The path to victory

by Douglas Porch

From the Publisher: The Mediterranean theater in World War II has long been overlooked by those who believe it was little more than a string of small-scale battles-sideshows that were of minor importance in a war whose outcome was decided in the clashes of mammoth tank armies in northern Europe. But in this groundbreaking new book, one of our finest military historians argues that the Mediterranean was, in fact, World War II's pivotal theater. In The Path to Victory, Porch examines the Mediterranean as an integrated arena, one in which events in Syria and Suez influenced the survival of Gibraltar. Churchill's controversial decision in 1940 to contest the Axis in the Mediterranean, followed by Roosevelt's insistence two years later that his service chiefs undergo a Mediterranean initiation, laid the foundation for Allied victory in Europe.^ Although conventional wisdom argues that Hitler could not have won World War II in the Mediterranean, Porch believes that the Allies might well have