U.S. Navy task force carrying General Patton’s Western Task Force approaches the coast of French Morocco. (National Archives)
invasion of the Soviet Union—was Greece firmly under Axis control and momentum restored to the drive into Egypt.
By the summer of 1941 the series of Italian failures, German rescue missions, and British reactions had created a confused arrangement of deployments in and around the Mediterranean satisfactory to neither side. Axis forces held Greece and the island of Crete as well as Sicily, the stepping-stone to Tunisia. In North Africa General Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps, allied with an Italian army of questionable ability, had pushed the British into Egypt to a point only sixty miles from Alexandria. Allied prospects were in a tenuous state. The bottleneck at Gibraltar was open, but passage depended on running a gauntlet of German submarines. Britain still held the island of Malta, though it was under frequent air attack, and the British Eighth Army was still a viable force in Egypt, though it had been on the defensive for some time. Both the Axis and Allies had invested heavily in the Mediterranean area, and to justify their presence both
