Page 51 - Le Operazioni Interforze e Multinazionali nella Storia Militare - ACTA Tomo I

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ActA
international arena. In the edition of the leading works of Mahan published by the Ufficio
Storico della Marina Militare, the Italian Navy Historical Office, there is an interesting
and significant map that carries this caption: “Soviet naval bases and anchorages at the
3
time of Admiral Gorshkov along the same routes of the old British bases” .
The transition of international relations from a purely European dimension to a
world-level one was marked by the struggle between the Spanish galleons and the Brit-
ish privateers which fought a Battle of the Atlantic, a convoy war, in which the vessels
of Queen Elizabeth I played the role that four centuries later the U-boote and the German
pocket battleships would take on against a British – and US – fleet, that had replaced the
Spanish one, although it was not gold that was transported from the American continent,
but weapons, ammunition and foodstuff.
As it is well known, starting from Halford Mackinder , different geopolitical theo-
4
ries tried to interpret history as an on-going conflict between continental powers and
sea powers. The transition from the modern to the contemporary era was marked by
the struggle between a maritime empire, the British one, and a mainly continental one,
the French empire, which at Abu Qir and Trafalgar paid for the damage inflicted by the
revolution to the navy, which had found in the last French King, Louis XVI, a sovereign
strongly interested in its development, convinced by Colbert’s lesson that “on ne peut,
sans la marine, ni soutenir la guerre ni profiter de la paix” (“Without the Navy, we can-
not support war nor benefit from peace”, Translator’s Note). In the course of modern
history, Great Britain traditionally contributed to the coalitions it participated in, par-
ticularly with its fleet and financial support, but was also the country that best developed
coordination between land and naval operations.
The advent of aviation added a new element to joint cooperation.
The Air Force as independent Armed Force was born at different times in different
countries. Strangely, it was established as late as in 1947 in the United States, the coun-
try which placed the highest stakes on air power. Even after the birth of the Air Force as
an independent Armed Force, in many countries the Navies retained an independent air
force, and in some also the Army has a light air force. Strategic debate on air power has
seen the opposition between theorists who supported its supremacy and independence,
as in the case of Giulio Douhet in Italy and William Mitchell in the United States, and
those who favoured an air force marked by close cooperation and interoperability with
land and naval forces, as the Italian Amedeo Mecozzi. Another Italian, Francis Pricolo,
Chief of Staff of the Royal Air Force from 1939 to 1941, summed up in a somewhat
brutal way the role of the three Armed Forces, “The effective weapon of the air fleet is
terror, while that of the Navy can be hunger, and that of the Army the actual occupation
of the territory» .
5
3 A. T. Mahan, Italian edition of The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1160-1783 (L’influenza del potere
marittimo sulla storia (1660-1783), Rome 1994, between p. 20 and p. 21).
4 Cf. H. Mackinder, The Geographical Pivot of History, in Geographical Journal, 1904, an essay re-edited
several times.
5 Quoted in the Italian edition of J. Gooch, Mussolini and his Generals: The Armed Forces and Fascist Foreign
Policy, 1922-1940 (Mussolini e i suoi generali. Forze armate e politica estera fascista 1922-1940, Gorizia
2011, pp. 542 and 597).