The Mediterranean Front 1914-1923 (4)

Rating:
Summary: An Anglo-centric Summary
Review: Readers should be aware that Geoffrey Jukes is not connected with this volume in any way, despite Amazon's listing. Retired British army colonel Michael Hickey covers the Mediterranean theater (and Persian Gulf) in Osprey's fourth volume in the Essential Histories series on the First World War. Overall, the author provides an adequate - at times excellent - summary of a variety of peripheral campaigns, but this volume suffers from the same Anglo-centric bias as the previous volumes. Readers expecting Turkish, ANZAC, French, Serb or Arab perspectives will be disappointed by the over-emphasis on British forces.

Hickey begins the volume with a background section on the decline of the Ottoman Empire, but spends a great deal of time discussing Turkey's neighbors. The section on opposing armies is decent, providing brief descriptions of the British fleet (although he fails to list the actual strength of the Mediterranean fleet in 1914), Italy, Serbia, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. Only eight very plain maps are included: Serbia and Salonika 1914-1916; the Mesopotamian theater 1914-1917; Gallipoli 1915; War in the desert 1915-1918; campaigns in Sinai and Palestine 1914-18; Megiddo September 1918; the Italian front 1915-18; eastern Mediterranean. The maps mostly depict terrain, with little effort made to depict actual campaigns, except for Gallipoli and Palestine.

The heart of the volume is the section on the fighting in the Mediterranean area in 1914-1918 (despite the author's claim to cover fighting out to 1923, he says very little about post-Armistice events). Hickey has a lot of ground to cover in a very limited space and his campaign descriptions, while often quite good, feel crammed. The author covers the invasion of Serbia, the Mesopotamian campaign, Gallipoli, the Sinai-Palestine campaigns, the Italian campaign, Salonika and Macedonia and the naval war in the Mediterranean. As in previous Osprey volumes in the series, air operations are only lightly touched upon. Although Hickey's description of the elderly Serb King Peter I fighting with his troops in the defense of Belgrade is quite stirring, the author's Anglo-centric bias is evident in twice mentioning in three pages the small British detachment of naval gunners sent to the Serb's help. Much less space is given to mentioning the Serb Marshal Putnik who masterminded the magnificent defense of the capital in 1914-15, and the fact that Putnik had to be carried around in a litter. It is clear that Gallipoli is the author's main focus and this comprises nearly one quarter of the campaign narrative. The other campaigns are covered in succinct fashion.

Just as in the previous Osprey volumes in this series, Hickey's Anglo-centrism appears in full-bloom in the sections on "portrait of a soldier" and "portrait of a civilian." In the former, the author uses three British brothers who served separately in the Mediterranean area; one served in the Royal Garrison Artillery (RGA), another as a ground crewman in the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and the third in the cavalry. Despite spending five pages on these individuals, Hickey actually provides very little detail about the actual military service of these men and the reader is presented mostly with information about their leave in Alexandria and complaints about lack of mail. The civilian section then profiles the family and village that these three brothers came from in England. Given that the two volumes on the Western Front both profiled British soldiers and civilians, did we really need the British perspective presented for a third time? The author would have provided a better service to the reader if he had given some Australian perspectives, given that those troops played such a critical role in the theater. Alternatively, key individuals like Erwin Rommel and T.E. Lawrence could offer interesting examples of soldiers who actually played a key role in this theater. The "world around the war" section is disappointing, consisting of overly generalized pap on technology, civilian morale, and medicine. Overall, this volume is clearly the weakest of the four that Osprey has produced on the First World War and it is not recommended as a stand-alone summary of this theater of operations.