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

His fears had been exponentially increased by the Italian invasion of Albania. Metaxas found himself on the receiving end of a British promise of protection. He could hardly say no to such help–but it took him some days to say thank you, in the blandest terms possible. ⁵⁶ He assured his German friends that he had not colluded in the offer. ⁵⁷

      Mediterranean war planning reached a crescendo in the spring and early summer of 1939. Then the bubble of expectations burst. Faced with the real possibility of a land war in Europe, the three Mediterranean naval powers reached a tacit agreement that they would rather not fight each other at sea. By May 1939 Backhouse had worked himself into an early grave. His successor as First Sea Lord, Dudley Pound, arrived at the Admiralty fresh from commanding the Mediterranean Fleet. From his headquarters in Malta, Pound, the practical ‘man on the spot’, had regarded the stream of scenarios for a ‘knock out’ blow against Italy that had flowed from London with something akin to contempt. His own elevation meant that they were dumped unceremoniously in a filing cabinet as so much waste paper. Drax was shown the door. The Royal Navy performed a volte-face. ⁵⁸ Darlan, bereft of further British support, was forced to abandon his own plans. ⁵⁹

      A similar failure of minds to meet occurred between the Italians and the Germans. In late May 1939 Mussolini and Hitler consummated their formal alliance when the Duce travelled in pomp to Berlin in order to announce the Pact of Steel. At the heart of the alliance was Hitler’s declaration that ‘Mediterranean policy will be directed by Italy’. ⁶⁰ Admiral Cavagnari was dispatched to the headquarters of his German opposite number, Admiral Raeder, in a bid to turn rhetoric into reality. Although the Kriegsmarine was by far the most ‘Mediterranean-minded’ of the German services, Cavagnari found little support for Italian ambitions. The German naval war staff, too, had taken part in the great Mediterranean war planning orgy of 1938-9. They had taken Italian policy at face value and had assumed that the Kriegsmarine and the Regia Marina would fight together. Predictably, however, the German sailors regarded Italy’s struggle for the Mediterranean as merely a means to an end. If the Italians managed to close the Mediterranean, the British would have to use other oceanic’ routes and by so doing leave themselves vulnerable to sinking by German raiders. ⁶¹ ‘We must see to it’, wrote the chief of the German naval operations division, that ‘Italy does not go running after all sorts of prestige targets such as the Suez Canal.’ Raeder wanted the Italians to fight a diversionary war. Cavagnari was horrified to find that the Germans had little aid to offer the Italians: they merely wished to use them as bait to draw out the British. What little enthusiasm he had had for war was snuffed out. ⁶²

      On his return to Rome, Cavagnari told Mussolini, as baldly as one might in Fascist Italy, that his great plans were little more than a fantasy. Everyone had done much pointing at maps to demonstrate the absolute centrality of the Sicilian Narrows for mastery in the Mediterranean. Cavagnari did not want to fight for it. Naval communications were so poor that it was as much as he could do to speak to some of his ships some of the time. Combined naval-air operations were out of the question. He doubted whether Italian torpedoes worked well enough to sink any enemy ships. Attacks on the British and the French were entirely out of the question. At a pinch the navy might be able to run fast convoys between eastern Sicily and Libya, but he wasn’t promising any good results. ⁶³ Perhaps, Cavagnari suggested, there was an alternative. If the Regia Marina stuck close to its old bases like Genoa it could hope for safety in numbers, with the Spanish and the Germans nearby and the French too interested in their own convoy routes to attack them. ⁶⁴

      Here lay the irony of 1939. The British accepted that the Mediterranean would be a ‘closed sea at the very moment that the Italians realized that they could not close the sea. The British had shocked themselves into a new way of thinking. In September 1939 they had a European war forced on them. Hitler’s invasion of Poland made conflict in northern Europe inevitable. Despite the declaration of war on Germany, little in the way of immediate fighting in this theatre ensued. The Anglo-German war of 1939 was for the most part fought at sea. The most spectacular engagements were the sinking by a U-boat of the British battleship Royal Oak at Scapa Flow and the hunting to destruction of the German battleship Graf Spee off the coast of South America. In the Atlantic war zone the Germans formed the first wolf-packs, whilst the Royal Navy imposed a blockade on Germany. In the Mediterranean matters were quite different. Britain’s commitment to Italian neutrality became so intense that the navy was willing to turn a blind eye to Italian ships busily transporting materiel through the Mediterranean to feed the German war economy.

      The short breathing space offered by Italian non-belligerence–it was clear even to casual observers–rested on a contest between Mussolini’s whim and his advisers’ totting up of military capacity. ⁶⁵ Mussolini had declared that Italy must never put itself in Serie B–a humiliation beyond contemplation for the dominant footballing nation of the 1930s. Stop complaining about lack of funds for the armed forces, he scolded the chiefs. It was an act of will to fight. ⁶⁶ ‘Are we in a position to do it?’ demanded an agitated Ciano of the other major diarist of Italian Fascism, Giuseppe Bottai, on the last day of August 1939. ‘No, no, no,’ he screamed in answer to his own question. The head of the air force was ‘shouting that he doesn’t have fighters’–a recent inventory had shown only about ten per cent of Regia Aeronautica’s strength was fit for combat. ⁶⁷ Cavagnari was wailing that the only result of a war would be that the Franco-British fleet would sink the Italian navy. With armed forces like ours, Ciano lamented, ‘one can declare war only on Peru’. ⁶⁸

      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