The Path to Victory: The Mediterranean Theater in World War II
- Book Review,
by Douglas Porch
From Publishers Weekly
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. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Americans commonly link the defeat of Nazi Germany with the dynamic campaigns of 1944-45 across Northern Europe. Of course, the West also had an important southern theater of operations -- the Mediterranean -- where the Allies battled fascist Italy as well as Germany beginning in 1940. But the vast sweep of historical scholarship focusing on D-Day and its aftermath has often subjected the Mediterranean to neglect -- and sometimes even dismissal as a costly sideshow. Despite the celebrated victories that Montgomery and Patton achieved in the region in 1942-43, critics of the Allied effort in the Mediterranean have minimized the overall campaign as little more than discrete, small-scale battles far afield from the mighty, decisive clashes in Northern Europe. Such critics single out the 1943-45 campaigns in Sicily and the Italian peninsula, where they claim the Allies employed a flawed strategy in pursuit of ill-conceived goals in an area of only limited military importance. Now, in a major work of synthesis and interpretation, drawing on recent work by others such as Rick Atkinson and Carlo D'Este, military historian Douglas Porch contests or modifies many of those views. Following the lead of the great Annales historian Fernand Braudel, Porch argues that the Mediterranean was in fact an "extended" region of significant global influence. So Porch provides a supple and absorbing analytical account of the fighting and the politics in North Africa, Italy, Greece and southern France, on the islands of Crete, Malta and Sicily, and as far as Yugoslavia, East Africa, Syria and Iraq.Acknowledging that Eastern and Northwestern Europe were the decisive fronts, Porch claims that the Mediterranean nevertheless played a crucial supporting role. It was "a pivotal theater for the Allies, one that made the difference between victory and defeat." Without the Mediterranean alternative, the Western Allies might have tried a cross-Channel invasion of German-occupied France in 1942 or 1943. Porch declares that such a premature attack would have failed, consequently fragmenting the Western Alliance and diverting U.S. priorities and strategy away from Europe to the Pacific.The Mediterranean campaigns against smaller Axis forces were crucial, Porch contends, because they forged a working Anglo-American alliance and allowed these Allied armies to acquire fighting skills, to identify able leaders and staff and to develop the technical, operational, tactical and intelligence systems that would allow the allies to successfully carry off the Normandy invasion in 1944. The Mediterranean was also a critical testing ground of personnel as well as fighting systems: When the Northwest Europe front opened up, the ablest Allied commanders in the Mediterranean left to fight the main German forces.Porch describes the colorful mosaic of common soldiers who made up the Allied forces in the Mediterranean: Americans, Britons and their imperial forces (including Canadians, Anzacs, South Africans and Indians), as well as a Polish Army Corps and a French Expeditionary Corps. The last included de Gaulle's Free French forces and the more numerous former Vichy officers. The French colonial force was largely made up of Muslim troops of the old Armée Afrique, who fought alongside the Allies beginning in 1943. Porch, who specializes in French military history, is especially adept at untangling France's effort to rehabilitate itself as a military power and all the various agendas and intricate rivalries, tensions and intrigues that accompanied it.Unlike many traditional accounts, Porch's narrative goes far beyond the armies and the ground war. He provides detailed descriptions of naval warfare and logistical support strategies, while also underlining the importance of air power in the region. He gives clear breakdowns of Anglo-American Ultra intelligence operations, as well as other critical work in signals and intelligence. Porch examines the various Resistance movements across the West's southern theater, and he briefly treats the stumbling occupation policies of the Allies in North Africa, Italy and the Middle East.Vivid biographical sketches of leading commanders punctuate Porch's battle chronologies, and, as is the case in the main military narrative, he supplies judgments of his various dramatis personae that are forceful and sharply etched. He pointedly dissents, for example, from German Gen. Erwin Rommel's reputation as the "Desert Fox." Porch gives due credit to the flamboyant American Gen. George Patton's flair for operational experimentation and relentless ability to win battles -- but he also notes that these virtues came close to being offset by Patton's emotional instability and "straight-backed histrionic militarism." Porch is more sympathetic than many American historians toward British Gen. Bernard Law Montgomery. Porch acknowledges Monty's tactless conceit and risk aversion but credits him with careful planning and the morale building of his hodge-podge Commonwealth army. In contrast, Porch sees few redeeming qualities in Gen. Mark Clark, the American Fifth Army commander in Italy, whom Porch depicts as close-minded, arrogant, merciless and obsessed with capturing picture-worthy objectives to advance his career.As for Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Porch recognizes his diplomatic skills and growth during the war but finds the Supreme Allied Commander often indecisive and lacking in imagination. After the failure of Operation Garden's attempted thrust into the Ruhr in September 1944, he writes, "Eisenhower ran out of ideas, merely pushing forward on a broad front in the attempt to wrest territory from the Germans, rather than destroy enemy forces or concentrate on vulnerable points." The Path to Victory is an indispensable single-volume guide to the war in the extended Mediterranean. No other treatment of the subject approaches Porch's narrative and thematic sweep, his eye for telling detail and his forcefully expressed judgments. Porch may not persuade everyone of all of his contentions, but he has given us a monumental work and a major contribution to our understanding of World War II. Reviewed by John Whiteclay Chambers II Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Reviews glow with kind words for Porch, a professor of national security at the Naval Postgraduate School. The author presents his case in clear, convincing prose and a careful eye to historical detail. Most importantly, he upends the idea of the Mediterranean campaign as a "costly sideshow" (Washington Post). He both successfully brings historic characters to life—including Mussolini, Churchill, and FDR—and combs through the finer points of military strategy. Whether his central hypothesis about the importance of the Mediterranean in the Allied victory is right or wrong, critics uniformly welcomed the book to the debate. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
Porch's stout history of the Mediterranean campaign in World War II justifies its size by its coverage: all the way from the outbreak of the war in Europe to the beginning of the cold war. The sheer complexity of the narrative may daunt readers unfamiliar with the basic events, but Porch writes clearly and accessibly, and the volume's many maps are good. Porch's thesis is that the campaign was neither strategically bad nor a waste of resources, whether in North Africa, Italy, or southern France. It knocked Italy out of the war, kept Spain and Turkey neutral, encouraged Balkan resistance, engaged large German forces, and mitigated against a premature attack across the English Channel. Many logistical and tactical difficulties arose from the terrain--desert to the south, mountains to the north--and the reputations of many distinguished generals don't go untarnished in Porch's pages. Finally, Porch rescues the inevitable role of and the serious fighting by the French from the oblivion to which Anglo-American historiography has relegated them. For WWII studies, essential. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Roland Green, Booklist
"[a] stout history of the Mediterranean campaign in World War II. . . Porch writes clearly and accessibly... essential."
Library Journal (starred review)
"A thoughtful account of an important theater of military operations."
Kirkus Reviews
"Illuminating . . . Porch’s analysis is sharp and to the point...his skills as a storyteller will please readers of narrative history."
The Washington Post
"Supple and absorbing...a monumental work and a major contribution to our understanding of World War II."
Book Description
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 examines the Mediterranean as an integrated arena, one in which events in Syria and Suez influenced the survival of Gibraltar. The Middle Sea constituted a strategic piece of a global war where crucial military decisions were made: it was a passage that linked far-flung theaters; saved scarce Allied shipping; became an essential conduit for lend-lease aid to the USSR; offered France a testing ground for its rehabilitation as a military power; and provided an entry point into southern Germany for two Allied armies. 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.
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.
About the Author
Douglas Porch is a military historian and the author of five previous books, including The French Secret Services: From the Dreyfus Affair to the Gulf War (FSG, 1995). He is a professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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 an armistice 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.
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