Mediterranean Front

by Alan Moorehead, Max Hastings (Introduction)

Posted to Cairo by way of Greece in mid 1940, Moorehead felt that the city was a backwater compared to the terrifying but exciting events unfolding in Europe. Yet, within a few months Africa had become a key theatre of war. In order to keep any hold on the Mediterranean, Britain needed to protect Egypt and Malta. Naturally, it was also preoccupied with the defence of its own shores. Mussolini seized the opportunity to annexe swathes of empire and in September, the Italian Tenth Army advanced into Egypt. Throughout the first shock retreat and then the counter-attack of Operation Compass, Moorehead was in the thick of the action. Flying in the few aircraft supporting the army, going out on daring night patrols and raids, he experienced the reality of desert war conducted on what he later called a ‘shoestring’ – 36,000 Allied soldiers attempting to hold out against 200,000 Italians. From Cairo, Moorehead reported on the airborne invasion of Crete and the ‘lowpoint for the fortunes of the British in the Middle East’. By the end of the summer, with Axis troops exhausted for the moment, Field-Marshal Wavell, with typical military understatement, summed up the year as ‘some setbacks, some successes’.

Genres: History, Military History, War, World War II

229 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1941

About the author

Alan Moorehead was lionised as the literary man of action: the most celebrated war correspondent of World War II; author of award winning books; star travel writer of The New Yorker; pioneer publicist of wildlife conservation. At the height of his success, his writing suddenly stopped and when, 17 years later, his death was announced, he seemed a heroic figure from the past. His fame as a writer gave him the friendship of Ernest Hemingway, George Bernard Shaw and Field Marshall Montgomery and the courtship and marriage of his beautiful wife Lucy Milner.

After 1945, he turned to writing books, including Eclipse, Gallipoli (for which he won the Duff Cooper Prize), The White Nile, The Blue Nile, and finally, A Late Education. He was awarded an OBE in 1946, and died in 1983.

Reviews

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alan Moorhead, the author of Mediterranean Front, was a war correspondent for London’s Daily Express newspaper, at the time a highly successful paper with a circulation of four million copies a day. He was Australian and had moved to London in 1937 to further his career. Mediterranean Front is the first book in his trilogy about the war in North Africa – the only front on which Britain was able to take the fight to the enemy and defeat Axis forces at that time other than trying to sink U-boats and surface raiders on the high seas.

When I began reading Mediterranean Front, The Year of Wavell 1940-1941, the first thing that struck me very quickly was that the writing is of high quality. Moorhead has a lovely style and way of expressing what he witnessed and the experiences he went through that speak to you, and make you feel that you were with him in adversity. Yes, he describes what a town, say, looks like and what the atmosphere feels like, but he also paints a picture, mentioning little details that make it more quaint, pretty or squalid and ugly than you might expect from a journalist. Here is an example of his description of desert warfare:

'There were practically no roads. The army shod its vehicles with huge balloon tyres and did without roads. Nothing except an occasional bird moved quickly in the desert. The army for ordinary purposes accepted a pace of 5 or 6 mph. The desert gave water reluctantly, and often then it was brackish. The army cut its men – generals and privates – down to a gallon of water a day when they were in forward positions. There was no food in the desert. The soldier learned to exist almost entirely on tinned foods, and contrary to popular belief remained healthy on it. Mirages came that confused the gunner, and the gunner developed precision firing to a finer art and learned new methods of establishing observation posts close to targets. The sandstorm blew, and the tanks, profiting by it, went into action under the cover of the storm. We made no new roads. We built no houses. We did not try to make the desert liveable, not did we seek to subdue it. We found the life of the desert primitive and nomadic, and primitively and nomadically the army lived and went to war.

I make these points at length here because in my belief the Italians failed to accept the principles, and when the big fighting began in the winter it was their undoing. They wanted to be masters of the desert. They made their lives comfortable and static. They built roads and stone houses and the officers strode around in brilliant scented uniforms. They tried to subdue the desert. And in the end the desert beat them.'

The writing is simple but evocative, and I guess that the short sharp sentences were typical of a journalist writing for a daily newspaper with a wide readership.

Moorhead was the favourite journalist of the armed forces commanders and politicians despite being highly critical at times of their efforts. He did always try to put everything in context, however, and did not criticise for the sake of it. Overall, he was fair and pretty positive about the campaign.

The events he wrote about in this volume were mostly successful by the British and Commonwealth forces engaged in them, despite some disasters, and largely a disaster for Mussolini’s Italians. General Wavell was a hero and very famous by the time he was replaced, but by then General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps was on the scene and the picture was very different indeed.

Here he describes the great opportunity Mussolini (thought he) had:

'In the full midsummer of 1940, Mussolini saw his great chance. Italy had earned only contempt for her entrance into the battle of France when the battle of France was done. Now, with England pre-occupied with home defence, her Mediterranean and African possessions seemed an easy prey. Conquest in Africa would elevate and enrich Mussolini at home, increase his standing with Hitler and justify Italy to herself and the world. With the French armies in Tunis and Syria removed, there was no saying how many British mandates and possessions and spheres of influence might not fall. There were Malta, the Sudan, Palestine, Cyprus, British Somaliland, Aden, Iraq, Kenya and, richest of all, the Nile valley. Nowhere was there anything like a strong British garrison. Even at sea the Mediterranean fleet was outgunned and outnumbered. In the air the odds were ridiculously to the Fascists' advantage. There were not at this stage more than half a dozen Hurricanes in Africa. So orders went out from Rome to the Italian commanders in Libya and Abyssinia to attack. In Tobruk easygoing Balbo had met his death in an air crash that may or may not have been accidental; 'Butcher' Graziani took command. In Addis Ababa the Duke of Aosta had a score of good generals and ample stores for a colonial campaign.'

That quotation is the first (large) paragraph of Chapter 2, and it sets the scene beautifully and gives an idea of what the British were up against at that early stage of the North African war.

When I was growing up in the 1970s we used to make jokes about Italian tanks having more reverse gears than forward ones, and other references to cowardice. Moorhead makes clear, however, that the Italians were not cowards but neither were they interested in dying for Mussolini’s ambitions to be another Hitler and expand his empire like a latter-day Roman emperor. The Allies, on the other hand, were fighting not only to preserve the British Empire (many of the soldiers were against it, I am sure) but for survival. The British could not afford to lose the oilfields of the Middle East, nor the Suez Canal, which was so vital to the prosecution of the war. Even Colonial troops knew that they were better off under British rule than a Fascist one.

This book describes in a great deal of detail the battles, the personalities and the politics of the North African Campaign, including not only Libya but also Ethiopia and Eritrea, and the danger of the Italians invading Kenya should they be successful further north. It is a fascinating read and I look forward to reading the other two books in this series, as well as Moorhead’s other great works, The White Nile and The Blue Nile.

[Shane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is war reporting at its finest! I am excited to read the next two in the trilogy.

[Erik Empson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite a thrilling if, by its very nature, a one-sided account of the war in North Africa, Greece, and the Middle East.
The main part of this book concerns the rout of the Italian Army in Egypt and Libya, and this makes for exciting reading. Here the author was closest to the action and it shows. It then progresses to Abyssinia and the conquest of Addis Abba, then Greece and finally the fighting in Syria and Lebanon against the Vichy French which I was pleased to read more about.
Lots of adventure and annecdotal stories that give a flavour of the combat and the slightly oblique view of the war correspondent who only tastes the privations of the ordinary soldier.
Note that Moorehead was a friend of Geoffrey Cox who apparently wrote his Tale of Two Battles whilst staying with the author in Cairo. Interesting linking between the north African objectives - whether to try for Tripoli, and the loss of Benghazi - with the battle in Greece: one of the author's claims is that there was a sense that the British mainland would fall and thus a land war in Greece would provide a means to battle through Europe and relieve it. Farfetched to read this now, but it does convey some of the scattered thinking on the ground.
If one wants an objective history of these campaigns, probably look somewhere else, if you want a first hand report that conveys the excitement and hopes and fears of the British, one will find it here.

Note my edition is a battered 1941 reprint of the original, published by Hamish Hamilton. I am not sure if the Folio edition splits this book into three, or has two other works by the author included.

[James Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a typical war book in that is very contemporary and not by a military historian explaining all the detailed events after the fact. Moorehead very much was on the front line and I think gets across the frenetic pace and just how quickly things can shift in modern warfare. I would describe this as a part travel, part war book, in that we spend just as much time on the front line as we do with the author traversing exotic locations trying to get to the next hotbed for reporting. Across Africa and the Mediterranean, Moorehead is an excellent guide, with an eye for incredible stories from first hand accounts. There’s an essence of the British dry wit, and Moorehead never strains from being an objective, if still British focused participant. His analysis of the Italian army is a very interesting one, and the pacing of the narrative lends itself well to the next installment in this trilogy.

“More and more I began to see that desert warfare resembled war at sea. Men moved by compass. No position was static….one did not occupy the desert any more than one occupied the sea. One simply took up a position for a day or a week”

[Steve Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Third time reading this, though the first time reading the Folio Society edition. Previously read it in paperback titled "The March to Tunis". Moorehead is an excellent writer and the book was written during the war, much of what he writes about he personally witnessed, or was with the troops in the area of operations.

[Wayne T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moorehead’s richly descriptive style takes one as close to the cliche “like you were there” as it gets. Many little covered locales and battles from WWII such as East Africa, Lebanon and Syria make this a rare eyewitness account. He doesn’t shy away from the costs of war, many times individually honoring the ultimate sacrifice that his subjects made.

[Dipra Lahiri · Rating 4 out of 5]

War correspondence at its finest. On the frontline with the troops, at HQ with the generals and the observant eye on the locals. In this volume of his trilogy, the action is between the Italians and the Allied forces (British, Australian, Kiwis and Indian mostly) and the action in Crete.