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

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      With so few friends, all that was left to Britain was the exercise of military power. Wavell was ordered to strike west along the Libyan littoral and north into Syria. He welcomed neither order, believing that he should be given more time to amass a critical weight of trained and equipped forces before taking on another major operation. Thus the stratagems emanating from Churchill’s fertile and information-rich mind were contested at the time and have remained controversial since. There has remained, however, an odd imbalance in these controversies. Wavell ordered his forces to fight a battle and a war in June 1941. The battle–on the Egyptian-Libyan frontier–lasted for two days and changed very little. The war–against France in Syria and Lebanon–lasted for five weeks and led to the occupation of the Levant and the definitive joining of the Near East to the Mediterranean. It took British forces towards the Turkish border at a particularly vital moment. The Turks, always good bellwethers of military fortune, chose the moment when both the Syrian campaign and Libyan battle were in the balance to sign a Friendship treaty with the Nazis. At the same time they colluded with the Italians to subvert the Montreux Convention that banned warships from passing through the Straits in wartime. Churchill himself claimed that the ‘prize is Turkey’. Yet the battle has been regarded as important, the war not. This imbalance was a product of propaganda as much as strategy. ²³