The Path to Victory : The Mediterranean Theater in World War II

Rating:
Summary: A one volume history of the Mediterranean Theater
Review: "The Path To Victory", by Douglas Porch, is a remarkably well written one volume history of the Mediterranean theater in the Second World War. In an engaging narrative studded with bold and often critical portraits of key personalities such as Mussolini, Eisenhower, Rommel, and Montgomery, Porch describes the theater from Gibralter to Baghdad. Porch's theme is that far from being a diversion of resources from a decisive Allied confrontation with Hitler in Northwest Europe, the Mediterranean theater was the vital path to victory. For the British immediately after Dunkirk and the surrender of France, the Mediterranean was the only theater of operations where the British could marshal the forces to effectively counter first Italian and then German military designs on the lifelines of empire. After the entry of the United States into the war, the Mediterranean became the only theater in which the United States could reasonably conduct ground operations against Germany while building the competence of green troops and commanders in modern warfare and while forging the great alliance with the British. For Italy and especially for Germany, the Med created huge demands on military forces that might have found better, even decisive use on the Eastern Front and after June 1944, in France. Porch provides a vivid narrative of the growing pains of the British and American militaries in North Africa and Italy, but he also makes clear the link to later successes in Northwest Europe. His commentary on the struggles of the French to re-enter the war are covered in a detail and with a sensitivity I have not seen elsewhere in English. This book is highly recommended for the serious student of the Second World War. The casual reader will find it very long at over 600 pages, and filled with occasionaly dense commentary on various longstanding academic disputes over the conduct and personalties of WWII. Production note: the maps in the book should have been full page size; at half page, they are too small to read without additional magnification.

Rating:
Summary: An exceptionally poor piece of scholarship
Review: "The difference between an incompetent doctor, and an incompetent historian," one wag quipped, "is that the latter doesn't kill anyone." to which his friend replied, "He does if someone in charge reads him." This work offers horrendously backward interpretations of most of the historical figures involved, and the value and import of the Mediterranean campaign as a whole. The author lauds Churchill's penchant for peripheral attacks, an obsession which other historians have long noted to have caused grave problems in both world wars. Porch also attacks Rommel, critisizing him for overextending his supply lines (a common criticism), reckless attacks, and drawing American forces into the theater. Porch should have read Rommel's wartime notes. Rommel details the tactics of using inferior attacking forces - in both France and North Africa - in a war of fast maneuver in order to prevent defenders from effectively digging in. Moreover, drawing Alied troops into a peripheral theater was what Rommel was supposed to do; it's called attrition. Porch soft pedals General Clark's incompetence in Italy. When questioned about Clark's move on Rome instead of cutting off retreating German forces, Porch lamely argues that "Germans were good at fighting out of encirclements," that "What happened, happened." and that it wouldn't have made any difference. The truth is that Clark didn't try, that he was focused on the publicity of taking Rome. I fervently hope that impressionable readers skip this book, and concentrate on primary sources, where available.

Rating:
Summary: a definitive account of the Mediterranean campaign
Review: According to Douglas Porch, the Mediterranean campaign was essential since it gave the Western allies time to cement their alliance and diverted German assets that could have been used on the Eastern and Western fronts. Porch praises Churchill for defending Greece and North Africa, thereby erasing the stigma of Munich, and allowing British forces to mature in combat. Porch is highly critical of the generalship of Rommel because he overextended his supply lines and lead reckless charges to Tobruk and El Alemein. Moreover Rommel's threat made the United States commit its forces to North Africa. Porch also believes that the bloody Italian campaign was beneficial to the allied cause since it diverted German troops to Greece and Italy that could have been better used in France. Finally the landings in Southern France were needed for the Western Alliance since that region had ports that could support the allied advance on the Western Front. The main weakness of the book is that Porch is a bit too critical of Rommel, who managed to hold the allies at bay for two years, otherwise this is a vastly superior book as compared to Rick Atkinson's account of the North African campaign.

Rating:
Summary: Good on dramatizing non-obvious connections
Review: By the middle of March, 1941, although the skies above London were ominously crowded with the Luftwaffe, and although U-boats made the North Atlantic was a very dangerous place for shipping bound for the British isles, still the British Empire had some grounds for optimism on one point, its position in the eastern Mediterranean. From General Wavell's headquarters in Cairo, Egypt, the theatre looked like an enormous wheel, with a southern spike toward Addis Ababa, one northward to Athens, another west - to Tobruk in Libya, and a final spoke heading east, to Damascus. Recent fighting within that huge wheel (the image is Alan Moorehead's, taken over here by Porch) had gone against the Axis powers, so that the axis of this wheel - Egypt itself, with its crucial canal - was secure.

Within days, though, everything would change. Rommel would begin an offensive in Libya. There was a pro-Axis coup in Iraq beginning in March 31, triumphant by April 3. The Germans declared war on Greece on April 6. The news from south of Egypt at this time was good, British tropps pushed the Italians out of their Somaliland protectorate - but perhaps in a sense it was too good - Wavell has been accused of pressing the campaign to his south at the expense of troop needs around the rest of his perimeter.

It was in this context that both sided prepared for a show-down on the island of Crete. Either the Axis powers, by taking this island, would continue to press their offensive and Wavell's position would become even more tenuous or the British, by holding firm on Crete, would produce a reversal of their fortunes. Or so it might have seemed. As Porch explains, the outcomes of the attack on Crete were themselves extremely ambiguous.

Still, the ability to look consistently for connections among disparate actions and events here is impressive, and is at the heart of what historians, especially those writing for a broad non-academic audience, ought to do.


Rating:
Summary: Heroics in the Mediterranean
Review: Douglas Porch' "The Path to Victory" presents a sensible, and on the whole well-balanced, survey of the progress of World War 2 in the Mediterranean. He draws keen portraits of all the players, Allied and Axis, and does not hesitate to give credit to some of the less known, and less popular, commanders (Juin, for example).

His criticisms of some commanders -- Freyberg is one -- seem born of 20/20 hind sight. Although we now know that Freyberg could have staved off the invasion of Crete with the resources at his command, he had no way of knowing this at the time, and was unable to organize himself to beat off what appeared to be a large scale German invasion of the island. For the first time Mark Clark's shenanigans in Italy are shown in a dispassionate, and largely unfavorable light.

Porch mostly gets it right, and covers a large canvas with ease, moving smoothly from discussions of technical details to the strategies needed to make almost anything happen in the turbulent politics of the time. He argues strongly, with incontrovertible evidence, for the wisdom of Churchill's strategy for fighting in the Mediterranean. His detailed coverage of the Italian campaign shows that it was nothing like the disaster often claimed. It tied down hundreds of thousands of German troops that otherwise could well have been in Normandy, allowing that invasion to proceed successfully.

It is essential to read the book with a good atlas at hand. The maps provided are appalling, among the worst I have seen in any WW2 history. Farrar, Straus and Giroux should be ashamed of themselves for producing such sloppy accompaniments to the text. The maps require the use of a magnifying glass and are mostly miracles of cartographic mud. The photographs are too few in number, and we have seen them all before in other works. I am sure that more thorough picture research would have provided better results than we see here.

The text is sloppily edited, and could have benfited from some judicious pruning.

Simon Evans

Rating:
Summary: This Book is Hard on the Generals
Review: I liked this book. I tend to agree with his thesis that the Mediterranean theater was critical for two reasons. First, at a time of uncertainty before America entered the war, it bolstered American confidence that the British could go head-to-head with the Germans and made the release of war materiel to Britain by the US far easier. Second, it gave the green US Army an opportunity to learn its craft in a theater that was not absolutely crucial and one in which experience of German military might served as a good "warm up" to the invasion of France. Porch is hard on the generals, especially Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley and all the Brits except Montgomery for whom he seems to have genuine fondness. Even the vaunted Rommel is taken down several pegs by this writer. The first section dealing with the desert war is perhaps the strongest. Sicily the weakest and Italy the most interesting. There are a few inconsistencies such as conflicting numbers of troops stationed somewhere on one page with a different number at the same place on the next, but by and large for a book with this much detail, Porch does a good job without bogging the reader hopelessly down in a never-ending stream of trivia.

Rating:
Summary: Impressive
Review: Reading The Path to Victory is like eating a nice steak. It's filling. It's rich and satisfying. It's to be slowly chewed and savored. It's meaty and juicy. And occasionally there's a bit that just isn't very good. Porch has a daunting task in his book: to relate the entire war in the Mediterranean in one volume. This is a difficult job, for a number of reasons. First, the conflicts in that theater were far-flung, ranging from Morocco to Iraq, and they had only indirect strategic links. In other words, many of the events do not fit in one single story. Second, conflict there lasted the entire war, without interruption, so there is a lot to tell.

Porch does an admirable job of telling this long, twisted story. His main purpose is not to simply chronicle combat operations. Rather his goal is to demonstrate the strategic importance of the Mediterranean in World War II. In many US histories, The Mediterranean theater is dismissed as a sideshow, a strategic dead end that diverted resources away from the main effort in northeast Europe. In many British histories, the critique is that the Mediterranean garners far more attention than it deserves, El Alamein notwithstanding. Porch takes on these assessments. He argues that while the theater was not sufficient for victory over Germany, it was necessary. The bases of his argument can be broken down into several parts.

First, Porch shows that Allied leadership needed a place to improve. He refers to the theater as the "graveyard of the generals", and rightly so, when one begins to tally all the failures in command. The UK and the US badly needed an opportunity to weed out poor commanders, and the theater (primarily in North Africa) gave them this opportunity in a strategically safe environment where operational reverses were not war-enders.

Second, Porch argues that the Mediterranean provided an opportunity for the US and the UK to improve it soldiering. Doctrine improved, tactics improved, and amphibious landings were executed, all of which gave the Allied militaries practical experience necessary for the eventual invasion of northeast Europe.

Third, although the Mediterranean theater was on the periphery of US and German strategy, it was decidedly not on the periphery of British or Italian strategy. In the United States, we view the war from a US- and German-centric perspective. We forget that the Mediterranean represented an important region for the UK, with its interests in Egypt and the Middle East, and the Suez canal represented a lifeline to India. For Italy, the importance of the region is obvious. Some historians complain that the US was "sucked into" the Mediterranean and wound up fighting for British strategic interests. Possibly so, but Porch argues that the practical experience of fighting outweighed this. Additionally, the US put its fighting in the Mediterranean to good use: clearing Sicily and much of Italy allowed for ANVIL, the amphibious invasion of southern France, which was instrumental in producing the strategic withdrawal of the Germans.

Porch also demonstrates that the Germans, like the US, got "sucked into" the Mediterranean in order to help its ally (Italy). However, for the Germans, the theater certainly was a dead end and ended up costing Germany a great deal of resources (squandered in Tunisia, or occupying Italy and the Greece and the Balkans).

The largest contribution of the Mediterranean theater was to clear up political and strategic ambiguities. El Alamein was a badly-needed victory, politically and for morale, for the British. Another significant strategic advance was to resolve the French situation. Action in the Mediterranean theater swept away Vichy and firmed up power for the Free French, important in the short term for fighting Germany and in the long run for the political stability of France. Allied offensives also knocked Italy out of the war, which was significant for politics and morale. Bombers stationed in southern Italy could reach significant targets, such as the Ploesti oil fields. ANVIL could not have happened without the liberation of North Africa, Sicily, and most of Italy.

While I think Porch does an admirable job of demonstrating the worthiness of the Mediterranean theater, his book does have some problems that keep it from being uniformly excellent. He is too quick to excuse Churchill's strategies. Although Porch notes that many of his ideas were either wrong or impractical, Porch still gives him the benefit of the doubt, claiming that British "effort" was required in order to ensure US support. Since this support was almost certainly forthcoming (Porch never demonstrates that perhaps was not) these simply excuses for Churchill's disastrous and amateur meddling.

On the issue of command, Porch is hard on most generals, except Mark Clark of all people. Clark is almost universally recognized as a disaster. Although Patton and Monty were both insufferable egomaniacs, neither let that get in the way (very much) of the command decisions they had to make. Clark, on the other hand, did put egotistical competition before sound military judgment and rightly deserves to be labeled a disaster. Porch dismisses his functional insubordination, by turning to Rome out of Anzio instead of bagging the retreating Germans, stating that encirclements were hard to carry out and the Germans usually escaped anyway. With Rommel, Porch is equally off-base, stating that his battles were wasteful with no strategic purpose. Of course, his whole "strategic purpose" was to prop up the Italians and bother the British. This he accomplished and his efforts, strategically, must be considered a success.

Finally, Porch never questions why the Allies made the decision to continue pushing up Italy after Rome fell, and after ANVIL was carried out. By this time, the Germans were shifting troops away from Italy and there was no longer any strategic value in further offensives. If any lives were wasted in the Mediterranean, clearly they were wasted in northern Italy starting in the Fall of 1944.

This is a big meaty book. Porch presents a satisfying argument, even if bits of it are questionable.


Rating:
Summary: Overall a good book
Review: This is a good book that stresses convincingly the author's point of view with regards to the importance of the Mediterranean theater. As stated by other reviewers, some portions of the book are better than others, especially the North Africa campaign, French involvement in the War and inter-relations between the Anglo-American alliance. Not withstanding there are three things I disagree with the author's opinion: 1) His crticism of Rommel, especially with regards to his campaign management in North Africa. With more supplies is possible that Rommel could have taken Egypt even with Monty's materiel superiority. Anyways, Rommel's main objective was to tie down British troops in North Africa, which he did for two years; it was never realistically expected that he conquer Egypt; things that people seem to forget due to his early success. 2) I agree with Kesselring's assertion that he won in his side considering that it took almost 2 years for the Allies to clean the boot even with an overwhelming material superiority. The high German casualty rate presented by the author as example the Allies won the campaign, fails to consider the high casualty rate suffered by the Germans in the final offensive when the troops were less experienced and subjected to massive aerial bombing, and by then the final outcome of the war was decided. 3) It was the pivotal theater for the Western Allies but of for the war itself; the war was won in the Eastern Front. Still, you are left to wonder what more capable commanders would have accomplished especially in Italy.

Rating:
Summary: Useful but Uneven: Approximately 3.5 Stars
Review: This is a serious and partly successful attempt to produce a 1 volume history of combat in the Medierranean during WWII. This is a very ambitious goal. The Mediterranean theater involved numerous combatants, both major and minor, complex politics, and a variety of campaigns. The book also includes narrative/discussion of relevant events in the Balkans, Middle East, and East Africa. Porch aims at providing the basic military/naval history, appropriate background, assessments of the major military and political figures, and even discussion of the aftermath of the war. Packing all this into 1 book, even a reasonably thick book like this one, is difficult. It is not surprising that Porch does better with some aspects than others. The book appears to have been written primarily from secondary sources and I suspect the quality of individual sections depends to some extent on the quality of the sources from which Porch drew for each topic. Some sections are excellent. For example, his narrative and assessment of the invasion of Italy and the first year of the Italian campaign is first rate. An number of other episodes are described equally well. His descriptions and discussions of the French Army, a subject on which he is an expert, are enlightening. He does very well in giving a feel for how events in Britain, America, and the Soviet Union interacted with and drove decisions in the Mediterranean. In a number of other cases, however, he does less well. His analysis of Franco's behavior is probably incomplete. He attributes Franco's failure to join the Axis to his native caution, which is partly correct, but intelligent Allied diplomacy (translation: economic blackmail) also played a significant role. Franco's decision making during WWII is discussed well in Paul Preston's excellent biography of Franco, which Porch does not seem to have utilized. Similarly, much of his discussion of Mussolini is derived from Dennis Mack Smith's biography, which is considered by many scholars to have been superceded by other work. A signficant deficiency is that Porch is a bit careless about his narrative. The narrative doesn't give precise specification of dates, and Porch has a tendency to cut back and forth between episodes. Readers without a basic familiarity with the war will be confused. Porch's strategic overviews and discussions of personalities are generally very good but these tend to occupy space at the expense of narrative. Porch takes considerable pains to emphasize the significance of the campaigns in the Mediterranean. In contrast to conventional views that the Mediterranean campaigns were a wasteful sideshow, he argues convincingly for their political and military significance. He repeatedly descibes the Mediterranean theater as "pivotal", arguing that it was necessary though not sufficient for Allied victory. His analysis is thoughtful, articulate, and convincing. It also appears in different forms repeatedly in the book, again at the expense of the narrative. The final and excellent summary chapter would have been enough. Porch is generally a competent writer and often a very good writer. For example, his concise, vivid and ultimately scathing discussion of the failure of Allied military planners to anticipate the needs of the civilian population in Southern Italy is a particularly nice example of historical narrative as rhetoric.

Rating:
Summary: Useful but Uneven: Approximately 3.5 Stars
Review: This is a serious and partly successful attempt to produce a 1 volume history of combat in the Medierranean during WWII. This is a very ambitious goal. The Mediterranean theater involved numerous combatants, both major and minor, complex politics, and a variety of campaigns. The book also includes narrative/discussion of relevant events in the Balkans, Middle East, and East Africa. Porch aims at providing the basic military/naval history, appropriate background, assessments of the major military and political figures, and even discussion of the aftermath of the war. Packing all this into 1 book, even a reasonably thick book like this one, is difficult. It is not surprising that Porch does better with some aspects than others. The book appears to have been written primarily from secondary sources and I suspect the quality of individual sections depends to some extent on the quality of the sources from which Porch drew for each topic. Some sections are excellent. For example, his narrative and assessment of the invasion of Italy and the first year of the Italian campaign is first rate. An number of other episodes are described equally well. His descriptions and discussions of the French Army, a subject on which he is an expert, are enlightening. He does very well in giving a feel for how events in Britain, America, and the Soviet Union interacted with and drove decisions in the Mediterranean. In a number of other cases, however, he does less well. His analysis of Franco's behavior is probably incomplete. He attributes Franco's failure to join the Axis to his native caution, which is partly correct, but intelligent Allied diplomacy (translation: economic blackmail) also played a significant role. Franco's decision making during WWII is discussed well in Paul Preston's excellent biography of Franco, which Porch does not seem to have utilized. Similarly, much of his discussion of Mussolini is derived from Dennis Mack Smith's biography, which is considered by many scholars to have been superceded by other work. A signficant deficiency is that Porch is a bit careless about his narrative. The narrative doesn't give precise specification of dates, and Porch has a tendency to cut back and forth between episodes. Readers without a basic familiarity with the war will be confused. Porch's strategic overviews and discussions of personalities are generally very good but these tend to occupy space at the expense of narrative. Porch takes considerable pains to emphasize the significance of the campaigns in the Mediterranean. In contrast to conventional views that the Mediterranean campaigns were a wasteful sideshow, he argues convincingly for their political and military significance. He repeatedly descibes the Mediterranean theater as "pivotal", arguing that it was necessary though not sufficient for Allied victory. His analysis is thoughtful, articulate, and convincing. It also appears in different forms repeatedly in the book, again at the expense of the narrative. The final and excellent summary chapter would have been enough. Porch is generally a competent writer and often a very good writer. For example, his concise, vivid and ultimately scathing discussion of the failure of Allied military planners to anticipate the needs of the civilian population in Southern Italy is a particularly nice example of historical narrative as rhetoric.