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

Bruno Mussolini was sent to Majorca to command a squadron of bombers. ‘I envy them,’ Ciano wrote of his old colleagues from Abyssinia, ‘but I am, at least for the moment, nailed to this desk.’ Still, he could give them a satisfying mission since ‘we must seize the moment to terrorize the enemy’. 31 Valencia, and even Barcelona, the heart of the most hardcore Catalan resistance to Franco, were within easy bombing range of Majorca. The aircraft had less than an hour’s flying time to their targets and could approach, unobserved, over the water. 32 The Italian pilots boasted incessantly–and inaccurately–about the amount of damage they were doing. Mussolini was so delighted with the results that he doubled the bomber force on Majorca at the beginning of 1938. 33 In March the aircraft were ‘unleashed’ on the civilian suburbs of Barcelona, causing many casualties. Regia Aeronautica chief Giuseppe Valle, the butt of the younger Mussolini’s taunt that he no longer had what it took to be a man in the cockpit, even flew a lone aircraft at night from Rome to bomb Barcelona. 34 Whenever the world talked about bombing they did not get much beyond the Nazi Condor Legion’s devastating attack on the Basque town of Guernica in April 1937–an attack in which Italian bombers, unnoticed, took a minor part. 35 Surely, the Italian ambassador in Berlin claimed with some satisfaction, ‘the whole world knew that those involved in the bombing attacks on harbour cities, especially Barcelona, had been Italian fliers’. 36

Fascist propagandists lamented the fact that the Italian Empire, emasculated by ‘morbid parliamentarism, had not hitherto been regarded as ‘an immediate menace to the great imperial artery from Gibraltar to Port Said’. 37 For the Italians too, the Mediterranean comprised a whole. To them, however, the proper orientation of the sea was not west to east but north to south. Their ambition to reorientate the Mediterranean had been constantly thwarted by Britain’s west–east stranglehold. As early as May 1919 Mussolini had travelled to Fiume, the heart of Italia irredenta, to tell his supporters that ‘the first thing to be done is to banish foreigners from the Mediterranean, beginning with the English’. 38 Now that Fascism had ‘incalculably strengthened Italy’s spiritual, political and military efficiency’, Britain would discover that Italian possession of the north–south ‘trans-Mediterranean lines Sicily–Tripoli and Dodecanese–Tobruk’ rendered its own Mediterranean artery forfeit. Britain was hegemon of the Mediterranean, but that hegemony would be challenged. For anyone with a smattering of classical learning–and no account of the Mediterranean in the 1930s could resist extensive reference to ancient history–the implication was clear. Athens’s hegemony in the Aegean had–according to Thucydides–inevitably led to war with Sparta. The war had dragged on for decades, leaving Athens enfeebled. Italy was Sparta to Britain’s Athens. 39

Britain was the hegemon of the Mediterranean; Fascist Italy was its would-be successor. At either end of the Mediterranean, however, lay two major powers each with claims to eminence in their own half of the sea, with some, albeit limited, ability to project power into the other half. Such an evaluation may seem unfair to the French who possessed a formidable Mediterranean Fleet docked on both shores of the Mediterranean. The French Fleet had naval bases at Marseilles and Toulon in France, Bizerta in Tunisia, and Oran in Algeria. In addition the French had a complex series of alliances with the smaller powers, not least, since 1927, Yugoslavia. It held the ‘mandates’ for Syria and Lebanon in the eastern Mediterranean. The further east one went, however, the less apparent was French power. 40 Regretfully, the French themselves realized that their naval power made sense in the western Mediterranean only in conjunction with that of Britain, and operated in the east entirely on the sufferance of the English. Although the Marine did not like to admit it they were, for all their gleaming new warships and well-appointed ports, merely an escort force for the French Army. Their mundane task was to transport thousands of ‘black’ African troops across the Mediterranean to serve in Europe. If the French ever had to fight the Germans they intended to rerun the war of 1914–1918, this time bleeding Africa, rather than France, ‘white’. By the end of the first year of a European war, half a million Africans would be fighting for France, with millions more to come if necessary 41 ‘If we use the base in Majorca, Mussolini assured Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim Ribbentrop, ‘not one negro will be able to cross from Africa to France by the Mediterranean route.’ 42 The head of the French navy, Admiral François Darlan, believed that Majorca was more important than Spain. 43

The embarrassment, for some a humiliation, of the navy’s subordinate position made for a streak of vicious Anglophobia that ran through the Marine and other elements in French life. Many Britons, on the other hand, admired France’s Mediterranean empire. Winston Churchill, wintering in North Africa, remarked that ‘you would be staggered by what the French have done out here in twenty years…an extraordinary effort’. ‘The French are not at all infected with the apologetic diffidence that characterizes British administration,’ he assured the readers of the Daily Mail in February 1936, ‘they offer [indigenous] inhabitants logical, understanding modern solutions.’ 44

The Mediterranean’s other major power, Turkey, revived by the successful Kemalist revolution, had had its right to the Sea of Marmara–and to the city of Constantinople on its west shore–acknowledged by the other powers after it had gone to the brink of war with Britain in 1922. Turkey sat astride the third egress from the Mediterranean. The Straits, the Dardanelles running from the Mediterranean into the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosphorus running from the Sea of Marmara into the Black Sea, remained under international control. The Turks could not deploy a formidable navy, but their huge army lay at the heart of the Kemalist regime. 45

Both the French and the Turks knew that for Italian ambitions to be realized, they themselves would need to be displaced. In 1926 the Duces brother, Arnaldo, was honest about family intentions. Italy would predate both the French and the Turks. Italian expansion had many avenues to pursue. ‘There’s the entire eastern basin of the Mediterranean, where the remnants of the old Turkish empire are to be found,’ Arnaldo wrote gleefully in the Popolo d'ltalia. ‘There’s also Syria, which France won’t even colonize because she has no excess population. Then there’s Smyrna which should belong to us. And finally there’s Adalia.’ 46 The French continually toyed with the idea of an alliance with Italy against the Germans in Europe, to the disadvantage of the British in the Mediterranean, but they could never bring themselves to trust a country whose ambitions ran so obviously counter to their own. In the autumn of 1933, for instance, the Army’s Deuxième Bureau reluctantly concluded that the destruction of France would be ‘a fundamental objective of Italian policy as long as France remains a Mediterranean power’. 47

The Turks, unlike the French, never tried to convince themselves that the Italians were friends. 48 Kemal Ataturk had a nice line in Mussolini appreciation: ‘the swollen bullfrog of the Pontine Marshes’. The Turks also had a cynical view of the Italian threat: ‘It is unlikely that there will be any serious trouble between Italy and Turkey,’ Ataturk commented in 1935, ‘madmen don’t as a rule fall foul of drunkards.’ 49 Indeed, the Turks adroitly turned the geopolitical obsessions of the other powers to their own advantage. With astonishingly little resistance they persuaded other countries to allow them to reoccupy the Straits. The signature of the Montreux Straits Convention in July 1936 was the signal for remarkable manifestations of joy throughout Turkey. Turkish troops were greeted on the Dardanelles with garlands and streamers, the Turkish Fleet was met by cheering crowds. In September 1936 King Edward VIII, travelling ‘incognito’ as the Duke of Lancaster, arrived off Turkey in his steam yacht; he and Ataturk paid each other carefully choreographed mutual visits. The Turkish Fleet steamed into the Mediterranean for the first time since the Great War. They were warmly received at Malta. British diplomats were delighted by their coup; the British military was not. British interest in the new situation and the assistance Britain would receive from it, they complained, could be summed up in one phrase: ‘very small’. ‘This country’, the military observed wearily,‘would give more than it receives.’ 50

Many post-war Italian historians have doubted the seriousness of Mussolini’s Mediterranean ambitions. Citing his undoubted tergiversations, they have questioned whether a master plan for Italian hegemony in the Mediterranean ever really existed. Their Mussolini is a restless opportunist, constantly searching for a status that Italy’s military and economic power did not deserve. This Mussolini was potentially as interested in the Danube and the Brenner Pass as in a new Roman Empire. He was a ‘Stresa’ Mussolini, as likely to make a deal with Britain against Germany in Europe as he was to make a pact with Germany against Britain in the Mediterranean. Refuting these unconvincing apologetics has made work for generations of counter-revisionists. 51

Mussolini’s apologists were able to make a case because of the self-contradictions at the heart of Fascist plans for the Mediterranean. Mussolini contradicted himself about the purpose of a Mediterranean empire. Often he celebrated Italy’s Mediterranean destiny. He spoke of the Mediterranean as Italy’s natural space. Italy, Mussolini declared, was ‘an island which juts into the Mediterranean’. What was the Mediterranean to Italy, he asked: ‘it is life’. For the British, on the other hand, the Mediterranean was no more than ‘a short cut whereby the British empire reaches more rapidly its outlying territories’. 52 He would, he boasted, recreate Mare Nostrum–‘our sea–as part of the great Fascist crusade to rebuild the Roman Empire. That empire had bound together the north and south of the Mediterranean; Italy and North Africa had been an organic whole. 53 Now Fascism would rebuild ‘the fourth shore’, the empire in North Africa. It would be peopled by Italian colonists. 54 One could only admire, wrote a British expert, ‘the courage of the Italian nation in boldly applying new methods to this old problem of colonization, and in setting examples which, if they succeed, will furnish models for others to follow’. 55 Freed of land hunger the Italian population would increase exponentially. In decades to come the Mediterranean, purged of the British, would house an Italian population rivalling that of the British Empire, the United States or the Soviet Union.

At other moments Mussolini disdained the Mediterranean. Far from being a natural space, it was a prison. The Fascists could not confine themselves to repopulating the Fourth Shore. They needed to escape the Mediterranean altogether. In 1934 he told the Second Quinquennial Assembly of the Fascist Party that Italy would ‘find the keys of the Mediterranean in the Red Sea’. ‘The historical objectives of Italy have two names,’ he declared, ‘Asia and Africa.’ 56 In 1938 Mussolini had ‘The March to the Oceans’ included in the official record of the Fascist Grand Council. It claimed that Italy was imprisoned in the Mediterranean:

The bars of this prison are Corsica, Tunisia, Malta, and Cyprus. The guards of this prison are Gibraltar and Suez. Corsica is a pistol pointed at the heart of Italy; Tunisia at Sicily. Malta and Cyprus constitute a threat to all our positions in the eastern and western Mediterranean. Greece, Turkey, and Egypt have been ready to form a chain with Great Britain and to complete the politico-military encirclement of Italy. Thus Greece, Turkey, and Egypt must be considered vital enemies of Italy and of its expansion…Once the bars are broken, Italian policy can only have one motto–to March to the Oceans. 57

What did Mussolini want? A Mediterranean Empire? Or was the Mediterranean merely a prison from which he must break free to achieve WeltmacM Whatever the answer, the first step was the same: Italy had to defeat the British.

The contradiction in Fascist goals was actually less important than the contradiction in Fascist methods. Whereas the difference between Mare Nostrum and the Prison was only intermittently debated, arguments within the Fascist elite about methods of expansion were constant. There were two main schools of thought. On one side were those who advocated mezzi insidiosi, ‘insidious methods’, the use of stealth and dissimulation to achieve long-term goals. The driving force behind Mediterranean expansion should be political warfare. Through subversion, propaganda and espionage the Fascists could undermine their rivals. Self-doubt and internal divisions would cause them to collapse. If military force was to be used, it should be limited and aimed at weak opponents. The most useful type of military power was provided by special forces. They would engage in asymmetric warfare, using a few men armed with innovative weapons to cause disproportionate amounts of damage to the enemy. The Italians were pioneers in special forces. The navy’s ‘Special Weapons Section’ was tasked with using explosive-filled motorboats and ‘human torpedoes’ to bring the British Mediterranean Fleet to its knees. 58 Large conventional armed forces were also important but they were a ‘luxury fleet’, cowing and deterring potential enemies whilst the mezzi insidiosi took their toll. ‘Our fleet has no battleships; it has fast cruisers with little or no defences; it has good destroyers, good submarines. It is thus able to engage in little more than…guerrilla warfare at sea,’ the head of Italy’s armed forces, Pietro Badoglio, warned Mussolini in 1935. 59

This cannot be true Fascism, others objected. The practice of diplomacy, albeit laced with terrorism, hardly suited the needs of a regime whose claims to violent, masculine squadrismo were beginning to look distinctly middle-aged. The Second Quinquennium reminded everyone that Fascism had done nothing violent or heroic for at least ten years. 60 Fascism would thrive on heroic conflict. The road to world power was paved by catalytic wars rather than sneaky subversion. 61 The Italian armed forces should be expanded and re-equipped, most especially with the weapons of total war, the bomber and the battleship. These forces were far from a luxury. They were there to be used. If the democracies showed signs of coalescing to face the threat, then Italy too would need to seek congenial allies, most notably Nazi Germany.

Throughout the 1930s the dispute over methods was a closely fought battle. In 1936 Admiral Domenico Cavagnari, the professional head of the Italian navy, declared that mezzi insidiosi showed a lack of ambition. Responding to Badoglio’s scepticism, in August 1936 he ordered his officers to concentrate on building a battlefleet capable of attacking the British in conjunction with the Nazi Kriegsmarine. 62 The predicted date for a war was 1942. The Duce formally proclaimed the Italian-German Axis on 1 November 1936 to an immense and enthusiastic crowd’ in a speech in the Piazza Duomo of Milan. His words were later broadcast in the major Mediterranean languages–English, French, Greek, Spanish and Arabic. He told Hitler’s personal representative that ‘our relations with London are very bad and cannot improve’. In return Hitler’s message was: ‘that we should know that he regards the Mediterranean as a purely Italian sea’. 63 Mussolini’s ‘tragedy’ was that his regime was supremely well equipped for mezzi insidiosi whereas its lack of material resources hobbled its preparation for total war.

Mezzi insidiosi continued in full force despite the Axis. In August 1935, the Royal Navy had decided that its great base at Malta was too dangerous as a wartime berth for the Mediterranean Fleet. Whenever there was a crisis the Fleet would have to steam to Alexandria, its main harbour in Egypt. Unlike Malta, however, Alexandria was far from being an ideal anchorage. Although offering the charms of a cosmopolitan and well-stocked city to sailors, it had real military disadvantages. Alexandria did not have a dockyard that could repair any damaged ships. Any warship damaged by accident or enemy action would have to leave the Mediterranean altogether. And Alexandria’s harbour mouth was notoriously narrow. If a ship was sunk within it, the entire British fleet would be trapped. Indeed, days after war in Abyssinia was declared, the Italian liner Ausonia-‘the most luxurious steamer on the Europe–Egypt service’–mysteriously caught fire in the entrance to Alexandria Bay. 64 British destroyers raced to the scene and, at considerable risk to themselves, nosed up to the Italian ship and pushed it out of the way. ‘British naval men’, remarked a journalist who reported the story, ‘have their own private opinion of the burning of this ship in this particular place.’ 65

A final flaw of Alexandria was created by its position on the Nile Delta. The outpouring of the Nile created complex eddies, currents and water densities. By developing a method–called sonar–of ‘pinging’ artificial bodies underwater with sound waves, and picking up the echo, the British possessed what they hoped was the decisive weapon against submarines. The hydrology of Alexandria, however, crippled this brilliant new British invention. 66 Alexandria was the perfect laboratory for mezzi insidiosi. Italian submarines operated at the harbour mouth, shadowing British battleships whenever they left port. 67

In the event, however, Italian submariners demonstrated the value of mezzi insidiosi elsewhere in the Mediterranean. In August 1937 Mussolini and Ciano ordered them to launch a ‘pirate war’ in the Mediterranean against Spanish and Soviet shipping. 68 In Rome, they would maintain ‘plausible deniability’. Merchantmen would be sent to the bottom by desperadoes of unknown origin. Fifty-nine submarines fanned out through the Mediterranean. Some daring submariners made it as far as the Black Sea Straits where they attacked Soviet ships, proving that the Turks could not defend the Straits they had, with such fanfare, remilitarized. Cruisers and destroyers entered the Straits of Sicily, the choke point between eastern and western Mediterranean, attacking any Spanish ship that passed. Torpedo boats ranged along the North African coast doing the same. 69 The operation also was not without its risks. At the end of August the submarine Iride attacked the Royal Navy ship HMS Havock in error. Up until that point British destroyer crews had largely enjoyed their posting in the western Mediterranean. Memorably, Miss Czechoslovakia had embarked on a warship during a stop-over at Palma by the First Destroyer Flotilla. The beauty queen had ‘enjoyed her passage enormously and even joined us in the water when we stopped and piped hands to bathe’. 70 The contrast with a sudden attack was a shock. The enraged destroyer captain hunted the submarine for hours, although in the end neither vessel was sunk. Even Ciano admitted, we are in deep trouble’. 71

The foreign ministers of the ‘Mediterranean powers’ assembled in the Swiss town of Nyon to discuss what should be done about the ‘piracy’. 72 Nyon was an appeasers’ paradise. The fiction that attacks on merchant shipping in the Mediterranean was the fault of ‘pirates unknown’ was fully indulged. Italy was even invited to the meeting, although it declined to attend. Not one word of criticism of Mussolini was allowed to emerge. The Mediterranean powers agreed to set up anti-submarine patrols. Italy was invited to take part in these patrols, in effect allowing her destroyers to search for her own submarines. The Royal Navy accorded the Regia Marina equality of status in the Mediterranean. 73 Nyon was hailed as a triumph of ‘collective security’. England: ‘a nation which thinks with its arse’, was Mussolini’s rather more robust verdict. ‘It is a great victory,’ chuckled Ciano, who only a fortnight before had been scared by the thought of British action, ‘from accused torpedoers to Mediterranean policemen, with the exclusion of the Russians, whose ships have been sunk.’ 74 Nyon preserved the naval status quo in the Mediterranean until the end of the Spanish Civil War: the Francoists received whatever they wanted, the Republicans got very little. 75

Mezzi insidiosi rested on a clear understanding of the psychological weakness of enemies. Mussolini could look deep inside the British military, political and diplomatic establishment. The Italians had an outstanding intelligence network that fed Mussolini timely and accurate accounts of British deliberations about the Mediterranean. Mussolini often dressed up the sources of his information in picaresque stories; he ascribed his–accurate–information about ammunition shortages of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean to a letter from ‘a lady’ in London. 76 In fact the intelligence-gathering was not fortuitous but the result of a professional and systematic effort. In 1924 Italian military intelligence–SIM–had introduced its first mole into the British Embassy in Rome. The treacherous Embassy servant was, in due course, succeeded by his brother, who kept Mussolini supplied with British diplomatic correspondence until Italy entered the Second World War in June 1940. 77 At the post-war trial of the head of SIM, General Mario Roatta, it was claimed that his agency removed 16,000 documents a year from embassies in Rome. They also ran operations in other capitals. Italian employees of the Marconi company in Egypt, for instance, copied sensitive telegrams and fed them to Italian intelligence. 78 When Galeazzo Ciano met Hitler on 24 October 1936 he was able to hand him a dossier of thirty-two British Foreign Office documents. ‘Today,’ Ciano recorded the Führer as saying, ‘England is governed merely by incompetents.’ 79

Hitler had a point: the damage caused by Italian espionage went far beyond diplomatic documents, however revealing of national policy. The haul from the British Embassy in Rome included diplomatic and consular codes, the naval attaché cipher, the India cipher and the interdepartmental cipher. Even without these windfalls the Italian cryptanalysts found communications between London and Athens, Belgrade, Rome and Addis Ababa easy to break. SIM could read British, French and Ethiopian diplomatic traffic. Naval codebreakers had similar successes. From the summer of 1935 they were reading signals from the Admiralty to Royal Navy units in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. 80 The decrypts often reached Mussolini’s desk within twenty-four hours of interception. Ignorant of how compromised they were, even the British recognized that Mussolini knew a great deal about their military plans and dispositions, ‘for’, Sir Robert Vansittart, the professional head of the Foreign Office, conceded, ‘they have a decent Intelligence service.’ 81

TWO

Death on the Nile

In October 1937 another famous novelist paid tribute to the impact of mezzi insidiosi on the English imagination. ‘The best of the new autumn crop’ of thrillers was Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile. It told a story of theft and murder in Egypt, unravelled by Christie’s Cartesian alter ego, the mincing Belgian, Hercule Poirot. Death on the Nile proved an entertainment of such enduring charm that few noticed how timely was the central plot. A group of western tourists escape the cold of the western Mediterranean for Egypt, ‘real warmth, darling. Lazy golden sounds. The Nile.’ On board the steamer Karnak, Poirot encounters two characters whose politics intrude into the murderous private affairs of their fellow passengers. His old friend Colonel Race, ‘a man of unadvertised comings and goings…usually to be found in one of the outposts of empire where trouble was brewing’, was on the trail of those who sought to undermine British power. There had been ‘a good deal of trouble out here’. But it was not, the Colonel revealed, ‘the people who ostensibly led the rioters we’re after’. Race’s prey were the men who ‘very cleverly put the match to the gunpowder’. He was seeking one of the ‘cleverest paid agitators that ever existed…a man with five or six cold-blooded murders to his credit...bit of a mongrel’. That clever, murdering, mongrel turned out to be an Italian fellow passenger. There was something not right about Signor Guido Richetti, Archeologo. He used ‘hair lotions of a highly scented kind’ and carried a lady’s gun, the ‘Mauser automatic twenty-five’. 1 Most damning was the discovery of Richetti’s telegraphed instructions from the Italian secret service in Rome. Once their code had been broken, it revealed that an innocent discussion of vegetables was something much more sinister, a plan for violent revolution, for ‘potatoes mean machine guns and artichokes are high explosives’.