was its most up-to-date component, lacked any aircraft carriers or any form of radar. Mussolini had gambled on both France and Britain being knocked out of the war, thereby giving him essentially a free hand in dramatically expanding his sphere of dominance in the Mediterranean and Africa. Libya and Abyssinia were already Italian colonies; next on the list were Malta, Egypt and Sudan – and the crucial Suez Canal, which would link them all neatly together. Also in his sights were Greece and the eastern Mediterranean.
Few of his senior commanders shared his enthusiasm, however – especially when it became clear that Britain had no intention of throwing in the towel. In early July, the Royal Navy sank much of the Vichy and Axis-backing French fleet at Mers el-Kebir in Algeria – hardly the action of a country soon to sue for peace. Then, in July, the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet had clashed with the Italian navy, the Regia Marina, at the Battle of Calabria and had given the Italians a brutal taste of superior British seamanship. Even the tiny Mediterranean outpost of Malta, an island lying just 60 miles south of Sicily, had resisted Italian bombing and had been hurriedly reinforced by the British. All this had not augured well for Mussolini’s ambitions.
By September 1940, with the RAF still successfully fending off all subjugation attempts by the Luftwaffe over southern England, men like Maresciallo Rodolfo Graziani, commander of the Italian Tenth Army in Libya, had begun to see the writing on the wall all too clearly. Land grabs in North Africa and the Mediterranean were one thing if the British were out of the war, but quite another if they were still fighting. It was reluctantly, and only under extreme pressure from Mussolini, that he advanced his men into Egypt on 13 September 1940; and then, having gone a few short miles, he stopped.
Already, Mussolini’s plans were starting to unravel. In Germany, he had a bullying dominant ally with a raft of victories already under its belt, while his own generals appeared to lack any fire at all; and all the while, the British, whom he had supposed to be dead and buried, were getting stronger, not weaker. Mussolini had wanted a parallel war where the Germans kept off his patch and where Italian victories would be ludicrously easy; one that would make him and Italy look militarily strong and the leading world player he believed it was Fascist Italy’s destiny to be.
By the end of that year such dreams had been completely dashed. The invasion of Greece at the end of October 1940 had quickly turned into a catastrophe as the Greeks unexpectedly resisted invasion and then fought back, while in December the British launched Operation COMPASS with its tiny Western Desert Force of 36,000 men. By February 1941, two Italian armies had been smashed, some 133,000 men taken prisoner and the remainder pushed back almost to Tripoli. Meanwhile, the British had also attacked through Sudan into Abyssinia and Eritrea, and by May had hammered the Italians there as well.
At this time, Britain’s priority was keeping open the Atlantic sea-lanes and defeating the U-boat threat. From one perspective, North Africa and the Mediterranean theatre held little strategic importance for Britain, given that the Mediterranean – and hence the Suez Canal – as a shipping channel and short cut to India and beyond was already closed because Axis forces controlled the northern shores. Nor was Middle East oil especially important to Britain, because the world’s leading oil producers at this time were America and Venezuela, and they were the sources of almost all Britain’s domestic oil; Middle East oil supplied British Middle East operations and nothing more.
Rather, Britain’s strategy in the Middle East and Mediterranean was largely opportunistic. This was a part of the world where Britain could easily concentrate the assets of the Dominions and the rest of the Empire – whether manpower or supplies – from India, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It offered a chance to defeat Italy, make it a liability for Germany and expose the Reich’s southern flank, from which future operations might then open up. It was also the perfect testing ground for a British Army that needed to grow and develop rapidly following the fall of its ally, France, and the losses suffered on the continent. Britain also hoped to create an eastern Mediterranean bloc with Turkey, Greece and Yugoslavia, from which British and Commonwealth troops could also push into Vichy French Syria and influence Franco’s Spain.
It was precisely for reasons of southern flank vulnerability that Hitler felt compelled to come to the rescue of his Italian ally. Generalmajor Erwin Rommel, one of the stars of the 1940 campaign in the West, was sent to Libya with two divisions, followed soon after by a third, while German troops swept into Yugoslavia, then mainland Greece, and then took Crete as well. This forced the British to siphon off troops from North Africa to support a failed cause in Greece and Crete, but in the long term the battles in the Balkans cost the Germans more, even though they won the day and sent the British scuttling back to the Middle East. This was because they took place immediately before the largest clash of arms the world had ever witnessed: Operation BARBAROSSA, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Germany had needed the dissipation of resources caused by being sucked into the Mediterranean like a bolt in the head. The diversion of even a handful of panzer divisions and the loss of vital transport aircraft and highly trained and motivated troops was keenly felt as, by late 1941, the German advance into Russia began to run out of steam. The aim of BARBAROSSA had been to annihilate the Soviet Red Army in a matter of three months at most, then feed off the booty gained. Instead, by the end of 1941, Germany had been sucked into an attritional and brutal campaign on the Eastern Front that was draining off ever more men and materiel, while at the same time pursuing a campaign in the Mediterranean that it could ill afford. Few in Germany had forgotten that fighting on two fronts for much of the First World War had done for them in that last major conflict.
Since there was absolutely no realistic chance of Britain invading Nazi-occupied Europe any time soon, and because they were now embroiled in North Africa and the Middle East, the British were compelled to keep fighting there until the bitter end. From June 1941 until the beginning of November 1942, the fighting raged across Libya, back and forth depending on the respective fortunes of the warring parties elsewhere. As a rough rule of thumb, when the Luftwaffe was on Sicily and pounding Malta, Axis fortunes in North Africa improved. When the Luftwaffe was needed elsewhere, however, as in the second half of 1941, then the British moved into the ascendancy, because Malta-based submarines, warships and aircraft were able to hammer Axis shipping convoys across the Mediterranean largely unchecked. When the Luftwaffe returned to Sicily en masse in the first half of 1942, Malta briefly became the most bombed place in the world. There had been discussions then about an Axis invasion of Malta, but it was eventually accepted that Rommel should push ahead with an offensive in Libya. Since that meant the Luftwaffe would be needed for support, most of Fliegerkorps II was transferred from Sicily to North Africa. At this point, Malta had been on its knees; but the easing of pressure and the arrival of more Spitfires allowed the island to get back on its feet. In North Africa, meanwhile, Rommel struck the British lines in late May 1942 and won a famous victory, with the garrison of Tobruk surrendering on 21 June and the British Eighth Army fleeing back to the Alamein Line, a mere 60 miles to the west of Alexandria in Egypt. For a brief moment, it looked as though Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika might actually conquer all Egypt and push on into the Middle East.
There were a number of reasons why he was unable to do so. On Malta, the RAF managed to win back air superiority in short order. Then, when the most heavily defended Allied convoy of the war inched into Malta in mid-August, it threw the starving island a lifeline and the chance to bounce back swiftly. By this time, Rommel’s men had hit a brick wall at the Alamein Line and couldn’t burst through to snatch the final furlong to Cairo, Alexandria and the Suez Canal. To make matters worse, Axis supply lines were hideously long – the only decent-sized port available was Tripoli, over 1,000 miles away – which meant that half the available fuel was used up transporting it to the front, while British supply lines had shrunk dramatically and very advantageously. At the end of August, Malta-based aircraft sank six vital Axis tankers headed for North Africa, the Battle of Alam Halfa was lost, and the Panzerarmee Afrika was now on the back foot, while a reinvigorated Eighth Army was able to build up enough strength to ensure it never lost in North Africa again.
As this Mediterranean see-saw rocked back and forth, the United States had formally entered the
