Purpose and Organization
Further information: East African Campaign (World War II)While, in general, the Red Sea Flotilla was not used aggressively by the Italians, the British viewed it as a potential threat to Allied convoys traveling in the Horn of Africa area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. This was a critical resupply route for British forces operating from Egypt. The Red Sea Flotilla was especially well situated to attack convoys headed from the Gulf of Aden through the Red Sea and to the Suez Canal, forcing Allied ships to take a much longer passage around the Cape of Good Hope.
On 10 June 1940, the day Italy declared war, the Italian Red Sea Flotilla had seven destroyers organized into two squadrons, a squadron of five Motor Torpedo Boats (Motoscafo Armato Silurante, or MAS), and eight submarines organized into two squadrons. The main base was at Massawa, with other bases at Assab (also in Eritrea) and Kismayu, in southern Italian Somaliland.
Read more about this topic: Red Sea Flotilla
Famous quotes containing the words purpose and, purpose and/or organization:
“With the breakdown of the traditional institutions which convey values, more of the burdens and responsibility for transmitting values fall upon parental shoulders, and it is getting harder all the time both to embody the virtues we hope to teach our children and to find for ourselves the ideals and values that will give our own lives purpose and direction.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)
“Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilised people is poetical.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
“The newly-formed clothing unions are ready to welcome her; but woman shrinks back from organization, Heaven knows why! It is perhaps because in organization one find the truest freedom, and woman has been a slave too long to know what freedom means.”
—Katharine Pearson Woods (1853–1923)