An Assessment of the Mediterranean Theater

Army,  Sep 2004  by Kingseed, Cole C

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An Assessment of the Mediterranean Theater The Path to Victory: The Mediterranean Theater in World War II. Douglas Porch. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 799 pages; photographs; maps; notes; index; $35.

The Mediterranean theater has long been a theater of tertiary importance to the legion of historians writing about World War II. Historian Douglas Porch attempts to correct this imbalance by placing the Mediterranean theater into a broader perspective. To Porch, the author of seven books and a professor of national security at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., the Mediterranean campaigns were neither strategically ill-conceived nor a squandering of resources. Porch argues persuasively that the campaigns not only knocked Italy from the war, but Mediterranean operations also kept Spain and Turkey neutral, encouraged Balkan resistance, engaged large German forces and mitigated against a premature attack across the English Channel.

Porch synthesizes the various campaigns in the Mediterranean and the Middle East to assess the importance of the Mediterranean in relation to the larger war. In so doing, he attempts a monumental task for a single volume. Indeed, American involvement in the invasion of North Africa is not even addressed until the midpoint of Porch's study. Placing Mediterranean operations into perspective, Porch opines that the Mediterranean was not the decisive theater of the war, but it was the pivotal theater and the prerequisite for future Allied success in Western Europe. Such a claim is hardly surprising, since aside from the combined bombing offensive, no other campaign consumed such a preponderance of Allied air, ground and naval forces.

What is less debatable is the author's assessment that Mediterranean operations provided the necessary transition from Dunkirk to Operation Overlord by forging the Anglo-American military alliance and by providing Allied armies with the necessary fighting skills, leadership development, and evolution of technical, operational, tactical and intelligence systems required to invade Normandy successfully in 1944. It is regrettable that Porch dedicates only one chapter to the campaign in Sicily because it was there that the American Army and some of its more notable commanders demonstrated their mettle.

Of particular interest are Porch's observations of the Allied high command in Sicily. Few senior members of the Allied command structure escape Porch's scathing pen. He posits that Sicily revealed the limitations of Gens. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bernard Law Montgomery and Harold Alexander. Each, claims Porch, was stalked in turn "by a lack of assertiveness that sprang from a sense of intellectual inadequacy, overconfidence bred from conceit and impetuosity born of ambition." Elsenhower's performance as senior Allied commander had been "minimal and indecisive"; Monty's tactical judgment was clouded by his arrogance and his overconfidence; and Alexander's role as 15th Army Group commander exceeded his abilities. As for George S. Patton, Porch alleges that "the hero of Operation Husky" was a "desperately unstable and insecure man, whose excesses in temperament overshadowed the legitimate successes of his Seventh Army." Only at war's end did the Allies assemble an efficient command team in Italy. Both Fifth Army commander Lucian Truscott and Eighth Army commander Richard McCreery were decided improvements over their predecessors. Given the limitations of so many Allied senior commanders, one ponders how the Allies successfully wrestled Sicily and Italy from the Axis camp.

Porch reserves his greatest criticism for Fifth Army commanding general Mark Clark. According to Porch, Clark's "near panic" at Salerno, his penchant for blaming subordinates for his own mistakes and his poorly conceived and executed attacks on the Cassino Line during the winter of 1943-1944 almost led to his relief by Eisenhower. Like Alexander, who failed to exercise effective command as an army group commander in Sicily, Clark's performance as an army commander was substandard following the invasion of the Italian mainland.

More concerned with his own ego and publicity than with being an effective team player, Clark "fell into the mind-set of a World War I commander, refusing to analyze the battle for tactical and operational lessons." Moreover, the amphibious assault at Salerno left Clark "operationally conservative, risk-averse, distrustful of his British ally and overly concerned with his own reputation." Porch finds little to commend Clark in any short list of effective commanders, and he leaves the reader with the harsh assessment that the Allies succeeded in spite of Clark's leadership.

In any event, Porch returns to his thesis regarding the value of the Mediterranean campaign to the ultimate Allied victory.

Peripheral operations around the Mediterranean basin were immensely valuable, he says. Hitler dedicated numerous divisions to North Africa and Italy to prevent the Western Allies from securing a firm southern base to launch an invasion directed at the heart of Germany. Most of these divisions never returned for the final defense of the Fatherland. The invasion of southern France in August 1944 alone eventually cost Hitler more troops than either Stalingrad or Tunis. True, the Allied effort in Italy might have been more effectively carried out, but that is a characteristic shared by every campaign with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight.