was a death-bringer. ⁹⁸

SIX
Losing the Light

At the end of her semi-autobiographical novel Friends and Heroes, Olivia Manning tried to sum up what losing Greece meant for the British. She thought that they had lost the light. For refugees fleeing the débâcle, the play of light on the North African shore was ‘too white’. ‘They moved forward to look at the new land, reached thankfully if unwillingly.’ In ‘crossing the Mediterranean’, ‘they had life–a depleted fortune’. ¹ That sense of survival–a life, but depleted fortune–permeated each of the Mediterranean powers. Britain, Italy, France, each survived but none could feel happy with their lot. All three wanted to fight for the Mediterranean, but their capacity to do so was sadly reduced. They could do little more than fall back on mezzi insidiosi, the Mediterranean guerrilla war that the Italians had feared might be their portion in the mid-1930s. The future of their reduced fortunes lay in German hands, and the Germans, established for the first time on the Mediterranean littoral as conquerors, were hard to read.

The Germans were such an unpredictable force in the Mediterranean world because of their own ambivalence. Combing through the records after the war, historians identified at least a dozen serious attempts by those gathered around Hitler to persuade him that the Mediterranean was the key to victory. Nothing in the Führer’s past conduct suggested that he believed them. His eyes were cast ever eastwards. ² This judgement took lapidary form on 11 June 1941 when the dictator uttered his directive on the future of the Mittelmeer. The future of the Mediterranean lay on the steppes, it was–as geopolitics had always insisted–a mere appendage of the Heartland. ³ The conquest of Russia would change everything. Turkey would have its twin fears–the Soviets and the Germans–unified into one terror. They would not resist as the forces of the Reich moved through the Straits by sea and Anatolia by land. The Spanish were timid, Franco had squirmed his way out of an attack on Gibraltar. With further proof of the Reich’s invincibility, his courage would improve and the British would be swept off the Rock. The French would see that full collaboration was their only chance of survival: North Africa would be open to German forces. Then, the British Mediterranean would be choked to death, squeezed from east and west by what Hitler called a ‘concentric’ attack. ⁴

Concentricity implied a number of important ideas. First, the Mediterranean could wait months, if not years, before the final reckoning. Second, that it was the three gates to the sea, Gibraltar, Suez and the Straits, which were important, not the actual battle for the central Mediterranean. Hitler’s Mediterranean creatures were, in order of importance, Turkey, Spain and France. In the wider scheme of things, Italy was left out. Italy’s main importance was its weakness. If Mussolini’s regime collapsed before Germany had finished with Russia then the completion of the Mediterranean ‘anaconda’ would be much complicated. Hitler was quite prepared therefore to commit some resources to the Mediterranean, not least to fuel the efforts of his most photogenic general, Rommel.

The quality of Hitler’s strategic reasoning has proved fertile ground for the ‘what if school of history. The most popular theory remains the claim that Hitler was wasting his time in the Mediterranean, that the victorious campaigns just completed were, in fact, a disaster because they delayed the invasion of Russia, placing the Germans at the mercy of ‘general winter’. Running the argument the other way is almost as popular. The Germans squandered their Mediterranean victory–if only Hitler had listened to his Mediterraneanists and kept German power running at full blast after Crete then a world of opportunity would have opened up: the destruction of British power, the creation of a consolidated anti-Anglo-Saxon Euro-Asia, the benison of Arab oil. None of this, of course, is provable in any serious way. The Germans failed to break through Russia, so the Mediterranean anaconda was never attempted. What can be said for sure was that in the summer of 1941 Britain had more potential enemies in the Mediterranean than Germany. Few were confident enough to proclaim Germany as the new thalassocrat, but even fewer mourned British decline. As her representatives looked around for support they could expect vituperation from some, but silence from most. ⁵

The expansive ideas about the Mediterranean came from those far distant from the sea. Those at work in the sea had a very limited horizon, their main aim was survival. The best they thought they might achieve was some damage to their enemies. It was time to face facts, Cunningham wrote home. ‘We have lost our Northern flank and are unlikely to regain it.’ The ‘through Mediterranean route’ was now ‘virtually closed’. The Royal Navy could, with enormous effort, sail from Gibraltar to Malta but it couldn’t get any further. Whilst the west–east route ground to a halt, the north–south route was, by the same token, made so much safer, since ‘the attack on Libyan communications is made very hazardous’. Naturally, Cunningham did not countenance inaction but his proposals for remedy were modest. ⁶

The best that might be done was some kind of ground offensive in Africa. This offensive would have no grand aims. It just needed to make some progress along the Cyrenaican coast. Cunningham’s dream prize was the city of Derna. Cyrenaica’s second ‘city’ was a pleasant enough place. European visitors praised it for being like the ‘proper’ Mediterranean, reminding them of Crete, rather than sub-standard North Africa. Rommel had a seaside villa nearby. Derna was the only place in eastern Libya where one could grow bananas. Charming Derna was not that far to travel–less than 200 miles by ship. Its position on the bulge of the Libyan plateau which pushed out into the Mediterranean, gave it its strategic attraction: not only a short flight from the Narrows but in range of Greece and the Aegean. In Cunningham’s mind a string of airfields from Sollum to Derna could protect his fleet around Malta whilst attacking the northern shore. ⁷ Cunningham’s military opposite number, Wavell, doubted whether even this modest plan was achievable. As Cunningham committed his thoughts to paper in Alexandria, Wavell recorded his in Cairo: he did not believe he could even get his troops over the Egyptian-Libyan border. The newly appointed air commander, the RAF’s best Whitehall warrior, Arthur Tedder, used his own message home to gloat that ‘the air has come into its own with a vengeance in the Mediterranean’. ‘I need hardly say,’ he toasted his fellow aviators in the Luftwaffe, ‘I have refrained from saying, “I told you so”.’ ⁸

The limited ambitions of Britain’s Mediterranean leaders failed to take into account that enemies considerably less formidable than the Germans were now willing to twit them. Germany and France had agreed, even before the fall of Crete, that aid should flow to a pro-Nazi revolt in Iraq led by Rashid Ali. Rashid Ali had the enthusiastic assistance of Britain’s old friend, the Mufti. Darlan had even been allowed into Berchtesgaden to see Hitler in order to seal the deal. ⁹ As they spoke, the first German aircraft were landing in Syria. Within days, supply trains were running along the railway from Aleppo to Mosul. The French were running a calculated risk. Darlan knew that such an act of aggression could well provoke a British attack on Syria. In preparation for this eventuality he had replaced the High Commissioner in Syria with a tough Alsatian general, Henri Dentz. Dentz preferred subterfuge–sadly undermined by British decryption of Luftwaffe signals–or deterrence to avoid war, but he was quite willing to fight the British if they came. ¹⁰

If the British commanders in the Mediterranean had had their way, Darlan and Dentz’s gamble would have paid off. They had no intention of invading Syria. Indeed they sought to maintain cordial relations with Dentz. The gamble was undone by Churchill, reading the Enigma traffic in London and demanding revenge. ‘If the French Army in Syria will come over to us,’ Churchill wrote, ‘then Vichy would have a future as the colonial power in the Levant.’ If, as it seemed, ‘they are going against us, or maintaining an attitude of malevolent passivity’ then the British should look elsewhere. Their new friends would be the ‘Syrian Arabs’. ‘I am not sufficiently acquainted with Syrian affairs to be able to formulate a plan,’ the Prime Minister admitted, ‘but I cannot doubt that our Islamic experts can easily do so.’ ¹¹

Churchill’s intelligence-fed take on Vichy was defensible enough, his faith in the ‘wisdom’ of Arab nationalism, or the competence of his own ‘Islamic experts’, less so. The leaders of Arab nationalism in Syria were most certainly looking for allies against the French, but had already found them elsewhere. One of the bargains Darlan made with Hitler was for the withdrawal of the Reich’s premier orientalist, von Hentig, from Syria. His sin was his success with indigenous politicians. Von Hentig’s successor, the equally dynamic Rudolf Rahn, was no less successful. It was not hard to see why. Despite the promises they had made in 1936, the French had delayed any transfer of power to indigenous politicians until the eve of war, when they suspended the constitution and appointed their own placemen to rule the country. The former Prime Minister, Jamil Mardam, was revealed, by the gleeful opening of the books by France’s new placemen, to be corrupt on an almost industrial scale. Although the French delighted in his discomfiture, they regarded corruption as a venial sin. That sin they attributed to Mardam’s rival Dr Shahbandar, with his anti-fascist and secular principles. Thus the French colluded with Mardam, first to have Shahbandar murdered as a British agent and an enemy of Islam, then to pervert his trial, and finally to whisk him across the border to a safe exile in Iraq. With Mardam having fled and Shahbandar dead, the field was left open for the other main leader of the National Bloc, Shukri al-Quwwatli, to emerge as the unchallenged spokesman of Syrian nationalism. Quwwatli used his new platform to celebrate openly the coming victory of the Axis and the great benefit to the Arabs thereof. ¹² There was a notable increase in the number of German ‘tourists’ crossing into Syria from Turkey. The most visible Abwehr operative in the region, Paula Koch, was inevitably dubbed ‘the Mata Hari of the Levant’. Lebanon’s leading nationalist politician, Riad Solh, was closely linked to Koch. ¹³

The choice between definitely anti-British and possibly pro-Nazi Frenchmen, or definitely anti-French but possibly pro-Nazi nationalists, was hardly appetizing. The means by which Britain might subvert such alignments were not in good repair when the point of crisis arrived. The man supposedly coordinating policy for Wavell was Colonel Illtyd Clayton. Clayton, by virtue of family connections–his older brother had been Lawrence of Arabia’s boss–had spent his entire professional life enmeshed in the intrigues of the Arab world. He, if anyone, was the Islamic expert for whom Churchill sought. At the exact moment he was called upon, however, he was having little success in controlling the civil war that had broken out between the secret organizations in Cairo and the Levant. The long-time Middle East hand that he was, Clayton still preferred working with his old French contacts. ‘Time and time again,’ complained one SOE leader whom Clayton held in check, ‘we have asked’ to be allowed to to cooperate with anti-French heterodox sects, such as the Druze, disillusioned by Dentz’s open favour towards orthodox Sunnis. ‘The answer given by Clayton has always been’, his interlocutor reported, ‘“No; nothing must be done to upset Dentz; we can always get the Arabs when we want them; we are staking everything on Dentz swinging over entirely to our side; or at any rate resisting any attempt by the Germans to occupy Syria”.’ ¹⁴

In retrospect, it was clear that Clayton had misread Dentz, but he was not solely grasping for a shop-worn former amity. In his desire to bluff the British, Dentz had cast an indulgent eye on some cross-border contacts. Clayton and Dentz were fighting for the soul of Colonel Robert Collet. Collet’s soul had both material and symbolic value, for he was by far the most famous Frenchman in the Levant. Everyone had to have their own Lawrence of Arabia; von Hentig was Germany’s and Collet had been France’s. In the inter-war period French governments and news-reels had made a cult of Collet, leading his highly colourful Circassian cavalry who, the propagandists had their audience believe, were his ‘children’, looking up to him as a ‘father’ if not a demi-god. The Circassians were not just there for show, although their fair-skinned women were undoubtedly a favourite of orientalist pornography Collet’s men had shown an enormous aptitude and appetite for butchering their racial and religious rivals in the massacres that had done so much to cement French rule. Dentz, however, was far from trusting his glamorous subordinate. Word reached him that the Circassians openly mocked the French for their wretched military performance against the Germans and the British. He had them confined to their barracks, and resorted to the low trick of having the carburettors removed from their lorries so that they could not decamp en masse to Palestine. Yet neither did Dentz wish to drive Collet into British hands. A ludicrous game developed between them. Each weekend Collet would announce that he was ‘going to Beirut’, pile a few Circassians into his car and then drive in the opposite direction across the Palestinian border to Haifa. The Circassians could then desert in safety and Collet would sit down and talk to Clayton’s men. He would then drive to Beirut for the weekend, all under the eyes of Dentz’s spies, who reported each move. It was not until the end of May 1941, when Collet finally took the momentous decision to desert, that Dentz ordered him to Damascus and court martial. One might call this game of shadows a draw between Dentz and Clayton since, when Collet finally fled to Transjordan, about half of his original Circassians came with him to fight with the British. ¹⁵

Clayton viewed Arab politicians as tarts; they had been bought by the Nazis, but they would be happy to be bought by the British when the time came. It hardly helped the British cause that almost their only friends amongst the local population were ‘the Friends’. ‘The Friends’ was the rather arch terminology used for militant Jews recruited to the British cause. Churchill, a believer in the wisdom of arming Zionists, should have been happy with these recruits. Most authorities in the Levant thought they were poison. Clayton at GHQ, the government of Palestine and the commander of British troops in Palestine all ordered Adrian Bishop, the champion of their use, to break off contact. Like any good secret operative he simply took pains to conceal his activities more carefully.

His critics objected not only to the fact of Jewish recruitment but to the nature of the recruits. Bishop reasoned that it was no good having intellectuals and politicians on one’s side. Men of action were needed. He found such men, ‘toughs’, among the Irgun. This was dangerous ground. The Irgun were unreconstructed terrorists, tarred, not least, with the brush of murdering fellow Zionists. The Irgun had been responsible for blowing up a refugee ship in Haifa harbour, killing over two hundred civilians and a number of policemen. The military wing of the Revisionists, of which they were part, had in the mid-1930s been the clients of Mussolini. Then they had accepted supplies and training from the Fascists; now they were accepting them from the British. ¹⁶ It was only when the call went out for ‘special operations’ in Iraq and Syria that Bishop was able to reveal, triumphantly, that ‘it is perhaps extremely fortunate that we have a certain number of trained men at our disposal–trained, that is to say, against the wishes of all the authorities’. The first mission for which the ‘toughs’ were put up was the assassination of von Hentig, in which they refused to participate. ¹⁷ Instead they were sent to Iraq with orders to pose as Arab terrorists; their violence was to spread discord amongst supporters of the revolt and aid British intervention propaganda. However, the leader of the Irgun ‘was shot dead before they were able to function’. As SOE’s internal assessment concluded: ‘the whole of this undertaking was most dangerous and ill-conceived, and it is lucky that the Iraqis never discovered that we employed Palestinian Jews against them during their revolt’. ¹⁸

As planning for the Syrian operation got under way, Wavell cabled home that ‘all senior officers on my staff who have dealings with [special operations] are convinced that the organisation in the Mideast is a racket’. He had decided to bring all special operations firmly under military control through the creation of a ‘Jerusalem bureau’. ¹⁹ As British power teetered in the spring of 1941, many looked to the dark arts of propaganda to make right what had been lost on the battlefield. But those in charge of black propaganda turned their weapons on each other, rather than any external enemy; charges of sexual and financial misconduct rebounded around the Middle East. ²⁰ As one of the officers sent in to clear up the mess remarked, ‘nobody who did not experience it can possibly imagine the atmosphere of jealousy, suspicion and intrigue that embittered the relations between the various secret and semi-secret departments in Cairo during the summer of 1941’. ²¹ In any case there was little to suggest that the secret departments had anything to offer in the way of expertise in manipulating Levantine politics to British advantage. They comprised a hotch-potch of military intelligence, Indian policemen, civilians who might speak Serbo-Croat, or were believed to be good at deception because they were, for example, lawyers. SOE’s chief ‘Islamic expert’ was Heyworth Dunne, a tarbush-wearing English Muslim with an Egyptian wife. Dunne devoted his time mainly to ‘astrologers, whom he used to prophesy the future and the outcome of the war’. ²² This is not what Churchill had in mind when he called for such experts to be consulted.

With so few friends, all that was left to Britain was the exercise of military power. Wavell was ordered to strike west along the Libyan littoral and north into Syria. He welcomed neither order, believing that he should be given more time to amass a critical weight of trained and equipped forces before taking on another major operation. Thus the stratagems emanating from Churchill’s fertile and information-rich mind were contested at the time and have remained controversial since. There has remained, however, an odd imbalance in these controversies. Wavell ordered his forces to fight a battle and a war in June 1941. The battle–on the Egyptian-Libyan frontier–lasted for two days and changed very little. The war–against France in Syria and Lebanon–lasted for five weeks and led to the occupation of the Levant and the definitive joining of the Near East to the Mediterranean. It took British forces towards the Turkish border at a particularly vital moment. The Turks, always good bellwethers of military fortune, chose the moment when both the Syrian campaign and Libyan battle were in the balance to sign a Friendship treaty with the Nazis. At the same time they colluded with the Italians to subvert the Montreux Convention that banned warships from passing through the Straits in wartime. Churchill himself claimed that the ‘prize is Turkey’. Yet the battle has been regarded as important, the war not. This imbalance was a product of propaganda as much as strategy. ²³

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