Kitabı oku: «The Bitter Sea: The Struggle for Mastery in the Mediterranean 1935–1949»

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 ‘volunteered’ to fly in the conquest of Abyssinia. Vittorio Mussolini was nineteen, Bruno only seventeen but worthy of bombing Abyssinians. Their cousin, Vito, son of Mussolini’s late brother, went as well. They were chaperoned by Galeazzo Ciano, the husband of Vittorio and Bruno’s sister, Edda. ‘We have carried out a slaughter,’ Ciano boasted. Vittorio’s shadowed autobiography was rushed out in celebration. He admitted to being a little disappointed by his first bombing raid; the Abyssinians’ feeble huts collapsed without any spectacular strewing of rubble. The Mussolini boys were not, however, good pilots: their true love was brothels rather than aerodromes. On their return from the front they lorded it around Rome, raping girls, crashing fast cars and treating the professional head of the Regia Aeronautica, Giuseppe Valle, like a flunkey. ⁴ Only Ciano stayed the course, returning to Abyssinia for the final victory in the spring of 1936. The fawning Italian press gave his exploits so much coverage that eventually he ordered them reined in lest he become a laughing stock at his golf club. ⁵ Nevertheless, Ciano, at the age of thirty-three, emerged from Abyssinia as the ‘hero’ of the dynasty. In the summer of 1936 Mussolini not only made him Italian foreign minister but put him in charge of the Fascist project for Mediterranean conquest. ⁶ Ciano was a monster: vain, corrupt and murderous. Nevertheless, most people liked his ‘winning ways’. ⁷ He was good-looking and fun to talk to. Ciano had a low, and usually accurate, opinion of his fellow man, Fascist, Nazi or democrat. He had a gift for self-reflection, as well as self-deceit. Both characteristics were reflected in a diary he began to keep, with Mussolini’s blessing, once he had firmly established himself at the foreign ministry.

Mussolini ‘dropped the dog’ on 3 October 1935 when Italy invaded Abyssinia. The Mediterranean may not have been a peaceful place in the decade before 1935: monarchy was overthrown in Spain, but preserved by a military dictatorship in Greece; the French ruthlessly suppressed colonial peoples in Morocco and Syria; terrorists murdered their ethnic enemies in Yugoslavia and Palestine. Its quarrels were, however, parochial. The Mediterranean itself played little part in these struggles beyond that of a means of departure and arrival. It was Mussolini’s challenge to Britain that plunged the Mediterranean as a whole into its fourteen-year crisis.

The British described their Mediterranean as an ‘artery’. ⁸ Armies and navies made the passage to the East through the artery, raw materials, tin, rubber, tea and, above all, oil, made their way west. On any given day in the mid-1930s the tonnage of British shipping in the Mediterranean was second only to that found in the North Atlantic. The Mediterranean was not, however, Britain’s only arterial route. Many of the same destinations could be reached by sailing the Atlantic–Indian Ocean route around Africa via the Cape of Good Hope. The Mediterranean’s chief attraction was speed. A ship steaming from the Port of London to Bombay would take a full fortnight longer, and travel nearly 4,500 miles more, to reach its destination if it did not pass through the Mediterranean.

The British artery had three main choke points: Gibraltar, Malta and Port Said. The first port of call for a ship entering the Mediterranean was Gibraltar. Seven million tons of commercial shipping called at Gibraltar every year. The Rock, a mere one-and-seven-eighths square miles in area, had been a British possession since the early eighteenth century. It housed a large naval base for the use of the Home Fleet. Nearly a thousand miles to the east, the small island of Malta lay at a point almost equidistant between Gibraltar and the entrance to the Suez Canal at Port Said in Egypt. It also sat astride the narrowest point in the Mediterranean, the Strait of Sicily. Valletta was one of the great harbours of the world, providing the main base of the Mediterranean Fleet, comprising, at the beginning of 1935, five battleships, eight cruisers and an aircraft-carrier. Apart from its strategic importance, the British dominance of Malta irritated Mussolini. In the early 1930s the British started a campaign to encourage the Maltese language to replace Italian in the schools and law courts. ⁹ Pro-Italian Maltese ‘traitors’ were imprisoned, and Italian diplomats were expelled from the island for indulging in subversion and espionage. Italian was expunged as a legitimate language. ¹⁰

A few ships left the main artery at Malta and headed into the northeastern Mediterranean, to the British possession of Cyprus, ‘off the main track of sea communications…unfortified and garrisoned only by native police, together with one company of British troops’. Unlike Gibraltar and Malta, Cyprus had a large land mass capable of supporting a substantial population–nearly 350,000 in 1935. Its coast was dotted with harbours but they were little more than ‘open roadsteads’ or ‘small and silted up’. The only substantial port was Famagusta on the east of the island. In the mid-1930s the British did consider turning Famagusta into a major naval base. ¹¹ In the end they decided that Cyprus was ‘out of the question for the immediate needs of the moment’. A base at Famagusta would have taken over a decade to complete. ¹²

Most ships did not divert to Cyprus. They travelled on for another thousand miles from Malta. At Port Said they entered the Suez Canal. A great feat of nineteenth-century engineering, the Canal ran for 101 miles through Egypt, providing a single-lane highway, with passing places to accommodate both north-and southbound traffic. A ship would take–on average–fifteen hours to pass through the Canal before debouching into the Red Sea at Port Suez.

Thus for the British the Mediterranean comprised a seamless whole. The sea was a journey from west to east, and the Mediterranean coast comprised the north and south banks of an eastward-flowing river. ¹³

By the time ‘major combat operations’ in Abyssinia ended on 9 May 1936, the British had been thoroughly spooked. ¹⁴ They could no longer ‘despise the Italians and believe they will never dare to put to and face us’, wrote Winston Churchill. ‘Mussolini’s Italy may be quite different to that of the Great War.’ ¹⁵ Major-General Robert Haining, the British army officer charged with assessing his Italian opposite numbers, described the campaign as a ‘masterpiece’. ‘There has been a great tendency in this country’, he warned, echoing Churchill, ‘to think that the Italian of today is still the Italian of Caporetto [whereas] the Italian, from what one has seen of him, is a very different individual to what he used to be.’ ¹⁶

The British response to the war was characterized by Sir Warren Fisher, the head of the civil service, as feeble. British officials had stood on the dockside at Port Said as Italian troop ships sailed through the Suez Canal carrying, by their estimation, nearly a quarter of a million men. ¹⁷ One in five ships that sailed through the Canal in 1936 were Italian. ¹⁸ Italy was able to send three hundred tons of poison gas through the Suez Canal on a refrigerated banana boat. Despite attempts to cover up the shipments, the British were well aware of the weapons of mass destruction passing under their noses. Abyssinia was a honeypot for ambitious writers hoping to make a name for themselves. The most famous, subsequently, of these writers, Evelyn Waugh, wrote to the wife of a British cabinet minister: ‘i have got to hate the ethiopians more each day goodness they are lousy & i hope the organmen gas them to buggery’. ¹⁹ The ‘organmen’ did Waugh proud. Sir Aldo Castellani, a prominent Harley Street surgeon and father-in-law of the British High Commissioner in Egypt, discredited British reports about gassing by claiming that the photographs of gas victims actually showed lepers. He admitted the truth, in private, to his English friends. ²⁰ ‘No country believes that we ever intended business,’ lamented Sir Warren, ‘and our parade of force in the Eastern Mediterranean, so far as impressing others, has merely made a laughing stock of ourselves. All that is now needed to complete the opera bouffe is a headline in the newspapers, “Italians Occupy Addis Ababa, British evacuate Eastern Med”.’ ²¹ Dino Grandi, the Italian ambassador in London, reported that although the British realized, ‘the Italian empire in Ethiopia was also the Italian Mediterranean empire’, they feared to act. ²²

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

Fascist propagandists lamented the fact that the Italian Empire, emasculated by ‘morbid parliamentarism, had not hitherto been regarded as ‘an immediate menace to the great imperial artery from Gibraltar to Port Said’. ³⁷ For the Italians too, the Mediterranean comprised a whole. To them, however, the proper orientation of the sea was not west to east but north to south. Their ambition to reorientate the Mediterranean had been constantly thwarted by Britain’s west–east stranglehold. As early as May 1919 Mussolini had travelled to Fiume, the heart of Italia irredenta, to tell his supporters that ‘the first thing to be done is to banish foreigners from the Mediterranean, beginning with the English’. ³⁸ Now that Fascism had ‘incalculably strengthened Italy’s spiritual, political and military efficiency’, Britain would discover that Italian possession of the north–south ‘trans-Mediterranean lines Sicily–Tripoli and Dodecanese–Tobruk’ rendered its own Mediterranean artery forfeit. Britain was hegemon of the Mediterranean, but that hegemony would be challenged. For anyone with a smattering of classical learning–and no account of the Mediterranean in the 1930s could resist extensive reference to ancient history–the implication was clear. Athens’s hegemony in the Aegean had–according to Thucydides–inevitably led to war with Sparta. The war had dragged on for decades, leaving Athens enfeebled. Italy was Sparta to Britain’s Athens. ³⁹

Britain was the hegemon of the Mediterranean; Fascist Italy was its would-be successor. At either end of the Mediterranean, however, lay two major powers each with claims to eminence in their own half of the sea, with some, albeit limited, ability to project power into the other half. Such an evaluation may seem unfair to the French who possessed a formidable Mediterranean Fleet docked on both shores of the Mediterranean. The French Fleet had naval bases at Marseilles and Toulon in France, Bizerta in Tunisia, and Oran in Algeria. In addition the French had a complex series of alliances with the smaller powers, not least, since 1927, Yugoslavia. It held the ‘mandates’ for Syria and Lebanon in the eastern Mediterranean. The further east one went, however, the less apparent was French power. ⁴⁰ Regretfully, the French themselves realized that their naval power made sense in the western Mediterranean only in conjunction with that of Britain, and operated in the east entirely on the sufferance of the English. Although the Marine did not like to admit it they were, for all their gleaming new warships and well-appointed ports, merely an escort force for the French Army. Their mundane task was to transport thousands of ‘black’ African troops across the Mediterranean to serve in Europe. If the French ever had to fight the Germans they intended to rerun the war of 1914–1918, this time bleeding Africa, rather than France, ‘white’. By the end of the first year of a European war, half a million Africans would be fighting for France, with millions more to come if necessary ⁴¹ ‘If we use the base in Majorca, Mussolini assured Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim Ribbentrop, ‘not one negro will be able to cross from Africa to France by the Mediterranean route.’ ⁴² The head of the French navy, Admiral François Darlan, believed that Majorca was more important than Spain. ⁴³

The embarrassment, for some a humiliation, of the navy’s subordinate position made for a streak of vicious Anglophobia that ran through the Marine and other elements in French life. Many Britons, on the other hand, admired France’s Mediterranean empire. Winston Churchill, wintering in North Africa, remarked that ‘you would be staggered by what the French have done out here in twenty years…an extraordinary effort’. ‘The French are not at all infected with the apologetic diffidence that characterizes British administration,’ he assured the readers of the Daily Mail in February 1936, ‘they offer [indigenous] inhabitants logical, understanding modern solutions.’ ⁴⁴

The Mediterranean’s other major power, Turkey, revived by the successful Kemalist revolution, had had its right to the Sea of Marmara–and to the city of Constantinople on its west shore–acknowledged by the other powers after it had gone to the brink of war with Britain in 1922. Turkey sat astride the third egress from the Mediterranean. The Straits, the Dardanelles running from the Mediterranean into the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosphorus running from the Sea of Marmara into the Black Sea, remained under international control. The Turks could not deploy a formidable navy, but their huge army lay at the heart of the Kemalist regime. ⁴⁵

Both the French and the Turks knew that for Italian ambitions to be realized, they themselves would need to be displaced. In 1926 the Duces brother, Arnaldo, was honest about family intentions. Italy would predate both the French and the Turks. Italian expansion had many avenues to pursue. ‘There’s the entire eastern basin of the Mediterranean, where the remnants of the old Turkish empire are to be found,’ Arnaldo wrote gleefully in the Popolo d'ltalia. ‘There’s also Syria, which France won’t even colonize because she has no excess population. Then there’s Smyrna which should belong to us. And finally there’s Adalia.’ ⁴⁶ The French continually toyed with the idea of an alliance with Italy against the Germans in Europe, to the disadvantage of the British in the Mediterranean, but they could never bring themselves to trust a country whose ambitions ran so obviously counter to their own. In the autumn of 1933, for instance, the Army’s Deuxième Bureau reluctantly concluded that the destruction of France would be ‘a fundamental objective of Italian policy as long as France remains a Mediterranean power’. ⁴⁷

The Turks, unlike the French, never tried to convince themselves that the Italians were friends. ⁴⁸ Kemal Ataturk had a nice line in Mussolini appreciation: ‘the swollen bullfrog of the Pontine Marshes’. The Turks also had a cynical view of the Italian threat: ‘It is unlikely that there will be any serious trouble between Italy and Turkey,’ Ataturk commented in 1935, ‘madmen don’t as a rule fall foul of drunkards.’ ⁴⁹ Indeed, the Turks adroitly turned the geopolitical obsessions of the other powers to their own advantage. With astonishingly little resistance they persuaded other countries to allow them to reoccupy the Straits. The signature of the Montreux Straits Convention in July 1936 was the signal for remarkable manifestations of joy throughout Turkey. Turkish troops were greeted on the Dardanelles with garlands and streamers, the Turkish Fleet was met by cheering crowds. In September 1936 King Edward VIII, travelling ‘incognito’ as the Duke of Lancaster, arrived off Turkey in his steam yacht; he and Ataturk paid each other carefully choreographed mutual visits. The Turkish Fleet steamed into the Mediterranean for the first time since the Great War. They were warmly received at Malta. British diplomats were delighted by their coup; the British military was not. British interest in the new situation and the assistance Britain would receive from it, they complained, could be summed up in one phrase: ‘very small’. ‘This country’, the military observed wearily,‘would give more than it receives.’ ⁵⁰