Читать книгу The Bitter Sea: The Struggle for Mastery in the Mediterranean 1935–1949 - Simon Ball - Страница 9

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