They sure didn’t shock the Brits much....
Today’s news is uniformly bad for Italy. Britain, with one hand tied behind her back, is beating Italy like a red-headed step child. The total rout of the Libyan army is followed by naval shelling of a northern Italian city by Force H from Gibraltar. While the Italian navy put to sea to head off the British, they didn’t make contact. From reading between the lines in the post from the Regia Marina website, I strongly suspect that the Regia Marina “declined” to tangle with the Royal Navy. And so the lesson is that the Royal Navy can go anywhere it wants, right up the the shores of Italy, with impunity.
No wonder that two years from now, Joseph Stalin will consider operations against Italy in the Mediterranean to not constitute a real “second front.”
In a way, I’m a bit surprised that Lease-Lend has a chance of passing right now. On the surface it looks as if the British are starting to get the upper hand. In the theaters that are active (Ethiopia, Libya, Greece) they are taking ground from the Italians or at least they are supporting those who are. The Nazi’s seem to have given up on a cross channel invasion, or at least they are not throwing the air assets into it as they were last summer. If I were an isolationist looking at the situation I would say that they don’t really need us.