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:
“Your good mother tells me you are feeling very badly in your new situation. Allow me to assure you it is a perfect certainty that you will, very soon, feel better—quite happy—if you only stick to the resolution you have taken to procure a military education. I am older than you, have felt badly myself, and know, what I tell you is true. Adhere to your purpose and you will soon feel as well as you ever did.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“No further evidence is needed to show that “mental illness” is not the name of a biological condition whose nature awaits to be elucidated, but is the name of a concept whose purpose is to obscure the obvious.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)
“Science, unguided by a higher abstract principle, freely hands over its secrets to a vastly developed and commercially inspired technology, and the latter, even less restrained by a supreme culture saving principle, with the means of science creates all the instruments of power demanded from it by the organization of Might.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)