The Mediterranean in 1940–1941: Crossroads of Lost Opportunities?

Abstract

In a war spanning the whole globe, the Mediterranean has certainly generated more postwar controversy concerning its 'might-have-beens' than all other theatres of the Second World War put together. From the first desert campaign in early 1941 to the plans for a thrust up the Ljubljana Gap in late 1944, the Mediterranean and the Middle East have been the main focus of attention of those Second World War historians to whom non-events (the case of the dog that did not bark in the night) are as important as recorded events. Both the Anglo-Saxon predilection for this particular brand of history and the Mediterranean as a possible avenue for the 'indirect approach' so favoured by earlier generations of British statesmen and military leaders have made most of these debates almost exclusively British affairs. German historians, who are brought up to view the practice of counter-factual history as time-wasting speculation, have been less inclined to join any of these controversies, and in the rare cases that they did, have done so from an exclusively German point of view and with the express purpose of nipping any 'might-havebeens' in the bud: they have invariably come to the conclusion that for the Third Reich the Mediterranean could never have been more than a strategic dead end. As far as this particular debate is concerned (whether a strategic shift to the Mediterranean sometime between 1940 and 1942 could have won the Axis the war) the majority of the English-speaking panellists tend to see it exactly the other way around: to them, the pennypacket strategy which was the hallmark of German operations in this area in 1941-42 constitutes a critical error of omission.