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

Each neutral was a study in ambivalence but the most ambivalent was undoubtedly Greece. Like Mussolini, its dictator, the so-called First Peasant, Ioannis Metaxas, co-habited contemptuously with a decrepit royal house. Greece was home to the classics beloved of the English; but those classics were no guarantee of a democratic temperament. The 1930s Mediterranean cocktail of sun, sea, classical literature and air travel was equally pleasing to others. Josef Goebbels’s dreams came true in the airspace over Mount Olympus. ‘Eternal Greece’ made him warm and happy, perhaps the happiest he had ever been. Greece, after all, was the very homeland of the Gods: Zeus, he thought, was a Norwegian. The ‘Fascist Frankenstein’, Metaxas, reciprocated Nazi warmth. Neither was the liaison confined to tours of the Acropolis and oiled Aryan bodies. The Greeks turned to the Germans for a modern army and arms industry. These new arms were turned, however, not against the degenerate democracies, but against Fascist Italy, the hated ruler of the Dodecanese, molester of Corfu and, latterly, threatened ravager of Epirus. 55 Metaxas quite rightly feared that Mussolini would despoil Greece given half a chance. His fears had been exponentially increased by the Italian invasion of Albania. Metaxas found himself on the receiving end of a British promise of protection. He could hardly say no to such help–but it took him some days to say thank you, in the blandest terms possible. 56 He assured his German friends that he had not colluded in the offer. 57

Mediterranean war planning reached a crescendo in the spring and early summer of 1939. Then the bubble of expectations burst. Faced with the real possibility of a land war in Europe, the three Mediterranean naval powers reached a tacit agreement that they would rather not fight each other at sea. By May 1939 Backhouse had worked himself into an early grave. His successor as First Sea Lord, Dudley Pound, arrived at the Admiralty fresh from commanding the Mediterranean Fleet. From his headquarters in Malta, Pound, the practical ‘man on the spot’, had regarded the stream of scenarios for a ‘knock out’ blow against Italy that had flowed from London with something akin to contempt. His own elevation meant that they were dumped unceremoniously in a filing cabinet as so much waste paper. Drax was shown the door. The Royal Navy performed a volte-face. 58 Darlan, bereft of further British support, was forced to abandon his own plans. 59

A similar failure of minds to meet occurred between the Italians and the Germans. In late May 1939 Mussolini and Hitler consummated their formal alliance when the Duce travelled in pomp to Berlin in order to announce the Pact of Steel. At the heart of the alliance was Hitler’s declaration that ‘Mediterranean policy will be directed by Italy’. 60 Admiral Cavagnari was dispatched to the headquarters of his German opposite number, Admiral Raeder, in a bid to turn rhetoric into reality. Although the Kriegsmarine was by far the most ‘Mediterranean-minded’ of the German services, Cavagnari found little support for Italian ambitions. The German naval war staff, too, had taken part in the great Mediterranean war planning orgy of 1938-9. They had taken Italian policy at face value and had assumed that the Kriegsmarine and the Regia Marina would fight together. Predictably, however, the German sailors regarded Italy’s struggle for the Mediterranean as merely a means to an end. If the Italians managed to close the Mediterranean, the British would have to use other oceanic’ routes and by so doing leave themselves vulnerable to sinking by German raiders. 61 ‘We must see to it’, wrote the chief of the German naval operations division, that ‘Italy does not go running after all sorts of prestige targets such as the Suez Canal.’ Raeder wanted the Italians to fight a diversionary war. Cavagnari was horrified to find that the Germans had little aid to offer the Italians: they merely wished to use them as bait to draw out the British. What little enthusiasm he had had for war was snuffed out. 62

On his return to Rome, Cavagnari told Mussolini, as baldly as one might in Fascist Italy, that his great plans were little more than a fantasy. Everyone had done much pointing at maps to demonstrate the absolute centrality of the Sicilian Narrows for mastery in the Mediterranean. Cavagnari did not want to fight for it. Naval communications were so poor that it was as much as he could do to speak to some of his ships some of the time. Combined naval-air operations were out of the question. He doubted whether Italian torpedoes worked well enough to sink any enemy ships. Attacks on the British and the French were entirely out of the question. At a pinch the navy might be able to run fast convoys between eastern Sicily and Libya, but he wasn’t promising any good results. 63 Perhaps, Cavagnari suggested, there was an alternative. If the Regia Marina stuck close to its old bases like Genoa it could hope for safety in numbers, with the Spanish and the Germans nearby and the French too interested in their own convoy routes to attack them. 64

Here lay the irony of 1939. The British accepted that the Mediterranean would be a ‘closed sea at the very moment that the Italians realized that they could not close the sea. The British had shocked themselves into a new way of thinking. In September 1939 they had a European war forced on them. Hitler’s invasion of Poland made conflict in northern Europe inevitable. Despite the declaration of war on Germany, little in the way of immediate fighting in this theatre ensued. The Anglo-German war of 1939 was for the most part fought at sea. The most spectacular engagements were the sinking by a U-boat of the British battleship Royal Oak at Scapa Flow and the hunting to destruction of the German battleship Graf Spee off the coast of South America. In the Atlantic war zone the Germans formed the first wolf-packs, whilst the Royal Navy imposed a blockade on Germany. In the Mediterranean matters were quite different. Britain’s commitment to Italian neutrality became so intense that the navy was willing to turn a blind eye to Italian ships busily transporting materiel through the Mediterranean to feed the German war economy.

The short breathing space offered by Italian non-belligerence–it was clear even to casual observers–rested on a contest between Mussolini’s whim and his advisers’ totting up of military capacity. 65 Mussolini had declared that Italy must never put itself in Serie B–a humiliation beyond contemplation for the dominant footballing nation of the 1930s. Stop complaining about lack of funds for the armed forces, he scolded the chiefs. It was an act of will to fight. 66 ‘Are we in a position to do it?’ demanded an agitated Ciano of the other major diarist of Italian Fascism, Giuseppe Bottai, on the last day of August 1939. ‘No, no, no,’ he screamed in answer to his own question. The head of the air force was ‘shouting that he doesn’t have fighters’–a recent inventory had shown only about ten per cent of Regia Aeronautica’s strength was fit for combat. 67 Cavagnari was wailing that the only result of a war would be that the Franco-British fleet would sink the Italian navy. With armed forces like ours, Ciano lamented, ‘one can declare war only on Peru’. 68

It is one of the great imponderables whether Mussolini would finally have acted in the Mediterranean if it had not been for Hitler’s victories in Europe. Those who observed him closely noticed his consistent inconsistency. 69 Mussolini ordered the war machine to put into ‘top gear’–even if no one quite knew what top gear was–at the end of January 1940. In March 1940 he fell into a paroxysm of rage when the Royal Navy finally got around, however hesitantly, to intercepting contraband coal shipments to Italy. 70 This act inspired his declaration that he was a ‘prisoner within the Mediterranean’. He was certainly willing to take a meeting with Hitler at the Brenner Pass. The Führer knew how to play on the Duces insecurities. ‘A German victory’, he whispered, ‘would be an Italian victory, but the defeat of Germany would also imply the end of the Italian empire.’ On his return to Rome, Mussolini committed himself to paper. Yet his plan of action’ revealed deep uncertainties. First, he wrote, that it was ‘very improbable’ that Germany would attack France. Then mulling over his conversation with Hitler he crossed out very. Now it was merely ‘improbable’. If the Germans did not go west soon, then the comfortable state of non-belligerence could be maintained as long as possible’, Mussolini underlining as long as possible. 71

But what happened if the Germans did attack France, and looked like winning? Then ‘to believe that Italy can remain outside the conflict until its end is absurd and impossible’. If German victory was on the cards, Italy must launch a ‘parallel war’. What was a ‘parallel war’? Mussolini asked himself. His answer: it was Italy’s war for the possession of ‘the bars of its Mediterranean prison–Corsica, Bizerta, Malta and the walls of the same prison: Gibraltar and Suez’. The war would be a naval war, ‘an offensive right down the line of the Mediterranean and outside it’. 72

At the point of decision, the tensions in Mussolini’s Mediterranean imagination were revealed more clearly than ever. That tension was visibly unhinging him. As Mussolini was writing his ‘plan of action’ others were writing character studies of him. ‘Physically, Mussolini is not the man he was,’ observed the British ambassador, Sir Percy Loraine, ‘he is beginning to go down the hill.’ He might boast endlessly about his running, riding, swimming, tennis, fencing, motoring, flying and, above all, his sexual athleticism. ‘But’, Sir Percy noted, ‘this self-justification is a well known sign of senescence.’ Mussolini was uneasy, fearing ‘that great events are happening and there is no heroic role for Mussolini’; he was irritated ‘that those muddle-headed English should have all the places of which Mussolini could make a really beautiful empire to the Greater Glory of Mussolini’. The ambassador concluded that what really drove Mussolini to distraction was that ‘his principal advisers, both political and military, not only expect the Allies to win, but actually wish them to win’. 73

Loraine was fooling himself that Mussolini’s cronies were pro-British. He was right to believe that they were unenthused by Mussolini’s plan. But they were either Mussolini’s creatures or in the thrall of such creatures. If the Duce wanted a war they would never gainsay him: the only way to stop the dictator was to overthrow him, and they feared that conspiracy more than war. What they wanted to torpedo was his fantasy about fighting anywhere other than in the Mediterranean. They fell on the phrase an offensive right down the line of the Mediterranean and outside it’. There was no chance of the Regia Marina throwing itself against the Franco-British fleet, defeating them and then sailing elsewhere. What they would be doing would be waging a ‘guerre de course in the Mediterranean’, trying to hinder movement between the eastern and western basins. Mussolini had given the navy the right of the line in his parallel war’, but the man who had to lead it, Cavagnari, was almost beside himself with fear. Despite the prospect of the two new gleaming battleships he was about to commission into service, he did not believe that the naval balance had moved in Italy’s favour since September 1939. He knew what would happen: one enemy fleet would assemble at Gibraltar, the other at Alexandria. Far from breaking the bars of the Mediterranean, Italy and her fleet would ‘asphyxiate’ within it. 74

On 12 April 1940 Mussolini ordered the fleet to prepare for war. He mobilized the organs of Fascist propaganda to prepare the people for an offensive against Britain’s ‘tyranny of the seas’. On 21 April 1940 the Ministry of Popular Culture–the politically correct term for the propaganda machine–announced: ‘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’. The spokesman who made the announcement confided to his diary that evening that he knew it to be nonsense. 75 The British could hardly do anything else but conclude that Italy was about to attack them. But even at his most belligerent Mussolini had inserted the caveat that ‘Germany must defeat France first’. It was only on 13 May 1940, with the Maginot Line breached, and the Anglo-Belgian-French armies in disarray that he decided that Italy would go to war. 76 ‘What can you say’, he demanded of Ciano, ‘to someone who doesn’t dare risk a single soldier while his ally is winning a crushing victory, and that victory can give Italy back the remainder of its national territory and establish its supremacy in the Mediterranean?’ 77 Mussolini had talked himself into a war. ‘It’s all over because the madman wants to make war,’ a prescient Balbo warned his fellow Fascists, ‘there won’t enough lampposts to hang you all.’ 78

FOUR

Gog & Magog

The Mediterranean war lived up to the expectations of those who had planned it. 1 This correlation between ideas and execution owed much to the cold dose of reality forced on the Mediterranean dreamers by the war scare of the summer of 1939. Much of the wild talk of earlier years had ceased before the shooting began. 2

Cavagnari’s Regia Marina had abandoned grandiose plans for ruling the sea, much less sweeping out of it. They had instead set themselves realistic tasks on both the east–west and north–south axes. The Italians believed that they could erect a system of defence which would divide the Mediterranean into eastern and western basins. The lynchpin of that system was the central Mediterranean, and in particular the Sicilian Narrows. But they had no truck with the belief that the system of defence would be impermeable. With enough expenditure of effort it would still be possible, if difficult, for the British and the French to sail between the western and eastern basins. 3 The first naval mission of the war was minelaying in the Sicilian Narrows. 4 The British naval commander in the Mediterranean was soon to pay tribute to this Italian system of defence. Their arrangements were ‘very efficient’, ‘first class’ in fact. British submarine losses were so severe–nearly every boat that approached the Italian harbours was sunk–that they had to withdraw to safer waters. 5 Contact mines proved to be ‘the primary menace in the Mediterranean’. 6 Although relatively few surface ships were sunk by mines in the first months of the war–the first, the destroyer Hostile, exploded catastrophically off Cap Bon at the end of August 1940–the ‘constant anxiety [about] what is to be done with a damaged capital ship’ made ‘minable water’ virtually no-go areas ‘without some very good reason’. 7

Equally the Regia Marina believed that it could carry out the limited task of escorting convoys from north to south, setting off from Naples and arriving in the unlading ports of Tripoli, Benghazi and Tobruk. Although the relatively short distance favoured the Italian sailors, they were far from sanguine, realizing that they would have to rely on expedients, such as the use of submarines and destroyers as well as merchant ships. They had providently transported the bulk of the troops in the weeks before the war began. 8 Equally, the collapse of British enthusiasm for grand Mediterranean adventures, under the guiding hand of Dudley Pound, left the Royal Navy equally as sanguine as the Regia Marina. The British sailors believed that they could get through the Mediterranean, but with the greatest of difficulty. Heavily armed warships would have a chance; the average merchant was easy meat. The geography and distances were against them. Some officers even doubted whether the game was worth the candle. Such complete sceptics were, however, quickly shushed in both London and Alexandria. 9

Even Mussolini might be given some credit for realism, on this issue at least. He had consistently railed against his Mediterranean prison, claiming that the British would stop up both ends and trap Italy within. And indeed that is exactly what the British did. Within weeks the Mediterranean had two gatekeepers, self-styled after the giant twin guardians of the underworld in English legend, Gog and Magog. 10 Magog was James Somerville, sent from Britain with a fleet–known as Force H–to secure the western exit at Gibraltar. 11 Gog was Andrew Cunningham who, on the eve of war, took the Mediterranean Fleet away from Malta and established it at the eastern exit, protecting the mouth of the Suez Canal from Alexandria. They were true naval twins, exact contemporaries, boys from the same class of the late-Victorian navy. Apart from that, the two gatekeepers were most unlike. Cunningham, the acknowledged star of the navy, was fierce to the point of over-confidence. Independent by temperament, now semi-marooned in the eastern basin, he felt himself to be the co-adjutor with London of the fate of the Mediterranean. Cunningham walked the fine line of insubordination–earning himself Churchill’s dislike–with the arrogance of irreplaceability Somerville was quite the opposite, a dug-out from the retired list, sent to Gibraltar mainly because of his immediate availability. In contrast to Cunninghams bursts of confidence, Somerville was perpetually gloomy, cavilling against, yet in thrall, to his masters, to whom he referred in terms of dread and contempt as Their Lordships. Somerville, unlike Cunningham, was kept on a tight leash, although that did not spare him Churchill’s similar dislike. His orders came directly from London; from London too–with a direct air link–came numerous senior officers enquiring into his conduct, some actively seeking his job.

The war developed much as the admirals had predicted. Indeed, the sea produced a conflict of curious symmetry. There were four major naval battles, two in the east, two in the west. There was one eastern and one western battle in July 1940, another eastern and another western battle in November 1940. None of these naval battles resembled the titanic and decisive fleet clashes that naval fantasists such as Churchill longed for. Two–Mers el-Kébir on 3 July 1940 and Taranto on 11 November 1940–comprised not engagements at sea at all but attacks by one fleet at sea upon another riding at anchor. Both fleets at anchor suffered significant damage, but neither was destroyed. In both cases battleships were able to leave the port under attack and sail to safer ports. In the two battles at sea–Punta Stilo on 9 July 1940 and Cape Spartivento on 27 November 1940–the two fleets followed engagement with evasion, privileging the survival of their ships. As a result, in neither battle were there heavy casualties. The fleets performed a delicate quadrille, living up to their own expectation that–barring disaster–the Mediterranean could be neither completely closed nor fully opened. 12

If the hopes and fears of the cautious admirals, if not of their querulous masters, proved realistic, they did nevertheless suffer some unpleasant surprises. The Mediterranean lacked the wide expanses of the oceans, but it suddenly seemed a very empty sea. The opposing forces had great difficulty in finding each other. The Mediterranean in 1940 offered little proof that there had been a revolution in naval affairs. Cunningham saw the evidence of this within days. His newly installed naval interception service beautifully triangulated the Italian cruiser Garibaldi, lying off Derna, from stations at Alexandria, Malta and Gibraltar. No high-level codebreaking of the Ultra kind was involved, the location of the cruiser was derived from traffic analysis and call-sign recognition. It was a brilliant early achievement for communications intelligence. Cunningham had squadrons cruising off Tobruk, Benghazi and Crete. Garibaldi was neatly in the middle of a trap. Sadly, although the communications intelligence was a triumph, British communications were less so. Alexandria failed to raise Cunningham’s flagship in time. By the time ABC knew what was happening, the Garibaldi had escaped. 13

If the British had their difficulties, so too did the Italians. Italy had a good intelligence system. It had been used in the years of peace, however, as the means by which Mussolini had pulled diplomatic rabbits out of the hat. Mussolini and Ciano were past masters at this kind of trick. With the onset of war and the removal of embassies, many of their best sources dried up. In any case the bullying or cajoling tactics of the Duce–his so-called animal instinct’–were hardly a good foundation on which to base the careful consideration of military intelligence. 14 Nevertheless, Italian naval intelligence was certainly not without resources. Its crypt-analysts could read a fair proportion of Cunningham’s signals. The Italian fleet at Punta Stilo was particularly well informed on his activities. 15 The listening war in the Mediterranean was roughly even in 1940, the successes and failures of each side mirroring each other. Both had a good idea of what the other was trying to achieve, both could read some signals traffic, neither had a complete enough picture to achieve a decisive advantage.

Both sides could hear each other, albeit fuzzily. They could see each other only intermittently. It was easy enough for the Italians to see Cunningham’s fleet leaving Alexandria. Thereafter he and Somerville were too often swallowed up by the sea. This was not how it was supposed to be. The aeroplane was supposed to solve such problems. Ciano, for one, thought everything would be simple, and indeed enjoyable. ‘I have tasted again in full the intoxication of being a flyer,’ he boasted to his wife. On the third day of the war he bombed Toulon–‘magnificent, soothing, indescribable we carried out a real slaughter’–and then on his way home, crossing the stretch of sea between Corsica and Italy, he spotted the British. ‘I saw a ship,’ he confided in Edda immediately upon landing, ‘I point my Zeiss: British flag. Imagine my orgasm.’ Ciano’s tumescence was perhaps premature. There is no proof that he actually saw anything. In any case he had no means of attacking a ship. Notably, other Italian pilots seemed to enjoy much less success than the multi-talented foreign minister. 16 The Italians had about one hundred planes out looking for British ships but most of them were ‘incredibly antiquated’ ‘Gulls’, a type of wooden flying boat, best known for long cruises. Somerville remarked on how often such aircraft were victims of ‘summary destruction’ as soon as they approached concentrations of British warships. 17 By the autumn of 1940, the Regia Marina and the Regia Aeronautica were involved in a vicious campaign of mutual discredit in the highest Fascist councils. The air force ‘made fun of the navy for failing ever to engage the British; the navy denounced the air force as liars, whose every claim to have found, much less damaged the British, was falsified. 18

If Cavagnari did not rate the RAI’s attempts at maritime reconnaissance then neither did Cunningham admire the RAF’s. He devoted much of his prodigious energy to complaining about, or attempting to take over, RAF activity in the Mediterranean. At the very least, Cunningham argued, more use should be made of Malta. A silly idea, retorted his air-force opposite number, Arthur Longmore; it was only a matter of time before the Italians got their act together and bombed Malta into impotence. In autumn 1940 Cunningham finally won the argument: first flying boats and then, at the end of October 1940, land-based reconnaissance aircraft were sent to Malta. These aircraft of uncertain parentage–made by America for France, taken by Britain as stop-gap–enjoyed an immediate and brilliant success, spotting the Italian fleet at anchor in Taranto. But there was still a big difference between spotting a fleet at anchor–the Italians could spot the British in Alexandria–and finding one at sea. The flyers lost sight of the Italian battleships once they hauled anchor. The Royal Navy and the Regia Marina complained about the same thing–the failure of air reconnaissance–at exactly the same time. 19