The Path to Victory: The Mediterranean Theater in World War II

by Douglas Porch

Overview

Brilliantly argued, with vivid portraits of Churchill, Montgomery, FDR, Rommel, and Mussolini, this original, accessible, and compelling account of a little-known theater emphasizes the importance of the Mediterranean in the ultimate Allied victory in Europe in World War II.

The Mediterranean theater in World War II has long been overlooked by historians who believe it was little more than a string of small-scale battles—sideshows that were of minor importance in a war whose outcome was decided in the clashes of mammoth tank armies in northern Europe. But in this ground-breaking new book, one of our finest military historians argues that the Mediterranean was World War II's pivotal theater.

Douglas Porch's The Path to Victory examines the Mediterranean as an integrated arena, one in which events in Syria and Suez influenced the survival of Gibraltar. Without a Mediterranean alternative, the Western Allies would probably have committed to a premature cross-Channel invasion in 1943 that might well have cost them the war.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374529765
Publisher:	Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
Publication date:	06/22/2005
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	816
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.84(d)

About the Author

Douglas Porch is a military historian and the author of The Conquest of Morocco and The Conquest of the Sahara (FSG, 2005). He is a professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt from The Path to Victory: The Mediterranean Theater in WW II by Douglas Porch. Copyright © 2004 by Douglas Porch. To be published in May, 2004 by Farrar Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved.

PREFACE

This book counts several points of origin. The first is a lifelong fascination for the Mediterranean that springs from its rich history, the mosaic of peoples who live along its coasts, and the stunning beauty of its land and seascapes. A second motivating factor has been my students at the Naval Postgraduate School, many of whom serve with the U.S. Mediterranean fleet and in peacekeeping missions in Bosnia or Kosovo, or who are natives of Mediterranean nations. They challenge one to understand the importance of the Mediterranean as a maritime highway, a geographic link between and among continents and oceans.

The "Joint and Combined" emphasis of U.S. military education encourages the study and practice of the interaction between air, sea, and land power in a multifaceted operational environment. While the combination of these three forms of warfare are conditions for victory in all theaters, their efficient interaction was especially vital in the Mediterranean theater in World War II. This requires that one consider the Mediterranean theater as a geographic and strategic whole, rather than as a sequence of discrete campaigns. The Mediterranean was more than the sum of its parts. Those who fought there had to engage over the sweep of a theater that offers a particularly complex series of operational as well as strategic challenges. The extreme variations in geography, not to mention forms of warfare, especially from 1943 when Italy signed anarmistice and insurgency warfare kicked in on the northern shore of the Mediterranean, put pressure on generals and admirals constantly to reconfigure and adapt their armies, navies, and air forces to new conditions. As in the Pacific, victory or defeat in World War II Mediterranean campaigns came down to who fought more efficiently in a three-dimensional setting. But the land component in the Mediterranean was far larger than in the island-hopping Pacific campaigns. A military force that mastered one or even two forms of warfare, but was deficient in a third, found itself at a severe disadvantage. Initially the Axis united German proficiency in land and air warfare with Italian sea power to command the "central position" in the Mediterranean. This allowed Rommel to run circles around the British in the Western Desert. But Axis air and naval power proved to be wasting assets. And while the Wehrmacht remained formidable right up to the last days of the war, years of Mediterranean fighting had shorn it of offensive capability, reducing it to desperate defensive campaigns in the mountains of Italy and the forests of the Balkans.

Finally, victory was determined not only by how one fought, but where one fought. War is never conducted in a political vacuum, but is, as Clausewitz reminds us, "politics by other means." In the politically complex, even volatile Mediterranean world, this famous dictum could almost be stood on its head. German and "Anglo-Saxon" generals particularly detested fighting in the Mediterranean, where every strategic decision, every coalition, every invasion proposal was prickly with political consequence. The British commander in the Middle East, General Archibald Wavell, resisted fighting in politically fractured Greece, Syria, and Iraq. French and Italian politics meant sleepless nights for Allied commanders right up to war' end. Meanwhile, it could be said that the Axis failed to exploit its political opportunities in the Arab world and seriously mismanaged the political dimensions of its occupation of the Balkan Peninsula and Greece, with significant military consequences.

This book, therefore, is a work of synthesis, one that attempts to meld the histories of the individual campaigns in North Africa, Greece and Crete, the Horn of Africa, Syria and Iraq, Tunisia, and Sicily and Italy, and the histories of the air and sea wars and the insurgencies fought out on, above, and around the seas. But this work aspires to be more than a litany of battles. I have examined the interrelationship of these campaigns in the context of a Mediterranean theater and a Mediterranean strategy to better assess the importance of the Mediterranean in its relationship to the larger war. Historians have not, on the whole, been kind to the Allied Mediterranean effort. From its inception, the Mediterranean was an "encounter" theater, a place where Italian and British interests intersected. Churchill opted to fight there to protect the corridor to the British empire, to demonstrate that London meant to fight to the knife against the Axis, to emphasize his distance from Chamberlain's failed appeasement policies, to attract U.S. support, and possibly to redeem a Mediterranean strategy that had foundered at Gallipoli in World War I. As a consequence, Hitler was forced to intervene to rescue Mussolini. American strategy was grafted onto the original British investment at Roosevelt's insistence, over the protests of his secretary of war and his chief of staff, who argued that intervention in the Mediterranean attacked no German center of gravity, and therefore constituted a wasteful diversion of American assets for the benefit of the "British empire machine."

The consequence of this Allied stumble into a poorly thought-out and "opportunistic" Mediterranean strategy was a dreadful slogging match in a theater in which the British and subsequently the Americans were outgeneraled and outfought around the shores of a sea of trifling strategic importance. British historian John Ellis complained that "the Mediterranean is consistently over-emphasized in most English studies of the war . . . the whole campaign barely merits an extended footnote." While the Mediterranean did constitute a strategic diversion, "the overall impression, indeed, is of a remarkable lack of direction in Mediterranean planning, with key decisions taken off the cuff, simply because no one, least of all on the American side, could think of anything better to do."1 Corelli Barnett called the Allied Mediterranean strategy a "cul-de-sac . . . mere byplay in the conclusion of a war that had been won in mass battles on the Eastern and Western Fronts."2 The Allies paid a heavy price for their opportunism because, by September 1943, their Mediterranean commitments had been funneled into the blind alley of the Italian Peninsula. This led to the foreseeable consequence, once preparations for the invasion of Northwestern Europe got under way, of the two regions' being treated as rival, rather than complementary, theaters. David Kennedy has called the Italian campaign "a slogan not a strategy," and condemned that battleground as "a grinding war of attrition whose costs were justified by no defensible military or political purpose."3 Others, while offering a more balanced assessment of the Italian campaign, nevertheless consider the Mediterranean portion of Allied grand strategy to have been a "failure" because, much as in World War I, the Mediterranean competed with, rather than complemented, the main Western Front.4 British historian John Keegan compares Italy to Wellington's campaign against Napoleonic forces in Spain, one in which the soldiers' "sense of purpose and stoutness of heart" are all the more to be admired "because of the campaign's marginality." "Their war was not a crusade," he writes, "but, in almost every respect, an old-fashioned one of strategic diversion on the maritime flank of a continental enemy, the 'Peninsular War' of 1939-45."5

This work argues that while the Mediterranean was not the decisive theater of the war, it was the pivotal theater, a requirement for Allied success. None of the Mediterranean theater's staunchest advocates at the time—Churchill, Harold Alexander, nor Mark Clark—ever argued that the Mediterranean should or could replace the Eastern Front or Northwestern Europe in importance. However, they did believe that the Mediterranean was a vital prelude to the invasion of Northwestern Europe, and that it played a significant role in the defeat of the Axis. This book seeks to explain how significant that contribution actually was to Allied victory. In the process, it assesses the relationship of the peripheral Mediterranean theater with the main Eastern and Western Fronts. My argument is that it was impossible for the Western Allies to transition successfully from Dunkirk to Operation Overlord without passing through the Mediterranean. That theater was critical in forging the Anglo-American alliance, in permitting Allied armies to acquire fighting skills, audition leaders and staffs, and evolve the technical, operational, tactical, and intelligence systems required to invade Normandy successfully in June 1944. Overlord was rehearsed in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. By 6 June 1944, the Mediterranean had worn down and ultimately dismembered the Axis. The "Peninsular War of 1939-45" became Hitler's hematoma, much as its "old-fashioned" 1808-14 counterpart had created an ulcer for Napoleon over a century earlier. It bought time for Roosevelt to build up American forces so that he could impose Washington's primacy in the Western Alliance, and therefore to shape postwar Europe according to U.S., rather than British or European, priorities.

To factor the Mediterranean out of World War II is to imagine a disaster of epic proportions, and a military outcome in the European theater far different from an unconditional surrender of Germany. Some who fault the Mediterranean strategy, like American historian Robert Love, blame it for delaying the invasion of Northwestern Europe, which, had it been carried out in 1943, would have brought an earlier end to the Reich and preempted Stalin's land grab in Eastern Europe. Love blames a combination of Churchill's imperial ambitions and Roosevelt's "vacillation" for "a wasteful, peripheral strategy in the Mediterranean" that allowed the Russians to overrun Eastern Europe and gave the Germans a bonus two years to strengthen their Atlantic defenses.6 At best, Italy was a pis aller, a series of "hesitant and flawed" operations that gave Hitler the leisure to organize his criminal war against European civilians.7 The sad truth is that Sledgehammer/Roundup, the planned invasion of northern France in 1942 or 1943, would certainly have collapsed in bloody disaster against a strongly entrenched German army, backed by a powerful Luftwaffe, with German wolf packs prowling among the Allied fleet supporting the invasion. Defeat would have throttled the Western Alliance, as U.S. strategy would have veered toward the Pacific. The political fortunes of Churchill and Roosevelt, not to mention Charles de Gaulle, perhaps even the stability of British and American democracy, would have been compromised. Hitler would have solidified his hold on the Continent, resistance movements would have become demoralized, and Stalin might have sought to cut the best deal he could with the invader. Postwar Europe, including its Mediterranean frontier, would certainly have been a far different place. Therefore, my argument is that the Mediterranean was vital to Allied success precisely because it forced the postponement of a premature invasion of Northern Europe.

Table of Contents

	Preface	ix
	Introduction: A Strategist's Nightmare	3
1.	1940: War Comes to the Mediterranean	31
2.	The Norway of the Mediterranean	70
3.	Tactical Triumphs, Strategic Misjudgments	139
4.	Rommel's War: A Perfect Battlefield	196
5.	The Great Kingdom of Terror	258
6.	Monty's War: El Alamein--The Unnecessary Battle?	290
7.	FDR's Secret Baby	326
8.	Tunisia: "The Verdun of the Mediterranean"	370
9.	Husky: "One Continent Redeemed"	415
10.	The Mediterranean Year	452
11.	The Incomplete Victory	507
12.	The Mediterranean Road to France's Resurrection, 1940-45	563
13.	Cassino without the Monastery: Cracking the Gothic Line	614
	Conclusion: The Pivotal Theater	661
	Notes	685
	Selected Bibliography	771
	Index	781

Editorial Reviews

Substantial, authoritative and beautifully written...[An] elegance of presentation rests on a mastery of technical detail... The best account of the Mediterranean campaign that we are ever likely to see.” —Michael Howard, Times Literary Supplement

“Porch's stout history of the Mediterranean campaign in World War II justifies its size by its coverage. . . Porch writes clearly and accessibly. . . For WWII studies, essential.” —Roland Green, Booklist

“[Porch's] sweeping narrative incorporates encyclopedic mastery of a massive body of source material, and is written in a style that holds attention from first page to last . . . [a] terrific book.” —Publishers Weekly

“A thoughtful account of an important theater of military operations.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“Illuminating . . . Porch's analysis is sharp and to the point, and his skills as a storyteller will please readers of narrative history.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A supple and absorbing analytical account . . . unlike many traditional accounts, Porch's narrative goes far beyond the armies and the ground war . . . No other treatment of the subject approaches Porch's narrative and thematic sweep, his eye for telling detail and his forcefully expressed judgments...A monumental work and a major contribution to our understanding of World War II.” —John Whiteclay Chambers III, The Washington Post Book World

From the Publisher

Most writing on the Mediterranean theater in WWII addresses specific campaigns: the desert war, the battle for Tunisia, the long struggle for Italy. A professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Porch (The French Secret Services) brings the entire story together, integrating land, sea and air operations from the first shots of 1940 to Germany's final collapse in 1945. His sweeping narrative incorporates encyclopedic mastery of a massive body of source material, and is written in a style that holds attention from first page to last. Porch argues that rather than being the sideshow or strategic dead-end it is portrayed as in most literature, the Mediterranean was the pivotal theater of WWII in Europe. Geographically, the Mediterranean provided a focal point for the U.S., Britain and a still-powerful French Empire to come together and attack a critical Axis flank by sea. In policy terms, the Mediterranean gave the Anglo-American alliance an opportunity to coalesce, under conditions where the consequences of failure and disagreement were less than catastrophic. Strategically, once Britain pounced on the Axis decision to open a theater in the Mediterranean, British victories encouraged Hitler's decision to attack the Soviet Union. The collapse of Italy forced a westward reorientation of German strategic priorities, absorbing resources previously available for Russia. Operationally, the Mediterranean offered no major opportunities for the Wehrmacht's lethal combination of air power and mechanized forces; a military system configured for the offensive found itself from the autumn of 1942 fighting a series of high-cost defensive battles. On the other side, campaigning in the Mediterranean gave the Western allies time and opportunity to master modern war at all levels. The Italian campaign, so frequently used to illustrate the alleged futility of the Mediterranean, produced less than half the casualties of the operations in Northwest Europe while lasting twice as long. In paradigm-shifting terms, Porch's terrific book asks what the odds of success would have been had D-Day been mounted without the Mediterranean campaigns under the allies' belt, with unproven leaders, untested troops and immature weapons systems. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Porch (The French Foreign Legion) has written a history of the Mediterranean theater in World War II that makes a case for its critical importance in making possible the Allied victory. Conventional military wisdom has viewed the Mediterranean theater as a sideshow or, worse, a distraction that prevented an early cross-channel invasion in 1942 or 1943. The adherents of the idea of an invasion of northwestern Europe in 1943 believe that the Western Allies could have prevented Stalin's seizure of Eastern Europe by destroying the Reich while the Soviet armies were still east of Poland. Porch argues that the Allies would not have been able to carry out a successful cross-channel invasion in 1943. The Mediterranean campaigns, however, not only proved to be a drain on the Axis by knocking Italy out of the war and forcing Germany to transfer significant military assets to the theater but also allowed the crucial and decisive testing in combat of Allied tactics, weapons, military organizations, and command personnel-with the successful cross-channel invasion following. Porch has written a thoughtful account of an important theater of military operations. This volume should appeal to both students and casual readers with an interest in World War II. Highly recommended for all academic and public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/03.]-Robert J. Andrews, Duluth P.L. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

An illuminating study of the southern front in WWII Europe, an operational theater that many historians have dismissed as a sideshow. So, too, did political and military leaders of the time, writes Porch (History/Naval War College; The French Secret Service, 1995, etc.). Hitler, for one, was reluctant to commit German troops to a "South Plan," which conflicted with his planned invasion of Russia but was necessary to shore up a flagging Italian ally: "Like the American generals whom he would later confront," writes Porch, "Hitler realized that once assets were committed to a peripheral theater, it would become difficult to extract them for other purposes." Yet, the author argues, the Mediterranean was anything but peripheral-it was instead "the pivotal theater, a requirement for Allied success." Dominance there allowed the Allies access to the Suez Canal and, more important, Middle Eastern oil, a resource in constant shortage in Germany after 1942; Hitler's failure to recruit Arab and Persian allies in his war against the Jews was a fatal error. Other errors emerged as the theater became ever more hotly contested: Italy's hitching its wagon to Germany's star was one such mistake, and its army's poor structure-"the average Italian infantry battalion in North Africa had one, or at most two, regular officers" and was made up of illiterate peasants, "poor material from which to fashion a modern army"-was another. But so, too, was Bernard Montgomery's failure to capture Erwin Rommel (who, Porch notes, was never highly regarded by the Afrika Korps soldiers he commanded) after the Battle of El Alamein; as Porch remarks, "even the British official history calls Rommel's retreat at the head ofalmost 70,000 beaten troops 'remarkable.' " Errors aside, the Allied victory in North Africa, and then in Italy, was the key to defeating Hitler, even though, Porch writes, "that victory was achieved at a considerable political price." Porch's analysis is sharp and to the point, and his skill as a storyteller will please readers of narrative history. Agent: Michael Congdon

Kirkus Reviews