The sea and the rise of the dictators: Italy, 1919–1940

Summary

ABSTRACT.Poets and visionaries had lamented that Italy was “the prisoner of the Mediterranean”; Mussolini took the phrase as a guide to strategy and built up a modern navy “to gain free access to the oceans.” In practice, command of the central Mediterranean proved to be excessively ambitious without aircraft carriers or air force cooperation, and Italy lacked the oil to fuel its new battlefleet.

RÉSUMÉ.Les poètes et les visionnaires ont déploré que l'Italie fût « la prisonnière de la Méditerranée ». Mussolini reprit cette phrase dans l'élaboration de sa stratégie et construisit une nouvelle marine pour « gagner un accès libre aux océans ». En pratique, la maîtrise de la Méditerranée centrale s'avérait excessivement ambitieuse en l'absence de porte-avions ou de coopération avec les forces aériennes, et l'Italie ne disposait pas du carburant nécessaire au fonctionnement de sa nouvelle flotte de combat.

In the Mediterranean Italy will either founder or dominate.

–Mussolini, 8 November 1929

Half-way prophetic words, which the Duce of Fascism and Capo del Governo prefaced with an abiding geopolitical fixation: “We are locked in the Mediterranean, and cannot willingly remain imprisoned.”1 Mastery of Italy's sea was a longstanding obsession of the Fascist movement, of Fascism's Nationalist allies, of much of literate, urban Italian opinion, and of Mussolini himself. His proposed extra-Mediterranean jail-break was yet more ambitions. It derived from the speculations of poets and nationalist sages, the Royal Italian Navy's reflections on the Great War, Italy's painful dependence on seaborne imports, and Mussolini's enduring resentment after Britain blocked his attempted annexation of Corfù in 1923.

Yet these objectives remained far beyond Italy's limited strength. The French navy alone retained superiority over the Regia Marina Italiana until June 1940, while Britain's positions at Gibraltar and Suez, its Mediterranean and Home Fleets, and its naval airpower promised a dramatic end not merely to Italy's claims to Mediterranean domination and world power, but even to national independence.

ASPIRAZIONI

United Italy's purported entitlement to Mediterranean hegemony had a long and illustrious pedigree: Fascist Italy did not “turn to the sea” by chance. Mazzini had invoked imperial Rome's domination of “mare nostro” and had claimed Tunisia, Malta, and Corsica – the last “assigned to Italy by God.” Successors such as the poet Giovanni Pascoli had lamented the alleged martyrdom of “proletarian” Italy, and proclaimed its “right not to be thwarted and choked in its [own] sea.”