World Battlefronts, THE MEDITERRANEAN: Uneasy Sea

WORLD BATTLEFRONTS

Mare Nostrum is nobody’s sea. Italy’s ports of Naples, Messina, Taranto and Palermo and Italy’s Navy serve the Germans, conveying war stuffs across the Mediterranean to North Africa (see map). German troops and fortifications guard Crete, the strongly defended shores of Greece and Yugoslavia on the Adriatic. The Germans have another strong point at Rhodes, lesser forces in the other Italian Dodecanese and the Greek islands just off Turkey. But the Mediterranean is not yet an Axis sea. The British and the Maltese still hold Malta (see cover); they still have Cyprus, Syria, Palestine and Egypt at one end of the Mediterranean, Gibraltar at the other. British convoys, British and U.S. warships and planes still dispute with the Axis the mastery of the greatest inland sea.

Last week the news from anybody’s sea included a New York Times report that the Germans had pulled almost all of their forces out of the Dodecanese and the occupied Greek islands of Chios, Samos and Mytilene (where Sappho was born). After a trip from Smyrna on a Turkish steamer past the islands, Correspondent Ray Brock concluded: “The entire Near East is probably secure [from Axis attack] until the spring of 1943. . . . The enemy, from Rhodes in the Mediterranean to the vital inner Aegean bases, is probably more vulnerable to Allied sea and air attacks than since . . . the spring of 1941. . . . Informed sources . . . talk confidently of the spring of 1943 as the time of the Allied blow to regain Aegean footholds as jumping-off places for an invasion of the Balkans.”

Whether the British (with perhaps some help from the U.S.) are actually planning a second front in the Balkans is one of the deepest military secrets. The British will hardly knowingly repeat their bitter experience of 1941, when the diversion of insufficient forces to Greece brought disaster to North Africa. Now British and U.S. forces piling up in Egypt have a better-than-even chance to hold what is left of North Africa, a growing chance to drive Rommel back.

The Allies know that the Germans were trying to improve the Balkans’ wretched inland communications (roads, railways); that they were rebuilding the Greek naval bases at Salamis (which the Luftwaffe wrecked in 1941); that Luftwaffe General Alexander Löhr had air forces and airborne troops waiting. London and Washington last week found it hard to believe that the Germans had actually stripped their Aegean defenses; perhaps the forces there had only been redistributed. Or perhaps the story was true, and the Germans were throwing everything into another drive on Egypt, to precede a general Middle Eastern offensive.

Along the uneasy Mediterranean, anything could happen.