Most writing on the Mediterranean theater in WWII addresses specific campaigns: the desert war, the battle for Tunisia, the long struggle for Italy. A professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Porch (The French Secret Services) brings the entire story together, integrating land, sea and air operations from the first shots of 1940 to Germany's final collapse in 1945. His sweeping narrative incorporates encyclopedic mastery of a massive body of source material, and is written in a style that holds attention from first page to last. Porch argues that rather than being the sideshow or strategic dead-end it is portrayed as in most literature, the Mediterranean was the pivotal theater of WWII in Europe. Geographically, the Mediterranean provided a focal point for the U.S., Britain and a still-powerful French Empire to come together and attack a critical Axis flank by sea. In policy terms, the Mediterranean gave the Anglo-American alliance an opportunity to coalesce, under conditions where the consequences of failure and disagreement were less than catastrophic. Strategically, once Britain pounced on the Axis decision to open a theater in the Mediterranean, British victories encouraged Hitler's decision to attack the Soviet Union. The collapse of Italy forced a westward reorientation of German strategic priorities, absorbing resources previously available for Russia. Operationally, the Mediterranean offered no major opportunities for the Wehrmacht's lethal combination of air power and mechanized forces; a military system configured for the offensive found itself from the autumn of 1942 fighting a series of high-cost defensive battles. On the other side, campaigning in the Mediterranean gave the Western allies time and opportunity to master modern war at all levels. The Italian campaign, so frequently used to illustrate the alleged futility of the Mediterranean, produced less than half the casualties of the operations in Northwest Europe while lasting twice as long. In paradigm-shifting terms, Porch's terrific book asks what the odds of success would have been had D-Day been mounted without the Mediterranean campaigns under the allies' belt, with unproven leaders, untested troops and immature weapons systems.
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