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

Many post-war Italian historians have doubted the seriousness of Mussolini’s Mediterranean ambitions. Citing his undoubted tergiversations, they have questioned whether a master plan for Italian hegemony in the Mediterranean ever really existed. Their Mussolini is a restless opportunist, constantly searching for a status that Italy’s military and economic power did not deserve. This Mussolini was potentially as interested in the Danube and the Brenner Pass as in a new Roman Empire. He was a ‘Stresa’ Mussolini, as likely to make a deal with Britain against Germany in Europe as he was to make a pact with Germany against Britain in the Mediterranean. Refuting these unconvincing apologetics has made work for generations of counter-revisionists. ⁵¹

Mussolini’s apologists were able to make a case because of the self-contradictions at the heart of Fascist plans for the Mediterranean. Mussolini contradicted himself about the purpose of a Mediterranean empire. Often he celebrated Italy’s Mediterranean destiny. He spoke of the Mediterranean as Italy’s natural space. Italy, Mussolini declared, was ‘an island which juts into the Mediterranean’. What was the Mediterranean to Italy, he asked: ‘it is life’. For the British, on the other hand, the Mediterranean was no more than ‘a short cut whereby the British empire reaches more rapidly its outlying territories’. ⁵² He would, he boasted, recreate Mare Nostrum–‘our sea–as part of the great Fascist crusade to rebuild the Roman Empire. That empire had bound together the north and south of the Mediterranean; Italy and North Africa had been an organic whole. ⁵³ Now Fascism would rebuild ‘the fourth shore’, the empire in North Africa. It would be peopled by Italian colonists. ⁵⁴ One could only admire, wrote a British expert, ‘the courage of the Italian nation in boldly applying new methods to this old problem of colonization, and in setting examples which, if they succeed, will furnish models for others to follow’. ⁵⁵ Freed of land hunger the Italian population would increase exponentially. In decades to come the Mediterranean, purged of the British, would house an Italian population rivalling that of the British Empire, the United States or the Soviet Union.

At other moments Mussolini disdained the Mediterranean. Far from being a natural space, it was a prison. The Fascists could not confine themselves to repopulating the Fourth Shore. They needed to escape the Mediterranean altogether. In 1934 he told the Second Quinquennial Assembly of the Fascist Party that Italy would ‘find the keys of the Mediterranean in the Red Sea’. ‘The historical objectives of Italy have two names,’ he declared, ‘Asia and Africa.’ ⁵⁶ In 1938 Mussolini had ‘The March to the Oceans’ included in the official record of the Fascist Grand Council. It claimed that Italy was imprisoned in the Mediterranean:

The bars of this prison are Corsica, Tunisia, Malta, and Cyprus. The guards of this prison are Gibraltar and Suez. Corsica is a pistol pointed at the heart of Italy; Tunisia at Sicily. Malta and Cyprus constitute a threat to all our positions in the eastern and western Mediterranean. Greece, Turkey, and Egypt have been ready to form a chain with Great Britain and to complete the politico-military encirclement of Italy. Thus Greece, Turkey, and Egypt must be considered vital enemies of Italy and of its expansion…Once the bars are broken, Italian policy can only have one motto–to March to the Oceans. ⁵⁷

What did Mussolini want? A Mediterranean Empire? Or was the Mediterranean merely a prison from which he must break free to achieve WeltmacM Whatever the answer, the first step was the same: Italy had to defeat the British.

The contradiction in Fascist goals was actually less important than the contradiction in Fascist methods. Whereas the difference between Mare Nostrum and the Prison was only intermittently debated, arguments within the Fascist elite about methods of expansion were constant. There were two main schools of thought. On one side were those who advocated mezzi insidiosi, ‘insidious methods’, the use of stealth and dissimulation to achieve long-term goals. The driving force behind Mediterranean expansion should be political warfare. Through subversion, propaganda and espionage the Fascists could undermine their rivals. Self-doubt and internal divisions would cause them to collapse. If military force was to be used, it should be limited and aimed at weak opponents. The most useful type of military power was provided by special forces. They would engage in asymmetric warfare, using a few men armed with innovative weapons to cause disproportionate amounts of damage to the enemy. The Italians were pioneers in special forces. The navy’s ‘Special Weapons Section’ was tasked with using explosive-filled motorboats and ‘human torpedoes’ to bring the British Mediterranean Fleet to its knees. ⁵⁸ Large conventional armed forces were also important but they were a ‘luxury fleet’, cowing and deterring potential enemies whilst the mezzi insidiosi took their toll. ‘Our fleet has no battleships; it has fast cruisers with little or no defences; it has good destroyers, good submarines. It is thus able to engage in little more than…guerrilla warfare at sea,’ the head of Italy’s armed forces, Pietro Badoglio, warned Mussolini in 1935. ⁵⁹

This cannot be true Fascism, others objected. The practice of diplomacy, albeit laced with terrorism, hardly suited the needs of a regime whose claims to violent, masculine squadrismo were beginning to look distinctly middle-aged. The Second Quinquennium reminded everyone that Fascism had done nothing violent or heroic for at least ten years. ⁶⁰ Fascism would thrive on heroic conflict. The road to world power was paved by catalytic wars rather than sneaky subversion. ⁶¹ The Italian armed forces should be expanded and re-equipped, most especially with the weapons of total war, the bomber and the battleship. These forces were far from a luxury. They were there to be used. If the democracies showed signs of coalescing to face the threat, then Italy too would need to seek congenial allies, most notably Nazi Germany.

Throughout the 1930s the dispute over methods was a closely fought battle. In 1936 Admiral Domenico Cavagnari, the professional head of the Italian navy, declared that mezzi insidiosi showed a lack of ambition. Responding to Badoglio’s scepticism, in August 1936 he ordered his officers to concentrate on building a battlefleet capable of attacking the British in conjunction with the Nazi Kriegsmarine. ⁶² The predicted date for a war was 1942. The Duce formally proclaimed the Italian-German Axis on 1 November 1936 to an immense and enthusiastic crowd’ in a speech in the Piazza Duomo of Milan. His words were later broadcast in the major Mediterranean languages–English, French, Greek, Spanish and Arabic. He told Hitler’s personal representative that ‘our relations with London are very bad and cannot improve’. In return Hitler’s message was: ‘that we should know that he regards the Mediterranean as a purely Italian sea’. ⁶³ Mussolini’s ‘tragedy’ was that his regime was supremely well equipped for mezzi insidiosi whereas its lack of material resources hobbled its preparation for total war.

Mezzi insidiosi continued in full force despite the Axis. In August 1935, the Royal Navy had decided that its great base at Malta was too dangerous as a wartime berth for the Mediterranean Fleet. Whenever there was a crisis the Fleet would have to steam to Alexandria, its main harbour in Egypt. Unlike Malta, however, Alexandria was far from being an ideal anchorage. Although offering the charms of a cosmopolitan and well-stocked city to sailors, it had real military disadvantages. Alexandria did not have a dockyard that could repair any damaged ships. Any warship damaged by accident or enemy action would have to leave the Mediterranean altogether. And Alexandria’s harbour mouth was notoriously narrow. If a ship was sunk within it, the entire British fleet would be trapped. Indeed, days after war in Abyssinia was declared, the Italian liner Ausonia-‘the most luxurious steamer on the Europe–Egypt service’–mysteriously caught fire in the entrance to Alexandria Bay. ⁶⁴ British destroyers raced to the scene and, at considerable risk to themselves, nosed up to the Italian ship and pushed it out of the way. ‘British naval men’, remarked a journalist who reported the story, ‘have their own private opinion of the burning of this ship in this particular place.’ ⁶⁵

A final flaw of Alexandria was created by its position on the Nile Delta. The outpouring of the Nile created complex eddies, currents and water densities. By developing a method–called sonar–of ‘pinging’ artificial bodies underwater with sound waves, and picking up the echo, the British possessed what they hoped was the decisive weapon against submarines. The hydrology of Alexandria, however, crippled this brilliant new British invention. ⁶⁶ Alexandria was the perfect laboratory for mezzi insidiosi. Italian submarines operated at the harbour mouth, shadowing British battleships whenever they left port. ⁶⁷

In the event, however, Italian submariners demonstrated the value of mezzi insidiosi elsewhere in the Mediterranean. In August 1937 Mussolini and Ciano ordered them to launch a ‘pirate war’ in the Mediterranean against Spanish and Soviet shipping. ⁶⁸ In Rome, they would maintain ‘plausible deniability’. Merchantmen would be sent to the bottom by desperadoes of unknown origin. Fifty-nine submarines fanned out through the Mediterranean. Some daring submariners made it as far as the Black Sea Straits where they attacked Soviet ships, proving that the Turks could not defend the Straits they had, with such fanfare, remilitarized. Cruisers and destroyers entered the Straits of Sicily, the choke point between eastern and western Mediterranean, attacking any Spanish ship that passed. Torpedo boats ranged along the North African coast doing the same. ⁶⁹ The operation also was not without its risks. At the end of August the submarine Iride attacked the Royal Navy ship HMS Havock in error. Up until that point British destroyer crews had largely enjoyed their posting in the western Mediterranean. Memorably, Miss Czechoslovakia had embarked on a warship during a stop-over at Palma by the First Destroyer Flotilla. The beauty queen had ‘enjoyed her passage enormously and even joined us in the water when we stopped and piped hands to bathe’. ⁷⁰ The contrast with a sudden attack was a shock. The enraged destroyer captain hunted the submarine for hours, although in the end neither vessel was sunk. Even Ciano admitted, we are in deep trouble’. ⁷¹

The foreign ministers of the ‘Mediterranean powers’ assembled in the Swiss town of Nyon to discuss what should be done about the ‘piracy’. ⁷² Nyon was an appeasers’ paradise. The fiction that attacks on merchant shipping in the Mediterranean was the fault of ‘pirates unknown’ was fully indulged. Italy was even invited to the meeting, although it declined to attend. Not one word of criticism of Mussolini was allowed to emerge. The Mediterranean powers agreed to set up anti-submarine patrols. Italy was invited to take part in these patrols, in effect allowing her destroyers to search for her own submarines. The Royal Navy accorded the Regia Marina equality of status in the Mediterranean. ⁷³ Nyon was hailed as a triumph of ‘collective security’. England: ‘a nation which thinks with its arse’, was Mussolini’s rather more robust verdict. ‘It is a great victory,’ chuckled Ciano, who only a fortnight before had been scared by the thought of British action, ‘from accused torpedoers to Mediterranean policemen, with the exclusion of the Russians, whose ships have been sunk.’ ⁷⁴ Nyon preserved the naval status quo in the Mediterranean until the end of the Spanish Civil War: the Francoists received whatever they wanted, the Republicans got very little. ⁷⁵

Mezzi insidiosi rested on a clear understanding of the psychological weakness of enemies. Mussolini could look deep inside the British military, political and diplomatic establishment. The Italians had an outstanding intelligence network that fed Mussolini timely and accurate accounts of British deliberations about the Mediterranean. Mussolini often dressed up the sources of his information in picaresque stories; he ascribed his–accurate–information about ammunition shortages of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean to a letter from ‘a lady’ in London. ⁷⁶ In fact the intelligence-gathering was not fortuitous but the result of a professional and systematic effort. In 1924 Italian military intelligence–SIM–had introduced its first mole into the British Embassy in Rome. The treacherous Embassy servant was, in due course, succeeded by his brother, who kept Mussolini supplied with British diplomatic correspondence until Italy entered the Second World War in June 1940. ⁷⁷ At the post-war trial of the head of SIM, General Mario Roatta, it was claimed that his agency removed 16,000 documents a year from embassies in Rome. They also ran operations in other capitals. Italian employees of the Marconi company in Egypt, for instance, copied sensitive telegrams and fed them to Italian intelligence. ⁷⁸ When Galeazzo Ciano met Hitler on 24 October 1936 he was able to hand him a dossier of thirty-two British Foreign Office documents. ‘Today,’ Ciano recorded the Führer as saying, ‘England is governed merely by incompetents.’ ⁷⁹

Hitler had a point: the damage caused by Italian espionage went far beyond diplomatic documents, however revealing of national policy. The haul from the British Embassy in Rome included diplomatic and consular codes, the naval attaché cipher, the India cipher and the interdepartmental cipher. Even without these windfalls the Italian cryptanalysts found communications between London and Athens, Belgrade, Rome and Addis Ababa easy to break. SIM could read British, French and Ethiopian diplomatic traffic. Naval codebreakers had similar successes. From the summer of 1935 they were reading signals from the Admiralty to Royal Navy units in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. ⁸⁰ The decrypts often reached Mussolini’s desk within twenty-four hours of interception. Ignorant of how compromised they were, even the British recognized that Mussolini knew a great deal about their military plans and dispositions, ‘for’, Sir Robert Vansittart, the professional head of the Foreign Office, conceded, ‘they have a decent Intelligence service.’ ⁸¹

TWO
Death on the Nile

In October 1937 another famous novelist paid tribute to the impact of mezzi insidiosi on the English imagination. ‘The best of the new autumn crop’ of thrillers was Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile. It told a story of theft and murder in Egypt, unravelled by Christie’s Cartesian alter ego, the mincing Belgian, Hercule Poirot. Death on the Nile proved an entertainment of such enduring charm that few noticed how timely was the central plot. A group of western tourists escape the cold of the western Mediterranean for Egypt, ‘real warmth, darling. Lazy golden sounds. The Nile.’ On board the steamer Karnak, Poirot encounters two characters whose politics intrude into the murderous private affairs of their fellow passengers. His old friend Colonel Race, ‘a man of unadvertised comings and goings…usually to be found in one of the outposts of empire where trouble was brewing’, was on the trail of those who sought to undermine British power. There had been ‘a good deal of trouble out here’. But it was not, the Colonel revealed, ‘the people who ostensibly led the rioters we’re after’. Race’s prey were the men who ‘very cleverly put the match to the gunpowder’. He was seeking one of the ‘cleverest paid agitators that ever existed…a man with five or six cold-blooded murders to his credit...bit of a mongrel’. That clever, murdering, mongrel turned out to be an Italian fellow passenger. There was something not right about Signor Guido Richetti, Archeologo. He used ‘hair lotions of a highly scented kind’ and carried a lady’s gun, the ‘Mauser automatic twenty-five’. ¹ Most damning was the discovery of Richetti’s telegraphed instructions from the Italian secret service in Rome. Once their code had been broken, it revealed that an innocent discussion of vegetables was something much more sinister, a plan for violent revolution, for ‘potatoes mean machine guns and artichokes are high explosives’.

Christie’s thriller was unusually well informed. At the time of publication official opinion had judged that the threat of subversion in Egypt was great enough to require the institution in Cairo of the ‘the only purely MI5 organisation in the area. The real-life counterpart to Colonel Race, Major Raymond Maunsell, was soon ‘deeply implicated in Egyptian politics’. ² Few informed observers doubted that, by 1937, Britain was faced by a serious crisis in the Muslim Mediterranean. ³ After decades of toying with the Eastern Question the British had definitively displaced the Ottomans as the master race at the end of the First World War. Since then she had requited none of the hopes, bizarre and impractical as her officials saw them, invested in her rule. It was Britain which was seen as a tyrannical and destructive force. Many found her representatives arrogant and hateful. They longed to be done with the British. In 1937 it was hard to judge, however, the depth and importance of such malcontent. Some said that the problem went no further than members of the traditional elite, both secular and religious, disgruntled that the British insisted on a modicum of good governance. Others looked deeper and said that the maintenance of such traditions, especially the indulgence of corruption, was in the British interest. The pashas and notables might make spiteful complaint, plot and curse in private, but in the end they were no real threat. If politics ever took to the street, the masses would not thank Britons for their reforming efforts; rather they would string the unbelievers from the recently provided lampposts. ⁴

The same informed observers were in little doubt that Britain’s enemies were fishing in these foetid waters. Propaganda, money and weapons flowed into the eastern Mediterranean. Signor Richettis aplenty plied their subversive and violent trade. In 1935 Captain Ugo Dadone, dashing traveller, explorer, journalist and zealous Fascist, set up a propaganda office in Cairo. ⁵ The Italians financed the radical Young Egypt movement. Young Egypt organized its paramilitary Green Shirts to ape the Black Shirts. The Ministry of Propaganda, then headed by Galeazzo Ciano, set up a radio station, Radio Bari, to appeal directly to Arab malcontents. In the summer of 1935 it began daily broadcasts that proved wildly successful because ‘adapted to the average puerile Arab mind’. Bari declared that: ‘the Arab populations of the Levant must be freed from the yoke of their present masters’. It traded on the message that Arab patriots…all those not contaminated by British gold–know well the consequences of Britain’s rule, they know how much grief and bloodshed Britain has caused…that it is in the interest of Fascist Italy that the Arab nations of the Levant attain their freedom and independence’. ⁶ The British soon noticed that Bari was ‘becoming increasingly popular in Arab cafes’. Arabs ‘sipped their coffee and swallowed Italian propaganda with every mouthful’. In 1937 it was calculated that over half of all the radios in Palestine were tuned into Bari. ⁷

Mussolini made a spectacular appeal for a Fascist-Muslim alliance in March 1937. Marshal Italo Balbo, the Governor of Libya, had complained that the dreams of a Fourth Shore were far from realization. Not only was it actually hard to get to Libya from Italy, but it was virtually impossible to travel along the Mediterranean coast. The two halves of Libya, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, were bisected by the inhospitable Sirtean desert. If one wished to travel from the capital in Tripoli to Benghazi, Cyrenaica’s main port, all that was on offer was a weekly boat. He devised a grand plan, a road that would run the length of Libya’s Mediterranean coast, all the way from the Tunisian to the Egyptian border. The gleaming thousand-mile-long highway was completed at the beginning of 1937. An arch of triumph was erected in the middle of the desert. The road was so much Balbo’s project that it was nicknamed the Balbia. Though irritated by the name, Mussolini grasped the symbolic importance of Balbo’s achievement. Determined to claim the glory for this great monument of civilization, he agreed to preside over the festivities. ⁸

A celebration of the civilizing mission, and the unveiling of plans for a mass influx of colonists from Italy, might have seemed an unlikely occasion for a celebration of Islamo-Fascist friendship. But in Balbo’s fertile mind he was to be the architect of pan-Mediterranean syncretism. Buildings, he decreed, were no longer to espouse European modernism but a ‘Mediterranean’ style. The minaret of the mosque and the tower of the Italian town were part of the same culture. ⁹ The Islamic part of that heritage must be respected. The Governor funded religious schools and banned the sale of alcohol in Ramadan. What better place than Tripoli,‘the new pearl of the Mediterranean’, Balbo convinced Mussolini, as a centre for mezzi insidiosi. ¹⁰

The fondouks of the old town of Tripoli were torn down to make way for the new Mediterranean metropolis. The city was subject to a phantasmagoria of lighting effects. Balbo’s palace, the Cathedral and long stretch of the embankment were floodlit. An immense Dux was laid out in powerful electric lights attached to the newly constructed grain silo. The motto ‘Believe, Obey, Fight’ was picked out in twelve-feet-high lighting on the customs warehouse. A steel tower was erected in the castle square with a huge searchlight mounted on top. The light beam was visible for thirty miles all around. When everything was ready, Balbo left Tripoli for Cyrenaica. At Benghazi, he proclaimed that Mussolini was the ‘Protector of Islam’. Two days later the Duce himself stepped ashore at Tobruk. Accompanying him to Libya was a cruise ship filled with 120 journalists. Each journalist was provided with a car and servants so that they might follow Mussolini along the Balbia from east to west. The journey, by car and aeroplane, took four days.

On the evening of 16 March 1937 Mussolini made a triumphal entrance into Tripoli. He was accompanied by a bodyguard of Arab cavalrymen. The route was lined by tens of thousands of Arabs brought in from the countryside. It was said that political officers had rounded up nearly the entire pastoral population. For weeks afterwards, ‘little columns of dust [would] betray the presence of nomads making the weary journey back’. Each group was equipped with banners to represent their particular Islamic religious society. The procession ended in the castle square. There, Mussolini was greeted by the dug-out son of the last Ottoman ruler of Tripoli and the Kadi, the head of the sharia courts. The Kadi in particular had a major role in driving home the point of the visit. The next afternoon he once more greeted Mussolini, at the mosque. ‘I take the opportunity presented by your presence among us’, the venerable judge intoned via a ‘slick Arabic interpreter’, ‘to express our profound gratefulness for the favour which Fascism has showered upon these our countries which enjoy the benefits of progress, well-being, justice and perfect respect for our Sharia courts.’ ‘We declare’, he continued, ‘that we are truly happy to lie under the shadow of the glorious Italian flag, under the Fascist regime. And how can we forget all that you have said and done in favour of Islam in such important circumstances of international politics, thus acquiring such lively sympathy among the 400 million of Moslem believers.’

Balbo and Mussolini were far from finished, however. On the next afternoon, yet another group of Muslims pledged their loyalty. Arab soldiers of the Italian colonial army were drawn up in mounted array. One of their number rode forward towards Mussolini. ‘In the name of the soldiers and Moslems of Libya,’ he bellowed, ‘I have the honour to offer to you, Victorious Duce, this well-tempered Islamic sword. The souls of the Moslems of all the shores of the Mediterranean…thrill with emotion at this moment, in sympathy with our own.’ Mussolini pulled the sword from its scabbard and ululated a war cry Then the mounted men made a second triumphal entrance into Tripoli, where Mussolini addressed the Muslim crowd from the saddle, his words followed by running translation in Arabic, each sentence being greeted in turn by cries of ‘Dushy, Dushy’. ¹¹

In the wake of Fascism’s victory over the Christians of Abyssinia, important Muslim leaders were ready to heed Mussolini’s appeal for an anti-British alliance. First amongst them was Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, leader of radical Islam in Palestine. The Mufti was an elusive character. People tended to see in him what they wanted. He was regarded by some as a charming moderate. Those who crossed him found that he was cruel, merciless and unbalanced: they would fear his assassins for the rest of their often shortened lives. The British High Commissioner in Palestine, Sir Arthur Wauchope, said of the Mufti that as time passed wicked Dr Jekyll became dominant over the more moderate Mr Hyde. It was a revealing slip: in Stevenson’s original story Mr Hyde is evil personified. Hitler refused to believe that the Mufti was a Semite at all. In the skewed vision of the Nazis he became a blond, blue-eyed Aryan, albeit one spoilt by miscegenation. The Grand Mufti was known to his Palestinian enemies as ‘the spider’ or ‘Rasputin’. ¹²

The Mufti had once been Britain’s favourite Muslim. The mandatory government had sponsored his rise during the 1920s as a traditional aristocrat willing to collaborate with them in crushing secular militants. In 1934 the Mufti’s power base, the Supreme Muslim Council of Palestine, was given an astonishingly generous financial settlement. The British congratulated themselves that the Mufti’s religious charisma gave him dominion over the peasantry, inoculating them against the dangers of extremism. The Mufti put it differently. He had always hated the English. His goal was their total overthrow, but it was foolish to launch a revolt unprepared. The best approach was to undermine British power covertly, whilst preparing the jihad. With British money the Mufti created cohorts of officials loyal to him. One of his relatives toured the villages around Jerusalem, as a member of the land settlement department, creating a jihadist organization, known as the Sacred Holy War. Sacred Holy War created training camps where members of the Palestine police and the Syrian army trained insurgents. ¹³ As the Mufti told a Nazi diplomat, the Muslims of Palestine hoped fervently for ‘the spread of fascist and anti-democratic leadership to other countries’. ¹⁴

Britain’s second foe was Ali Maher Pasha, minister of the royal household, éminence grise to the monarchs of Egypt. ¹⁵ Radio Bari blared that the English hypocrites took risks for infidel savages, the Abyssinians, but reduced civilized Muslims to slavery. Ali Maher’s mobs cheered Mussolini as a Copt killer–the Patriarch of the Abyssinian church being traditionally chosen from amongst the Coptic monks of Egypt. Unlike the Grand Mufti, Ali Maher’s espousal of violent Mohammedanism was not particularly sincere. His loathing of democracy, however, was just as real. In his view the ‘illiterate electorate’ should be no more than the attendees of disciplined rallies as in Fascist Italy. His main purpose was to recruit zealous thugs. Like the Italians he looked to the Green Shirts of Young Egypt as potential shock troops. His alliance with the sheikhs provided him with squads of embittered young men who found that their religious education was mocked by secular technocrats. Ali Maher could put violent gangs on the streets. He knew, however, that he had to bide his time.

The true mass movement in Egypt was the Wafd, ‘the Delegation’, the secular anti-royalist nationalist party created at the end of the First World War. The Wafd, too, was determined to make use of the Abyssinian War to its best advantage. Enemies of the Wafd charged that it was a Coptic conspiracy, its second-in-command and most outspoken radical, Makram Ubeid, was a Christian, reviled as ‘Master William’ by his Muslim opponents. Ubeid too, however, admired the Black Shirts. He raised his own paramilitary militia, the Blue Shirts. Egypt proved one of the most prolific creators of movements which looked to Fascist Black Shirt street violence as a model for emulation. Ciano’s agents had great success in recruiting genuine Black Shirts from amongst the Italian population in Egypt. When Ciano visited in 1936, twenty thousand Black Shirts greeted him. ¹⁶ The appeal of Fascist methods was potent. The Wafd leadership remained, however, Italophobes. They saw little advantage in swapping British imperialism for the Italian variety ¹⁷ After much thought, the leader of the Wafd, Nahas Pasha, denounced the Italian bogey. The Blue Shirts were turned upon the Green Shirts. Nahas and the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Miles Lampson, agreed that the best answer to ‘Italian intrigue’ was an Anglo-Egyptian treaty ¹⁸ The treaty would serve both their interests. The British could tell the world that they had secured untrammelled rights to bases around the Suez Canal. Nahas could tell the Egyptians that he had secured independence. ¹⁹

The tawdry insincerity of the Anglo-Egyptian negotiations provided fertile ground for Ali Maher and his Fascist allies to exploit. In Farouk, the boy-king of Egypt, Ali Maher saw the perfect blank canvas from which he could create an Islamo-Fascist monarchy. The Wafd’s elderly candidate for head of the royal household was discredited by his dalliance with a seventeen-year-old Austrian girl. With his competitor disposed of, Ali Maher became once again officially the King’s chief adviser. Farouk invited a circle of Italian Fascist advisers to the Palace. Chief amongst them was the ‘royal architect’. He did little design work. Instead he was a conduit for intelligence and influence to flow between Rome and Cairo. His influence was cemented by his equally important role of royal pander, supplying the young European girls so prized at Court. ²⁰

Fascists in the Palace were not Nahas’s only problem. The Wafd had won power by aping Fascist models of street violence. Yet it was unclear whether they controlled the power on the streets that they had unleashed. The gangs created in the image of the Black Shirts did not necessarily agree with their leader’s contention that the British, although repugnant, were better than the Italians. Although Nahas proclaimed himself‘supreme leader’ of the Blue Shirts, they increasingly appeared as much a threat as a boon. The government of Egypt had declared against the Italians but contained elements of Fascist decay within it. The Blue Shirts turned on their own corrupt pashadom. The Party had to use all the powers of the State to destroy its own mass movement, to the benefit of Ali Maher and the Palace.

Egyptian Islamo-Fascism emboldened others. ²¹ The Mufti of Jerusalem himself had never had much in common with his fellow Islamic militants in Egypt. Egyptian clerics dreaming of a Caliphate in Cairo distrusted their more charismatic Palestinian brother, who made no secret of his own ambition to lead Sunni Islam. The Egyptian Islamo-Fascist successes, however, egged on the Syrians. The Syrian National Bloc created its own paramilitaries on the Fascist model, the Steel Shirts. ²² The Syrian Emir Shakib Arslan, the best-known spokesman of militant Arab nationalism, whose anti-French, anti-British propaganda was financed in equal measure by Mussolini and Hitler, goaded the Mufti in the Palestinian press. ²³ The circumstances overrode the Mufti’s preference for mezzi insidiosi. ²⁴ The terrorist cells were activated. In April 1936 the Mufti himself arrived on the Mediterranean coast. Arabs started murdering Jews. The Mufti emerged as the head of the Arab Higher Committee. A general strike was declared. ²⁵ The priority of the strike was to close down Palestine’s modern commerce. The first target was the Mediterranean ports, and the railways which took imports inland. The struggle centred on Haifa, Palestine’s great hope for modernity. It contained a new port built by the British and the railway workshops, the largest industrial site in Palestine. ²⁶ Old Haifa was the base of the most notorious Islamic terrorists, the Black Hand. Modern Haifa was a heterogeneous place with many new immigrants. There, where the strike could have had most effect, its hold was patchy. On the other hand, the old Arab port of Jaffa was completely closed down. In order to solidify the strike in Haifa, and maintain it in Jaffa, the leaders of the revolt required a great deal of money. They needed to offer wavering Arab workers alternative incomes. Appeals to fellow Muslims raised very little. ²⁷

The Italians, on the other hand, were more than willing to provide the Mufti with ‘millions’. Both the Italians and the insurgents got what they wanted. British troops were transferred from the Egyptian-Libyan border to Palestine, where they struggled to deal with terrorism. At last it seemed that money and violence would close down Haifa. In extremis, the British Army acted decisively. It sent troops into Haifa to protect those who kept working. But British success in Haifa provoked even more violence. Insurgents took to the countryside. If they could not close the ports they would sabotage the economy inland. In the towns the paramilitaries forced shops to close, preventing what arrived at the ports from being sold. Foreign fighters arrived from around the Arab world. Those with military training were able to deploy heavier weapons such as machine guns, making the bands even more deadly.

The British response was hobbled by disagreement over the nature of the revolt. Sir John Dill, the officer dispatched from Britain to deal with the insurgents, argued that the surest and most effective way of crippling the uprising was to decapitate it. He wanted to eliminate the Mufti. The High Commissioner in Palestine, Sir Arthur Wauchope, however, remained the Mufti’s dupe. Wauchope’s own desire that Palestine should become a peaceful, multi-racial, multi-religious society, led him astray. ²⁸ The effect, one of his senior police officials remarked, was a policy of glossing things over’. ²⁹ In the autumn of 1936 London finally agreed to overrule Wauchope. He was ordered to extirpate the leaders of the revolt. Despite these orders Wauchope remained determined to subvert the ‘hard policy’. His first response was to wash his hands of his responsibilities, for he must remain ‘the Kindly Father’ of the Arabs. As the day of martial law drew near, he warned the Arab Higher Committee that he would soon be unable to protect them. The Mufti heeded Wauchope’s warning. Just before the Army moved in to arrest the leaders of the revolt, the Arab Higher Committee decreed that they had won and the strike would end. With his power intact the High Commissioner was able to override any plans to hunt down the insurgents. Foreign fighters merely crossed the border into Syria whilst home-grown terrorists returned unmolested to their day jobs. As Dill bitterly observed, a great proportion of the fighting power of the British army had been deployed to achieve a paper victory ³⁰

By the time Mussolini unsheathed the sword of Islam in Tripoli, the Mufti was planning an even greater uprising in Palestine. His Italian lire funded a meeting of militants at Bludan, well recorded since the ‘Colonel Race’ of Syria, Colonel MacKereth, managed to sneak in an agent disguised as an ice-seller. ³¹ Compromised, the Mufti fled. In the first of the escapes that added glamour to his sinister fame, he climbed down the walls of his Jerusalem mosque, sped to the Mediterranean coast by car and boarded a boat for Lebanon. Once safely in Beirut he declared Jihad against the British. It was launched on 26 September 1937. ³² In November 1937, when the British decided to send more troops to the eastern Mediterranean, the reinforcements went to Palestine. Far from deterring Mussolini, the so-called ‘Middle East strategic reserve’ was tied down by his Islamic allies in emergency counter-insurgency Twenty thousand troops, including eighteen infantry battalions, were deployed in the country ³³ Mussolini’s jihad even won the admiration of Hitler, who had previously dismissed the Arabs as lacquered apes. ³⁴

Ciano, famously, dismissed the efficacy of political mezzi insidiosi. ‘For years,’ he moaned to the German ambassador in Rome, ‘he had maintained constant relations with the Grand Mufti, of which his secret fund could tell a tale.’ Sadly, Ciano lamented, ‘the return of his gift of millions had not been exactly great’. Militarily, all he had got for his money was a few bands of Muslim insurgents willing to sabotage the oil pipeline that ran from northern Iraq to the Mediterranean coast at Haifa. But Ciano was speaking after Italy had declared war on Britain. Subversion was then of little importance to immediate military campaigns. ³⁵ As Otto von Hentig, the premier German expert on oriental subversion, pointed out, the erosion of British power in the Mediterranean would take years rather than months. In Egypt, Ali Maher was Prime Minister, although he was too wily to twit British power openly. With the greatest difficulty the British had been able to smother the second intifada. ³⁶ It was only in July 1939 that Britain, at last, managed to transfer troops from Palestine to the Egyptian-Libyan frontier. A remarkable amount had been achieved in only four years. Mussolini had acted as a beacon of hope for all those who hated the British. The tangible links between Islamic militancy and Fascism were actually less important than a vision of the future. The Italians had shown that British rule was not inescapable. ‘The old impression of invulnerability has gone,’ concluded one intelligence report, ‘and while there are many who believe that England can still hold her own in the Mediterranean, there are just as many who question her ability to do so.’ ³⁷ It was possible to plan, and fight for, the illiberal, undemocratic bright horizon. ³⁸

THREE
Of Mice and Men

In the spring of 1939 the great Mediterranean navies had a burst of enthusiasm for killing each other. The Royal Navy found release from its own problems in fantasizing about giving the despised ‘Itiy’ a good drubbing. ¹ The Regia Marina reached the height of its fervour for Fascist manliness. The most enthusiastic champion of a Mediterranean war was, however, the French Marine and in particular its charismatic leader Jean-François Darlan. Darlan had furiously politicked his way to the top. He cultivated an image as a ‘liberal’ ready to bring the navy out of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. His fellow admirals did not altogether trust him. Most of them respected or feared his skills. They knew he had the ear of their political masters. They realized that Darlan had sedulously placed his own allies in positions of influence during his rise to the top.

The royal republicans of the Marine understood that France’s best guarantee against Italian belligerence was the dominant power of Britain in the Mediterranean. This knowledge did not make them happy. France should have had a great role in the Mediterranean. She had a powerful fleet. That fleet had modern bases to both the north and the south: Toulon in metropolitan France, Oran in Algeria, Bizerta in Tunisia. Bizerta was the ‘key naval base of the Middle Mediterranean’, commanding the narrow seas between Sicily and Tunisia. Bizerta struck one British observer in the spring of 1939 as ‘the most magnificent harbour on the whole African coast’. The bay was large and deep enough to accommodate the entire French fleet. Unlike the main British naval base in the central Mediterranean, Malta, its Tunisian hinterland could provision and support that fleet even in time of war. ²

Unfortunately, however many great warships and magnificent facilities they possessed, at root the task of the French navy was to transport the French army from North Africa to southern France. This was hardly the glorious sea-spanning mission of a true battlefleet. But there was a golden scenario. If the Royal Navy was to fight Italy, it would seek an ally. French strength in the western Mediterranean would be indispensable; but so too would be France’s assets in the eastern Mediterranean. The British would invite the French to sail, not just north and south on their unglamorous supply route, but east to glory. The odds in a naval war between France and Italy were too close to take the risk; the odds in a Mediterranean conflict between a Franco-British alliance and Italy were quite excellent. At the end of the struggle the French navy would be victorious, it would have achieved gloire. Most importantly of all, the Marine would have inserted itself into the eastern Mediterranean whence it was doubtful whether its erstwhile allies could dislodge it. The thought of the British fighting France’s war to their own disadvantage was an appealing opportunity.

Darlan’s plan was a difficult concept to sell to his own countrymen, let alone the British. Most French army and air-force officers were fixated on the defence of France’s land frontiers, not ambitious naval operations far from home. Until the spring of 1939 the official position of the defence establishment was in favour of an alliance with Mussolini rather than for a war against him. ³ As the most enthusiastic military supporter of a campaign in the eastern Mediterranean, Maxime Weygand, put it: ‘if one’s range of vision were limited to distant horizons, one ran the risk of being like La Fontaine’s astrologer who, walking with his eyes fixed on the stars, fell into a well’. ⁴ Why couldn’t they see, Darlan demanded, that a war was coming in which France and Britain would be pitched against Germany, Italy, Japan and, he feared, Spain? That war would not be won by cowering behind the Maginot Line. War was about grand strategy, it was won by attack rather than defence and, Darlan maintained, the Mediterranean was the key to both. A great coalition war would not be a short affair. It would be a long struggle decided by which side was the most successful in mobilizing its resources. He argued that ‘a significant part of British and French supplies and, in particular, almost all the oil extracted from the French, British and Russian oil fields in the East depends on the mastery of the Mediterranean’. More importantly still, the Mediterranean offered the avenue by which Germany and Italy could be outflanked. Now, ‘above all,’ Darlan observed, ‘the Mediterranean constitutes the only communication line with our Central European allies’. The pivot of such a line would be the city of Salonika in north-east Greece. ⁵

Allied to his grand vision Darlan possessed a formidable talent for short-term political manipulation. Unable to convince the stolid military types, he appealed to worried politicians peering uncertainly into l’âbime. Rather nervously they agreed to consider his ideas. The political elite was far from endorsing Darlan’s scheme but they did allow him to insert the possibility of a Mediterranean war into the machinery of planning. ⁶

As ever it was Mussolini who transformed a dry debate about future possibilities into a pressing necessity for action. ⁷ At the end of November 1938, Mussolini ordered Ciano to terrify France. The Italian foreign minister presented himself in the Chamber of Deputies to espouse the ‘natural aspirations’ of the Italian nation. In response, the Deputies and those in the galleries erupted in chants of ‘Tunisia, Corsica, Nice, Savoy’. These chants, if taken literally, reflected a series of territorial demands that would have made Italy the dominant power in the western Mediterranean, not to mention dismembering metropolitan and colonial France. To agree to these demands would have finished France as a serious power and provoked an internal revolution. Even the hardiest of French appeasers found it impossible to imagine how a compromise might be reached if Ciano’s audience was a genuine sounding board for Italian ambitions–and Ciano affected to believe that he had ‘expressed their aspirations, which are those of the nation’. ⁸

One possible response was Nelsonian deafness. ‘According to some accounts,’ the British ambassador Lord Perth reported to London, the prolonged acclamations for Ciano, ‘included cries of “Tunis, Tunis”, though they were not distinguishable from the Diplomatic Gallery where I was seated.’ ⁹ Even the Fascist stage-managers appeared a little confused as to what they should be demanding. The gallery claque were supposed to cry for Tunis and Corsica, but not only was Nice added for good measure but a few enthusiastic souls shouted a demand for Morocco as well. ¹⁰ Mussolini told the Fascist Grand Council, swearing them to secrecy, that his actual programme was to seize Albania and ‘then, for our security needs in the Mediterranean which still constrains us, we need Tunis and Corsica’. ¹¹ Even the Duce acknowledged that plans to dismember metropolitan France were unrealistic. Mussolini’s real aim, he told Ciano, was to sow confusion in preparation for the invasion of Albania. The furore would ‘distract local attention, allowing us a convenient preparation without stirring up any fear, and in the end induce the French to accept our going into Tirana.’ ¹²

Within a few days even Mussolini was moved to admit that they might have overdone it, since ‘continuing at this rate cannon will have to be put to use and the time has not yet arrived’. ¹³ The damage, however, had already been done. ¹⁴ The French had no mean intelligence service working against the Italians: it was conservatively estimated that France had over one thousand agents in Italy by the late 1930s. The contents of Mussolini’s ‘March to the Oceans’ found their way into French hands. Darlan’s warnings about the inevitability of war against a German-Italian Axis were, even his detractors in the French army were moved to admit, appearing more and more prescient by the day. The French Prime Minister, Edouard Daladier, made a highly publicized trip to Tunis in January 1939 to emphasize French willingness to fight for its Mediterranean possessions. He approved extra spending to prepare Tunisia against Italian attack. ¹⁵

Darlan was by no means finished with his manoeuvres. German and Italian bellicosity had finally convinced the appeasement-minded governments of Chamberlain and Daladier that their respective armed forces should be allowed to talk to one another. Darlan hoped to use these talks as a means of achieving his long-term goal of levering France into the eastern Mediterranean. In the short term he intended to use the British to clear away the objections of his colleagues. He found a willing ally in his British opposite number, the newly appointed First Sea Lord, Sir Roger Backhouse. Backhouse, too, was trying to overcome what he regarded as pusillanimous diplomatic appeasers in an attempt to get to grips with Mussolini. If anything he was even more aggressive than Darlan and advocated going straight for the Italian mainland. In the autumn of 1938 he had commissioned his chief planner, the grandiloquently named Sir Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, to start work on that basis. The French found Drax’s plans rather strong meat.

Italian naval planners had also worked themselves into a lather, if not of aggression, at least of bellicosity. The planners pointed out that an unexpected surprise attack on the British, preceding the outbreak of a general war, might be the best way to achieve their goal. If no such ‘knockout blow’ was forthcoming then the Italians would wait until they had assembled a big enough army in Libya. The army would then advance eastwards towards Egypt and the Suez Canal to ‘to defeat the main enemy at a vital point and open one of the doors that close Italy off from free access to the oceans’. ¹⁶ The navy did, however, add one important caveat to these ambitious plans. Although the ‘system of defence’ that would divide the Mediterranean was plausible, and could be erected in fairly short order, the deployment of the main battlefleet was more problematic. There were only two harbours capable of handling the most modern battleships, both of them historic hangovers more suited for the coastal operations of an earlier age. Genoa was too exposed to attack. Indeed both Darlan and Backhouse had identified it as one of their first targets for naval bombardment. Venice and the Adriatic seaboard were too far from the central Mediterranean. The answer to this problem was a new naval base at Taranto in the far south of the Italian mainland; but it was not due to come into full operation before 1942.

The perceived caution of the naval planners prompted derision from the other services. Mutual inter-service mud-slinging offered an opportunity for Marshal Badoglio, the Chief of Supreme General Staff, who, for all his prestige, was usually kept away from real decision-making, to intervene. ¹⁷ Badoglio thought that the war talk was dangerous nonsense. Mussolini’s rhetoric, he assured the military chiefs, was just that. He himself had talked to Mussolini. He had assured Badoglio that Ciano’s speech and his own statements to the Fascist Grand Council were merely a blind for the limited operation in Albania. Badoglio’s timing was poor. On the day that the chiefs met, news arrived in Rome that Barcelona had fallen; victory in Spain, Mussolini said, bore only one name, his own. He had persevered when nay-sayers such as Badoglio had despaired. Mussolini always delighted in making the Marshal appear cowardly and foolish. The very next day the Duce contradicted his most distinguished soldier and declared that he was indeed intending to ‘wage war and defeat France destroying everything and levelling many cities’. ¹⁸

On 7 April 1939, Italian forces invaded Albania. The self-proclaimed king of the tiny Muslim nation on the Adriatic, Zog, had done his best to accommodate Italian demands down the years, telling his countrymen that we must make speedy and strong paces towards occidental culture and civilisation’. He had even sent his sisters into the mountain strongholds of Islamic fanaticism dressed in tight-fitting skirts to propagate the new Italian way ¹⁹ Despite Zog’s willingness to please, Galeazzo Ciano had concluded that it would be much more satisfactory if he, rather than ‘an Oriental’, should receive the homage of Albania’s feudal society Formally, his intention was to annex the ‘made up’ nation to the Italian crown. In reality Albania would become the private playground of the Fascist elite. There they could build their hunting lodges, change the names of whole regions and enrich themselves by the exploitation of Albania’s presumed oil reserves. ²⁰ Albania, Ciano said, was a ‘beautiful spectacle’, the Mediterranean ‘like a mirror’ giving way to green countryside and then the snow-crowned mountains. ²¹

Ciano’s original plan was to have Zog assassinated, his only qualm a lingering fondness for Zog’s wife, Queen Geraldine. ²² The assassination plot was discovered. In its place Ciano convinced Mussolini that a full-scale invasion could win the prize with minimum effort. Even the cautious Badoglio agreed that a war limited to Albania could be carried through without too much trouble. He merely insisted that an even larger body of troops should be used to be on the safe side. ²³ The Albanian ‘incident’ itself was over within forty-eight hours. Zog fled to Greece without putting up any resistance. Observers described a triumph: the British military attaché in Rome reported that ‘the invasion of Albania was an example of the great progress made by the Italian army in military organisation on a large scale’. ²⁴

Those closer to the action were less sure. One of Ciano’s aides commented that ‘if the Albanians had possessed a corps of well-trained firemen they would have thrown us into the Adriatic’. ²⁵ Ciano himself, who made the short flight to Albania’s Italian-built Mediterranean port Durazzo on the day of the invasion, was delighted. The situation in the country was ‘excellent’. As Britain’s senior diplomat in Tirana noted, ‘whatever the deeper feeling of various sections of the Albanian people as a whole, the broad fact remains that on the political side the Italians carried through with much greater ease than might have been expected’. ²⁶ What was even better, Ciano remarked, was that the ‘international reaction was almost non-existent’. ²⁷ But despite the cordiality of the Britons on the spot, he was wrong. ²⁸ The invasion marked the start of feverish attempts by Britain to redefine the Mediterranean. ²⁹ Before the spring of 1939 there was talk; between the summer of 1939 and the summer of 1940 there was, if not action, at least organization.

The very terminology used for Britain’s new Mediterranean paid testimony to the now overriding concept of a ‘closed sea–impassable to merchantmen and difficult even for warships unless in great strength. If the Mediterranean was severed at the Sicilian Narrows, then British forces could still reach it from the east, albeit with difficulty. Thus, the argument went, the Mediterranean and the Middle East was clearly one strategic problem’. In the 1930s the RAF had started using the generic term ‘Middle East’ to refer to Egypt as well as Iraq, leading in turn to the application of the phrase to all British forces deployed around the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Sadly no one could quite agree on the nature or geographical extent of that problem. ³⁰ The Army’s concept was to create a General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Middle East. But until the crisis of the summer of 1939, the generals were unwilling to act on their own concept. The army commanders in Egypt and Palestine objected to having a commander imposed on them when their main challenge was internal revolt. They saw themselves as vice-regents of the eastern Mediterranean, in uneasy partnership with their diplomatic and gubernatorial opposite numbers. So the Army parked its commander-in-chief-elect at the other end of the Mediterranean in Gibraltar, ready to be rushed to Cairo in an emergency. ³¹ It was only in June 1939 that the GOC-in-C was activated. General Archie Wavell was finally dispatched to Egypt in August 1939. At that time he controlled two pieces of the Mediterranean littoral–Egypt and Palestine–and a major island, Cyprus. He was instructed to make arrangements to fight alongside three Mediterranean powers, France, Turkey and Greece; ‘a bit hectic if we have a war’, he commented with some understatement. ³²

The RAF already had a Mediterranean Command of sorts, since the Air Officer Commanding Malta also controlled air forces on Gibraltar. Some flyers wanted to move the Mediterranean west rather than east, arguing that Malta was indefensible and that Cairo was too far away from the real action. They were overruled, not least because the Army was moving east. The RAF, too, created an Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Middle East to sit alongside his Army counterpart. ³³

It was the Royal Navy who stood out for a true Mediterranean command. They had a Mediterranean Fleet and a Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean. The sailors were purists. Their Mediterranean stretched from Gibraltar to Suez, with Malta as the half-way point. They would have no truck with ideas of a unified Middle East and Mediterranean. Anything south of the Suez Canal was in the Indian Ocean as far as they were concerned. ³⁴ The navy also disliked the AOC-in-C Middle East. They wanted the AOC Mediterranean to be part of their organization; the RAF wanted him firmly under the command of their man in Cairo. The final compromise reached through the ‘alembic’ of the Chiefs of Staff placed the AOC Mediterranean under the ‘command and general direction’ of the AOC-in-C Middle East but with the authority to deal directly with the C-in-C Mediterranean. ³⁵

When the three commanders-in-chief met for the first time on 18 August 1939 on board the battleship HMS Warspite in Alexandria harbour they still couldn’t agree exactly where the Mediterranean was, or where they were going to control it from. The Army and the RAF were busy setting up their headquarters in Cairo. The Royal Navy was still equivocating between Malta and Alexandria. The C-in-C Mediterranean, Andrew Cunningham, himself admitted that he was ‘rather remote’. ³⁶ Even when the time came to move ‘lock, stock and barrel to Alexandria in a hurry’, there would be real difficulties for the Mediterranean commanders in talking to each other. ³⁷ Following naval tradition, Cunningham insisted on sleeping on his flagship. He was often at sea. Quite often when a Commanders-in-Chief meeting was called he would be unreachable, leaving behind a harassed and unauthoritative staff officer.

In the wake of the commanders-in-chief came a plethora of subsidiary organizations all seeking their place in the sun. For some years it had been acknowledged that commanders might need to know what was happening in the vast area they were supposed to control; equally they would probably need to know what the enemy intended to do to them. No one was collating such information, however. At the time of the Munich crisis in the autumn of 1938, naval intelligence detected troop ships sailing from Italy to Libya, but no one told the GOC Egypt who was supposed to defend Egypt against a surprise attack from Libya. Agents in Libya observed the troop ships arriving, but they communicated the information to the Foreign Office in London, who failed to decipher the telegram. When the telegram was finally read it was passed along Whitehall from the Foreign Office to the War Office. The War Office then telegraphed Cairo. All the communications went via London, and no one in the Mediterranean seemed to talk to one another. ³⁸

There were three schools of thought on this issue. One maintained that all such high matters of state should be decided in London. The military could be given the information they needed and ordered to get on with whatever operations the government decided upon. ³⁹ A second school retorted that this model of central control was unrealistic. Although London and Cairo could talk to each other fairly easily by telegraph, and personnel could be moved to and fro on aircraft, the Mediterranean was really a semi-autonomous world that needed its own sources of information. ⁴⁰ A third school went even further and argued that military and civil rule in the Mediterranean should be integrated. Britain should create not merely short-term military expedients but political instruments devoted to the long-term maintenance of British power. ⁴¹