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

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      The expansive ideas about the Mediterranean came from those far distant from the sea. Those at work in the sea had a very limited horizon, their main aim was survival. The best they thought they might achieve was some damage to their enemies. It was time to face facts, Cunningham wrote home. ‘We have lost our Northern flank and are unlikely to regain it.’ The ‘through Mediterranean route’ was now ‘virtually closed’. The Royal Navy could, with enormous effort, sail from Gibraltar to Malta but it couldn’t get any further. Whilst the west–east route ground to a halt, the north–south route was, by the same token, made so much safer, since ‘the attack on Libyan communications is made very hazardous’. Naturally, Cunningham did not countenance inaction but his proposals for remedy were modest. ⁶

      The best that might be done was some kind of ground offensive in Africa. This offensive would have no grand aims. It just needed to make some progress along the Cyrenaican coast. Cunningham’s dream prize was the city of Derna. Cyrenaica’s second ‘city’ was a pleasant enough place. European visitors praised it for being like the ‘proper’ Mediterranean, reminding them of Crete, rather than sub-standard North Africa. Rommel had a seaside villa nearby. Derna was the only place in eastern Libya where one could grow bananas. Charming Derna was not that far to travel–less than 200 miles by ship. Its position on the bulge of the Libyan plateau which pushed out into the Mediterranean, gave it its strategic attraction: not only a short flight from the Narrows but in range of Greece and the Aegean. In Cunningham’s mind a string of airfields from Sollum to Derna could protect his fleet around Malta whilst attacking the northern shore. ⁷ Cunningham’s military opposite number, Wavell, doubted whether even this modest plan was achievable. As Cunningham committed his thoughts to paper in Alexandria, Wavell recorded his in Cairo: he did not believe he could even get his troops over the Egyptian-Libyan border. The newly appointed air commander, the RAF’s best Whitehall warrior, Arthur Tedder, used his own message home to gloat that ‘the air has come into its own with a vengeance in the Mediterranean’. ‘I need hardly say,’ he toasted his fellow aviators in the Luftwaffe, ‘I have refrained from saying, “I told you so”.’ ⁸

      The limited ambitions of Britain’s Mediterranean leaders failed to take into account that enemies considerably less formidable than the Germans were now willing to twit them. Germany and France had agreed, even before the fall of Crete, that aid should flow to a pro-Nazi revolt in Iraq led by Rashid Ali. Rashid Ali had the enthusiastic assistance of Britain’s old friend, the Mufti. Darlan had even been allowed into Berchtesgaden to see Hitler in order to seal the deal. ⁹ As they spoke, the first German aircraft were landing in Syria. Within days, supply trains were running along the railway from Aleppo to Mosul. The French were running a calculated risk. Darlan knew that such an act of aggression could well provoke a British attack on Syria. In preparation for this eventuality he had replaced the High Commissioner in Syria with a tough Alsatian general, Henri Dentz. Dentz preferred subterfuge–sadly undermined by British decryption of Luftwaffe signals–or deterrence to avoid war, but he was quite willing to fight the British if they came. ¹⁰

      If the British commanders in the Mediterranean had had their way, Darlan and Dentz’s gamble would have paid off. They had no intention of invading Syria. Indeed they sought to maintain cordial relations with Dentz. The gamble was undone by Churchill, reading the Enigma traffic in London and demanding revenge. ‘If the French Army in Syria will come over to us,’ Churchill wrote, ‘then Vichy would have a future as the colonial power in the Levant.’ If, as it seemed, ‘they are going against us, or maintaining an attitude of malevolent passivity’ then the British should look elsewhere. Their new friends would be the ‘Syrian Arabs’. ‘I am not sufficiently acquainted with Syrian affairs to be able to formulate a plan,’ the Prime Minister admitted, ‘but I cannot doubt that our Islamic experts can easily do so.’ ¹¹

      Churchill’s intelligence-fed take on Vichy was defensible enough, his faith in the ‘wisdom’ of Arab nationalism, or the competence of his own ‘Islamic experts’, less so. The leaders of Arab nationalism in Syria were most certainly looking for allies against the French, but had already found them elsewhere. One of the bargains Darlan made with Hitler was for the withdrawal of the Reich’s premier orientalist, von Hentig, from Syria. His sin was his success with indigenous politicians. Von Hentig’s successor, the equally dynamic Rudolf Rahn, was no less successful. It was not hard СКАЧАТЬ