Chapter 5 is a case study, further pursuing the conclusions of Chapters 3 and 4, and analysing an example of ‘hard-to-integrate’ foreigner: southern Italian sailors were imagined by British officers and policymakers through the lens of substantial racial stereotypes, compounded by cultural, linguistic, and religious differences, mutual unfamiliarity, and the Mediterranean’s geographical distance from the British world. This did not mean that it was deemed impossible to turn these seamen into useful and respected crew members. However, it did mean that, if this was to happen, they needed to be completely removed from the structures of their own state, and particularly from the influence and perceived corruption and inefficiency of Neapolitan and Sicilian officers. The imbalanced power dynamic between Britain and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which during the French Wars came to depend entirely on the Royal Navy, led to frequent manpower exchange, and affected the interactions between British and Neapolitan officers. Collaboration and patronage flourished, but so did acrimony and rivalry. This tense undercurrent offered British officers a chance of separating the seamen whom they were reclaiming as perfectly good recruits from the stereotypes of corruption and unreliability that they associated with those seamen’s country.

Operation Torch, the 8 November 1942 Anglo-American landings in French North Africa (AFN), strengthened and ballooned the Mediterranean into a major “Second Front” and put the Anglo-Americans on the strategic offensive until the war’s end. Torch also crystallized the contradictions of Vichy’s wartime posture, and dispelled all ambiguity of “the order to defend against whomever.” The collapse of the Vichy formula of a French Army surviving within a sovereign, neutral France, an open invitation to Axis forces to enter Tunisia and Constantine, and the scuttling of the French High Seas Fleet at Toulon confirmed France’s descent to the status of a second-, if not third-tier power. Going forward, Torch removed any incentive for the Germans to cease to meddle in French internal politics, and ironically accelerated Vichy collaboration. Torch became the first instance in which resistance was integrated into operational planning. The Darlan deal alienated the resistance in France and drove them into the arms of de Gaulle, making it virtually impossible for the Allies to jettison the nettlesome French Leader. AFN supplied both a geopolitical “trampoline” to advance the Allies’ strategic agenda and a fragile venue for France’s resurrection. The French reaction to the Anglo-American invasion was undermined in part by confused command arrangements in AFN, made more complex by Darlan’s fortuitous presence in Algiers. This chapter traces the tortuous hesitations of the French command in Algiers and Rabat, which allowed Axis forces to gain a foothold in Tunisia. The so-called “Darlan deal” struck between Darlan and Eisenhower to cease French resistance in AFN was to have far-reaching consequences. In the wake of Torch, all the accouterments of Vichy independence disappeared – the zone libre, the empire, the armistice army, and the fleet.