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Struggle for the Middle Sea: The Great Navies at War in the Mediterranean Theater, 1940-1945

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STRUGGLE FOR THE MIDDLE SEA is primarily a reference work focusing on surface naval actions in the Med during WW2. It covers the entire war and all the major powers including Britain, France, Germany and the US but best documents those actions which impacted Italy's maritime war (and so the period from 6/40 to 9/43 is of most interest.)

To some extent this work is meant as an antidote for Anglo-centric (and German) accounts of the naval war in the Med which focus on Italy's failure to win, or even participate in, a decisive surface action in the Nelsonian tradition. O'Hara's thesis is that Italy ground out the naval war of attrition that was best suited to its war aims and limited capabilities. In the Central Med the Regia Marina generally succeeded in achieving it's goal of sea control. The author's view is that while the Royal Navy was certainly successful in winning "sea control victories," strategically speaking it simply had its feet set wrong. His key point is summarized on page 259: "With regard to Italy's mercantile war ... 98 percent of the men and 90 percent of the material that set forth from Italian ports for Libya, Tunisia, of the Balkans arrived safely."

Those who enjoy naval games and simulations will find a lot to like here regardless of whether they agree with O'Hara's overall thesis. By his definition Italian warships (from minesweepers on up to battleships,) participated in 34 of the 55 major surface actions fought in the Mediterranean (including the Red Sea,) during the 5 years of WW2. The accounts of all 55 battles includes an order of battle table listing the ships (by type,) formations, and commanders involved. And, as befits a work with a tactical focus, there are lots of maps and tactical illustrations (27 to be exact,) to help place the operations in perspective. Of course the fights sparked off by Allied attempts to run convoys through to Malta are included but, again, O'Hara's framework ALSO shows the many battles that were fought over Italian convoys etc...

This book strikes me as a perfect complement for Greene and Massignani's THE NAVAL WAR IN THE MEDITERRANEAN 1940-1943 or (so I'm told,) De Belot's THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MEDITERRANEAN 1939-1945. The reason I say this is that things like grand strategy, economics, diplomacy, Taranto, special forces and the submarine war are mentioned in perspective but given very little direct focus or analysis in this work. Therefore it shouldn't be your first book on the Med. Overall, however, I think this will be a worthwhile addition to almost anybody's WW2 naval library; most particularly if you are looking for a detailed accounting of tactical surface actions fought by escorts, destroyers and cruisers of the Italian Navy.

This book is Vincent P. O'Hara' third in a series, the first two being "The German Fleet at War" and "The U.S. Navy Against the Axis". Each offers MUCH greater detail about naval surface combat than the general histories I have read. O'Hara delves deeply into the strategy and tactics of the combatants, though not so much into equipment. (N.J.M. Campbells' "Naval Weapons of World War 2" fills this void.) I was particularly fascinated by accounts of successful German use of captured Italian torpedo boats ( roughly equivalent to U.S. DE's) after Italy's surrender. I was unaware of engagements in the Red, Adriatic and Ionian seas until I read this work. O'Hara's analysis of Italian intentions and successes at achieving them are interesting.

Vincent O'Hara's new and excellent essay on the naval war in the Mediterranean Sea - a painstaking analysis of all major surface actions in the theater - is a reading much to be commended for a number of reasons. Some WWII Med war myths (Britain's so-called "moral ascendancy" over the Italians, the Italian admirals as a bunch of incompetent bunglers, etc.) had already been exploded by other authors. Taking a step further, O'Hara sheds light on the strategic dimension and respective achievements in that titanic struggle. Ultimate balance and fairness to all sides involved in the war - contrary to what some prejudiced reviewers may have written, the author doesn't try turning Italian defeats into victories, he just successfully tries to be fair, a seemingly daunting task considering the sheer amount of British chest-beating and Italy-bashing slant in large portions of the literature. In this reviewer's opinion, O'Hara is even overcautious here and there - for instance, in all likelihood the British destroyer Khartoum in the Red Sea sank due to an Italian 100 mm round splinter hitting a torpedo and detonating it. But since unequivocal evidence of that is lacking, O'Hara prudently confines the likely cause of Khartoum's loss to a note. The book's scope and research width and depth: obscure, usually neglected or ignored, yet dramatic French and German surface actions are dealt with. In the light of O'Hara's detailed survey of surface naval combats in the Med, his conclusions deserve credit and attention. All navies in the Mediterranean basin fought well, or very well, on many occasions. But while the Italian, French and German navies more or less achieved their strategic goals, the Royal Navy fought a brilliant war she could not win by her own means - a useless, even noxious (to the British Empire) war at the end of a hugely long supply line, at a staggering cost, in a secondary theater, where victory was out of Britain's reach until the arrival of the American war machine. All in all a very fine, thought-provoking book by a widely acclaimed naval historian.

This is a very disappointing book.

The problem is that the author seems to have an agenda of over-turning 70 years of prejudice and restore to the Italian Navy a reputation it was, in his view, unfairly robbed of during and immediately after World War 2 when it was portrayed as inept and over-cautious by both wartime propaganda and the memoirs of various admirals and politicians.

This is not an unreasonable aim. Anyone looking objectively at the problems facing the Italian Navy at the start of the Mediterranean campaign - its lack of direct air support, some shockingly poor weaponry and over-bearing political pressures as a result of Il Duce's ambitions and pusillanimous nature - can applaud the fact that it managed to wage a campaign at all, and often very courageously at that. Had Vincent O'Hara made moves in that direction this book would have been as well worth having as, say, Robert Mallett's " The Italian Navy and Fascist Expansion " or, indeed, Andrew Cunningham's memoirs.

Alas, whilst there is ample evidence from the sources on both sides of the conflict that would support such a revisionist view - and a work doing so would be welcome - Vincent O'Hara does not leave it there but regrettably seems to have decided that whilst he's at it, he'll take a few swipes at the Allies in general, and the Royal Navy in particular. This is the only book you will ever read that describes Andrew Cunningham as "over-cautious" and, as noted, "scared" - and worse, there are occasional suggestions that he was less than fully competent.

Thus, for example, in his account of the Battle of Calabria, something he also dealt with in an article in Warship 2008, O'Hara indicates that it is " unclear" why Cunningham divided his force into three non-supporting groups. Yet ABC never made a secret of why - because he wanted to use "Warspite" as a battle-cruiser in support of his limited number of scout cruisers which O'Hara himself demonstrates were themselves short of ammunition at the time, and his other battleships were too slow to operate in such a role and so were left to catch up as best they could, forming a reserve on which the RN could fall back on should things turn against them. This appears in his report of the battle written five months after, his memoirs and various other writers' accounts of the action. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that in seeking out new and exciting sources O'Hara has avoided the information under his nose that would resolve the dilemmas he seems convinced exist.

O'Hara concentrates on surface actions, something the author himself has admitted in interviews. Yet these battles did not occur as purely naval actions - indeed as events quickly demonstrated to all surface fleets operating in "The Middle Sea" to neglect the ipact of air and submarine developmenst was to leave oneself dangerously vulnerable. Yet in this book, such factors are downplayed to the point, at times, of irrelevance. Not only are the other dimensions of the naval war in the Mediterranean ignored as noted, he also overlooks the important fact that there was a land campaign going on in the theatre at the time fought at one stage, lest we forget, by Cunningham's own brother. The naval forces operating in the Mediterranean did not do so independently of the wax and wane of the war in the desert, but here it is discounted to a damaging extent.

Then, even more importantly, there are the political concerns that shape overall strategy. Every naval historian of World War 2 knows that one should always look to what that inveterate meddler, the mercurial " Former Naval Person " who was running Great Britain, was demanding at any specific time to understand the pressures exerted on any commander of Royal Navy forces but O'Hara, perhaps over-specialising, pays little heed to Churchill's impact for either good or ill on his admirals. This is a major failing.

In the end O'Hara lets himself down. His agenda gets in the way of cool analysis of all the facts and so there remains the need for a major reconsideration of the Italian Navy's achievements, and failures, in World War 2. This book is not it and with its many omissions, generalisations and above all it's rather too blatant bias against the Royal Navy, the better to advance what the writer obviously believes is a radical reinterpretation of events, it is a book to be approached with caution and at least two other sources to hand for a reader to check matters and attain a clearer picture of how, and why, matters progressed the way they did.

STRUGGLE FOR THE MIDDLE SEA: THE GREAT NAVIES AT WAR IN THE MEDITERRANEAN THEATER, 1940-1945
Vincent P. O'Hara
Naval Institute Press, 2009
Hardcover, Tables, Illustrations, Charts, Abbreviations, Maps, Photographs, 352 Pages, $34.95


The four-year naval battle for the Mediterranean began with Italy's entry into the war as a German ally on 10 June 1940. The resulting campaign was one wholly concerned with the application of sea power to support operations ashore. The naval operations in the Mediterranean ran the gamut from sea denial to sea control to power projection. It was very much a war of swinging fortunes and fluctuating momentum, but throughout it all, control of the sea determined success, while loss of control led to failure. The Axis failure in this campaign ultimately drove Field Marshal Erwin Rommel out of Africa and Italy out of the war. Allied success brought the first Allied troops back into Western Europe. Theoretically, Italy gained naval superiority in the Mediterranean when the French surrendered to the Germans in June, 1940. Italy had the second largest submarine fleet in the world (more than 100 boats), as well as four modernized battleships, two new ones, and a third in construction. More importantly, the Italian Navy had the potential support of one of the world's reputedly strongest air forces. Italy's ships were fast and powerfully armed. Perhaps more importantly, Italy's strategic location dominating the sea lanes of the central Mediterranean gave it a potential choke hold on Allied maritime commerce. Only the British base on Malta, located mid-way between Sicily and Italy's African possession of Libya, occupied a similar position vis-a-vis Italy's sea lanes. The first three years of the campaign, in fact, revolved around Britain's effort to retain that island. It was from Malta that the bulk of Britain's sea denial operations were launched against Italy's sea lanes. Given the small size and aged units of the British Mediterranean Fleet, Malta's defense and Britain's hold on the Mediterranean initially appeared tenuous indeed. Fortunately for the British, events proved otherwise. Controlling the Mediterranean was critical to the British Empire, for it was through the Mediterranean that oil and other vital materials flowed from its eastern possessions to Britain. It also was the most efficient route for shipping supplies and material for the defense of those possessions. Traveling around Africa tripled the transit time, effectively quintupling the amount of shipping required to achieve the same tonnage. Britain didn't have any merchant shipping to waste. The Mediterranean had to be held at all costs. Although outnumbered and encumbered with much slower units, the British Royal Navy enjoyed several advantages over its Italian opponents. It had a more aggressive and professional leadership. Italy's admirals adhered to the "fleet-in-being" strategy, where preservation of units took precedence over all other considerations. The British Royal Navy's sailors also were superior in technical ability to those of the Italian Navy, which relied on conscripts to man its ships. The Italians also suffered from flawed tactics, equipment, and doctrine. Doctrinally, they had no procedures for joint air-navy operations, no specific antisubmarine doctrine, and no air defense tactics. Each ship's captain was supposed to use his own initiative. Sonar wasn't introduced until late 1942. More significantly, the Italians didn't train or prepare for night combat. Their surface ships had no radar or nightfighting equipment. Italian surface and antiaircraft gunnery was poor throughout the war. They had no aircraft carriers and commissioned none during the war. Their submarines lacked night periscopes and weren't trained in conducting either day or night surface attacks. Italian conning towers and silhouettes were too large. Submarine fire control equipment was nonexistent, and the captains computed their own firing solutions. Italian submarines were large, unwieldy, and slow to dive. Finally, the Italian Navy suffered from fuel shortages throughout the war. Available fuel dictated the size and duration of every naval operation. The Mediterranean Campaign cost the Axis 2.1 million tons of shipping and the Allies 1.7 million tons. The campaign was one of rapidly shifting momentum. Like the cavalry battles of ald, the introduction of fresh forces often altered the balance and tide of battle. With that shift went the fortunes of war on both land and sea. For the Axis, it was their lack of initiative and daring that caused them to squander their opportunities. The victory in Crete wasn't exploited by further landings. More importantly, Malta was never taken. It was that failure that ultimately cost them the campaign and possibly the war. For the Allies, primarily the British, it was a brilliantly fought campaign in which few opportunities were missed and many were created by sheer initiative and determination. The risks were great and the potential payoff unknown. For Great Britain, success in the Mediterranean offered the opportunity for eventual victory, while defeat there meant the possible loss of the war. Only the Atlantic Campaign had a greater importance. That they won is a testament to the fighting spirit and skills of the Allies' navies. This superbly researched book gives a complete account of the war in the Mediterranean on, above, and beneath the sea. It not only provides a detailed and fascinating narrative of the entire naval war, but also sets the individual actions fully in their strategic context for both the Axis and the Allies. With its detailed background information and fascinating narrative, this book is essential reading for all those interested in one of the major naval theaters of the Second World War.


Lt. Colonel Robert A. Lynn, Florida Guard
Orlando, Florida

This is an important book which, contrary to many previous accounts, shows the Italian Navy as a fighting force that successfully executed its predetermined mission, whose crews fought with exemplary tenacity and courage, whose ships were more than adequate for the assigned tasks, and the navy whose inventiveness was remarkable and set a completely new trend in naval warfare. (special operations, e.g., the exploits of X MAS - for a more detailed account it is worth reading The Black Prince And The Sea Devils: The Story Of Valerio Borghese And The Elite Units Of The Decima Mas).

The author offers insightful analyses of surface actions fought in the Mediterranean not only by the familiar protagonists - the Royal and Italian navies - but also by the French and German navies as well. This is a wonderfully objective portrayal of the longest conflict at sea characterized by the highest number of surface actions fought briskly, and often with a very considerable tactical skill of all involved. The significance of the book rests, however, not with the account of gunnery exchanges, but with a fresh look at the Italian Navy. A navy operating without adequate air support, under constraints of rapidly dwindling fuel reserves and insufficient new construction capacity that dictated the seeimngly timid strategy of the Supermarina, and yet the navy that for the most part fought without hesitation, often against overwhelming odds, and one that served the assigned mission extraordinarily well.

The actions of the French Navy are also shown in the proper and objective perspective, from its joint operations with the Royal Navy, through the debacle of Mers-el-Kebir, and the subsequent conflict of loyalties between the Free French of General de Gaulle and the Vichy Government, followed by the uneasy truce between the French and the British Navies. Few know about surface actions fought against the Royal Navy during the African landings, and most US readers are unaware of the fact that the French Navy acquitted itself exceedingly well during these trying times. It fought with skill and courage and paid a heavy price for fighting for France rather than the Allies. Yet, the desperate suicide of the French fleet in Toulon also showed clearly that the French Navy preferred to sink its ships rather than have them be taken over by Germans and used against the erstwhile comrades at arms. The magnificent sense of honor permeating the French Navy in all its proceedings dictated nothing less.

As O'Hara shows, contrary to the popular view, both the Italian and German Navies gave the British a good run for their money, and offered many serious concerns to Admiral Cunningham and Admiral Somerset of the Royal Navy. Maybe not surprisingly, the Middle Sea turned out to be the place where battles took place to the very day of German surrender, a place where every type of warship was involved, and every type of naval action was fought. A sea where all actions took place in the curious atmosphere of highly complex political realities of the region, where nothing was as straightforward as it is commonly thought today. It was the unique place and the unique time where two of the main protagonists (Vichy France and Italy) changed sides, one fought a losing war to the very end (Kriegsmarine), while another - the Royal Navy - lived again up to its magnificent tradition to see the Italian fleet surrender and drop its anchora "...under the guns of the Fortress of Malta," and the last arrival on thge scene - the US Navy - contributing by its very presence to the overall success of the Allies.

It is a worthwhile book; a very good read unfortunately marred by at times awkward and confusing diagrams of surface actions. I blame for this the editorial staff of USNI rather than the author: it is the editor's task to assure the quality of every aspect of the book. Increasingly more often USNI is rather deficient in this: typographic errors, sloppy editing, and poor selection, and captioning of photographs become a habit rather than exception. O'Hara's book would also gain a lot through a better and more diverse selection of the photographic material, and better quality of paper on which it was printed. Again, faults that should be addressed by the book's publisher.

Vincent O'Hara's "Struggle for the Middle Sea" is an excellent book, well written, full of useful maps and tables and rich of never published primary sources, maybe the best of his trio about the main naval surface actions between 1939 and 1945. I was therefore going to write just a few lines about such a sound book. Yet the discovery, among Amazon.co.uk customers reviews, of so an uproar induced me to analyse deeper this quite curious phenomenon of critics.

I vainly sought, for example, just to quote the first of the charges, where Admiral Cunningham was described as scared. All that I was able to find was (page 57) the disappointment the commander of the Mediterranean Fleet himself expressed towards the RAF: "The sudden discovery on 30 September (1940) of a numerically superior battlefleet within 30 miles of our Fleet, in spite of the shorebased reconnaissance from Malta was disquieting". The fact that Admiral Cunningham preferred to took avoid action that time is not commented by O'Hara, but this hard truth probably collided with the swashbuckling vision of wartime propaganda.

O'Hara had previously limited himself to record (page 51) that on 31 August, as soon as a Sunderland signalled him that two Cavour class battleships (the same encountered during the Action off Calabria) had just been sighted 140 miles north-west heading straight for him, the Mediterranean Fleet went south as the battleships Warspite and Malaya, supported by the carrier Eagle, were considered no match for them. If O'Hara had had only a fraction of the supposed anti-British feelings some critics claimed so loudly, he would have added that ABC increased in his memories the Italian battleship force signalled to him to five, copying (but not quoting) an Italian book published after the war which actually was affected by a mistake as only four battleships sortied that day from Taranto. This 1951 fabrication, compromised by the original 1940 proceedings, is only one among many others; an understandable, but sad effect of wartime propaganda that the final victory plastered creating some die hard myths.

Being history an eternal search for truth based on the check of secondary sources through the critic use of primary ones, O'Hara's book is by far the most rigorous exercise in historiography available on the market and beyond, exactly what the professional review published by Derek Law on The Mariner's Mirror on May 2010 confirmed, considering, on the other side of the hill, over 200 books published on various aspects of the Mediterranean Sea war in English alone.

The accusation not to have debated adequately the Taranto Night is another curious fact, inducing to presume some reviewers were moved by a sort of inferiority complex of deep and tangled psychological nature. This is the third book where O'Hara states his purpose was to write about naval surface actions. He even describes the terms (war purpose built vessels more than 500 tons, 16 knots, 4 in guns at least etc.) with the same dedication a lawyer would spend conceiving a contract and, as a matter of fact, this is an agreement between the author and the readers opening with a double beware: despite - I concede it - the misleading title, this is not (and cannot be in 300 pages only) a total story of the total war in the Mediterranean; this is a story of battles and actions rich of never published infos, all documented according to the best university and academic rules. If you are looking for one further celebration of the good old times, from "That Hamilton Woman" to Dudley Pope, please go to the opposite shelf.

The Taranto night itself received by O'Hara a 19-page detailed analysis in Warship 2010, based again on never published sources. To pack such a non surface gun and torpedo action in the book would be impossible for any editor; the same for submarine warfare, air power, Italian Navy midgets etc.. To state the author incorrectly handled logistic, intelligence, fast coastal forces, politics, economic, land warfare and technology (a true encyclopaedia, indeed) is then unfair, since the 45 pages of notes and bibliography included in "Struggle for the Middle Sea" are a mine of first time searched original documents found inside the archives of two continents (see, for instance, the secret Italian navy commission of inquiry about the night action off Cape Matapan, a document never seen before, both in Italy and abroad). What irritated some critics, was probably the fact that the items supplied to the reader do not fit the old wartime, easy schemes that two consecutive lazy generations of scholars or, more often, journalist and amateurs, preferred to copy instead of probing the since many years available original wartime reports.

To criticize the author's conclusion is the privilege of any buyer, of course, but to do such an exercise saying only "I don't like it" is someway childish.

A further proof of a hooligan rather than scholar attitude of some reviews may be found in the furious accusation moved by a gentleman affirming that O'Hara is the first who dared to criticize Admiral Cunnigham 1st Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope, KT, GCB, OM DSO and two Bars; actually he was, at best, the second as Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, PC, FRS wrote many hard judgements about that sailor, like the following one, quoted by Professor Hinsley in his British Intelligence in the Second World War, vol. II, HMSO, page 286, and dated 24 August 1941: "What action will C-C Mediterranean take on this information? Surely he cannot put up with this kind of thing. Is he going simply to leave these ships to the chance of a submarine without making any effort by his surface force to intercept them? Please ask specifically if anything he is going to do. We are still at war". For history's sake we can add that the Mediterranean Fleet preferred to stay more or less comfortably in Alexandria that time and later. Many more similar and bitter remarks were made by the Premier during that long war, but probably the magnanimous O'Hara preferred to spare them to the too frail and pampered British readers.

Actually O'Hara's ideas and method are much more British than some of his critics are ready to admit. The basic principle, for example, stating that in the long run of history there is no alternative to the hard task to "Face the Battle" and that direct confrontations, i.e. naval actions, are psychologically unavoidable, like the historical task to discriminate between fake and true victories and even wars (Verdict or Truth), is maybe the most important lesson developed by professor Keegan (Sir John).

The immediate necessity, for some readers, to go in their mind to Taranto and other comforting sweet memories, once faced by the hard facts described by O'Hara since the early pages of "Struggle for the Middle Sea", would induce old Freud to presume such an escape is only a way to exorcize what Correlli Barnett (but also Paul Kennedy, Jeremy Black and H.P. Wilmott) described in his many studies as the decline and fall of Britain, an historical process the recent European Community statisticians do not soften, the more when they underline the better French and Italian data and lifestyle.

The somehow naïve rather than ironic search for the "glorious day in September 1943 when the Italian navy arrived at Malta to accept the surrender of the British Mediterranean Fleet" is another confirmation (a lapsus in psychiatry) of the desperate need of self-reassurance some readers (all of apparent British origin) are asking in such a vociferous way. Another book by the same author, Dark Navy (a further 100 pages blockbuster which could probably not be inserted in "Struggle for the Middle Sea" for the same said size problems) documented that "After this meeting Cunningham sent his oft-quoted signal to the Admiralty, "Be pleased to inform their Lordships that the Italian Battle fleet now lays at anchor under the guns of the fortress of Malta." These famous words disguised the fact that the British did not have physical control over the former enemy fleet. The Americans especially appreciated the irony. When Admiral di Pollone's Squadretta unexpectedly arrived at Palermo from the Isle of Elba, at 1000 on 12 September, the American commander there felt like signalling, "Be pleased to inform Their Lordships that Palermo lies under the guns of an Italian Fleet." The British lack of control was further indicated by a letter Cunningham sent to Admiral Willis on 14 September in which he worried, "[the Italian Fleet] is alright at the moment but I smell trouble coming. I am quite convinced that all the ships are prepared to scuttle should things not be to their liking".

In a word, in front of the alleged accusal to minimise every British success and maximise every British failure, a serene reader is allowed to suspect that after more than 50 years of a never ending tendency by the British literature to minimise all Italian, French, German and American achievements, O'Hara tried, at last, to redress, through honest historical tools and methods, a naval history vessel almost capsizing by an extra cargo of bias, mistakes and self-complacency.

The real problem, so, is not a supposed anti-Royal Navy attitude of the author (by the way who are the pro-Royal Navy authors? Oliver Warner, maybe, or Taffrail, General I.S.O. Playfair, F.W. Winterbotham or Montgomery Hyde, all outdated, at best, or without any historical value), but a confirmed bias by some among his readers, usually in Britain; being prejudices a not correct and sport attitude, even if dating from Mount Grapius, the Barbarica Conspiratio and the Act of Supremacy, the alternative is only between history or not. O'Hara did his choice and his readers may only approve it; for the reminder there is such a lot of old stuff that anyone may be pleased at will. My personal preference, anyway, is for something fresh, even if the best compliment is the one proposed by one of the aforementioned bitter reviewers, when he admonished that "Struggle for the Middle Sea" is a book which must be approached with caution. Gutenberg's Bible and Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, received the same label of infamy and glory.

I had an inkling of the magnitude of action in the Mediterranean but had not guessed at all this. As a comprehensive one-volume treatment, this is ideal; I'd look forward to the multi-volume set if the author ever chose to offer more detail. Well done.

O'Hara's fine book stands as a useful corrective to the anglocentric histories of World War II in the Mediterranean that have heretofore weighed down the shelves. It's a lean, fast-moving narrative that captures the action quite well at some expense to background detail. The reader may need a reference book at hand when it comes to, say, details of ship armament and capabilities. It would also be nice if the author explained a few nuances, e.g., the fact that most of the ubiquitous Italian torpedo boats were, like their German counterparts, small destroyers -- a different breed of cat from the equally ubiquitous MAS motor torpedo boats, which were equivalent to German S-boats and US PT boats. But across his many battle pieces the author hits home the main point about how well the Italian Navy did its job in keeping supplies moving to North Africa in the face of the Royal Navy's superior intelligence and seemingly inexhaustible supply of cruisers and destroyers as well as proven British superiority in doctrine and operational experience. In our collective historical memory the Italians are dismissed as both timid and incompetent, and if that's the way you see it this book will open your eyes.

Vincent O'Hara's new work on the Italian Navy's war in the Mediterranean is a delight. Written in a clear, concise, and eminently readable style, and amply enriched by charts, tables, and graphs, this modest-looking book conceals a tart riposte to decades of Anglo-centric readings of the conflict. Narratives of bravery and devotion to duty in wartime are not solely the bailiwick of the victorious nation(s) and Vincent's text does much to rehabilitate the reputation of Italy's oft-maligned naval forces. There are a number of quite striking and poignant tales of heroism that must surely have been altogether overlooked by the great majority of historians and students of the war.
O'Hara is to be commended once again for his thoroughness and clarity, both extremely difficult to achieve in recording, after over six decades, these most uncertain of combat encounters. As a single volume text on the naval campaign in the Med one could scarcely hope to find a better work.