ABSTRACT
DURING THE early days of June 1940 evidence continued to accumulate that the period of uneasy calm in the Mediterranean was at an end. On the 1st, German aircraft bombed Marseilles and the S.S. Orford (20,000 tons) was sunk, an unpleasant foretaste of things to come. Daily reports were received of Italian troopships leaving Brindisi, Syracuse and Naples for Libya, and of Italian merchant ships in South American ports bunkering much larger quantities of coal and oil than normally.
