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

the Union. Newly elected, he wanted an alternative to the faltering ‘Barcelona process’ that, since 1995, had been a vehicle for transferring aid from the European Union to the Arab world. Something grander and more heroic was required to capture the imagination of Europe and the Middle East, Sarkozy believed. Gaddafi was appalled. The initial invitation to Club Med, issued in December 2007, was grandly entitled, in the worst possible taste, the ‘Appeal from Rome’. Libya had been created from the ashes of Mussolini’s Roman Empire. Sarkozy had flanked himself with the leaders of Spain and Italy, an echo of the unrealized Mediterranean Axis of 1940. ‘We shall have another Roman Empire and imperialist design,’ Gaddafi snarled from his palace in Tripoli. ‘There are imperialist maps and designs we have already rolled up. We should not have them again.’ ¹

      This is a book about an idea and its time. The idea was that there was a place called the Mediterranean and that the Mediterranean was worth fighting for. The time was the mid-1930s to the late 1940s.

      The existence of the Mediterranean is embedded in the modern imagination. ² Long before the aeroplane or the satellite created aerial pictures of the Mediterranean, the Victorian art critic John Ruskin urged his reader to rise with him higher than the birds. Together they would see ‘the Mediterranean lying beneath us like an irregular lake, and all its ancient promontories sleeping in the sun’. Beneath them were ‘Syria and Greece, Italy and Spain, laid like pieces of a golden pavement into the sea blue’. ³ This vision of the ‘golden pavement’ and ‘sea blue’ was endorsed by the most famous twentieth-century history of the Mediterranean. In The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, published in 1949, the French historian Fernand Braudel insisted that the Mediterranean was a unit of ‘creative space’: its amazing freedom of sea-routes and ‘complementary populations’ shaped human actions. Braudel’s putative subject was the sixteenth century, but few were in any doubt that he was addressing his own times. ⁴ As Braudel himself remarked, his view of the historical Mediterranean was formed by his years as a teacher in Algeria. He imagined a Mediterranean seen from the ‘other bank’, ‘upside down’. ⁵

      Yet there were sceptics about ‘the Mediterranean’. What, writers from Mediterranean countries asked, did all this talk about ‘Mediterranean culture’ amount to, beyond chatter worked up into an intellectual system? The Mediterranean was not a good ‘unit of analysis’. The unity of its populations was illusory. National histories mattered more than an ill-defined Mediterranean identity. ⁶ The Mediterranean did not make much sense. A central tenet of ‘Mediterraneanness’ was that religious difference, though not religions, was essentially unimportant. As Braudel put it, the Islamic Mediterranean lived and breathed with the same rhythms as the Christian. Yet at the very moment he wrote, the whole concept of the ‘the Middle East’, a different, identifiable, Muslim, world incorporating eastern Mediterranean lands, had colonized the imagination of politicians and journalists. Efforts to halt or reverse the spread of the concept proved fruitless. Winston Churchill told cavillers: ‘a million or so Englishmen had fought, and many died, in what they knew as the Middle East, and the Middle East it was to remain!’ By the late 1940s the term Middle East was in universal circulation, and has retained its grip ever since. ⁷

      One group able to write about the Mediterranean and the Middle East, without worrying too much about questions of identity, has been military historians. ⁸ For them the Mediterranean was not a culture area but a theatre. Rather than doubt the self-evident existence of the Mediterranean ‘theatre’, they instead gnawed away at the question of whether the Mediterranean was important to the outcome of the Second World War. The argument stretched back to Anglo-American disputes about strategy in the middle years of the war. ⁹ These arguments did not long remain private. Elliot Roosevelt, the officer in charge of the air-force photographic reconnaissance in the Mediterranean, but more prominently the son of the President of the USA, published a bilious caricature of foolish British Mediterraneanists and wise American Europeanists as early as 1946. ¹⁰ More in the same vein was to follow. The Americans claimed that arms and men had been wasted on a sideshow. The British retorted that American foot-dragging had prevented the exploitation of victory. The burgeoning literature on ‘total’ war dismissed the Mediterranean war as ‘second class’ because of its political and limited nature. ‘Mediterraneanists’ were left to argue that their theatre was of primary importance for short, but pivotal, periods. ¹¹

      This book does not assume that the unity of the Mediterranean rested on deep structures. Rather it suggests that any such unity was fleeting. The Mediterranean was the product of competing notions of thalassocracy–‘rulership of the sea’. These ideas were ebbing away by the late 1940s. Whilst belief in the Mediterranean existed, however, there were genuine attempts to wield pan-Mediterranean authority. This is a history of the Mediterranean told from the point of view of those who attempted to rule it. Their Mediterranean was a crucible of modernity. The key features of the Mediterranean crisis–shifting coalitions held together by contingent loyalty, information warfare, the projection of air and sea power, civil war and terrorism–remained crucial long after the Mediterranean itself had become a fantasy of western tourist brochures.

       ONE

       The Dead Dog

      Eyeless in Gaza, Aldous Huxley’s 1936 novel, opens with a metaphor for the Mediterranean: the lazy, ripe, sea-girt lands, beloved of travellers, and Mussolini’s hell-hole. Two sunbathers’ eyes are drawn to the west, to ‘a blue Mediterranean bay fringed with pale bone-like rocks and cupped between high hills, green on their lower slopes with vines, grey with olive trees, then pine-dark, earth-red, rock-white or rosy-brown with parched heath’. To the east they observe ‘the vineyards and the olive orchards mounted in terraces of red earth to a crest’. The ‘sunlight fell steep out of flawless sky’, and they dozed, until ‘a faint rustling caressed the half-conscious fringes of their torpor…and became at last a clattering roar that brutally insisted on attention’. Annoyed, they closed their eyes once more, ‘dazzled by the intense blue of the sky’. Suddenly, ‘with a violent but dull and muddy impact the thing struck the flat roof a yard or two from where they were lying’. ‘The drops of a sharply spurted liquid were warm for an instant on their skin, and then, as the breeze swelled up out of the west, startlingly cold.’ ‘In a red pool at their feet lay the almost shapeless carcass of a fox-terrier. The roar of the receding aeroplane had diminished to a raucous hum, and suddenly the ear found itself conscious once again of the shrill rasping of the cicadas.’ Eyeless in Gaza prophesies a Mediterranean war in 1940. ¹

      Huxley’s aeroplane was indeed an apt metaphor for Italian Fascism. Sowing chaos from the air was central to Mussolini’s regime. ² Il Duces collected writings and speeches on the subject were published in March 1937. ³ Flying was dynastic aggrandizement for Mussolini. When he took flying lessons in the 1920s he took his sons, Vittorio and Bruno, to the aerodrome. In 1935 the Mussolini clan