I guess France gets completely occupied, Carl. Its fleet joins the Royal Navy instead of being shelled by it at Mers-el-Kabir. As you say, the Italians have some thinking to do!

Good question, this.

 

Hitler had a compelling obsession with the Russia. I believe that Hitler would have reasoned that a North African French government in exile could have been left to languish until he had pacified all Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.

 

Of course, as I have posted in the past, I believe Hitler should have sought to gain control of the Mediterranean immediately after defeating France.

 

Hitler seems to have been confidant that Britain would not succeed in holding out against him. I believe Hitler most likely had counted on the Brits to join him rather than to fight him and that this was a delusion of HItler's encouraged by Hitler's British admirers such as the Duke of Windsor.

 

 

Yes, he was aghast that the Brits knocked back his 1940 peace offer. He was upset that Franco wouldn't let him through to Gibraltar. Turkey stayed defiantly neutral until the war was effectively won. He really hoped the Vichy French would join him at one stage, but the Italians upset them occupying the Riviera.

 

The Mediterranean seemed like a whole bunch of headaches to the Fuhrer.

As it turned, Russia was a much greater headache for Herr Schickelgruber though. One may wonder how he could conceive of such an undertaking as the invasion of Russia after having been balked  by such seemingly lesser challenges.

 

Some observations related to Hitler's not securing the Med before attacking the USSR, IIRC -

 

In the Spring of 1941, the Germans had to delay Barbarossa from May to June in order to invade the Balkans and Greece partially, at least, in response to the presence of British forces landed in Greece. The Germans could have used that extra month in their race to Moscow.

 

The British El Alamain offensive could only have been undertaken because of tanks provided to them from across the Atlantic. Those tanks probably could not have gotten there had the Germans controlled the Med and the Red Sea.

 

Germany's North African campaign failed in 1943 and as a result hundreds of thousands of Axis soldiers went into captivity because they had no means of escape across the Med. Later in Russia, it was the decline in available divisions that hurt Germany.

 

Rommel was supplied only with difficulty because of the British control of the Med.

 

In 1943, the Allies invaded Sicily. This occurred during the Kursk offensive in Russia and resulted in badly needed divisions being switched to Italy at a critical time in the war in the east.

 

The allies bombed Hitler's Romanian oil fields from bases in Italy.

 

 

 

 

Had Renaud enough support for moving the government to Africa he & his supporters would have remained in power in the following months and the others would have to choose to follow or stay in France.  It is likely the Germans would have tried to set up a collrabanationist government as with Norway & some of the other occupied nations, but that government would have not have the legitimacy that the Vichy government had as they directly inherited power from the elected government.   In other words had Renaud been able to move the government to Africa the Vichy government never would have existed.

Clackers... yes indeed the Italian have something to think about.   The combined Allied fleet in the Mediterrainian outnumbers the Italian between 2-1 & 3-1.   The Italian airforce in the summer of 1940 had not yet recived many of the new modern aircraft and few were in production.  Conversely the French had placed huge orders for aircraft with the US manufactors.  The intial deliverys of just 300+ had arrived before the defeat.  In transit were over three hundred more with over 1000 ordered in production.  The French airforce was in the act of transfering its remaining best aircraft to Africa when the ceasefire orders came.  That would be between 400 & 600 more aircraft.  Plus the support equipment and parts brought from the US and France.  Add in the few hundred aircraft already in Morroco, Algeria, and Tunis and the French have nearly 2000 aircraft to harrass the italians in Sicilly and Lybia.  On the ground the French had roughly ten depot or training divsions with small arms and artillery.  Augment those with whatever that can be evacuated from France and in a couple months a couple corps of five or six divsions can be formed up on the Tunisian/Lybian border.

Then there are British reinforcements.  With the ports like Algers, Oran, and Tunis in Allied hands it makes much more sense for Britian to  send its reinforcements to Tunisia rather than Egypt.  They arrive on a battle fron nearly two months earlier.  And, from the railhead at Sfaz or Gabes it is only 350 kilometers to Tripoli, as opposed to 1500+ kilometers from the railhead at Mersa Matruh in Egypt.  Once the danger of invasion of Britian recedes  in October then the RAF can begain sending its extra squadrons to help the French in Tunisia.