MEDITERRANEAN THEATRE: Currents and Eddies

Here lies the Mediterranean, the great, tideless, embattled sea of antiquity.

Until the defeat of the French & Spanish fleets at Trafalgar in 1805 the great Naval battles of the world were fought on its waters.

On the heights of Salamis overlooking the Bay of Eleusis, the mighty Persian, Xerxes, in 480 B. C. watched his fleet sink under attack of 300 Greek battleships.

At Actium, in 31 B. C., while spellbound land forces stopped fighting to watch, Octavian’s Roman fleet struck the Eastern fleet of Antony and Cleopatra, until Antony’s soldiers saw their leader abandon the fight, sail off with the Egyptian queen.

At the Gulf of Lepanto the 300 Christian ships commanded by Don John of Austria struck the Turkish fleet in 1571, enfolded it and then pierced it, destroyed it except for 40 vessels that made a desperate heroic escape.

But until Admiral Nelson won it for Great Britain 134 years ago, no power ruled over the Mediterranean unchallenged. The Romans and the Carthaginians, Genoa and Naples, the pirates of Tripoli, the Crusaders and the Turks, again and again the East fought the West in its waters, the North fought the South, the powers of Africa and Asia fought the powers of Europe, societies, civilizations, monarchs, rose or fell with the fate of their fleets on the tumultuous sea.

The Shores. Last week as fighting began the Mediterranean again took its place as a decisive theatre of war. Unlike the Baltic, where Germans and Poles clashed headon, where battle-lines and objectives were clear, the Mediterranean was a maze of variables. It was crisscrossed with conflicting currents that ran ever more strongly; it was marked with eddies and backwaters set up by the rush of opposing interests. Along its southern shore Egypt’s Army of 22,500 was mobilized, but also, in Libya, were the 120,000 soldiers of unpredictable Italy (though Italian armies drew back from the frontiers). French Morocco and Algeria, granaries as well as a source of French manpower (total population of France’s African Empire: 41,000,000), were valuable to France in proportion as the Mediterranean remained free to transport. Along the Mediterranean’s northern shore the line-up was still more confused. French naval bases at Toulon and Villefranche, guarding French communications with Africa, threatening Italian coastal cities; Italy, with her 105 submarines, Europe’s biggest fleet; the Dalmatian coast of Yugoslavia, long wanted by Germany, source of friction in the Axis when it ran at its best; Greece, guaranteed by France and Great Britain, threatened from Albania; Turkey, also guaranteed, courted by Germany, allied with Greece. Beyond these northern shores the Balkans simmered, politically and militarily fluid, but likely, to go with the strongest current that swept the Mediterranean.

But it was in the East that the crosscurrents boiled and eddied, across the 1,100 miles from the British base at Malta to the entrance of the Suez Canal, around the islands of Greece, in & out of the Dardanelles. There lay a net of variables, each as dangerous, each as explosive, as a floating mine.

Retreat. In October 1935, at the height of the Ethiopian crisis, the British fleet sped swiftly from its base at Malta and anchored off Alexandria. Malta, historic fortress guarding the British lifeline at midpassage, was suddenly revealed as vulnerable to air attacks launched from Italian bases in Sardinia, Bizerte, from naval attacks launched from La Spezia and Leghorn. Italian submarines lurked outside the harbor, ready to torpedo ships that escaped the bombing; more submarines were to close the Straits of Gibraltar.

Alexandria was then not much safer. Attempts were made to bottle up the British fleet in the harbor; the base, big but unfinished, was vulnerable to air attack. In Britain, naval authorities soberly proposed a reversal of Britain’s century-old policy, abandoning the lifeline, closing the Mediterranean, but in the end went no further than reducing the Mediterranean fleet to its normal size in July 1936.

But this week made it clear that the retreat from Malta was by no means a surrender of the Mediterranean by Great Britain. Nobody questioned the strength of Alexandria, now succeeding Malta as Britain’s most strategic Mediterranean base. British naval strategy was based on four simple facts:1) France, guarding her communications with North Africa, needed a major fleet with up-to-date submarine defenses, in the Western Mediterranean, 2) with a strong British fleet in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Italian fleet would be virtually bottled up at Brindisi, because 3) if it moved against the British the French could attack its bases, 4) cut Italian communications with Libya.

If Italian neutrality stayed put, troops and grains could be ferried from North Africa to Marseille, munitions could be sent the other way to supply the Mareth Line running from the Mediterranean to the salt lakes of Nefzaoua, France’s immensely strong, little-known colonial equivalent of the Maginot Line. Aid to Rumania, Turkey, Greece, perhaps up the Balkan valleys to Poland, could be carried safely east and west.

Turkey, Greece. Bigger than the rebuilding of Alexandria were renewed British efforts in Turkey. With an army of 1,200,000, self-sufficient in ammunition with three munitions factories going full blast (one a $50,000,000 plant), with an air fleet of 450 planes and, at Karabuk, a new steel mill, constructed by 122 British engineers in two years, Turkey would be a formidable Eastern Mediterranean force even if she did not control the Dardanelles, cast her shadow over Suez, Greece, and the bottle-neck of the Red Sea.

The guns of the Dardanelles were built in Germany, Turkey’s antiaircraft artillery came from Vickers, Krupp, Skoda. Turkey’s fleet includes a pre-War German battle-cruiser, four destroyers, nine submarines, small in relation to the armadas on the Mediterranean, big in relation to the Black Sea.

No modern Turk underestimates Turkey’s strength, doubts Turkey’s crucial position. Last week it was well noted that Turkey would stand fast with Britain and France, that neither German Ambassador von Papen nor the Soviet Union had been able to dislodge Turkey from the anti-aggression pact (TIME, May 22). This week the news was that a Turkish-Greek military mission had sped to Thrace, discussed its defense. So long as the British fleet dominates the Eastern Mediterranean, innumerable Greek and Turkish harbors are safe from attack by sea, only an overland campaign through Greece, to Salonika, could close Greek refuges to the British and French. After the British fleet left Malta an Italian naval expert wrote: “Any grouping of powers which gave Britain and France the use of the Grecian bases would mean the complete strangulation of Italy.”

Albania. To most of the world Italy’s seizure of Albania looked like a sorry imitation of Adolf Hitler’s seizure of Czechoslovakia. To British military men it looked different. For it put Italian troops close to Yugoslavia’s landlocked harbor at Cattaro, put big Italian guns commanding the roadstead between Corfu and the Greek mainland, and most seriously of all, it put Italian armies where they had not marched since the days of the ancient Romans, down the old Via Egnatia to the frontier of Greece.

The Dardanelles seemed as vital for Britain as they had been for the Central Powers in 1914, and so long as Italy stayed neutral Britain dominated the Mediterranean East. Whatever happened the policy of Turkey was fixed by Italy’s act; in 1939 as in 31 B.C. the capital of the Eastern Mediterranean watched the capital at Rome. And if naval battles were to come they promised to be on an equal scale, to mean as much to history, as the fight of the Greeks and Persians at Salamis, or the battle of Lepanto where the infidels lost the sea.