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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were three schools of thought on this issue. One maintained that all such high matters of state should be decided in London. The military could be given the information they needed and ordered to get on with whatever operations the government decided upon. 39 A second school retorted that this model of central control was unrealistic. Although London and Cairo could talk to each other fairly easily by telegraph, and personnel could be moved to and fro on aircraft, the Mediterranean was really a semi-autonomous world that needed its own sources of information. 40 A third school went even further and argued that military and civil rule in the Mediterranean should be integrated. Britain should create not merely short-term military expedients but political instruments devoted to the long-term maintenance of British power. 41

These somewhat academic discussions were brought into focus by the embarrassing intelligence failure that was the Italian invasion of Albania. The Italian assault had come as such a complete surprise to the British that it found the capital ships of the Mediterranean Fleet paying courtesy calls in Italian ports, ‘lolling about in Italian harbours’, as Churchill put it, bitterly. Even if the British government had wanted to intervene, their own fleet was effectively hostage to good behaviour. The best the ships could do was to surreptitiously slip anchor and make their way back to Malta. By the time the Italian armada had sallied into the Adriatic from Brindisi, various British agencies had received upward of twenty warnings of Italian intentions. None had been taken seriously. It was all very well Chamberlain complaining that Mussolini had acted ‘like a sneak and a cad’, intelligence was supposed to spot the actions of those who were something less than gentlemen. 42

Albania forced everyone to agree that it was no good limiting the ‘men on the spot’ to reporting back to London. There was finally agreement to create a self-contained regional intelligence organization. 43 Agreement in principle did not, of course, mean agreement in practice. The new body was to be called the Middle East Intelligence Centre–although it was usually referred to, not always kindly, as ‘Mice’. The diplomats and spies refused to take part, in the hope that Mice would limit itself to military intelligence. The sailors and the airmen preferred to hand over as few resources to Mice as possible, the Royal Navy at one point saying rather insultingly that they couldn’t spare a real naval officer and would send a Royal Marine instead. But the Centre did begin operating in October 1939. Despite attempts from London to insist that Middle East really did mean Middle East, Mice gaily included the northern littoral of the Mediterranean in its remit. 44 Although staffed almost wholly by soldiers, it was not deterred from offering political advice. The old-established bureaucracies in London suspected that once such agencies were created, they would slip away from central control; that suspicion was borne out in practice. Within months Wavell’s GHQ had grown from a few officers lodging with the British army in Egypt to over a thousand men establishing themselves at Grey Pillars, a modern office building in the south of Cairo’s Garden District. Slowly but surely, assets began to move eastwards. New pan-Mediterranean organizations began to burgeon around Grey Pillars. 45

Those parts of the Mediterranean world not yet mortgaged to either side shifted uncomfortably. In the full spasm of their Mediterranean enthusiasm, the British courted the Turks. ‘On no occasion does it appear to have been realised’, they later chastised themselves, ‘that we needed Turks more than they required us.’ 46 A triple alliance was formed between Britain, France and Turkey. 47 In the person of Maxime Weygand, France had grand plans for this alliance. It was they who paid the direct price of the alliance, slicing off much of the Mediterranean coast of Syria–known as the Sanjak of Alexandretta–and gifting it to the Turks. 48 Appointed as commander of French forces in the eastern Mediterranean, Weygand imagined that he would lead a great expeditionary force into the Balkans from his base in Syria. The British demurred. They could find little appealing in the thought of Darlan harnessing British naval power and Weygand leading Britain’s armies. The French had led the British a merry dance into the Balkans in the Great War, tying down a huge expeditionary force in Salonika for no military gain. The British felt that to play the same trick again lacked something in Gallic subtlety. The Kemalist regime begged to differ. They fêted Weygand and snubbed his British companions, asking why they had failed to draw up such valiant plans. The Turks and the French had a shared interest in British aid, shorn of British direction. Yet whatever their outward show, the Kemalists were playing the French as well. They swallowed the Sanjak but offered little in return. They made this calculation. If Britain and France went to war with Italy in the Mediterranean, they were happy to join in. If Britain and France wanted to fight Germany in the Balkans then that was their problem. Turkey would pursue the strictest neutrality. 49 Right at the beginning of negotiations, Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary, had noticed that the Turks always worded their commitments very, very carefully. They were willing to act only if a war started ‘in the Mediterranean’. If Germany launched a war elsewhere, if Italy joined in, thereby spreading the fighting to the Mediterranean, Turkey would be under no obligation to fight. He then declared that he could not believe that the Turks were so deceitful. 50 Halifax should have heeded his inner voice. The Turks were that deceitful, and they had said exactly what they meant. 51

Neutralism was equally popular at the other end of the Mediterranean. Recognizing the inevitable, Britain had acknowledged Franco as the legitimate ruler of Spain at the beginning of 1939. In the first flush of victory Franco had not been slow to declare that he was now one of the arbiters of the Mediterranean. Britain and France’s attempts to ‘reduce Spain to slavery in the Mediterranean’ would lead to war. 52 He, Franco, now held the entrance to the sea. Such declarations did not, however, extend much beyond empty rhetoric. The performance of Italian forces in Spain had imbued the Spanish right with considerable scepticism about their goals and capabilities. Yet briefly, in the winter of 1939, Mussolini gained cult status in Spain. Not for reasons of which he would be proud, but for his hesitations and evasions. The Spanish admired his ability to run away from conflict, an ability that they hoped to emulate. Those suspected of wishing to entangle Spain in a new conflict, most notably the foreign minister and Franco’s brother-in-law, Serrano Súñer, could expect a chilly welcome even amongst the most ardently Fascist Spaniards. Among the sullen remnants of the defeated left, on the other hand, at their strongest in the Mediterranean port cities, many hoped that the despised Italians would declare war and suffer humiliating defeat. 53 Franco had the intention of indulging neither his fire-breathing friends nor his hate-filled enemies. He would follow a policy of hábil prudencia–‘adroit prudence’. 54