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

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ