archaeogeek
Banned
The Suez Canal was being repeatedly blocked by mines dropped from German aircraft operating from Rhodes, to such an extent in 1940 and early ‘41 that the army in the western desert was at times receiving only half the supplies it required.
You don’t need to take possession of a canal to render it unusable to the enemy.
Franco’s ‘shopping list’ was French Morocco and Western Algeria. The German compensation offer to Vichy was that the French Empire would be compensated with further overseas possessions following the defeat of the British. Some deft diplomacy by Germany and these two conflicting demands could have been managed; Germany had ‘settled’ the conflicting territorial demands of Hungary and Rumania and had resisted handing significant French territories to Italy so it is certainly not beyond the bounds of the possible.
Hungary and Romania were not France, not in scale, not in power, and not in insufferable amounts of pride. And Algeria was on the level of Alsace-Lorraine in terms of national territory in the consciousness of the time.