Mediterranean, battle for the

Mediterranean, battle for the. War spread to the Mediterranean basin on 10 June 1940 when Italy declared war on the UK and France (see Maps 2 and 68). Mussolini, who nursed a jealousy of Hitler's spectacular successes in the fighting then going on in France, aimed to establish a ‘New Roman Empire’ by ruling those parts of the Mediterranean area which belonged to the British and French colonial empires. In pursuit of these aims, he informed Hitler during a meeting at the Brenner Pass on 4 October 1940 that he wanted Corsica, Malta, Tunisia, parts of Algeria, an Atlantic port on the Moroccan coast, and French Somaliland, and to replace the British imperium in Egypt and the Sudan.

Another fascist Mediterranean state, Spain, with whom Germany had signed a Treaty of Friendship in March 1939, also had designs on the British and French colonies and had, as a preliminary, annexed the internationally administered port of Tangier to prevent any move into it by Mussolini. But it was still suffering the ravages of the Spanish Civil War and was reliant on the Allies for food imports. So when, on 23 October 1940, Hitler suggested to Franco that he co-operate in a joint attack on the British colony of Gibraltar, the Spanish leader declined.

Opposing Mussolini's grand ambitions were France and the UK. Although France was quickly defeated and reduced to vassal status, with the country divided into an occupied zone and one controlled by the Vichy government, it still retained some influence. It enjoyed American favour, and still controlled its fleet and its colonies in the area—Algeria (the Mediterranean coast of which formed part of metropolitan France) and the protectorates of French Morocco and Tunisia—and it also retained control of Syria and Lebanon on the eastern littoral through a League of Nations mandate. As a belligerent, the position of the UK was less secure. Save for a number of small outposts that were crown colonies—the naval bases at Gibraltar and Malta, and the island of Cyprus (which respectively dominated strategic points in the west, central, and eastern Mediterranean)—its position was sustained mainly by informal treaty with Egypt, with Palestine and Iraq being ruled through League of Nations mandates and the former in the throes of revolt 1936–9. However, the British were determined to control the Mediterranean and the strategic routes, via the Suez Canal, to India and Singapore. After the fall of France the Admiralty, which had depended on the French Navy to secure the Western Mediterranean, contemplated evacuating the eastern Mediterranean and falling back to Gibraltar. This proposal was rejected by Churchill. The Mediterranean was by this date the only theatre in which British forces could engage any of the Axis powers, and in the initial phase, they enjoyed the advantage of engaging a power of the first rank, Italy, whose forces were equipped with obsolescent equipment. Germany regarded the theatre as secondary. The Mediterranean was of interest to Hitler only in so far as it defended the south-eastern flank of his armies fighting the German–Soviet war, but before this began German units were sent south in order to bolster up Italy's defeated forcesin the Western Desert campaigns. This, in the opinion of thee German General Staff (OKH), was a tiresome distraction, Rommel's ‘African Adventure’. Opportunities to destroy British power in this region were missed because of the failure to make more than a fragmentary effort.

Stiffened by Churchill's resolve, the Admiralty created a new ad hoc force to fill the vacuum created by the collapse of French power in the western Mediterranean—Force H, commanded by Admiral Somerville. In July 1940 the British acted precipitately to reduce the risk of powerful Vichy French warships falling into the hands of the Germans by attacking the French naval base at Mers-el-Kébir, near Oran in Algeria. This act risked the entire western Mediterranean by bringing Vichy France back into the war on the Axis side. The danger passed slowly, but not before Vichy had signed the Paris protocols in May 1941 promising to co-operate with Germany in the Middle East and Africa. Air, sea, and land facilities were granted in Syria, and use of Bizerta.

The war on land in the Mediterranean followed a similar pattern to that in France and the Low Countries. A period of masterly inactivity was followed by rapid and crushing movement. The Tenth Italian Army in Libya appeared very imposing on paper: 250,000 men, with a further 350,000 in Abyssinia. The British C-in-C Middle East, General Wavell, had only 36,000 in Egypt. In September 1940 the Italians invaded Egypt from Cyrenaica, but halted after only 80 km. (50 mi.). The following month Mussolini launched a disastrous invasion of Greece from occupied Albania (see Balkan campaign). The Greek Army put up a spirited defence in the mountain passes, which the Italians lacked the fire-power to dominate; not only were the Italians repulsed but the Greeks advanced into Albania. In this first phase of the Mediterranean war these campaigns were interdependent, activity in one having effects on another. Closely related, too, were the land, air, and sea elements. Victory could not be attained by one side or the other unless the three services worked in intimate co-operation.

The Italian humiliation in Greece, followed closely by the extraordinary success of the British Fleet Air Arm in attacking the Italian fleet in harbour at Taranto in November 1940, encouraged Wavell in his belief that the Tenth Italian Army should be attacked at Sidi Barrani and driven back into Cyrenaica. The strategic results of his audacious decision were momentous and did much to shape the war in this region. A mere 31,000 men of L the Western Desert Force, commanded by Maj-General O'Connor, and supported by units of the Royal Navy which bombarded Bardia and the coastal road, advanced through a gap in the Italian defences on the morning of 9 December 1940. Five Italian divisions were destroyed within two days and Tobruk fell. This great victory transformed the Mediterranean from a backwater, in which the British forces seemed likely to be crushed by the weight of Italian numbers, into the main British land front where Axis forces could be successfully engaged. O'Connor urged that he be permitted to continue his advance on Tripoli. Wavell refused, thus ensuring that the land war on the southern shores of the Mediterranean would continue.

Wavell's forces were spread very thinly over great distances. Not only was he advancing in Libya, but since January he had undertaken the conquest of Italian East Africa, and the recapture of British Somaliland (see East African campaign) which the Italians had occupied the previous August. After a tenacious defence, the Italians surrendered the Abyssinian capital, Addis Ababa, on 5 April. None the less, securing all these objectives was beyond the resources allocated to Wavell. The secretary of state for India, Leo Amery, was of the view that the occupation of Tripoli was ‘the key to any future operations on a serious scale against Sicily, Sardinia, or in the Balkans. It might be the Open Sesame of the whole war and as an operation of surprise might completely disorganize the enemy's plans’ (quoted in J. Baynes, The Forgotten Victor: General Sir Richard O'Connor, London, 1989, p.126). There can be little doubt that Amery was correct. But a third priority was now jostling to the top of Wavell's agenda, the need to send troops to sustain Greece against a German threat of invasion.

In 1939 the British government had guaranteed Greek independence along with that of Romania and the ill-fated Poles (see Poland, Guarantee of). The precedent was not a happy one and the Greeks were reluctant allies. The Greek dictator, General Ioannis Metaxas (1871–1941), refused to make any moves likely to antagonize Germany. After the Italian invasion, all British help therefore had to be covert. On 29 January 1941 Metaxas died and within a month the new Greek government acknowledged that it needed British troops to counter-balance the growing German threat. These could only come from O'Connor's Western Desert Force. Wavell viewed this extension of his commitments with what can only be described as equanimity. When members of his directorate of intelligence in Cairo argued that any Greek expedition would have a poor chance of success, Wavell observed laconically that Wolfe had once described war as ‘an option of difficulties’.

The Germans invaded Greece and Yugoslavia on 6 April. The latter was conquered within thirteen days, falling victim to overwhelming military strength, firepower, and command of the air, and British intervention in Greece resulted in disaster, mitigated only by a further naval victory over the Italians at Cape Matapan on 28 March 1941. The Greek Army of fourteen divisions refused to give up its gains in Albania. The British and three Greek divisions took up position on the Aliakmon Line. A gap emerged between this position and the main Greek Army through which the Germans surged. Within five days they had secured all the important towns; the British retreated to Thermopylae and thence to Piraeus for a repeat performance of Dunkirk in which the Royal Navy succeeded in performing another ‘miracle’ in evacuating the troops in face of German aerial superiority. These forces were removed to Crete which was to be transformed into a bastion to prevent the spread of German power to the southern shores of the Mediterranean. The German invasion of Crete relied heavily on air power—an aerial bombardment to demoralize the defenders followed up by paratroopers who delivered the coup de main. This reliance paid off (although only just) and another hurriedly improvised evacuation was organized to bring the remnants of British forces back to Egypt. In a very short passage of time the strategic balance had swung in favour of the Axis once German forces were deployed in the theatre. In February German troops were reported in Tripoli commanded by what British intelligence called ‘this obscure general’—Erwin Rommel.

If the full might of the Wehrmacht had been deployed in the eastern Mediterranean in the spring of 1941, British power in this region, fragile and over-extended, would surely have been destroyed. British forces were too weak and poorly equipped to overcome German professionalism. The land campaign in Cyrenaica demonstrated that British generals had quite enough difficulty overcoming Rommel's tiny panzer force in a theatre which OKH regarded as a ‘side show’. Before December 1942 German forces in Libya never amounted to more than three divisions compared with 200 on the Eastern Front. Yet by the end of the first week in April Rommel had recaptured Benghazi and Derna. All that Wavell had achieved in three months had been cancelled out in one. This setback, followed by the repulse of a British offensive (BATTLEAXE) in July, led to a strategic stalemate.

During these months Wavell was distracted by the needs of other operations which endangered his rear. The first was the crushing in May 1941 of a pro-Axis coup in Iraq led by Rashid Ali, prime minister since March 1940. The British then moved to consolidate their rear by securing the Levant in a five-week operation mounted mainly by Free French forces. After the Vichy commander Dentz surrendered on 14 July 1941, the Lebanon and Syria were granted their independence by de Gaulle. These events put General Auchinleck, the new C-in-C of Middle East Command, who replaced Wavell in July 1941, in a stronger position to concentrate his resources for a major effort in the Western Desert and his first offensive (CRUSADER) illustrates more clearly than any other the interdependent character of the Mediterranean war.

By the autumn of 1941, the plight of Malta, lying astride Rommel's line of communications, and the only British outpost remaining in the central Mediterranean, was becoming desperate. Blockaded and subject to constant aerial attack, its relief could only be assisted if the Libyan ports, Benghazi especially, fell into British hands. This required the assistance of the navy. The army could only move on these ports under an air umbrella, and to guarantee such cover more airfields in Cyrenaica had to be captured by driving Rommel out of the territory. Consequently, the operations in this campaign revolved around the northern communications centres. Conversely, Rommel could not drive the British from Alexandria and capture the Suez Canal until his lines of supply (especially of fuel) were freed from a grip exerted from Malta. All of these considerations were determined by logistics and levels of inter-service co-operation. Consequently, the campaign in the Western Desert developed into a ‘pendulum war’, one side or the other recovering as it was thrown back on its sources of supply while the opposing side became over-extended.

Here the strategic position of Malta, equidistant from Gibraltar and the Levant, was pivotal. In 1940–1 the Royal Navy could not strike effectively at the Axis convoys supplying Rommel—despite having access to ULTRA intelligence—because of a shortage of submarines and aircraft. But maintaining a base at Malta was a powerful potential thorn in the Axis side and it was a valuable aid to the ships escorting Allied convoys. These comprised Vice-Admiral Philip Vian's Fifteenth Cruiser Squadron, which escorted convoys between Alexandria and Malta, from which Force H took them west to Gibraltar. This system was put to the proof when, in December 1941, Fliegerkorps 10 was transferred to Sicily along with eighteen submarines. Air attack on Malta now became unremitting and British sea power was crippled. In the three months October– December 1941, the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, the cruiser Galatea, and the battleship Barham were sunk. Two other battleships, Valiant and Queen Elizabeth, were disabled by Italian frogmen, the human torpedoes of the Tenth Light Flotilla, who attached mines to their hulls in Alexandria harbour. On 18 DecemberForce K, the only striking force left in the central Mediterranean, floundered into a minefield off Tripoli and, depleted and harassed by incessant air attack, it was withdrawn to Gibraltar. Eight months later it returned escorting a convoy of fourteen merchantmen, of which only five arrived in Valetta harbour, but they included the precious tanker Ohio (lashed between two destroyers), whose fuel nourished Malta's beleaguered air defences.

Thus the war at sea and in the air undermined the foundations upon which Auchinleck's success in CRUSADER rested and, in the early months of 1942 Rommel was allowed to build up the resources upon which his spring and summer offensives were wholly reliant. But by the summer of 1942 this equation was reversed. The Allies again tightened their grip on his supply lines and simultaneously improved their own. ULTRA intelligence once more permitted the pinpointing of convoys that could be attacked by Allied submarines or by ‘sweeps’ from the air. In January– July 1942, 80 ships of 163,000 tons were sunk; in the months August– December 1942 this tally was almost doubled, 150 ships of 276,000 tons being destroyed, and in August 1942 Rommel's monthly stock of supplies dwindled to 6,000 tons.

All the major desert campaigns, especially CRUSADER ( November 1941), Rommel's second counter-offensive (  January– February 1942), the battle of Gazala ( May 1942), and the first battle of El Alamein ( July 1942), were governed by these factors. If Hitler had allowed Rommel to concentrate his resources on finally eliminating Malta in the summer of 1942, rather than pursuing the British towards the Nile delta, then the Germans might have solved their logistical conundrum. A solution was provided for the British by the decision taken by Roosevelt that US forces should enter the battle for the Mediterranean. After the fall of Tobruk in June 1942 the British and Commonwealth forces, which had been formed into the Eighth Army the previous autumn, were re-equipped with American tanks. This permitted the substantial build-up of equipment which served as the basis of Montgomery's success in the battle of Alam Halfa and the second at El Alamein (August and October– November 1942). Throughout the early months of 1943 Allied naval superiority was established, laying the basis for later amphibious warfare operations in the Mediterranean and strangling Rommel's supply lines. This task was made easier by the transfer of Fliegerkorps 10 back to the USSR. Allied navies now dominated the central Mediterranean.

In deciding to intervene in the Mediterranean, Roosevelt had effectively overruled the advice of his military advisers. The US chief of staff, General Marshall, argued that it was a theatre of secondary value, and that resources should be concentrated in the UK for the decisive blow that would follow in north-west Europe. Even a small commitment to the Mediterranean, he believed, would grow inexorably. There was something in Marshall's view, but he overlooked the importance of political factors and the necessity for ‘blooding’ American troops without excessive slaughter. The British had long cherished ambitions to extend the conflict to French north-west Africa, and this was a tempting spot to strike because it was calculated (wrongly) that the Vichy French would not be disposed to fire on American troops. The successful landings of 8 November 1942 that started the North African campaign (TORCH) signalled a major Allied commitment to the Mediterranean theatre, and Marshall was right in thinking that it would continue to grow. But the success of these amphibious operations and the advance into Tunisia do not justify the argument advanced by some historians that the second battle of El Alamein was a strategic irrelevance. Rommel's army had to be worn down, and if it had been allowed to withdraw intact into the mountain fastnesses of Tunisia, securing a decisive land victory in North Africa would have been rendered immensely difficult.

By the time victory in the North African campaign had been achieved in May 1943 the decision had been taken in principle to invade Sicily, although discussion on the subject at the Casablanca conference in January 1943 (see SYMBOL), where the decision had been made, had hinged around the benefits of a Sardinian alternative which would have provided bases from which to bomb northern Italian cities. To clear the remaining obstacles for the Sicilian landings, which began on 10 July, the island of Pantelleria was occupied on 11 June and Lampedusa and Linosa captured. Islands further north, such as Corsica and Elba, were also eventually liberated. By then the principle of invading the Italian mainland had been accepted by the Americans at the Quebec conference held in August 1943 (see QUADRANT), in return for a definite commitment by the British to launch the Normandy landings in the spring of 1944 (see OVERLORD), but at that time none of the advocates for a landing in Italy envisaged a prolonged campaign inching its way up the Italian peninsula. In truth, though, the logic of exploiting the victories already won in the Mediterranean was incontrovertible.

None the less, the US chiefs of staff fought a long battle to restrict the numbers of US troops involved in the Italian campaign which began on 3 September 1943. The Mediterranean, which became a unified command in December 1943, was dominated by the British, and after its first supreme commander, Eisenhower, had departed in January 1944 Maitland Wilson was appointed supreme commander. The bulk of his troops were British, but this concealed the overall US dominance of the Western Alliance. Whereas the British had dreams of opening up an immense theatre aligning Turkey against the Axis, the USA was only interested in the theatre to the extent that it contributed to OVERLORD. Marshall therefore supported a scheme for an invasion of southern France as this operation (ANVIL, later DRAGOON), would open up a new route of supply for US forces participating in OVERLORD. Unilateral British efforts to extend operations to the eastern Mediterranean, as during the ill-fated Dodecanese Islands campaign in September– December 1943, merely underlined how important American assistance had been in earlier victories, and from then on operations in the Mediterranean were run down. Seven divisions were withdrawn from Italy in December 1943 and transferred to Britain for OVERLORD. Turkey remained obdurately neutral. Despite the fall of Rome in June 1944, a further six divisions including the French Expeditionary Corps, were withdrawn for the French Riviera landings, which went ahead in August 1944 despite impassioned British protests.

In the event it was less British efforts than the arrival of Soviet forces in the Balkans that affected affairs in the eastern Mediterranean. The defection from the Axis of Romania and Bulgaria in August 1944 and the retreat of over-extended German forces from the Balkans, forced the British expedition to Greece (MANNA) to prevent a communist coup. In the early 1950s an argument was advanced that the sagacious British were more far sighted in envisaging the full extent of the communist threat in eastern Europe after 1945. If greater resources had been placed in the Mediterranean theatre and more support given to Alexander's ambitious plans to advance on Vienna via the Ljubljana gap, writers such as Chester Wilmot argued, then the West would have been in a stronger position to wage the Cold War. Much of this is retrospective pipe-dreaming. There were no thoughts in British plans about frustrating the Soviets, only defeating the Germans. In achieving the final defeat of Nazi Germany, the Mediterranean campaigns had a subsidary, if not insignificant, role. They were the decisive proving-ground of Allied forces—allowing expertise to be developed in ground, air–ground, and amphibious operations before the Allies undertook the massive challenge of OVERLORD and the defeat of the Wehrmacht in north-west Europe.

Brian Holden Reid

Bibliography

Hamilton, N. , Monty: Master of the Battlefield 1942–1944 (London, 1983).
Howard, M. , The Mediterranean Strategy in the Second World War (London, 1968).
Macintyre, D. , The Battle for the Mediterranean (London, 1964).
Sainsbury, K. , The North African Landings: 1942 (London, 1976).