The Path to Victory
by Douglas Porch
Reading The Path to Victory, by Douglas Porch, is like eating a nice big 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 many of them had only indirect strategic links. In other words, many of the events do not fit together 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 theater 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 theater 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 itself. 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 the many 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 a body of knowledge and practical experience necessary for the eventual invasion of northeast Europe.
Third, although the Mediterranean theater was somewhat 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 tend to 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. As 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 the 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 sitting in garrisons occupying Italy and the Greece and the Balkans).
The largest contribution of the Mediterranean theater was to clear up political and strategic ambiguities. Operationally many of the battles were disasters for the Allies, there still were important strategic advances. El Alamein was a badly-needed victory, politically and for morale, for the British. One 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, if not militarily. 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 a few 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 (or both), Porch still gives him the benefit of the doubt, by claiming that British "effort" was required in order to ensure future US support. Since this support was almost certainly forthcoming (Porch never demonstrates that perhaps was not) these are excuses for Churchill's disastrous and amateur meddling. Porch is very hard on most leaders, yet Churchill escapes his critical eye.
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, most certainly 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 (pg. 560). 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.
Email me with comments at mlicari@cfu.net
Back to the Book Review page.
Back to my ASL page.