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

of likely casualties, they would try it, and believed that if they did try, ground troops could defeat the effort. In the meantime, however, he argued that the weight of German air attack from captured Greek bases made Cretan airfields too vulnerable to justify the waste of his resources. Thus when the German parachutists started landing, the RAF had largely vacated the island. Its aircraft fought at the edge of their range from Egyptian bases.

      Naval forces sent north of Crete to prevent the Germans reinforcing their airborne troops from the sea proved desperately vulnerable to air attack. Crete was the perfect arena for Stukawaffe. The Stukas were feared by ground troops. If anything they proved even more effective in anti-shipping operations. Their main base on the island of Scarpanto was separated from Crete by the narrow Kaso Strait. The short-range aircraft could thus operate with comfort to the east of Crete. Another base in the Peloponnese was equally well placed for the sea lanes to the west of the island. Even Cyrenaican Stukas could reach ships to the south of Crete. Effectively, Crete was a killing zone. British cruisers and destroyers in particular proved frighteningly vulnerable to attack.

      After three days Cunningham had had enough. He made the unilateral decision to recall his fleet to prevent its slaughter by the Luftwaffe. There had been nothing short of a trial of strength between Mediterranean Fleet and the German air force’: the German air force had won. Not only was Cunningham losing ships, he was losing captains at an even quicker rate as they buckled under the accumulated strain of months of air fear’. ‘I am afraid’, Cunningham admitted, we have to admit defeat and accept the fact that losses are too great to justify us trying to prevent seaborne attacks on Crete. This is a melancholy conclusion but it must be faced.’ There was ‘no hiding the fact’ that ‘the future out here does not look too good for the Fleet’. He persuaded his fellow Mediterranean commanders to defy London again and halt the evacuation of the defeated imperial forces even from the south coast of the island. Crete proved, he could not resist pointing out, what he had been saying for months. His ships had survived only because of the foul Mediterranean winter weather. The glorious Mediterranean spring was a death-bringer. ⁹⁸

       SIX

       Losing the Light

      At the end of her semi-autobiographical novel Friends and Heroes, Olivia Manning tried to sum up what losing Greece meant for the British. She thought that they had lost the light. For refugees fleeing the débâcle, the play of light on the North African shore was ‘too white’. ‘They moved forward to look at the new land, reached thankfully if unwillingly.’ In ‘crossing the Mediterranean’, ‘they had life–a depleted fortune’. ¹ That sense of survival–a life, but depleted fortune–permeated each of the Mediterranean powers. Britain, Italy, France, each survived but none could feel happy with their lot. All three wanted to fight for the Mediterranean, but their capacity to do so was sadly reduced. They could do little more than fall back on mezzi insidiosi, the Mediterranean guerrilla war that the Italians had feared might be their portion in the mid-1930s. The future of their reduced fortunes lay in German hands, and the Germans, established for the first time on the Mediterranean littoral as conquerors, were hard to read.

      The Germans were such an unpredictable force in the Mediterranean world because of their own ambivalence. Combing through the records after the war, historians identified at least a dozen serious attempts by those gathered around Hitler to persuade him that the Mediterranean was the key to victory. Nothing in the Führer’s past conduct suggested that he believed them. His eyes were cast ever eastwards. ² This judgement took lapidary form on 11 June 1941 when the dictator uttered his directive on the future of the Mittelmeer. The future of the Mediterranean lay on the steppes, it was–as geopolitics had always insisted–a mere appendage of the Heartland. ³ The conquest of Russia would change everything. Turkey would have its twin fears–the Soviets and the Germans–unified into one terror. They would not resist as the forces of the Reich moved through the Straits by sea and Anatolia by land. The Spanish were timid, Franco had squirmed his way out of an attack on Gibraltar. With further proof of the Reich’s invincibility, his courage would improve and the British would be swept off the Rock. The French would see that full collaboration was their only chance of survival: North Africa would be open to German forces. Then, the British Mediterranean would be choked to death, squeezed from east and west by what Hitler called a ‘concentric’ attack. ⁴

      Concentricity implied a number of important ideas. First, the Mediterranean could wait months, if not years, before the final reckoning. Second, that it was the three gates to the sea, Gibraltar, Suez and the Straits, which were important, not the actual battle for the central Mediterranean. Hitler’s Mediterranean creatures were, in order of importance, Turkey, Spain and France. In the wider scheme of things, Italy was left out. Italy’s main importance was its weakness. If Mussolini’s regime collapsed before Germany had finished with Russia then the completion of the Mediterranean ‘anaconda’ would be much complicated. Hitler was quite prepared therefore to commit some resources to the Mediterranean, not least to fuel the efforts of his most photogenic general, Rommel.

      The quality of Hitler’s strategic reasoning has proved fertile ground for the ‘what if school of history. The most popular theory remains the claim that Hitler was wasting his time in the Mediterranean, that the victorious campaigns just completed were, in fact, a disaster because they delayed the invasion of Russia, placing the Germans at the mercy of ‘general winter’. Running the argument the other way is almost as popular. The Germans squandered their Mediterranean victory–if only Hitler had listened to his Mediterraneanists and kept German power running at full blast after Crete then a world of opportunity would have opened up: the destruction of British power, the creation of a consolidated anti-Anglo-Saxon Euro-Asia, the benison of Arab oil. None of this, of course, is provable in any serious way. The Germans failed to break through Russia, so the Mediterranean anaconda was never attempted. What can be said for sure was that in the summer of 1941 Britain had more potential enemies in the Mediterranean than Germany. Few were confident enough to proclaim Germany as the new thalassocrat, but even fewer mourned British decline. As her representatives looked around for support they could expect vituperation from some, but silence from most. ⁵

      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