Let us look at the Paris Protocols. (May 1941): part of a French reaction to Operation Catapult, and see how it finally falls out as played.
Mers el Kebir? (Operation Catapult) July 1940
Dakar? (Admittedly bungled. Operation Menace.) September 1940
Paris Protocols. (May 1941)
Syria? (Operation Exporter.) June/July 1941
Madagascar? (Operation Ironclad) May-June 1942, It is a big island.
French scuttle themselves? (Operation Anton foiled.) November 1942^1
Tunis? (This one took awhile.) May 1943
IOW, the British were between the Germans and the Paris Protocols, and in the end the French^1 had no intention of allowing the Germans to use them as patsies, either.
you are off a year on Dakar ( I always consider Mers el Kebir and Dakar a one-two punch by UK), when Exporter took place to clear Vichy out of Syria, the French had sent reinforcements as far as Greece but left waiting for German air transport the final leg of journey. likely that does not happen absent Barbarossa.
my speculation also had nothing to do with use of French fleet, but simply to use two locations they did use historically (Aleppo and Tunis) in a more coherent manner.
think it was well understood by Vichy regime once Nazis were fully invested in the USSR invasion that German-French relations and the entire Med were of little importance to them.
Corrected timeline, which just renders the Paris Protocols even more meaningless.
The point is
Can one explain (^^^) how one uses these bases in the face of an enemy who controls the sea and air? If that braindead mass murdering sociopathic corporal or any of his equally criminally stupid minions had learned FRENCH history as Admiral Darlan DID, he would have known what happened to another would be world conqueror (Napoleon) who did not understand SEAPOWER. Napoleon actually got as far as the pyramids, but he lost to a NAVY, too. Same navy in fact, for the same exact reasons; I might point out. No secure logistics and in fact no logistics period. At least the dumb Berlin maniac should have remembered what happened to Kaiser Bill the worst?
May I suggest... this.
And this...
Listen to William Mitchell from 2.20 to 3.10 on especially.
Implicit in both lessons (Mahan and Seversky), is that
one must have land and sea lines of communications to make it all work. The British never lost and the Axis never gained those secure lines of communications, nor when the Axis had some temporary tenuous sea lines of communication to North Africa, did they have the freighters (sealift) to supply more than they did, so their sputtering logistics effort was doubly insufficient and inefficient.
One will note the British moved immediately on Syria-Lebanon?
There was the greatest danger that the Germans might make a go in the Middle East and subvert Turkey to their cause. There was the closest and greatest danger to Egypt, the yoke between the Mediterranean and Indian oceans. The British nailed that one down as soon as they dared.
It is instructive to see
the British moves along the periphery of the North African struggle of 1940-1941 because those are the moves that MAHAN would have urged. Not Corbett... MAHAN.
To compound the error of not understanding seapower, the Berlin maniac and his criminal crew airlifted 50,000+ future prisoners of war into Tunis to swell the Anglo-American final prisoner bag.
Can't swim back to Italy once the Royal Navy seals off your sea borne line of retreat.