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

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ