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

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СКАЧАТЬ him with the thought that his campaign need be nothing more than a demonstration. It would be nice if he could sweep along the Mediterranean coast and capture the British fleet base at Alexandria. But Mussolini did not demand this. He did not even demand that Graziani should reach the first coastal town that the British held in strength. There were no ‘fixed territorial objectives’, he just had to do something. ⁶⁵

      Mussolini’s gamble was to twin his attack on Egypt with an attack on Greece. This was a course that the disgruntled viceroy of the Dodecanese, De Vecchi, had been urging almost since the war began. De Vecchi hated the Greeks–as indeed the Greeks hated him. From the beginning of the war Cunningham had gone ‘so far as to say that we shall never be able to control the Central Mediterranean’ until the fleet could operate from a base in the Greek islands. The location he desired above all others was Suda Bay on the north coast of Crete. ⁶⁶ The Greeks had no intention of giving it to him. Indeed the Greeks protested vigorously on each occasion they believed that the British had entered their territorial waters. Metaxas held no brief for the British war effort, victory in the Mediterranean meant little to him, only the safety offered by neutrality. That was the reality, but De Vecchi worked himself up into such a rage against the Greeks, he would never believe it was so. His reports to Rome were stridently insistent that the Greeks were allowing the British to operate from Suda, and that all the denials they issued were nothing more than dirty lies. De Vecchi was unapologetic about the indiscriminate bombing of Greek ships in their own waters–Greeks, British were all the same in his eyes. ‘To your fine diplomats who whine about me (who has had to amuse himself with Greeks here for four years),’ he scolded Ciano, ‘I can answer that in French “Greek” means “swindler”.’ ⁶⁷

      Project G, the attack on Greece, was hatched in August 1940, after only a few days’ discussion, with the hope of an easy victory. Its architects were Ciano and his henchmen in Albania. Their motives were opportunistic. Mussolini wanted something to happen. The Ciano équipe were sucking money out of Albania for their own enrichment and glory–Ciano had renamed an Albanian port Edda, after his wife. If Albania got bigger then there would be more money and fame to suck. They quickly cobbled together all the border disputes that existed between Albania and Greece in Epirus and claimed all the land for Albania. They threw in the island of Corsica for good measure. This done, Ciano wheeled his men in to see Mussolini. To Ciano’s delight Mussolini thought the plan a good one. The first stage was his long-preferred method of intimidation. The movement of troops to the border and the use of terrorism might make ‘the Greeks cave in’. If threats didn’t work he was willing ‘to go to the limit’. ⁶⁸

      Mussolini may have thought the plan good; his military commanders were aghast. The happiest man was De Vecchi. If there was going to be a war, the Italians wanted a casus belli. De Vecchi already had the means of inflammation in his own hands. Mussolini and Ciano were mulling over a ‘pirate submarine’ campaign of the kind they had used against Spain. The very evening that the idea was suggested to De Vecchi, he ordered the submarine Delfino out of Rhodes. The captain was told that he was to strike the first blow in an inevitable, if undeclared, war. De Vecchi’s haste was dictated by local knowledge: the next day marked the Panayia, the great Cycladic religious festival held on the Lourdes of the Aegean, Tinos. Each 15 August since 1822, the wonder-working icon of Our Lady of Tinos had been paraded from her shrine. There to do her honour in 1940 was the Greek cruiser EM. Predictably, given the nature of the occasion, the crew had given more thought to their decorations–the ship was bedecked with bunting–than their antisubmarine precautions. The Delfino slipped into the bay and torpedoed the Elli before sailing away, entirely unnoticed. ⁶⁹

      Despite this spectacular violence to one of the Mediterranean’s most famous festivals, Mussolini engaged in weeks of hand-wringing about his decision. Ships were loaded with stores at Brindisi and Bari, they were then unloaded and the stores dispersed. Men were mobilized for transfer to Albania, then the army high command rescinded the order and the men stood down. Then the men were remobilized on the proviso that when they reached Albania they were not to go to the Greek frontier until further consideration had been given to the issue. There the matter lay. Before Mussolini would do anything he wanted to know whether his instrument in Africa, Graziani, would act.

      Graziani did not, in the end, disappoint. Given no option, he ordered his forces into Egypt. To say that he led them into Egypt would be too strong a statement. The Marshal had taken a great liking to the Greek tombs of Cyrene. Not because of their historical value, but because they gave excellent shelter from attacks by British aircraft. Nevertheless, in his own way, he conducted a model operation. Mussolini had given him no territorial objective, he himself had no wish to advance. The best answer was surely to advance for the shortest distance possible. Graziani took as his target not the first town across the frontier, Sollum, but the second town, Sidi Barrani, some twenty miles into Egypt. As an indefensible position that the British had no intention of holding, it couldn’t be bettered. Six days of confusion saw it seized for Fascism. The Italian flag at last flew over a piece of Egyptian real estate. Sidi Barrani was the final stop, travelling east–west, on the British coast road. Sidi Barrani thus had some claims of being a point of moderate importance on the Mediterranean coast. Before 1940 the traveller heading west ate a great deal of dust until he could reach the Balbia. Graziani’s men stopped and began the task of making the place habitable. They built themselves a proper road, ‘the Victory Way’, between Sollum and Sidi Barrani, considerably improving on previous British efforts. A tent city of most excellent quality was erected. History has not been kind to this operation, finding in it a means of mocking Italian martial virtues. But at the time it was enough. Mussolini was ‘radiant’ at the success of the operation. At last Italy had scored a ‘success in Egypt which gives her the glory she has sought in vain for three centuries’. ⁷⁰

      The ‘triumph’ of Sidi Barrani was useful to Mussolini because he had before him a difficult set of manoeuvres. Hitler had set aside October 1940 as the month in which he would consult with his friends in the Mediterranean and decide on whom he wished to bestow his favour. Punta Stilo and Sidi Barrani do not measure up well to ‘total war’ but in the context of the autumn of 1940 they were rather more impressive than the abject defeat of France or the inglorious inaction of Spain. It was in Mussolini’s interest to belittle both. He had no reason to welcome a Hitler–Franco alliance, which would see the whole balance of the Mediterranean shift towards the struggle for Gibraltar. ⁷¹ Mussolini was confident, however, that Franco’s caution would keep him out of the war. He was much less sanguine about Pétain or his henchmen Darlan and Laval. On the surface it would be a good thing if the French acted on their hatred of the British; the Mediterranean would undoubtedly become the centre of the war, ‘which is good for us’. Looking deeper, however, Mussolini saw the French only as a problem. French arrogance would simply lead to one thing, ‘a bill’. What was the point of fighting the British if, at the end of it all, an equally noxious French power would wax in the south ^?72 An alliance with France was ‘a cup of hemlock’. ⁷³

      Mussolini and Hitler met twice in October 1940, on the Brenner at the beginning of the month and in Florence at the end. Mussolini had some difficulty in reading Hitler’s mind. The Führer and his minions were studies in ambivalence. Historians have had little more success in deciding for certain on Hitler’s intentions, even with access to diaries, documents and memoirs. Later writers divide into two schools of thought. Some believe that Hitler was content to let Mussolini fight a ‘parallel war’ in the Mediterranean–and СКАЧАТЬ