5

Mare Nostrum – Again,
1918–1945

I

While most naval action within the Mediterranean during the First World War took place in the east and in the Adriatic, in waters that lapped the shores of the disintegrating empires of the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, the entire Mediterranean became the setting for rivalry between 1918 and 1939.¹ At the centre of the struggle for mastery of the Mediterranean lay the ambitions of Benito Mussolini, after he won control of Italy in 1922. His attitude to the Mediterranean wavered. At some moments he dreamed of an Italian empire that would stretch to ‘the Oceans’ and offer Italy ‘a place in the sun’; he attempted to make this dream real with the invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, which, apart from its sheer difficulty as a military campaign, was a political disaster because it lost him whatever consideration Britain and France had shown for him until then. At other times his focus was on the Mediterranean itself: Italy, he said, is ‘an island which juts into the Mediterranean’, and yet, the Fascist Grand Council ominously agreed, it was an imprisoned island: ‘the bars of this prison are Corsica, Tunisia, Malta and Cyprus. The guards of this prison are Gibraltar and Suez.’²

Italian ambitions had been fed by the peace treaties at the end of the First World War. Not merely did Italy retain the Dodecanese, but the Austrians were pushed back in north-eastern Italy, and Italy acquired much of Italia irredenta, ‘unredeemed Italy’, in the form of Trieste, Istria and, along the Dalmatian coast, Zara (Zadar), which became famous for the excellent cherry brandy produced by the Luxardo family. Fiume (Rijeka) in Istria was seized by the rag-tag private army of the nationalist poet d’Annunzio in 1919, who declared it the seat of the ‘Italian Regency of Carnaro’; despite international opposition, by 1924 Fascist Italy had incorporated it into the fatherland. One strange manifestation, which reveals how important the past was to the Fascist dream, was the creation of institutes to promote the serious study (and italianità, ‘Italianness’) of Corsican, Maltese and Dalmatian history. Anyone who wandered along the great ceremonial avenue carved out alongside the Roman Forum, through the heart of ancient Rome, could admire large maps of the Roman Empire that showed how it had grown from a tiny settlement on the Palatine Hill to the empire of Trajan, encompassing the entire Mediterranean and lands far beyond. Albania, precariously independent since 1913, also came within Italian sights: the central bank of Albania was based in Rome; its new ruler, King Zog, was desperate for financial and political support from Italy, an issue impatiently resolved with the Italian invasion of Albania in April 1939. Even before then, Italy operated an important submarine base at Saseno, a small island off the Albanian coast. Submarines were seen as the key to future Italian success in the Mediterranean, when the time came to challenge the ascendancy of Great Britain. In 1935 Marshal Badoglio, commander of the Italian armed forces, asserted that Italy would have no need for heavy battleships, but could win command of the sea by more modern means. In fact, the Italian fleet was unimpressive: ‘it lagged in practically every category of naval warfare, being technologically backward, operationally off balance and unimaginatively led’.³

The invasion of Albania and continued repression of rebels in Libya proved that talk of a Mediterranean empire was not mere bluster, however much observers saw Mussolini as a semi-comic figure with his jutting jaw out of which poured grandiose statements about the restoration of the Roman Mare Nostrum. The acquisition of Libya had created a north–south axis across the Mediterranean, and North Africa was to constitute Italy’s ‘fourth shore’. British Malta, commanding the seas between Sicily and the ‘fourth shore’, was therefore more than an inconvenience; it was an obstacle. Mussolini staged a triumphal visit to Tripoli in 1937, celebrating the creation of the first proper road running for 1,000 miles along the Libyan coast, and the rebuilding of parts of the capital as a modern European city.⁴ Further proof of the Fascist ambition to displace Great Britain, by whatever means, emerged when the Italians extended financial support to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a highly disruptive figure who exploited the Arab riots in Palestine in 1936 to increase his political influence as religious leader of the Sunni Muslims in Palestine. Fascist militias – Green Shirts and Blue Shirts (who naturally detested one another) – were created in Egypt, where, in any case, there were many Black Shirts within the Italian community of Alexandria.⁵

Then, in 1936, the Italians offered active help to the Falangist forces fighting in Spain under the ruthless, uncharismatic but effective command of General Franco. As well as 50,000 troops, Fascist Italy provided air and sea support and played a major role in the battle for the Balearic islands. Mussolini made no claims to the Spanish mainland, but the islands were a different matter. The Italians landed in Majorca, from where by September 1936 they had chased out the Republicans; they executed about 3,000 Majorcans accused of sympathy for the Communists. Over the next two years the island became a base for savage Italian air raids on major Republican centres such as Valencia and Barcelona. Mussolini would probably have liked to hold on to Majorca, but he had acquired what he wanted: a centre of operations in the western Mediterranean, close enough to Toulon and Oran to serve as a warning to the French fleets based there, although his major obsession remained the British navy. In reality, though, the Italians made their presence felt: the main street of Palma de Mallorca was renamed Via Roma, its entrance adorned with statues of youths on whose shoulders Roman eagles were perched.⁶ After fifteen centuries, Mare Nostrum once again extended from Italy into Spanish waters.

Great Britain was not sure what it wanted in the Mediterranean. By 1939, only 9 per cent of British imports passed through the Suez Canal, while Malta was not, in fact, a particularly useful supply base, despite its magnificent harbour, since the lack of local resources (beginning with water) meant that it constantly had to be resupplied. It did provide a useful staging-post for aircraft flying the length of the Mediterranean, enabling them to refuel between Gibraltar and Alexandria. Apart from its superb sixteenth-century fortifications, Malta was not well defended. At the start of the war the island was protected by three single-engine biplanes known as Faith, Hope and Charity, carrying light .303 machine-guns.⁷ Strategically, Malta had the advantage, and disadvantage, of lying only a few minutes by air from Sicily: it was dangerously exposed, but Britain would not give up lightly a position that commanded the sea passages of the central Mediterranean. It was at Alexandria, though, that Britain chose to concentrate its Mediterranean fleet, despite having to use a harbour much inferior to Valletta.⁸ As for Britain’s other Mediterranean holdings, Cyprus had not been much used as a naval base since it was acquired from the Ottomans, while the bay of Haifa possessed a special strategic value as the terminal of the great oil pipeline from Iraq. Gibraltar was to prove slightly less of a problem in relations with Spain than the British government expected, even after war with Germany broke out: Franco, to Hitler’s disgust, refused to be drawn into the war, partly for fear that Britain would then occupy the Canaries. Hitler denounced Franco for his ingratitude after years of support during the civil war, suggesting that he must have Jewish blood.⁹ Still, what Britain required was easy access from west to east, particularly towards the Suez Canal.

Even when Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939 there was no reason to suppose that a war in defence of Poland would convulse the Mediterranean. Most of those involved expected a reprise of the hard-fought land battles in Flanders during the First World War. Mussolini was reticent about joining Hitler’s side, though his propaganda ministry routinely churned out empty boasts: on 21 April 1940 his spokesman declared that ‘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’.¹⁰ It was only when France was about to fall that he opportunistically decided to join the rout, on 10 June. This brought him a small slice of occupied France, though not yet the port he coveted, Nice.

II

France, not Italy, was Britain’s first problem in the Mediterranean. Most French commanders, stunned by defeat, saw the salvation of their country in Pétain’s humiliating deal with Hitler; they masked the shame they felt with an intense patriotism that was turned not so much against Germany as against Britain, for had not Britain sent too few men to fight, exposing la Patrie to a defeat it did not deserve? Before it could come to grips with the Italians, who were beginning to threaten British convoys, the British navy needed to know where it stood in relation to the French fleet, part of which, under the title ‘Force X’, was parked at Alexandria. There, in what was effectively British territory, the French refused to offer their vessels to Britain but did agree to mothball their ships, and little trouble ensued, despite the professed loyalty of the French sailors to the Pétain regime at Vichy.¹¹ But the pride of the French fleet lay at Oran, mainly in the harbour of Mers el-Kebir, and included two of the world’s best-equipped battle cruisers, the Dunkerque and the Strasbourg. Admiral Darlan proved to be an impassioned defender of what he saw as French interests, and it would be several years before his loyalty to Vichy wavered. The British offered Darlan a variety of options, from bringing his fleet into the British navy to sailing the ships to the Caribbean where they would be immobilized for the rest of the war. Darlan’s view was that French they were and French they would remain. The only option left, the British made clear, was for the Royal Navy to attack, which it did on 3 July 1940, giving no quarter. Although the Strasbourg managed to make its escape, the British achieved their main military objectives: the French ships were wrecked, though at a cost of about 1,300 French lives.¹² But Britain paid a political cost: vestigial diplomatic ties with Vichy France were broken. Darlan’s loathing of Britain was amply confirmed. Hitler could now see that the French navy and army in North Africa and French Syria were led by men who would remain tenaciously loyal to the Vichy regime. They might be of some use against the British, but the edges were fuzzy: France considered itself out of the war. Mers el-Kebir confirmed Hitler’s sense that he should concentrate his war in northern Europe. Mussolini could be allowed the scraps he sought in the Mediterranean, though Tunisia was out of the question: the Germans considered that North Africa was safer in the hands of a compliant Vichy France, and they laughed at Foreign Minister Ciano’s demand for Nice, Corsica, Malta, Tunisia and part of Algeria.¹³

So Britain’s next clashes in the Mediterranean were with the Italians, who seized Sidi Barrani, at the extreme west of Egypt, though not for long. In November 1940 the British won their spurs at Taranto, where an air attack launched from the decks of the aircraft-carrier Illustrious holed the Littorio, the most powerful ship the Italians possessed, and sank the battleship Cavour.¹⁴ This quick and easy victory discouraged the Italians from seeking battle at sea and, more importantly, it confirmed that even limited air power could overwhelm the pride of an enemy fleet. The question now was whether air raids could help conquer an island. Malta had been suffering Italian air attacks almost from the outbreak of war between Great Britain and Italy, though with the help of newly developed radar the little planes Faith, Hope and Charity proved surprisingly effective against the Italian Regia Aeronautica, until a squadron of modern Hurricane aircraft arrived to boost British air defences. At the start of 1941, German and Italian aircraft crippled the Illustrious as she made her way east from Gibraltar, though she managed to limp into the Grand Harbour of Malta.¹⁵ The bombing of Malta intensified, with daily air raids by the Germans that devastated Valletta and the Three Cities on the opposite side of the Grand Harbour, as well as killing hundreds of Maltese civilians who, along with British troops stationed on the island, were constantly short of food and other basic supplies. The situation became even worse after December 1941. By now the Germans were taking the Mediterranean more seriously. The fanatical Kesselring was appointed commander in the Mediterranean and made a concerted effort to destroy British convoys heading for Malta; as the German presence grew, though, pressures from other directions also grew, once Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were at war. By autumn 1941 the British were able to respond with bombing campaigns against Sicily and North Africa, and British submarines targeted Italian and German shipping supplying the Axis forces in North Africa. The Germans and Italians were so irritated that they consulted the third major Axis power, Japan, about the best way to seize an island, given Japanese experience in the Pacific; one method they proposed to employ was starvation.¹⁶

Malta now possessed a Grand Harbour filled with debris, the bodies of drowned sailors and oil from sunken vessels (which threatened to catch fire). Part of its defenders’ achievement was to keep Malta functioning as a base for aircraft and submarines capable of needling the enemy and interfering with their deployment of forces and supplies in North Africa. It is hardly surprising that the second Great Siege of Malta has seared itself as deeply in the Maltese consciousness as the Great Siege of 1565.¹⁷ Churchill was worried that conditions had reached a point where the Axis powers would not even need to invade: Malta would simply be bombed into submission. British convoys were under enormous pressure from submarines in the waters south of Majorca, and then from Italian cruisers and German and Italian aeroplanes on the approach past Tunis – in August 1942 only five ships out of a convoy of fourteen, heading from Gibraltar, reached safe anchorage in Malta.¹⁸ Fortunately, the Germans themselves could not decide whether they wanted to take the island, especially since that would mean a joint exercise with the Italian army, which recent experiences in North Africa had led them to respect less and less; and Mussolini assumed that the island would be his for the asking once Great Britain was forced to surrender on all fronts.¹⁹ Fortunately, too, the Germans became increasingly obsessed by their ambitions in North Africa, as Rommel advanced eastwards to Tobruk, and so, by May 1942, Malta seemed to be a peripheral consideration. The Axis powers were convinced that the war in the Mediterranean would be won on land, and not by conquering a small, dusty island. British commanders too thought that ‘it is better to lose Malta than Egypt’.²⁰ Yet what also saved Malta was undoubtedly the stalwart refusal of those on the island to allow constant bombardment and months of utter misery to break their resolve, and this was duly recognized when King George VI awarded the entire island the George Cross. The medal is still borne on the Maltese flag as a reminder of the island’s heroic resistance: 30,000 buildings had been damaged or destroyed, and 1,300 civilians had been killed by bombs.²¹

Malta held out, but in 1941 the British were beaten in the battle for Crete, even if its strategic value to the Germans was not entirely obvious.²² The German High Command had only a disjointed appreciation of the importance of the Mediterranean. The Germans viewed the Mittelmeer from the perspective of the Balkans. Who in the long term would control routes across the sea was seen as an issue between Italy and Britain. With German forces fighting alongside the Italians in North Africa, the Axis powers aimed to secure the north–south supply route across the Mediterranean. But the way the Führer chose to do so was controversial. When Hitler decided to send U-boats into the Mediterranean – a hazardous exercise, since it meant passing Gibraltar – Admiral Raeder expostulated that this would harm the German war effort in the Atlantic. The Axis powers knew that the Mediterranean gave access to the oil supplies of the Middle East, via the Suez Canal, although it was unrealistic to expect that route to be opened up quickly. But Axis oil stocks were running short; by summer 1942, the Italian fleet was marooned without oil, and the Germans refused to supply any in view of all their other commitments. So Hitler pointed to a different route to the oil, across the vast open plains of Russia into Persia, which made more sense to him once the war with Russia was under way in 1941. This took his army to Stalingrad, where it stalled and then suffered a massive defeat. The growing importance of the Mediterranean took the Germans by surprise. Its real importance became much clearer when, in November 1942, the Allies, now including the Americans, landed on the same beaches the French had used in 1830 to invade Algeria.²³

The attack on Algeria (‘Operation Torch’) was accompanied by landings in Morocco and a drive eastwards to Tunisia. The Germans had already been checked at El Alamein in July 1942, and were pushed back decisively in November by Montgomery’s army of ‘Desert Rats’. However, the presence in North Africa of Vichy commanders, notably Darlan, enormously complicated the situation. Darlan was only really interested in supporting the winning side. He regarded himself as heir-apparent to Pétain. He was willing to treat with the Allies, however much contempt they felt for a man many saw as a craven traitor. But he was worried that the Allies might yet be beaten back, and then he would be exposed as a double-dealer. In November 1942 General Eisenhower met Darlan at Algiers, where the admiral lived in spectacular style. Eisenhower hoped to persuade him to bring the French home fleet from Toulon to North Africa and join the American effort. Darlan made murmurs of assent, but he knew that the admiral in charge at Toulon, an old rival, would not dream of so doing, and even the French ships at Alexandria demurred, despite the good relations their crews enjoyed with the British. A messy compromise allowed Darlan to remain as Pétain’s deputy in North Africa, creating outrage in Britain and the United States: Darlan was denounced as a quisling and anti-Semite; the CBS anchorman Ed Murrow asked: ‘Are we fighting Nazis or sleeping with them?’ Darlan’s predicament was resolved when, on Christmas Eve, a fanatical monarchist sneaked into the government offices in Algiers, waited for him to return from an agreeable lunch, and shot the self-righteous admiral dead.²⁴

The contest for mastery over the Mediterranean was becoming more bitter; Allied success seemed far from certain. In December 1942 the Vichy commander in Tunisia handed the Axis powers the finely equipped French naval base at Bizerta. Meanwhile, during November, Hitler had decided to end the divided status of France by occupying the areas under the control of Vichy; Mussolini was allowed to claim Nice as his prize, while for good measure he also sent some squadrons across to Corsica, on which they raised the Italian flag. Vichy commanders played a murky role in Mediterranean war and politics, and used their indeterminate status as the representatives of a country not officially at war to oscillate between both sides. When the Allies smuggled a little-known French general, Henri Giraud, by submarine from Vichy France to Algiers, they discovered that he possessed all Darlan’s pride and prejudices – he did not want to be an Allied poodle, he had no interest in abolishing the anti-Semitic laws, he arrested the ‘usual suspects’ and interned them in concentration camps out of sight of the Allies. His great hope was to lead a massive assault to free his mother-country from the humiliation of German occupation.²⁵ The lines between the opposing sides were far clearer in the Atlantic or the Pacific than in the Mediterranean.

III

Political confusion in the Mediterranean increased still further in 1943. Allied forces crushed the Germans at Medenine in Tunisia in March, and Rommel’s Germans pulled out of Tunisia. On 8 May Tunis and Bizerta fell to the Allies, along with 250,000 Italian and German troops. The fall of Tunisia rendered the Mediterranean safer for Allied shipping, and super-convoys of as many as 100 ships now passed Malta to reach Gibraltar or Alexandria – the unity of the Mediterranean as a largely British-controlled sea was, if not restored, at least in prospect. In June 1943 King George VI sailed across the open sea from Tripoli to Malta, where he was greeted by masses of jubilant Maltese. The intention was not just to boost the morale of the Maltese, but to show the whole empire that Great Britain was making ineluctable progress towards final victory.²⁶

There was further bleak news for the Axis. Greece descended into civil war, and resistance was building up in Yugoslavia.²⁷ Within the Axis, suspicion grew that Sardinia was being targeted as the gathering point for a massed Allied invasion of Europe by way of southern France; Cagliari paid a high price for this disinformation, and the marks of allied bombing are still visible there. The real question was whether Mediterranean France or Italy was (to use Churchill’s phrase) ‘the soft underbelly’ of Axis Europe. In June 1943 the Allies captured their first piece of Italy: the small but strategically placed island of Pantelleria west of Malta, where 12,000 demoralized Italian troops succumbed to intense bombardment.²⁸ When the Allies confounded earlier expectations by landing in Sicily, in July, a special meeting of the Fascist Grand Council turned on Mussolini. At his next audience with King Victor Emmanuel he was not asked to resign – he was informed that he had already been replaced by Field Marshal Badoglio, and on leaving the Quirinale Palace he was hustled into a police van and placed under arrest. Even though the direction Badoglio’s government would take was not clear, the Germans began to build up their own strength in Italy, awaiting the day when Allied forces crossed to the mainland. On 22 July Palermo was occupied by the Americans, led by General Patton; by the time the Allies arrived at Messina, on 17 August, the city had been reduced to rubble and 60,000 German troops with 75,000 Italian troops had escaped. These Italians were not keen to carry on fighting, and their mood matched that of the nation; in early September Badoglio was cajoled into signing an armistice agreement with the Allies. When German planes bombed the Italian battleship Roma, causing a great many deaths, the Italian navy sailed the pride of the home fleet to Malta, handing the ships over to Britain. The great harbour at Taranto was willingly ceded to the Allies. On the other hand, the situation in the islands was more confused. British forces managed to occupy the smaller islands in the Dodecanese; in Kephalonia the Germans wantonly killed 6,000 Italian troops; in Corsica there was complete chaos, as Germans, Italians, Free French and Corsican resistance fighters all staked claims to pieces of the island.²⁹ The capitulation of Italy thus introduced new uncertainties across the Mediterranean.

The first attempts to gain an Allied toehold in Italy in late 1943 were succeeded by the surprise landing of masses of Allied troops at Anzio, south of Rome. Thereafter the Allies would have to fight their way up the rest of the peninsula; the political situation in Italy had been complicated by the escape of Mussolini and his acquiescence in the creation of the ‘Italian Social Republic’ in the north, under Nazi control. Despite slow progress, the Free French (not surprisingly) and the Americans were keen to go ahead with landings in southern France, to balance the Allied landings in Normandy during June 1944: Toulon fell to the Allies on 26 August, earlier than they had believed possible, and this released manpower for the attack on Marseilles, which crumbled on 28 August.³⁰

Before long, thoughts turned to the future of the Mediterranean after the German defeat. Live issues included Palestine, Yugoslavia and Greece, where Communist insurgency was beginning to tear the country apart. In October 1944 Churchill was in Moscow and put to Stalin the British position: Britain ‘must be the leading Mediterranean Power’. Stalin saw the point, sympathizing with the difficulties Britain had faced when the Germans interfered with its transit routes across the Mediterranean; he even assured Churchill that he would not rock the boat in Italy. This was because Stalin was primarily interested in gaining British acquiescence to a Soviet ascendancy in Slav Europe, including Serbia.³¹ The moment had not yet come for the Russians to reassert their own claim to be a Mediterranean power.