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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’.
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.
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Britain’s second foe was Ali Maher Pasha, minister of the royal household, éminence grise to the monarchs of Egypt.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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
(#litres_trial_promo) 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
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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.
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) The circumstances overrode the Mufti’s preference for mezzi insidiosi.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) The effect, one of his senior police officials remarked, was a policy of glossing things over’.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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
(#litres_trial_promo) Mussolini’s jihad even won the admiration of Hitler, who had previously dismissed the Arabs as lacquered apes.
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) It was possible to plan, and fight for, the illiberal, undemocratic bright horizon.
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THREE (#ulink_d05b35e0-1eb1-5754-92a7-62d26246352e)
Of Mice and Men (#ulink_d05b35e0-1eb1-5754-92a7-62d26246352e)
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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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.
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As ever it was Mussolini who transformed a dry debate about future possibilities into a pressing necessity for action.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.
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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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
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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’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The damage, however, had already been done.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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’.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.
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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
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) Albania, Ciano said, was a ‘beautiful spectacle’, the Mediterranean ‘like a mirror’ giving way to green countryside and then the snow-crowned mountains.
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Ciano’s original plan was to have Zog assassinated, his only qualm a lingering fondness for Zog’s wife, Queen Geraldine.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.
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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’.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.
(#litres_trial_promo) What was even better, Ciano remarked, was that the ‘international reaction was almost non-existent’.
(#litres_trial_promo) But despite the cordiality of the Britons on the spot, he was wrong.
(#litres_trial_promo) The invasion marked the start of feverish attempts by Britain to redefine the Mediterranean.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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.
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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’.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
