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

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      The Fascists oriented their Mediterranean quite differently from that of the British: north–south rather than west–east. Apart from metropolitan Italy, the pre-Fascist Italy–stretching around the northern end of the Adriatic to Pola, a naval base, and the city of Zara in Dalmatia–had acquired colonies from the dying Ottoman Empire: the twin lands of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in North Africa, and the islands of the Dodecanese in the Aegean, chief amongst them Rhodes, Cos and Leros.

      Mussolini developed this existing empire. In 1936 he sent Cesare Maria De Vecchi, one of the ‘heroes’ of the Fascist seizure of power, to govern the Dodecanese. De Vecchi built himself a huge palace on Rhodes and managed to alienate the native population through a combination of excess and incompetence. He pursued, for instance, assimilation–banning all newspapers in Greek–and segregation–banning intermarriage–at the same time. ²³ The Italians fortified the islands, building airfields and naval facilities. Leros had a deep-water harbour from which destroyers, torpedo boats and submarines could operate. ²⁴ The island became known as ‘the Malta of the Aegean’. The Turks called it the ‘gun’ pointing at Turkey. They suggested to anyone who listened that the base was the first link in the chain that would give Italy dominance in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean. ²⁵

      Ciano’s nascent Ufficio Spagna also fell greedily on the idea of a base in the western Mediterranean. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 gave the Fascists the chance to seize such a base. For the Italians the war was as much about bases in the Balearics as it was about Madrid. ²⁶ Months before any Italian armies went to Franco’s aid on the mainland, the Italians were already fighting a parallel war for the Balearic islands of Majorca, Minorca and Ibiza. A particularly brutal Black Shirt leader, Arconovaldo Bonaccorsi–known as the Conte Rossi because of his red hair and beard–was sent to Majorca, announcing that he was there to ensure ‘the triumph of Latin and Christian civilization, menaced by the international rabble at Moscow’s orders that want to bolshevize the peoples of the Mediterranean basin’. Rossi carried out a reign of terror, murdering about three thousand people during his occupation of the Balearics. ‘Daily radical cleansing of places and infected people is carried out,’ he boasted. ²⁷ Soon Rossi was reinforced by a small air force. The aircraft operated to such good effect that the Republicans were forced to withdraw at the beginning of September 1936.

      For years, those who observed Fascist ambitions had suspected that Mussolini coveted the Balearics: now the Fascists were firmly in charge. ²⁸ Indeed Mussolini opened his November 1936 oration on the need for an expanded war in Spain with the cry, ‘the Balearics are in our hands’. ²⁹ It was only in the light of the triumph in the Balearics that Mussolini fully embraced Franco. The Duce ordered that Franco should receive both an Italian air force and army. One month later the Black Shirts surreptitiously set sail from the port of Gaeta, north of Naples. Within months nearly 50,000 Italian troops were fighting in Spain. Their first mission was to seize Spain’s Mediterranean coastline. ³⁰

      Bruno Mussolini was sent to Majorca to command a squadron of bombers. ‘I envy them,’ Ciano wrote of his old colleagues from Abyssinia, ‘but I am, at least for the moment, nailed to this desk.’ Still, he could give them a satisfying mission since ‘we must seize the moment to terrorize the enemy’. ³¹ Valencia, and even Barcelona, the heart of the most hardcore Catalan resistance to Franco, were within easy bombing range of Majorca. The aircraft had less than an hour’s flying time to their targets and could approach, unobserved, over the water. ³² The Italian pilots boasted incessantly–and inaccurately–about the amount of damage they were doing. Mussolini was so delighted with the results that he doubled the bomber force on Majorca at the beginning of 1938. ³³ In March the aircraft were ‘unleashed’ on the civilian suburbs of Barcelona, causing many casualties. Regia Aeronautica chief Giuseppe Valle, the butt of the younger Mussolini’s taunt that he no longer had what it took to be a man in the cockpit, even flew a lone aircraft at night from Rome to bomb Barcelona. ³⁴ Whenever the world talked about bombing they did not get much beyond the Nazi Condor Legion’s devastating attack on the Basque town of Guernica in April 1937–an attack in which Italian bombers, unnoticed, took a minor part. ³⁵ Surely, the Italian ambassador in Berlin claimed with some satisfaction, ‘the whole world knew that those involved in the bombing attacks on harbour cities, especially Barcelona, had been Italian fliers’. ³⁶