9 - The Mediterranean

Summary

By the last months of 1942, with the successes at El Alamein and the ‘Torch’ landings behind them, Allied thoughts turned increasingly to the next step in the war in the West. The most obvious move, an invasion somewhere along the North-West coast of Europe was, even with growing American participation and the Russian victories in the East, extremely risky. In the circumstances, the British Chiefs of Staff pushed strenuously for an Anglo-American strategy that would build on accomplishments in North Africa and focus on the achievable rather than the desirable. For Britain, knocking Italy out of the war was the obvious answer to the strategic conundrum. In British eyes, in many ways, the war had always been ‘Italy first’, not ‘Germany first’.