Operating on the soft underbelly
Noble Frankland
HITLER'S MEDITERRANEAN GAMBLE by Douglas Porch Weidenfeld & Nicolson, .E25, pp. 794, ISBN 0297846329 This is an excellent book with a silly title, The gamble in the Mediterranean was not Hitler's; it was Churchill's, His decision to reinforce the Middle East at a time when the seemingly invincible might of the German army had reached to within 22 miles of the British coast is now generally regarded as audacious and by many historians, including Douglas Porch, as sagacious. At the time, however, it looked more like a lunatic's gamble.
Nevertheless, neither the Italian army nor the navy proved to be a match for Wavell's army and Cunningham's fleet. The Italians even failed to overcome the Greeks. To avoid a potentially fatal exposure of his southern flank, Hitler was inevitably sucked into the campaign and Rommel made his appearance in the desert.
Montgomery's victory at Alamein redeemed Churchill's gamble, but British resources alone were obviously insufficient to exploit the striking strategic options that now existed. It was fortunate for Churchill's ploy that Roosevelt was determined to get his troops into action somewhere in 1942. North Africa was the obvious and, indeed, virtually the only place he could do this. So the Americans were involved in the Mediterranean campaign via Operation Torch and the invasion of Italy loomed as the next logical step.
Porch deals with the ups and downs, the disasters and triumphs and the results of this sequence of events in great detail and depth, though it is noticeable that his treat
ment of the naval element in the campaign is less thorough than of the military, and of the air battle much less so. But all this is only the prelude to the critical point of his book, namely, of course, the Italian campaign, which is often seen as a highly controversial undertaking. John Keegan, for example, apparently believes it was strategically advantageous to the Germans. Correlli Barnett finds that it had little impact on the main course of the war. Porch, however, draws the firm conclusion from his own extensive narrative that it was vital to the success of Overlord, not only because of the number of German divisions tied down and in many cases severely damaged, but also because it made possible the invasion of southern France, in which the Germans lost more soldiers than they had done in Stalingrad, and as a result of which Patton's southern flank was covered as he headed for the Rhine.
The Italian campaign lasted 602 days. It cost the Allies 312,000 casualties; it cost the Axis 536,000. It, together with the adjacent areas it rendered vulnerable, contained up to 55 German divisions, which was more than a fifth of the entire German ground forces. That, Porch believes, is the proof of the pudding and, though contrary arguments can still be advanced, they must depend on the ifs and not the facts of history.
Porch is equally decisive about another controversy, namely that concerning the qualities of the commanders. He thinks very little of very nearly all of them and seems more or less to have cast them for an updated version of Oh. What a Lovely War! Wavell and Auchinleck were Chateau Generals who perpetuated a defective British style that led them to join the 'deposed nobility of British Middle East leadership'. Montgomery's professional self-confidence `slithered over into vanity' after Alamein. Patton was a 'paradoxical mélange of humility and megalomania, geniality and rage, heroics and lunacy'. Rommel's 'overweening ambition' and his failure to acknowledge his 'strategic limitations' compromised his gifts as a battlefield commander. Alexander lacked the 'intellectual stature and force of character' to deal with the quarrels of his subordinate commanders. Mark Clark was prodigal with casualties and absorbed with selfpublicity. Eisenhower had no grip on battle situations. Virtually the only survivors of this carnage are Kesselring, whose conduct of the German defensive campaign in Italy was seldom wrong-footed, and Juin, Leclerc and de Lattre, in whom, Porch claims, France produced 'three of the war's best commanders'. If this is perhaps slightly optimistic, it does at least enable Porch, in his own rather irksome and too oft-repeated phrase, to 'showcase' the fine performance of French troops in Italy and southern France and to impose a corrective on Alanbrooke's view that the French were adequate only for garrison duty.
Porch is on the whole attractively evenhanded in dealing with a highly complex subject although, when he comes to the French, he reveals a soft spot in his heart. He obviously admires their performance and enjoys telling us why. But a modicum of opinion in a historian is not necessarily a bad thing and Porch does supply acres of evidence reflecting upon his. This, however, is all from a massive quantity of published material. He has not been detained by the study of original documents. But this, too, is not necessarily a bad thing. There is a distinct and important role for works of general synthesis where large subjects, such as this one, are concerned. The danger of course is that the published works being synthesised are of such unequal quality. Memoirs are notoriously liable to prejudice, but so too are many other sorts of book. They can rise up and call the synthesiser a liar, which original documents, if properly used, cannot do. Porch's synthesis, notwithstanding, seems likely to overthrow any such charge, at least as to the greatest part of this book.
In a book of 683 pages with another 111 devoted to source references and index, it would be surprising if no defects were noticeable. In this case there are a few. The index is inadequate. The maps are miserable. It is odd that neither Slessor's nor Tedder's memoirs appear in the bibliography and the author appears not to have read Monty Woodhouse's Apple of Discord. Had he done so his explanation of the not easily understood twists of Greek politics might have been clearer. Finally, while there is nothing wrong with a big book on a big subject, this one could have been a bit shorter if the author had told us everything once instead of twice or even thrice.
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