Page 233 - Il Mediterraneo quale elemento del Potere Marittimo - Atti 16-18 settembre 1996

THE LUFTW AFFE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN
IN WORLD WAR II. A STRATEGIC SURVEY<•>

HORST BOOG

This survey does not pretend to give you a complete picture of the axis side
of the air war in the Mediterranean from 1940 to 1945, because this is impossible
without reference to the achievements of the ltalian Air Force. Iwon't deal with
them here, not only for reasons of time but also because there are other historians
who know more about them than I do.
In the second half of 1940, with France having been defeated and Spain stili
suffering from her Civ il War, ltaly and Great Britain were the mai n powers in
the Mediterranean, but their li n es of interest w ere crossing an d excluding each other.
ltaly was also a colonia! power in Africa with Libya and Abyssinia. She wished
to maintain secure North-South-communicacions in addition to the connections with
the Dodecanese. For this her supremacy over the centrai part of the Mediterranean
as delimitateci by Sicily, Tripoli, the Cyrenaica and Albania was indispensable. Great
Britain, however, needed free west-east passage between Gibralrar an d Suez to spa-
re herself the inconvenience of the incomparably longer and more expensive route
around South Africa with its, at times, unaffordable need for cargo and escort ves-
sels and to secure the main axis of the British Empire between the homeland, the
ali-importane sources of o il around the Gulf of Persia, an d India. The crossing point
of these two lines of communication and interest was the Island of Malta in the
centrai Mediterranean, an island of utmost strategie importance (Annex 1). The
existence of air forces made the narrow gap there still narrower and very dange-
rous for the British flc:et so that the Admiralty considered the abandonment of this
centrai maritime basis in view of the numerically strong ltalian Air Force on the
unsinkable natura! nearby aircraft carrier Sicily and Southern ltaly. Theoretically,
however, i t seemed possible to make Malta a strong air an d submarine base against
ltaly. The British decision to fight for air and naval supremacy from the basis of
Malta pro v ed to be o ne of the great strategie deeds in the Second W orld War.
ltaly had not developed a conclusive strategy in Libya and against Malta. Mus-
solini had enrered the war precipitately and perhaps to forestali what was percei-
ved as German hegemonial aspirations in the Mediterranean. His armed forces were
not equipped for a modern war of attrition, the army was under-motorized, the
air force, though strong in numbers, comprised too many - and many of them
obsolete- types of aircraft, the navy suffered from lack of fuel, the merchant fleet
was detained abroad to a large extent. Despite of these dire facts, Mussolini, in