The Path to Victory: The Mediterranean Theater in World War II (review)

It is Douglas Porch's contention that the Mediterranean theater in World War II was not only the stepping stone to D-day and the Second Front, but an integral part of Allied victory in the West in 1944 and 1945. He argues the first assertion brilliantly, indeed to my mind incontrovertibly; I remain skeptical regarding his second claim.

A word of warning. This is not a book for those who are unfamiliar with the existing literature of World War II in Europe. Rather, it is an attempt, by a considerable historian and teacher of military strategy, to shine his own light on the enormously complex story of that "segmented lake," bounded by three continents and a vast ocean—a lake dotted not only with islands but "islands the sea does not surround," namely the peninsulas of Europe and Asia Minor that stretch into its blue waters. Strategically, it was the bridge between Britain and its colonial empire, while culturally it formed an immense tapestry of religious, ethnic, and political communities draped around its shores. Not the least virtue of Douglas Porch's long book is that it maps out that tapestry in its very complexity, and shows us how both Hitler's Germany and Roosevelt's America were only reluctantly drawn into the Mediterranean, against their wills and seeming interests—the Germans to bolster the Italians, the Americans to back the British.

Unlike the majority of his compatriot historians today, Douglas Porch thinks this was a mercy, for the Allies. With a mix of wide-ranging scholarship and literary brio he nevertheless charts Churchill's instinctive course in the Mediterranean, before and after the fall of France. We watch with fascination how the main players are dealt their hands, and how they play them: strategically and operationally, logistically and in terms of Intelligence, as well as in the air, on land and at sea. His depiction and judgements of the various personalities can be severe, but they are never based on ignorance. He is alive to Churchill's rashness and military mistakes, but never loses sight of the prime minister's larger vision—or the inherent disadvantages of conscript forces "raised by a democratic society," not a militaristic tyranny. As such he is adamant that a cross-Channel invasion of France in 1942, or indeed 1943, could not have succeeded—and for this reason, feels Roosevelt was correct in overruling his military advisers and plumping not only for a Germany First, but Mediterranean First strategy. This bought the Western Allies the time and experience they needed, while "attriting" (his word) the naval, air and army resources Germany needed to conquer Russia. Gradually, the Allied armies were blooded in a theater where local defeat (as at Kasserine) would not defeat their strategy. In the Mediterranean the Allies thus learned the intricacies of inter-service, inter-national warfare and amphibious invasion that were vital to an eventual Overlord: the D-day landings.

By page 562, Mr. Porch has surely convinced any but the most ideologically anti-Mediterranean strategist that Churchill and Roosevelt were right—and that war in the "inland sea" had thereby swung from being a Nazi hammer to an Allied anvil.

That leaves Mr. Porch, however, with only 120 pages to back his contention that the prosecution of the campaign in Italy for the rest of the war, after D-day, was worth the tremendous Allied effort and casualties. In this he fails, in part because he fails to see that the very threat of invasion and advance was sufficient to keep German troops stationed in the Mediterranean, away from the Eastern Front and Second Front. (Norway is a prime example.) Instead, the Italian campaign became an unfortunate rival with other theaters for men, munitions and supplies—while leading nowhere, especially in experience or confidence by that time.

Thus we close Mr. Porch's...