CONTENTS

THE FLEET’S PURPOSE

Doctrine

FLEET FIGHTING POWER

The Ships
Technical Factors

HOW THE FLEET OPERATED

Command and Communication
Intelligence and Deception
Logistics and Facilities

COMBAT AND ANALYSIS

The Fleet in Combat
Analysis
FURTHER READING

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

 THE FLEET’S PURPOSE

In 1914, the French Marine Nationale (MN), the Italian Regia Marina (RM)
and the Austro-Hungarian k.(u.)k. Kriegsmarine were the three regional navies
of the Mediterranean. All were unable, however, to project sea power beyond
the Mediterranean except for a few armoured or protected cruisers and sloops.
ey also could not count on the most recent types of warships (super-
dreadnoughts, battlecruisers and light cruisers) and technology (such as
analogue mechanical re-control instruments) that the advanced blue-water
navies of Britain, Germany and the United States relied upon.
By 1919, the Habsburgs’ navy had gone, and the French and Italian eets
were still some steps behind the Royal Navy (RN) and the US Navy (USN).
e rst re-control systems were soon to be introduced, but there was still a
long way to go to perfect them (although the Italian solution was more
promising than the Vickers conjugateur graphique bought by the Marine
Nationale after World War I). e MN’s eet included pseudo-super-
dreadnoughts of the Bretagne class which were essentially Courbet-class
dreadnoughts but with 13.39in guns. ese offered only a 15,800yds range
and the same thin armour as their predecessors. Italian big guns could,
however, since 1916, reach 26,200yds, but their 12in main guns were unable
to pierce the super-dreadnoughts’ armoured decks (even by plunging re from
9,000yds, as the Battle of Jutland had shown).
e real problem, however, for both Paris and Rome was the fact that the
RN was now back in the Mediterranean after a long absence. In 1904, Britain’s
Mediterranean Fleet, not counting the squadron based at Gibraltar, wielded 12
pre-dreadnoughts. In 1914, this force had been reduced, due to the increasing
German threat, to just three battlecruisers. France and Italy took advantage of
Britain’s changing priorities in 1911–12, pocketing Morocco, Libya and the
Dodecanese islands in the Aegean Sea. During the post-war era, the 1st Battle
Squadron based at Malta never had less than four modern battleships
supported by a seaplane carrier (replaced from 1924, by a real aircraft carrier).
e balance of power east of the Rock had changed. With the absence of
Germany and Russia after their defeats, the Mediterranean appeared to expect
a new Pax Britannica, crowding out the Latin powers’ competing ambitions in
the Middle East and the Balkans. Aside from this, the United States, in spite of
their 1919-onwards policy advocating non-involvement in European and
Asian con icts, were far from satis ed by the Anglo-American convention
regarding American rights in Palestine signed in 1924, and even less, in 1928,
by the Red Line Agreement about oil monopolies in the ex-Ottoman
territories.
Eastern Mediterranean, 1 September 1940. 15in Turrets 1 and 2 (A and B in the RN) of the
R.N. (Regia Nave or Royal Warship) Vittorio Veneto. The modern 35,000t battleships of the
Littorio class were the pride of the RM battleforce (‘La Squadra’, as it was called in Italy).
They were the only real Italian battleships as the modernized dreadnoughts with their
12.6in guns lacked the power of the 15in guns. (AC)

is was the scenario into which the RM battleforce, the core of the Italian
Navy, which had rejected journalistic ideas of a navy formed of submarines,
aircraft and large 120-ton MTBs armed with 4in guns, would play its political
and strategic role during the following quarter of a century.
After the 1918 disappearance of the ve-century-old Austrian threat, Italy
was able to pursue its economic interests and ambitions along all the
Mediterranean coasts and beyond, on a much larger scale than before 1914.
eoretically, France was Rome’s main adversary, as was the case between 1871
and 1914, but since 1919, Paris preferred to adopt a conciliatory policy
towards Italy, while Britain was less cooperative.
During World War I, Italy and the ‘Entente’ (the UK, France and Russia)
had been allies, not friends. Rome had been ‘kindly blackmailed’ to join the
war by the British and French naval blockade, initiated from August 1914,
however, by May 1915, 25 per cent of Italian factories had closed down
because of lack of coal and raw materials. e partnership that followed
between the respective navies was marked (like the Axis naval collaboration
during World War II) by great formal courtesy and a general feeling of
mistrust.
e tactical results of the Battle of Jutland were received with a certain
satisfaction in Italy (and in France), as con rmation that ‘Nelson’s touch’ was,
after a century, a one-off. During the two main surface actions fought in the
Adriatic on 29 December 1915 and 15 May 1917, the allied British and
Italians pointed accusing ngers at each other, especially during the Action of
the Strait of Otranto, when Admiral Alfredo Acton (later Chief of Staff of the
RM, 1919–21 and 1925–27) was unimpressed by the Royal Navy, observing,
after the light cruiser Dartmouth was struck by one 3.9in shell (judged, then
and later, by the British to be a 6in projectile), that the ship turned away at
once, ordering her forward magazine to be ooded, and breaking off the
pursuit of the Austro-Hungarian squadron.
Despite France’s irritation with the Washington Naval Conference (1921–
22), which ended by dictating a parity in French and Italian battleships, Paris
and Rome agreed not to support Britain during the Turkish Chanak Crisis in
1922, contributing to Lloyd George’s fall from power. A few days later, a new
government in Rome led by Benito Mussolini complicated things even more.
Admiral Giuseppe Fioravanzo, the most important Italian strategist of the 20th century. In
1924, he authored the future strategy for the RM’s naval conflict against the UK. During
World War II, he alternated time at the Supermarina in 1940–42 with the command of the
modern 35,000t battleships squadron and an autonomous cruiser squadron. As
commander at Taranto, he had a clear-minded, decisive role in the directing of the Italian
Navy during the Armistice and was ostensibly the real leader in Southern Italy as all public
services were led or directly manned by the RM after the political and organizational
collapse on 9 September 1943. He also broadcast to the public during 1940–43 about the
ongoing naval situation. (AC)

e rst big problem was the Corfu Incident in August 1923, when the RM
bombarded and occupied the Greek island after the assassination of Italian
officers near the Albanian border in Epirus. Britain had supported Athens since
1919 in the Balkans and Anatolia, in contrast to France, Italy and the United
States. Mussolini believed that if the RM intervened, it would be possible to
obtain consent for Italy to create a naval base in the Dodecanese (a decision
Britain opposed until 1925), and perhaps to pocket Corfu itself.
When the Italian Navy Minister Admiral Paolo aon di Revel and the CoS
Admiral Gino Ducci discovered, with horror, that Britain had not been
appeased beforehand, as the new Prime Minister had agreed would happen,
and that Mussolini was merely a chancer compared to the clever, daring and
lucky Cavour, they faced him down to avoid a clash with the Mediterranean
Fleet. Mussolini’s reply demonstrated a total ignorance of sea power; he really
believed submarines, MAS boats (the Italian MTBs) and aircraft could
confront British battleships. To conclude, he asked how long the RM and Italy
could endure a ght against Britain. aon di Revel’s terse answer was ‘72
hours’. Diplomacy and French help – since Mussolini had supported the
Franco-Belgian occupation of the Rhineland in 1923 – defused the crisis
within a month with a settlement which required a formal apology from
Greece, the neutralization of Corfu and the payment of an indemnity,
delivered to the victims of the RM’s bombardment of the ancient Venetian
fortress at Corfu.

DOCTRINE
When Italy joined the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, in
1882, Rome included a clause, the so-called Lodo Mancini, stating that on no
account would the new kingdom ght a war against Britain, the naval
superpower of the 19th century. In 1924–25, while Britain and Italy were
agitating one another in the Middle and Far East, the RM considered, for the
rst time, the ‘impossible hypothesis’ of a con ict with Britain. e author of
the strategy was brilliant Lieutenant Giuseppe Fioravanzo, who in 1921 had
supported, the proposal for an Italian Navy 10,000t carrier.
e principles of his thinking were:

Battleships (flanked by carriers) were the core of the navy. At the

modern long ranges, the classic 5kt advantage requested since
Tsushima to cross the T of the enemy line was not important, while
armour was decisive.
It would be very difficult to sink a modern battleship (not a
battlecruiser) at the current and increasing ranges of naval artillery.
Only very few direct hits would be obtained in these conditions. The
USN estimated, in 1921, that its 16in guns would achieve, at
 26,000yds, a 2 per cent success with the aid of efficient air spotting.
Increased accuracy was possible as the distances decreased, but in such
cases, the danger would be so great as to induce the force that was
damaged first by the modern, huge ranges, to break off the
engagement. The best long-range shooting battlefleet would thus gain
local sea control, opening its sea lanes and closing them to the enemy.

In autumn 1916, the German submarine threat had induced British

merchant shipping with the Empire to leave the Mediterranean and use the
Cape Route as an alternative. But the year after, due to the by-now unrestricted
U-boat warfare, this option had proved to be too expensive in terms of tonnage
and home imports.
Pending the availability of modern battleships within the RM line of battle,
if (a big if ) Italy was able to induce the Mediterranean Fleet to leave its
traditional and well-equipped base of Malta, then RM naval guerrilla strategy
could close the Strait of Sicily to British commerce. Like the campaign against
Austria-Hungary in the Upper Adriatic during World War I, this was planned
to cause serious losses to the enemy and to threaten the Ionian Sea with mines
and expendable warships, submarines and, at night, torpedo boats and a new
type of large, 32t round-bilge MTB named ‘autocannoniere’. e decisive tool
for such a task had to be a railway battery based at Cape Passero, in the
extreme southern corner of Sicily, consisting of 8.2in long-range siege guns
based on some 15in guns manufactured during World War I for the four
never-completed battleships of the Caracciolo class and modi ed as
210/102mm guns.
As history shows, Fioravanzo concluded proper use of sea power could
facilitate victory, but the nal success had to come by land. e local control of
the central basin of the Mediterranean would therefore be exploited to ferry
and supply, from Italy to Tobruk, a small Regio Esercito (Italian Army)
motorized corps which had to cross the Western Desert to join the Egyptians,
still troublesome after the revolt of 1919, and expel the small British garrison.
is ambitious programme was tested during the naval exercises of 1924–
25, but no one, especially Mussolini, considered it probable. At the same time,
the Washington Treaty and budget constraints did not allow Italy (or France)
to put on their slips anything bigger than heavy cruisers, while in 1927, the
RN completed the ‘two ugly sisters’ Nelson and Rodney – the most powerful
and heavily protected, and the only post-Jutland battleships in the world.
At the end of 1926, the balance of power in Europe was turned abruptly
upside down as a clandestine quasi-war in the Balkans began, with the warring
parties backed by France and Italy. Britain came down almost automatically on
the side of Rome, which gave Italy some small economic and prestige
satisfaction. e subsequent world crisis helped to avoid any naval race,
con rming a substantive equality between the old RM and MN battleline and
cruiser squadrons. In 1931, a further upheaval followed in Europe. e new
French Prime Minister Pierre Laval, mesmerized by the by-now not-so-secret
German rearmament, developed a new policy towards Italy, giving Mussolini a
silent but ambiguous green light for his movements in East Africa. During the
same year, the British adopted the Imperial Preference tariff, which promoted
home production of goods over those of the Empire and foreign producers.
e global naval balance was affected again in 1931 by the French answer to
the laying down in 1929 of the rst German 10,000t pocket battleship,
Deutschland. e new 26,500t warship, Dunkerque, begun in 1932, forced
Italy to respond. Its budget did not allow, however, an order for any of the
ambitious fast battleships from 28,000t to 35,000t planned by the RM
between 1927 and 1933. e only option was a radical reconstruction, in
1933–37, of the old dreadnoughts Cavour and Cesare. In 1934, news about a
fourth German warship of the Deutschland class followed by French
parliamentary debates about the Strasbourg, a twin of Dunkerque, persuaded
Mussolini (Minister of the Navy between 1925 and 1929 and, again, 1933–
43), to follow his CoS Admiral Domenico Cavagnari’s advice about the best
choice of what to build: no half-measures like France, but the most powerful
battleships in the world, similar to the revolutionary Duilio class of 1871
which had downgraded other existing ironclads. Within a few months, these
new 35,000t warships Littorio and Vittorio Veneto were laid down. e
Admiralty and the British government did not believe the Italians would be
able to complete them.
The modernized Cavour in 1937. A masterpiece of reconstruction designed by General
GN Francesco Rotundi. The new machinery extended one full deck level higher than
before, including a separate armour box to protect it using improved silicon-manganese
ER Steel which seems to have been similar to the contemporary British D-Steel. (AC)

After Britain incorporated the region of Hadhramaut in South Arabia into

the Empire in 1933 (without the approval of Paris and Rome), the British
Colonial Office began a series of initiatives in Ethiopia which culminated (via
the agreement about Zeila with Addis Ababa and the later Wal Wal Incident)
in the Abyssinian Crisis of 1935–36. At that time, Italy still had only two fairly
old dreadnoughts, Doria and Duilio, used to defend Augusta (Sicily) and
Naples; while the RN, after leaving Malta in August 1935, had at least ve
battleships and two carriers in the Mediterranean. Cavagnari had adopted,
since 1933, Fioravanzo’s doctrine with a personal variant: tonnage war, and a
powerful ally like France or, at worst, Germany, would suffice.
e Italian Army’s long-range gun had proved a failure in 1935, however,
the Regia Aeronautica (RA), the Italian Air Force, had long been vocal in
promoting propaganda about its speed records and transatlantic ights
(particularly since the arrival of future Air Marshal Italo Balbo); this
propaganda proved extremely effective, and the RN relinquished nearby Malta
in August 1935 for the almost non-existent naval base of Alexandria and the
modest facilities of Gibraltar.
 e Abyssinian Crisis in 1936 was immediately followed by the unexpected
Spanish Civil War. Considering it to be something of a 20th-century War of
the Spanish Succession, Britain did not obstruct the Italian intervention into
Spain, con dent that Mussolini would never try to annex the Balearic Islands
or anything else. However, after the abdication of King Edward VIII, a friend
of the Italian monarch Victor Emmanuel III since 1916, the British attitude
underwent a sharp change and the clandestine RM surface and submarine
campaigns against Republican Spanish shipping in 1936–37 were studded
with incidents where RN warships were attacked. is did not improve
Italian–British relations. In September 1937, the British Admiralty was
charged, for the rst time since 1912, with planning for a brief naval war
against Italy. Almost simultaneously, two modernized Cavours were
commissioned. e RM had at last a small, modern battle squadron.
e path to war and the development of the Axis relationship in 1936–39
was a predictable evolution. When war began in summer 1940, the RM had to
face the RN with a battleship force conceived in 1932 to face France only.
Italy’s plans had never envisaged a war against the UK, but just a confrontation
as had happened in Ethiopia in 1935, which would reshuffle the cards in the
Middle East and the Balkans and lead to a peace conference to overturn the
Versailles settlement. e decision for a new pair of Littorios was made in
December 1937, with the new battleships Roma and Impero scheduled to enter
service in late 1941.
 FLEET FIGHTING POWER

THE SHIPS
The Mediterranean after World War I
During World War II, Italy’s battle eet was formed by battleships (a category
including both the so-called super-dreadnoughts, dreadnoughts and the
surviving battlecruisers of World War I), cruisers and eet destroyers. In 1919,
the RM had ve dreadnoughts in service: Dante Alighieri, the twins Conte di
Cavour and Giulio Cesare, and their half-sisters Andrea Doria and Duilio. At
the same time, the French Navy battle line was formed by the dreadnoughts
Courbet, France, Jean Bart and Paris, and by the super-dreadnoughts (or
almost) Bretagne, Provence and Lorraine.
On the slips there were, respectively, four battleships of Italy’s Caracciolo
class and ve of France’s Normandie class, but there was no chance they would
be completed as their design had been compromised by the Battle of Jutland.
Too thinly protected, they lacked an adequate armoured deck against long-
range plunging projectiles, which the dreadnoughts’ single-calibre big-gun
main armament and modern re-control directors now made possible.
A study was completed in 1917 examining a reconstruction of Caracciolo, to
improve the original horizontal armoured deck of only 2in (actually 30 +
14mm, i.e. much less than the 2½–1in decks of RN battlecruisers lost at
Jutland), to a new 90–110mm deck (3.54–4.33in), but this implied an
increase in the ships’ draught and displacement (to 34,000t), which
compromised the effectiveness of the side belt. e idea was dropped and, in
1919, the Ansaldo yard of Genoa proposed, as a private venture, to use
Caracciolo’s hull and machinery for a conversion to an aircraft carrier
(following the lines of the British Argus) or as a fast seaplane carrier. e idea
was refused by the Navy for budgetary reasons and the ship, launched in 1920,
was sold to a cruise line. e prospect of converting Caracciolo to a merchant
vessel was soon relinquished as, after a revision of the programme, it was
considered too expensive. e hull was towed to Baia, near Naples, in
December 1920 and mothballed there, at the expense of the RM, in view of a
possible emergency conversion to a carrier.
e full picture of the dreadnought situation in the Mediterranean during
those years also includes the former Austro-Hungarian battleships Prinz Eugen
and Tegetthoff, seized by the RM in November 1918 at Pola. e rst was
handed to the French in 1919 who sank her as a target on 22 June 1922,
according to the terms of the peace treaty. e Italians cheated, preserving the
Tegetthoff in Venice until late 1923 when the battleship was sent to La Spezia to
be broken up gradually over the next two years.
A proposal was made, in November 1919, to recover the capsized Austro-
Hungarian Viribus Unitis, sunk at dawn on 1 November 1918 by an Italian
attack craft, from the sea bottom – thus circumventing the rules of the peace
treaty signed at Versailles. is plan was soon abandoned and the battleship
was broken and recovered piecemeal during the 1920s.
In 1921, the threat of an enduring rst rate naval power in the Adriatic Sea
after the end of Austria-Hungary, vanished. Belgrade had planned to buy (with
Czechoslovakian money) the former White Russian battleship General Alekseev,
just interned at Bizerte, and some large and modern destroyers with a seaplane
carrier. e programme was rejected, wisely, by Paris to avoid any complication
with Rome and the warships soon become, because of lack of maintenance,
scrap iron.

Naval Aviation Struggles

In 1921, the RM asked for a 7,000t fast seaplane carrier and two non-
protected and fast 5,000t cruisers armed with eight 6in high-velocity guns
(152mm/50). ese had been designed in 1914 following the new Italian naval
ballistic doctrine envisaged in 1909. According to the original schedule of
1913, this new gunnery system would become viable during the 1920s once
the necessary Italian-made range nders and re-control calculating machines
were completed and tested. e Caracciolos, conceived in 1910, were, in fact,
a stop-gap solution, with their originally planned 12 15in guns1 whose range
was limited to 19,600yds, to face the announced (and never laid down) four
Austro-Hungarian Ersatz Monarch-class battleships, armed with ten 13.8in
guns, 21kt and a displacement of 24,500t.
 18 March 1937 Tripoli. Mussolini, Balbo, the party secretary Achille Starace and Minister
Alessandro Lessona on the cruiser Pola. Behind them Admiral Cavagnari, the often-
ignored naval adviser of Il Duce between 1933 and 1940. (AC)

e 1920s budget crisis caused by wartime debts to Britain (the richer

United States, by far the biggest lender to Italy’s balance of payments, had since
1919 granted very generous conditions, while France was almost absent from
Rome’s general ledger) caused the cancellation of the two cruisers until 1926,
when they were nally ordered. It took another two years for them to be laid
down – still because of lack of funds – following a new and much-debated
design proposed in 1924 by Colonel Genio Navale (GN: Naval Engineering
Corps) Giuseppe Rota. e fast seaplane carrier too was a victim of the
Treasury axe. In August 1922, the nal, weak, parliamentary Liberal
government before Mussolini decided to end its construction. It preferred a
cheaper option: converting a passenger ship on the slip which became the
Giuseppe Miraglia, a 4.880t, 21kt vessel with two catapults, carrying a dozen
oatplanes or small ying boats. She was only marginally stable, so much so
that she capsized in 1925 before being completed. Miraglia was recovered and
commissioned two years later.2
When the modernization of the two Cavours was nally con rmed in 1932,
after a year of doubts, Miraglia would be too slow to steam with the future
battleships. e adoption in 1933 of two bulges to increase stability made her
even slower, too slow for anything other than auxiliary tasks as a transport and
depot ship. e nal bill was more than the original 7,000t true warship
planned in 1920 would have cost – a waste of money. e availability of a fast
seaplane carrier with about ten oatplanes would have addressed what was the
biggest handicap suffered by the World War II RM by day: insufficient air
reconnaissance.
e real tragedy for the RM was, however, the introduction, in 1923, of the
Regia Aeronautica (RA), the Italian Air Force. e new service had been
strongly advocated by some of the most efficient blackshirt leaders, themselves
Army demobilized aviators. Always a Lilliputian force (with an average of
about 1,200 ghters, attack aircraft and reconnaissance planes during World
War II, facing more than 5,000 in the RAF or the Luftwaffe), the RA was
always concerned about a rebirth of the Forza Aerea, the Italian naval air
branch incorporated in 1923 (similar to when the RAF absorbed the Royal
Naval Air Service between April 1918 and May 1939, or the French
Aéronavale was put at the orders of the Air Force between 1928 and 1932).
Being Il Duce’s pet service, the RA starkly opposed any Navy proposal that
appeared to intrude on its territory. No carriers, no torpedo bombers, no (from
1931) bombers or ghters controlled by the RM; only some air reconnaissance
groups (MARINAVIA) formed by oatplanes and ying boats based on land,
and spotters on the warships with Navy officers as observers, but not pilots.
e number of reconnaissance aircraft and their type were, in any case,
decided by the RA, and its available strength before and during World War II
(less than 200 aircraft) would always be half of the size planned in 1931 for a
war against France alone.
An idea about reconstructing the dreadnought Leonardo da Vinci as a carrier
(sunk by an internal explosion in 1916, re oated upside down in 1919 and
righted two years later) was short-lived during 1922, as her hull was considered
inappropriate for such a role. A 10,180t carrier for 20 aircraft was planned in
1923, but the RA stopped construction the next year, not only because of
budgetary constraints. e design, made by the OTO (Odero-Terni-Orlando)
yard of Livorno, was proposed later, in a slightly reduced version, by the
affiliate CRDA-Trieste company to Argentina as an alternative to a third
cruiser for the Veinticinco de Mayo class built in Italy by OTO, but the
programme for a third warship was cancelled by Buenos Aires in 1928 both for
budgetary and political reasons.

The seaplane carrier Giuseppe Miraglia. A very short-lived capital ship. During World War
II, she served as a depot ship for floatplanes and submarines and for the trials of the
Re.2000 fighters embarked, from September 1942, on the Littorios. (AC)

In 1924, the Italian government had declared itself unable to pay for new
cruisers and a carrier. In August 1925, the RM admirals instead asked for a
pair of 12,480t, 34kt, heavy cruiser-carrier hybrids, armed with eight 8in guns
in two quadruple turrets, and designed by Colonel GN Rota. Mussolini’s
answer was that the money was not there and this idea too was dropped.
Minister of the Navy aon di Revel, while complaining about the law which
only gave the Army (Italy’s ‘Senior Service’) the role of Chief of the General
Staff,3 had declared to Parliament that a 10,000t carrier would be too
vulnerable under the waterline and that it would be necessary to order a 25–
30,000t ship (in essence the Caracciolo). Di Revel resigned in May 1925, and
in 1926 the newly appointed RA Secretary Italo Balbo persuaded Mussolini to
scrap the Caracciolo hull.
In December 1927, a further proposal for an experimental carrier of slightly
less than 10,000t (a new design by Colonel GN Curio De Bernardis, which
would allow Italy to commission a carrier without touching the total tonnage
terms of the Washington Naval Treaty) was requested by the deputy CoS of the
Navy, Rear-Admiral Romeo Bernotti. But the proposal was repulsed by Balbo
and Mussolini. e RM obtained, on the same occasion, the green light for a
four-year programme which included the four heavy cruisers of the Zara class
and a third Trento, the Bolzano, being therefore able to even the score with the
French 8in cruisers now authorized in Paris (Suffren, Colbert and Foch) or
envisaged (Dupleix and Algérie). Due to lack of funds, neither France nor Italy
had taken advantage of the clause of the treaty signed in Washington in 1922,
which had allowed them to build new battleships since 1927.

The cruiser Trento in her original appearance. The Trentos were the testbed of the new
RM warships of the 1920s and 1930s, from machinery to gunnery. Despite some rumours,
they were better protected than the British County and the French Suffrens. (AC)

In addition, by 1928, the battleship Dante had been paid off. Two years
later, the three too-old, too-slow Courbets were transformed into gunnery and
signal training ships. A series of studies were made, together with a design
scheduled for 1931 by General GN Filippo Bon glietti, for a 15,000t, 29kt
light carrier. is programme too was vehemently opposed by Balbo, with
Mussolini’s ideological approval, in spite of the fact that the RM had saved,
year after year, money for a rst ship. In 1932, a new proposal was made. is
time it was a design by General GN Giuseppe Vian for two small 10,000t
aircraft carriers which could be built by the minor Italian yards leaving free, for
any emergencies, the only two Italian shipyards which were more than 200m
(218yds) long, and adequately equipped with heavy cranes: Ansaldo-Genoa
and CRDA-Trieste, both modernized between 1928 and 1930, to build the
new 50,000gwt superliners Rex and Conte di Savoia.
is idea was scuttled too and the money saved by the RM was transferred
to the Army-controlled General Staff, which used it to buy an ‘untouchable
reserve’ of cast iron at its disposal only. e amazed Germans discovered it
intact after the Italian armistice was announced on 8 September 1943. is
was the last missed opportunity for an Italian carrier during World War II.
A possible Italian carrier sideshow was the Portuguese deal for a seaplane
carrier to be named Sacadura Cabral. e design, proposed by OTO in 1930,
was for a 6,096t warship, 22kt, with four 4.7in guns and 12 oatplanes. Like
other orders assigned by Lisbon to OTO, the warship too was deferred after
the 1931 devaluation of sterling and, in the end, cancelled in 1934.
A last effort was made between 1932 and 1933, when the RM, after the
Vian design for a carrier was abandoned, studied a successor for the Miraglia.
e idea was to build a 5,000t, 27kt cruiser armed with two 6in triple turrets
and three catapults, one xed on the forecastle and two, revolving, aft. e
ship would have been able to serve in East Africa as a submarine depot ship
and would have been equipped with ve oatplanes. e idea was discarded at
the end of 1933, by the new Secretary of the Navy, Cavagnari, hostile to any
compromise on the path of the long-awaited aircraft carrier.

Surface Fleet Rearmament

Until 1931, the naval parity between Italy and France had remained balanced.
In 1922, the MN ordered three unprotected cruisers of the Duguay-Trouin
class and, later, three further minor and one-offs (Pluton, Jeanne d’Arc and
Émile Bertin). Italy replied in 1926–28 with six Condottieris. ey too were
unprotected, but budgetary restrictions and prestige needs resulted in a 5,000t
design with the power (eight 6in guns) of a 7,200t Duguay-Trouin. e
architectural solution found by Colonel GN Rota was to concentrate the main
steam pipes in a single, vulnerable position with no redundancy. e high
block coefficient of the little Condottieris’ hulls caused hard rolling, interfering
with their gunnery.
During the August 1925 meeting with Mussolini, the admirals informed the
Prime Minister about this weakness, but the conclusion was that the likelihood
of such damage to the pipes was low, and would be a case of extremely bad
luck. However, this is exactly what did happen on 19 July 1940 when Colleoni
was hit off Cape Spada.
e following generation of light cruisers ordered in 1931–32 were much
more balanced. France’s six La Galissoniére class were matched by Italy’s four
similar Montecuccoli/Eugenio di Savoia class, and followed by the two bigger
Abruzzi class. ese cruisers now had adequate protection in which a totally
new electric system with triple redundancy served the rudder, re-control,
searchlights, the telephone lines and the various services needing AC
(including weapons). Warships’ electrical power had increased from 39kW on
the 670-ton three-stacker destroyer Sirtori in 1917 to 6,800kW on Vittorio
Veneto 20 years later. During the war, the battleships were modi ed with
further emergency cables inside the cofferdams. Wartime experience con rmed
this as a weakness of the rst generation of Italian cruisers: Pola and Trento
were immobilized and later lost, respectively in March 1941 and June 1942,
after being hit by a torpedo and losing all electric power. In comparison, the
durability of the second generation was demonstrated in similar incidents, by
Garibaldi in July 1941 and Abruzzi four months later. It is necessary to add,
however, that there were episodes (Bolzano in August 1941 and Trieste in
November 1941) when torpedoes hit older vessels, but the electric generating
sets worked by the book, saving the ship.
 Taranto, 1 November 1940. Vittorio Veneto sailors saluting Mussolini, standing on the
motorboat running between the battleship and a destroyer. In tribute to the Italian Parallel
War principle, i.e. a war alongside Germany, but not for Germany, the victory against
Austria-Hungary in 1918 was always celebrated until spring 1943 in spite of German
annoyance. (AC)

As previously mentioned, the 1930s saw a erce battleship competition

between the RM and the MN. In 1931–32, Dunkerque was laid down, and the
rebuilding of Conte di Cavour and Giulio Cesare was ordered; in 1934,
Strasbourg, Littorio and Vittorio Veneto (known to sailors as Veneto) were all
ordered.

LA SQUADRA BEFORE THE ACTION OFF

CALABRIA
The Italian naval programmes mirrored the French ones until 1933. The RM
consequently had an excess of cruisers, but lacked aircraft carriers and longer-
range, bigger destroyers. During the Action off Calabria on 9 July 1940, the
abundance of cruisers allowed Admiral Campioni to use a vanguard and a rearguard
of, respectively, heavy and light cruisers with some extra as a scouting reserve
force (VIII and IV Divisione). The objective was to engage RN battleships before they
could form a line of battle. Campioni would then be able to position his squadron
favourably to the sun and the wind and use his speed advantage to balance his lack
of armour when confronting the British 15in guns. It was impossible to engage all
Italian cruisers at once as an enemy vessel could only be the target of two warships.
Both the Italian and British navies had low opinions about concentration fire.
On the night of 8/9 July 1940, nine of the short-legged Italian destroyers had to sail
back home for refuelling. On the morning of 9 July, two unprotected cruisers, Diaz
and Cadorna, and three destroyers, reported machinery defects and went to
Taranto, thereby missing the action.
On 9 July 1940, five Italian submarines were off Augusta improving the harbour
defence of a twin 15in mounting named ‘Opera A’. Despite rumours to the contrary,
no submarine trap was planned in advance of the encounter with the Mediterranean
Fleet, whose plan to attack the eastern coast of Sicily had been revealed by RM
codebreakers during the night of 4/5 July 1940.
The Italian plan, supported by Mussolini himself, was to let his pet service, the Regia
Aeronautica, attack the Mediterranean Fleet with its three-engined level bombers
before the naval action. The lack of training over the sea, however, by the Regia
Aeronautica crews, scuttled this scheme and no Italian attack aircraft arrived before
1640hrs.
 In 1935, France replied with the 35,000t battleships Jean Bart and Richelieu.
But in truth, since 1931, Paris had not been considered a probable enemy in
Rome. e German threat was the real problem for both France and Italy. As
an act of goodwill, France transferred the three Bretagnes to the Atlantic
Squadron in 1934. e following Anglo-German Naval Agreement, signed in
London on 18 June 1935, allowed Berlin, without the advice of Britain’s
previous allies who were conveniently bypassed, to build a new eet of 35 per
cent of the Royal Navy’s total tonnage, all of which did not help any entente
along the two sides of the Channel. In turn, the Italians were worried about
the Germans selling modern weapons, from 37mm anti-tank guns to small
arms, to Ethiopia. When the MN proposed, in 1935, the conversion of the
two heavy cruisers of the Duquesne class (by now considered too vulnerable as
their protection was limited to gun-shields and a splinter-proof conning tower)
into light carriers with a dozen aircraft, it was not an anti-Italian move (the
RM being without carriers) but as a countermeasure against Britain.
When the chance of a war against Britain for Ethiopia became a real and
present danger, Cavagnari went back to Mussolini to demand a carrier. After
having dropped the proposal to rebuild the dreadnoughts Doria and Duilio as
carriers in early 1935, the Italian admirals now asked for a speedy conversion,
within 12 months, of the 32,582gwt liner Roma as an emergency carrier, along
the lines of the future Allied escort carriers of World War II. Mussolini refused
in October 1935, explaining that his opposition was based on economic and
operative arguments: that the warship, with her original machinery built in
1914 for a Caracciolo-class battleship, would only be able to do 20kt. As a
result, in 1936, the RM proposed a new, more ambitious conversion by
Colonel GN Luigi Gagnotto. is time the ship had to be similar to the
British carrier Furious, and be capable of 26kt once new diesel engines were
tted; these had been recently proposed by the FIAT enterprise for the planned
modernization of the liner Roma and her step-sister Augustus. e delayed
manufacture of these new 7,100bhp engines (the most powerful in the world),
which only made their nal, successful trial in autumn 1942, defeated this
plan too.
Naples, May 1938. The large Italian submarine fleet was the best deterrent towards the
RN during the four 1935–37 crises in the Mediterranean. Its value was considered much
reduced by the British after the introduction of ASDIC from summer 1937. (AC)
23 February 1942. The sinking, by a Cant Z 501 flying boat and the torpedo boat Circe, of
the British submarine P 38. Italian ASW doctrine and effectiveness evolved together with
the RN underwater campaign during 1940–43. Forty nine British or Allied boats were lost
in the Mediterranean Sea before 8 September 1943. (AC)

In 1936, Cavagnari proposed to Mussolini, in the wake of the conquest of

Addis Ababa, a hugely ambitious ten-year naval programme for a gigantic
breakout eet formed (including the former programmes now completed or in
progress) of nine battleships, three carriers, 36 cruisers, 142 destroyers and
torpedo boats, 84 submarines, 16 sloops, 24 submarine hunters and much else.
A Plan B proposal was for six battleships, 22 cruisers and 116 destroyers and
torpedo boats.
e Italian Navy had, in 1936, two old dreadnoughts (and four more being
modernized or under construction, in the yards of Genoa and Trieste), 21
cruisers (and two others on the slips) and 135 destroyers and torpedo boats,
old warships included. Plan B was, thus, only a modernization programme.
Among the battleships of this last programme, there were two which were a
sort of Italian 17,500t pocket battleship, diesel-engined and with a main
armament of six 10in guns.
It was, anyway, a pipe dream as the Italian budget, after the strain of the
economic sanctions voted by the League of Nations and enforced in 1935–36,
had no chance of making this materialize. Much cheaper and more promising
were the new generation of attack craft studied and tested from 1935: SLC
(Siluro a Lenta Corsa), the so-called human torpedo, nicknamed ‘maiale’ (pig)
by the crews as its sailing qualities were simply terrible; MAT (Motoscafi
Aviotrasportati da Turismo) explosive motor boats; and ‘frogman’ combat
divers.
After the successes of World War I, a new generation of small attack craft
had been tested during the 1920s, from radio-controlled MAS boats to a very
fast 8t motor torpedo boat of Austro-Hungarian origin, designed to enter
enemy harbours, whose prototype had been found almost ready at Pola in
November 1918. ey were all failures, but Cavagnari4 supported any idea for
a third generation of attack craft, despite the immediate refusal by the Italian
Air Force to supply the S 55 oatplanes which had, according to the original
programmes, to be used to ferry the new secret weapons near the British bases
of Alexandria and Gibraltar. e special craft were, from the beginning, not a
substitute for battleships, but a long-range weapon system to be used beyond
the range of the battleforce.
 Taranto, 12 November 1940. The battleship Littorio stranded. She was hit by three
torpedoes and repaired by 19 March 1941, sorting from the drydock and beginning a two-
month retraining of her crew. (AC)

In August 1936, Italy had the option to order a 13,000t carrier designed by
General GN Umberto Pugliese, with new sandwich underwater protection
replacing his previous longitudinal drum system, devised in 1917 and tested
successfully by the tanker Brennero four years later. Mussolini again stubbornly
refused to order the carrier, and instead the two Richelieus (by now the future
core of a no-longer-friendly France) would be answered with the
reconstruction, ordered in 1936 and begun the next year, of the dreadnoughts
Duilio and Doria. ey would be no match for the future MN battleships, but
for lack of a better alternative, they could be useful as they were equipped with
the same, very advanced re-direction as the Littorios.
To escort its capital ships, the RM had never more than about 40 destroyers
at a time, varying between the two categories of ‘cacciatorpediniere’ and
‘esploratori leggeri’, united under the same classi cation in 1938. e ‘Tre pipe’
(three-stackers) of World War I and the two-funnel ships of the early 1920s
were rated as torpedo boats and assigned to coastal command duties.
 e light carrier programme was proposed again in 1937, 1938 and 1939,
unsuccessfully, due to the renewed opposition from Mussolini and the RA.
Instead, in December 1937, two improved Littorios, Roma and Impero, were
ordered. is time the idea was to get eight battleships (four Littorios and four
modernized ones) for 1942, in the expectation of a showdown with Britain
and France to redraw the maps of the Middle East and the Balkans after ‘una
grande conferenza per la pace’ (a great conference for peace) with the support of
its new German partner. France replied in 1938 with orders for two further
35,000t battleships, Clemenceau and Gascogne, and two 18,000t carriers, Joffre
and Painlevé. Painlevé and Gascogne were never begun. On the other side of the
Alps, France’s yards and naval industries were in a much poorer state than
Italy’s, and Richelieu and Jean Bart were not yet completed when the new
Prime Minister Marshal Pétain had to ask for an armistice in June 1940, with
Clemenceau and Joffre not even launched.
Now was no longer the time for a confrontation in the Mediterranean with
the French ird Republic but instead for a war against the much tougher and
impregnable Britain.

TECHNICAL FACTORS
Italian naval machinery had high fuel consumption, but proved to be powerful
and reliable, and Italian warship designers were competent and original.
Between the two world wars, Italian warship exports were second, by a
fraction, only to the British.
Italy’s homogeneous armour, called AOC, was, according to tests
undertaken in the USA after the war using plates from Impero, roughly on a
par with the USN ‘B’ armour (in itself superior, in the thicker plates,
compared to Germany’s famous new ‘Wotan harte’ armour of the Bismarck
class).
e four rebuilt battleships had deck protection over magazines and 2in
spaced armour surrounding the barbettes, which assured a considerable
improvement against medium- and long-range shell re and armour-piercing
(AP) bombs. e Littorios had armoured decks 6.38in over the magazines and
3.94in over the engine and boiler rooms. A world- rst was their spaced
decapping plates5 on virtually all of their heavy vertical armour. One de ciency
was that their main belt was, like the Nelsons, shallow below the waterline,
which exposed them to successful underwater hits. Regarding the heavy
cruisers, the British did not expect that their 6in shells could penetrate the
Zaras’ armour beyond 7,000yds while the Trentos had an immunity zone far
off 24,000yds. e RN light cruisers except the Southamptons were all
vulnerable to the 8in shells within an approximate area between 17,000 and
24,000yds.
e generation of hardened armour produced after World War I was around
30 per cent superior in resistance to the equivalent armour plates of 1914 and
it was extremely difficult to sink a battleship by gun re, with the relatively soft-
skinned Hood being an exception. e chance of getting a very-long-range hit
during an action was unlikely even with the improved re-control systems of
the 1930s, if, for no other reason, than the ight-time of the shell allowed the
target to change course, and both sides used smoke and evasive manoeuvres to
complicate the enemy’s re-control problem. Other variables were the size of
the target, its speed and, of course, visibility. e RM stereoscopic range nders
were considered superior to the RN coincidence types by the British, who
considered the limit for accurate re-control to be less than 30,000yds.
Straddles that included no hits were common.
e general rule is that the bigger the gun, the greater the accuracy. As
dispersion tends to be inversely proportional to calibre, the new, larger
generation of artillery had higher muzzle velocities and better ballistic
performance with longer ranges, a atter trajectory and a shorter time of ight.
Accordingly, the RM adopted a high-velocity/very-heavy projectile
combination for good range and armour penetration. e RN had shells with
almost identical properties, but a bigger bursting charge. In terms of their
guns’ charges (chemical stability and burning efficiency) the RM had,
according to the study made by Kent R. Crawford and Nicholas W. Mitiukov,
a slight primacy in comparison to the RN.
As the spread of shots in a salvo was random, only a minimal percentage of
projectiles, averaged over many salvos, would actually hit. It was not by chance
that the minimum spotting correction for the RN was 400yds and for the RM
437yds (400m). Near-miss detonations (within 30ft of the ship according to
the RN’s con dential pre-printed forms) were part of expected damage too,
because they caused a powerful gas bubble expanding in the direction of least
resistance through the hull plating below the bottom edge of the armour,
causing structural damage. Big guns’ heavy splinters could hit the ship up to
90yds away, riddling the superstructure, bridge and turrets, causing potentially
considerable wreckage and casualties.
 An Italian 12.6in shell in the Venice Naval Museum. These AP shells (14lb of TNT) had
strengthened casing and, thus, little space for the bursting charge, whose blast and fire
effect was like a 10in projectile, something no longer used against battleships since the
widespread introduction of homogeneous Krupp-type armour from 1905. After the Action
off Calabria, the RN discovered, with dismay, that the Queen Elizabeth battleships were
not immune, as previously believed, to Chance Vital Hits (C.V.H.) in the face of these
plunging shells. (AC)

At war, the Italian Admirals Inigo Campioni and Angelo Iachino considered
the RN gunnery: ‘né ordinato né efficace, benché raggruppato’ (‘neither ordered
nor effective, even though with little spread’). A judgement con rmed, after
the war, by all the RM’s wartime reports about day actions and by the
recollections of officers and sailors.
 e RN high-shell expenditure compromised the nal phase of the action
off Cape Spada. In 1944, the RN discovered that its guns red short of the
distance re-control officers were trained to achieve on the basis of their range
tables.
e Italians noted from July 1940 that at long ranges the British 6in shells
often did not explode and, during the war, many RN 6in which hit were duds.
e only recorded Italian projectile which did not explode (after hitting HMS
Cairo on 15 June 1942) was, actually, a Skoda-made 14cm shell whose base
fuze was found defective.
As we will see in the Analysis chapter, the Italians’ so-called excessive spread,
quoted so often in Anglophone literature, in fact assured a considerable
advantage in terms of ‘danger space’ compared to the British fairly tight
patterns.
Anti-aircraft RM weapons were more effective than the British pom-poms
and 0.5in MGs until 1942, when American-made 40mm Bofors and 20mm
Oerlikon cannons were introduced. American intelligence considered the
Breda 37/54 (1.457in) twin and single mountings, with a 125rpm per barrel
rate of re, a very effective light anti-aircraft gun and the Breda 20/65 heavy
MG an excellent AA gun.
e RM torpedoes too (all classic wet-heaters with natural air and kerosene
fuel) were considered by the British to have very high performance, and to be
reliable and effective. Lack of electric torpedoes and magnetic pistols until late
1942, however, reduced their effectiveness against well-trained RN crews.
Like France, Russia and Japan, Italian technology lagged behind that of
Britain, America and Germany in electronics, radar and sonar before and
during World War II, due to the limited home market for technology, which
delayed commercial research and development. In May 1942, the RM began
to move from experimental to effective Italian radar sets, EC3 ter Gufo at sea
and RDT 1 Folaga on the ground.
However, the real drawback was the lack of adequate air reconnaissance at
sea, both in numbers and types of aircraft. e Sunderland, for example, did
not have different, more powerful or better engines than the contemporary
Italian ones. It was the RA which considered ying boats much more expensive
than oatplanes, refusing, from late 1936, any proposals for equivalent planes
like the four-engined Caproni Ca 403 ying boat, the Ca 406 designed by
engineer Pegna, or the CMASA four-engined bomber and reconnaissance
ying boat BS12 with retracting stabilizing oats in the outboard engine
nacelles. e idea to increase the number of the squadriglie of MARINAVIA
(another quite possible choice, with available personnel, raw materials and
production capacities in excess) was, then, an anathema for the RA which was
happy to disband the Navy-controlled command in 1944, restoring it only in
1956.

RADAR ADVANTAGE: THE NIGHT ACTION

OFF CAPE MATAPAN
Admiral Cattaneo’s I Divisione – cruisers Zara and Fiume and four destroyers – was
sent by Iachino to tow the immobilized cruiser Pola despite Cattaneo’s proposal to
recover the crew with two destroyers and scuttle her. I Divisione had to do a
Butakov pipe turn, being without radar, to find Pola in an almost moonless night but
HMS Orion’s radar had spotted the immobilized cruiser, and I Divisione’s course was
betrayed by the bright light of the planet Jupiter behind it. They were sighted
visually at first by the British lookouts on the taller platforms of the Warspite, Valiant
and Barham, and ambushed point-blank (3,000yds). In this illustration, Zara is being
smashed with only a twin 37mm MG surviving port side. The Italian fleet claimed a
small hit first on Barham, which turned through 360°, then on Valiant. According to
the British press, H.R.H. Prince Philip, a midshipman on Valiant, ‘survived unscathed
amid his shattered lights as an enemy cannon shell ripped into his position’. The
Duke later spoke of how he coped when his shipmates died or were wounded: ‘It
was part of the fortunes of war’ he said. ‘We didn’t have counsellors rushing around
every time somebody let off a gun, you know, asking “Are you all right – are you sure
you don’t have a ghastly problem?”. You just got on with it.’. According to Prince
Philip, Valiant received ‘another eight-foot hole, narrow but deep, in the starboard
torpedo protection bulges amidships.’ It was claimed by the destroyer Carducci
with her first, and last, 4.7in shell salvo before she was hit by Valiant. In 1945, the
Report of Med. Intelligence Centre confirmed: ‘Our losses – a few hits by gunfire’. In
1977, Captain Roskill wrote, in his book, Churchill & the Admirals, that Lord
Salisbury, Secretary of State for the Dominions, did not approve of the fact that the
Admiralty had ‘boasted that our Fleet did not receive a scratch’ in the Night Action
off Matapan.
1 Caracciolo carried eight main guns in the final version, displacing 31,400t with a 28kt top speed.

2 At the same time, France commissioned the experimental carrier Béarn, which had been laid
down as a battleship of the Normandie class. Converted with British help, Béarn had similarly
little success, being slow (21kt) and with little stability; the carrier’s first reliable torpedo
bombers were embarked only in 1930.

3 The Italian Navy only obtained this prerogative in 1972.

4 Cavagnari was himself a commander who, in 1916, distinguished himself by entering the
Channel of Fasana in Istria at night, with his torpedo boat towing a MAS, forcing the boom
defence.

5 Designed to knock the cap off an armour-piercing capped shell on impact, reducing its
effectiveness.
 HOW THE FLEET OPERATED

COMMAND AND COMMUNICATION

Between 1914 and February 1917, the RM had suffered from a con ict about
strategy between the battle eet commander, the Duke of the Abruzzi, who was
a cousin of the King and a believer in the ‘great-decisive-naval-battle’ (a myth
the Austro-Hungarians were not going to oblige), and the two-times Navy
CoS, aon di Revel who preferred calculated risk. No such confusion about
the nal strategy would be allowed once aon di Revel was back.
Based on the centralized Italian Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Command
created in 1917, the RM had, since 1936, planned a Central Command,
which was tested in 1939 and activated in May 1940 and named
‘Supermarina’. Its tasks were to dictate strategy, order general directives, collect
information from any source and to initiate orders of operations. Contrary to
rumour, the Commander at Sea in fact had total freedom during an
engagement; a situation not unlike that of the Admiralty with its admirals or
commodores.

Action off Calabria, 9 July 1940. Admiral Inigo Campioni on Cesare. Appointed Governor
of the Dodecanese in July 1941, he resisted the German aggression after 8 September
1943. Taken prisoner by the Germans, he was tried by a fascist court at Parma and shot
on 24 May 1944. (AC)

In 1940, Admiral Angelo Iachino was appointed the new battle eet
commander. His predecessor Inigo Campioni became the deputy CoS, while
Admiral Carlo Bergamini was appointed Inspector of the tting out of new
warships until July 1941, when he went back to sea as commander of the V
Divisione formed by the modernized battleships. Iachino asked the new CoS,
Admiral Arturo Riccardi, at once for a detailed, written description of his rules
of engagement and received a curt reply that the RM tradition was that the
commander of the battle eet was the master, once at sea.
 For most of the war against Britain, the RM battle eet was commanded by
Admiral Iachino (9 December 1940–4 April 1943). He was a brilliant
destroyer man and a torpedo and optics expert, not primarily a gunnery officer
like admirals Campioni and Bergamini. According to a report from British
Intelligence written in December 1940, Iachino was:
found to have an attractive personality and he speaks uent English … While in London as Naval
Attaché Iachino adopted a pleasing manner to those officers of similar or superior ranks with whom
he came into contact, but was occasionally bad-tempered and, unlike the majority of Italians, he had
little sense of humour and resented any form of leg-pulling … he was held in high regard in the
Italian Navy and was equally efficient at a desk and at sea; he was, however, not at all popular. He
has the reputation of being hard, efficient, stubborn and exceedingly ambitious but without
imagination. It is thought that at this time a C. in C. with imagination and human understanding is
what the Italians require to pull them together. is is just what this new appointment will not give
them.

He was an unlucky man, as the wild goose chase of Force H and the
Matapan night battle con rmed in 1941.
His successor, Bergamini, was what the RN Intelligence described as the
right man in the right place at the right time. In December 1940, he should
have been Campioni’s replacement as the new battle eet commander, as
Cavagnari considered Iachino too young and lacking the necessary experience.
But politics decided otherwise and Cavagnari was sacked in early December
1940, with many other top-ranking Italian officers – Marshal Badoglio was
replaced by his arch-enemy General Ugo Cavallero – when Mussolini tried to
put the blame for the Greek asco on everyone else’s shoulders except his own
and those of his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano.
e II Squadra was the scouting force of the battleforce. It was commanded
rst by Admiral Riccardo Paladini and, after he suffered heart failure on 24
July 1940, by Iachino. Abolished on 9 December 1940, the II Squadra was
reactivated on 12 January 1942 around the Cavour-class dreadnoughts and was
led by Bergamini until 1 January 1943, when he took the place of Iachino,
raising his ensign on Littorio as commander of the IX Divisione formed by the
three modern 35,000t battleships. Iachino was ‘promoted’ to the command of
any joint operations of both the I and II Squadra, a far from probable scenario
as the oil available did not allow such operations until the second half of
August 1943. On 2 January 1943, the by-now practically autonomous V
Divisione (Duilio and Doria) based at Taranto raised the ensign of Admiral
Emilio Brenta, who, on 30 July, was substituted, for reasons of health, by
Admiral Alberto Da Zara, by far the most popular and outgoing Italian
admiral of World War II.
ere were three CoSs of the RM during the war. First was the severe
Cavagnari, father of the Littorio class and the battle eet, and a World War I
destroyer man whose personal doctrine about sea control of the Ionian Sea and
ghting a long-term tonnage war, mainly by submarines, dominated the
con ict. He was replaced, on 11 December 1940, by Riccardi. e new CoS
added his personal touch about escort vessels to battleship doctrine (he had
been, since 1916, a strenuous supporter of ASW and of the decisive role of the
defence of sea lanes) and his faith in mass production. As a result, from 1942,
the RM commissioned plenty (by Italian standards, of course) of Ciclone-class
destroyer escorts, corvettes, MTBs, motor antisubmarine boats and landing
craft.
Taranto, August 1940. A despatch motorboat bringing sealed orders to the flagship of the
battleforce. The RM used hand-delivered messages for its Operations Orders. An
exception was the order for air reconnaissance sent by air by a messenger to Rhodes
before the Action off Matapan. The aircraft and the Enigma-ciphered message were
seized by the British on the night of 26 March 1941, at Crete using a fake radio-beacon. A
new message was then broadcast from Rome to Rhodes. ULTRA decrypted the original
message within 24 hours, but not the signal sent by radio. (AC)

As the CoS was simultaneously the Secretary of the Navy whose minister,
Mussolini, was virtually absent, the leadership of Supermarina was actually in
the hands of the Deputy CoS. He was supported by at rst four and, from
1941, six admirals, one of them at a time directing, during his watch, the
Situation Room. e Deputy CoS were Admiral Odoardo Somigli until 18
December 1940, Admiral Campioni up to 23 July 1941 and Admiral Luigi
Sansonetti as late as the days after the Italian armistice. Somigli was rigid and
not very popular in the Navy ranks; Campioni was very clear-headed, but
suffered bad health; Sansonetti was the powerhouse behind the remaining
Italian war at sea.
e communications between Supermarina and the eet were always
efficient, mostly taking place by hand or scrambler telephone for security, and
the RM wireless network was, traditionally, the most efficient in the country.
In 1940–41, the TPA, a sort of Italian version of the USN TBS ship-to-ship
system, was introduced, helping greatly with tactical communications.

INTELLIGENCE AND DECEPTION

SIGINT
e RM codebreaking organization Ufficio B (Beta from the Italian phonetic
alphabet) turned from an amateur out t into a tiny, but operational one in
1931, when the Director of the Reparto Informazioni dello Stato Maggiore della
Marina (from June 1941 onwards known as the Servizio Informazioni Segrete
or SIS), Rear-Admiral Alberto Lais, decided to create a professional
cryptological section. Two years later, the new Secretary of the Navy (and, in
the following year, CoS) Cavagnari, put the organization on a war footing,
having foreseen that Mussolini’s political strategy would inevitably lead to a
crisis with Britain within a few years. e rst target of Ufficio B, whose rooms
were on the top oor of the Naval Ministry, just a ight of stairs up from
Cavagnari’s office, was the main French naval cipher, the TMB. It was
considered impregnable, but it was cracked within a few weeks. e new
versions adopted by Paris the following year, TBM 2 and 3, were quickly
broken, and until June 1940 the cipher granted high dividends to the RM.
e next goal was, of course, the British. In November 1934, the Royal
Navy’s Administrative Naval Code was broken. Twenty-four hours were
originally needed to reconstruct the keys, but from 1935 this delay was
reduced to a few hours.
e much more complex and more important Naval Cipher proved,
however, a harder nut to crack. In 1938, Lieutenant Commander Francesco
Camicia, commander of the sloop Lepanto stationed in China, was able to
‘rent’ and photograph over the course of several hours, the rst of the two
books of the Naval Cipher from an NCO of a British destroyer in Shanghai.
e sailor who passed the book to the Italians had been persuaded he was not
doing anything really dangerous as, without the second book
(Superencipherment) with random or incoherent keystreams, the cipher was just
a useless dictionary. An initial solution was found after some spy-ship missions
in the Mediterranean and in the Atlantic identi ed pairs and triples of
messages superenciphered with the same keystream (the so-called ‘depth’)
which allowed the reconstruction of the relevant superencipher tables. ere
were gaps, of course, but that cipher remained in use until 20 August 1940. It
was necessary to periodically reconstruct the new superciphers introduced
every month by cryptologic systems, but it was a task the mathematical
methods that Ufficio B created could handle usually in less than a week. e
cryptology section was increased, between 1938 and 1939, with the
appointment of a dozen new codebreakers, including the magician of tactical
signals, Lieutenant Eliso Porta, nicknamed ‘Il principe azzurro’ (Prince
Charming) for his successes with foreign tactical codes classi ed by female
names, ‘Boadicea’ and ‘Rowena’ for the British.
e secret battle fought by the RM codebreakers went on until the
Armistice and beyond, as the Italians wanted to be sure the Allies were as good
as their word. Although a comparison between signals and the different sets of
data is always difficult (as routine radio interceptions made in lower-grade
codes are included), between 10 June 1940 and 1 September 1943, RM
codebreakers intercepted and decrypted 36,262 British, 209 French pre-
armistice, 4,002 French post-armistice, 989 Yugoslavian, and several hundred
American, Greek, Free French, Russian and Turkish signals. e decryption
times varied from less than 15 minutes for the RAF reconnaissance signals
(reduced to under two minutes from January 1942, when the rst IBM
machines modi ed in Italy became operative for decrypting purposes) to hours
or days in the worst cases.
On 14 July 1940, an intercepted RN message revealed that the British had
been able to decrypt a signal broadcast using one of the two new, main RM
ciphers introduced on 2 July 1940, the SM 19S, seized three days before on
the submarine Uebi Scebeli. An emergency order was issued to the effect that,
for superenciphering, the initials of the captain of any vessel were to be used
pending delivery of a new (currently reserve) cipher to all ships before the end
of that month. As Professor Hinsley acknowledged in his famous British
Intelligence in the Second World War: ‘the cyphers used by [the Italian] eet for
most of its important communications were never read again after July 1940
except for a few brief intervals as a result of captures after the middle of 1941’.
ese few leaks, all concerning administrative codes, were always promptly
discovered by the RM codebreakers and used to their advantage, such as
during the great British Crusader offensive, when the RM, having discovered
the Benghazi naval coastal command cipher had been photographed by British
Intelligence two months before, broadcast false messages to deceive Eighth
Army HQ that no Axis counter-offensive was planned for months, before it
was actually unleashed on 21 January 1942.

DAWN SURPISE: THE BATTLE OF

PANTELLERIA, 15 JUNE 1942
On 15 June 1942, the Italian VII Divisione made a completely surprise attack against
the Harpoon convoy and its escort force. The assessment of the situation in the
Mediterranean the previous day by the Admiralty and Force W from Gibraltar, led by
Admiral Alban T. B. Curteis, had incorrectly concluded that the VII Divisione was
going to join the main Italian battleforce in the Eastern Mediterranean from Palermo.
It instead intercepted the Western convoy for Malta in the mine-infested Strait of
Sicily. The scattered British and Allied (one Polish destroyer) force was thus
deployed in penny packets, favouring the Italian cruiser squadron which detached
the slower destroyers Ugolino Vivaldi (28kt; caused by a machinery defect) and
Lanzerotto Malocello (32kt). They attacked the convoy independently before the
smoke curtain, laid by four Hunt destroyers and Fleet minesweepers, made the
convoy disappear.
In spite of the much vaunted ‘ULTRA’ decrypts, British Intelligence about the RM
was still pretty poor. The estimated effective strength of the Italian fleet in June
1942 was largely inaccurate: it was not known that the battleship Vittorio Veneto
had been repaired and had been back at sea since late March 1942, also that three
light cruisers and seven destroyers, which were given as sunk, were actually in
service, untraced by British intelligence. Information about the RM was categorized
as mainly B1 and B2, and even the desperate fuel situation was unknown, in spite of
the fact that the waterline of Italian battleships and cruisers showed how little fuel
was in their bunkers.
Force X had planned to include the cruiser HMS Liverpool too, but the ship had
been torpedoed by an Italian S.M.79 aircraft the day before. The idea to replace it
with HMS Kenya was dropped, preferring to respect the original plan which dictated
Kenya and the cruiser Charybdis (armed with only eight 4.5in guns because of the
lack of the originally planned main 5.25in armament) had to remain west of the Strait
of Sicily to wait for the return of the escort force sent to Malta.
 The Italian modified Hagelin C-38m mechanical cypering machine. Unlike the Regia
Aeronautica low-grade C-35, this medium-grade system was used for administrative
signals only and never from ships to ships or land commands. (AC)

e wartime British decryption organization, the Government Code and

Cipher School (GC&CS), whose output is commonly known as ‘ULTRA’,
boasted a total of 42,163 decrypted messages (of every origin and nationality)
relating to Italian naval affairs in 1941–43, labelled ZTPI and now in e
National Archives. eir origin is mainly from mechanical and
electromechanical machines (the latter German only) while 3,699 are hand
ciphers. ese messages were intercepted between 1 April 1940 and 9
September 1943, but around 50 per cent were decoded in 1944–45 for
historical and statistical purposes. e times of codebreaking varied between
real time (once the machine cipher keys had been broken) to several days for
the messages composed using the classic cipher books.
e main Italian leak was the Hagelin C-35 machine, operated from
October 1940 by the RA and broken by the British in July 1941. e RM had
refused it in 1935 as it considered the Swedish cipher machine unsafe, but the
RA preferred the C-35 for everyday communications because of its speed and
ease of use. is continued despite the regular protests by the RM, which,
from November 1941, used another, more advanced Hagelin machine, the C-
38m, but only for administrative traffic, like the daily press review. e C-38m
(which was broken by ULTRA in January 1942) was not used by individual
warships nor by the commands at sea, which could only receive and read
signals sent to them (generally circular letters) encrypted with the system, but
not broadcast by the cipher.
e percolation of information from the C-35 ended in January 1943, when
the RM reactivated and relaid, in the direction of Italy, two cables between
Tunis and Malta which the Italian cable layer Giasone had cut on 14 June
1940. is meant that communications between Tunisia–Sicily and the Italian
peninsula could no longer be intercepted over the airwaves. From that point
until the Italian Armistice, the importance of ULTRA intercepts of Italian
signals declined dramatically. ey had been, however, always a lower priority
compared to the German Enigma signals, and it often took 96 hours or even
more for Bletchley Park to send Italian decrypts to the Intelligence Centre of
Heliopolis, in Egypt.

HUMINT
Agents played a minor role on both sides during the naval war in the
Mediterranean. In May 1940, the British were able to seize the Italian spy
network in the UK (actually a group of White Russians in ltrated by the
NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, who were also active in
the US Embassy in London, and were loaned from Soviet intelligence to Rome
in 1935). Two years later, the RM had a new agent in Britain, the Portuguese
embassy clerk Rogério de Magalhães Peixoto de Menezes, who on 24
September 1942 sent, via Ireland, some very detailed information about the
future Anglo-American landings in French North Africa. Once other details
were added, this source allowed Comando Supremo (the Italian General Staff)
to be ready, between late October and the landing on 8 November, to occupy
Tunisia from Italy and Libya, in spite of Germany’s disbelief in such an Allied
invasion.
Unfortunately, in 1943, Rogério also decided to work for the SS intelligence
agency Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) and was sold out to British
counterespionage within two weeks. Condemned to be hanged, he was saved
by the direct intervention of the Italian royal household and liberated in 1949
as a courtesy to Rome after the signature of the NATO treaty of alliance.
All 20 agents sent by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to Italy in
1941–43 were either captured, unknowingly used by Italian
counterintelligence, or at worst, forcibly turned as double agents. False
information about the imminent commissioning of the repaired battleship
Cavour, which arrived on Admiral Pound’s desk in December 1941 and was
accepted until the Italian Armistice, originated from deceptions such as this.

LOGISTICS AND FACILITIES

e RM’s stocks of spare parts and related domestic production was never in
short supply during World War II except between 1940 and 1941, for high-
tensile steel for hulls and copper and mica for electrical equipment. In 1943,
depots and wrecks in the Toulon dockyard were ransacked for these strategic
materials. e manufacturing of anti-aircraft munitions was always a hand-to-
mouth affair, which compelled Italian air defences to avoid barrage re, day or
night, and only to aim to shoot when the target was sighted or illuminated by
searchlights.
No warships bigger than a destroyer were constructed during wartime. is
was not unexpected: since 1931, assessments had been made on the
consequences of a con ict with Britain, and wartime construction of both
warships and merchant vessels accorded with these. Italy correctly forecast the
amount of raw materials and workforce which would be realistically available.
e dispersed network of Italian yards and arsenals allowed a certain degree
of security against air raids. Before the Armistice, only the OTO enterprise of
Livorno was seriously damaged, on 28 May 1943, by USAAF bombers.
 e main naval bases were La Spezia and Taranto. Naples and La Maddalena
could receive the battle eet, but had only minor facilities. Messina, Cagliari,
Augusta, Venice, Pola and Brindisi could supply and support a cruiser
squadron. Tobruk, Leros, Massawa, Tripoli and Trapani were bases for light
forces formed by destroyers, torpedo boats, MTBs and submarines.

Taranto, August 1940. The destroyer Carducci and the submarine Serpente in a dock for
refit and maintenance. The larger Italian yard facilities as opposed to the poorer British
ones in the Mediterranean provided key back-up to the Italian Navy during the war. (AC)

e British were much worse off without Malta, unavailable from 1940

onwards due to the air threat, and whose main docks would be lled with
debris and wrecks until the end of the war. e limited facilities available at
Alexandria and Gibraltar forced the RN to avoid risking serious damage which
could only be repaired at Durban, Singapore, at home or in the USA. When
recaptured in 1943 and 1944 respectively, the ports of Bizerte and Toulon were
found in ruins, and the only major yard the Allies could use during the Italian
Campaign was the intact Taranto.
e real problem for the RM was oil. In mid-August 1940, Mussolini
ordered that oil stocks should last until early 1942, as the original prediction
about a three-month war had been wrong. e original RM reserves of fuel
were empty by the end of September 1941. From June 1941, supplies from
Romania (mainly by rail) to the RM amounted to a monthly average of
35,000t. After a lone, emergency German aid of 81,000t was shipped between
late November 1941 and January 1942, German supplies crashed, and
between April 1942 and July 1943 Germany sent, irregularly, a total of a
further 333,000t of mostly synthetic fuel oil, with unexpected pauses between
shipments as long as three months.
e activity of La Squadra was thus progressively paralysed from summer
1942 until early March 1943, when increased production of Albanian oil
arrived in Italy, allowing the RM to ll the empty bunkers of the Littorios in
April and of the two Duilios after 20 July for some short-range training and a
last do-or-die sortie.
 COMBAT AND ANALYSIS

THE FLEET IN COMBAT

On 26 January 1939, the British Admiralty discussed a swift, mainly naval war
against Italy with the MN. Paris answered enthusiastically. British opinion was
that the RM was a ‘sugar cake navy’ and, in March 1939, Winston Churchill,
then a backbench MP, argued that Italy’s exposed geographical position and
lack of resources made it a hindrance to its Axis partner.6
In April 1939, Italy invaded Albania with an improvised landing; the second
round was the invasion of Greece, scheduled for September 1939. Mussolini
and General Alberto Pariani, Secretary of War and his main military adviser
from 1934, both wrongly believed that the Anglo-French would accept such a
fait accompli, while the USSR (which had been an excellent economic partner
to Italy since 1920) would want to get its hands on the Bosporus and
Dardanelles Straits. Britain and France collaborated, at the same time,
planning and supporting a Turkish landing at Rhodes that autumn. However,
the Danzig Crisis unleashed by Hitler against Poland in August 1939
prevented any of these plans from going ahead. It was soon clear that any real
chance for an Allied victory would pass through Italy.

The Outbreak of War

e Allied naval blockade was considered to be as effective as it had been in
1914–15. e difference was that what the Allies now looked for in Italy was
not a potential ally but a good battle eld. In September 1939, Cavagnari asked
for the conversion of the liner Roma into the slow emergency aircraft carrier
planned in 1935. At rst the plan seemed to be on the right track and the
ghters for the ship, Caproni Vizzola F.5, were chosen, but, in November
1939, the newly appointed CoS of the RA, General Francesco Pricolo, brought
everything to a stop.
On 1 March 1940, it was announced that German coal exports to Italy, sent
by sea via Dutch ports, would be prohibited. e Allies were aware of the fact
that German exports of coal by railway through Austria and Yugoslavia could
cover only 50 per cent of Italy’s peacetime consumption (one million tons
monthly) and that Switzerland had closed its borders to this rail traffic in
September 1939.
As soon as the puzzled French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier (a much
more prudent man since the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was unexpectedly
signed on 23 August 1939) was replaced, on 21 March 1940, by the battling
Paul Reynaud, the Allied concentration of naval forces in the Mediterranean
began. e previous build-up, inaugurated by the return to Toulon in July
1939 of the three Bretagnes, had been halted by force majeure in August 1939
due to the imminent danger of war with Germany. Between April and May
1940, the Mediterranean Fleet (which had left Malta for Alexandria in April
1939), rallied four battleships (Warspite, Malaya, Royal Sovereign and Ramillies)
and the carrier Eagle, while since April 1940, the French had had three
Bretagnes and two Dunkerques in the Mediterranean. e so-called
‘Mediterranean Stoppage’ – the end of Britain’s route through the Strait of
Sicily – was introduced on 30 April.
 On 9 May 1940, Dunkerque and Strasbourg sailed from Mers-el-Kébir to
search, near Sardinia, for the Italian battle eet (which was formed, at that
time, by the reconstructed battleships Cavour and Cesare only). eir mission
was halted the day after, as the Germans had unleashed their invasion of
Western Europe. After a series of last-minute diplomatic skirmishes, Italy
declared war on 10 June 1940, with less than 30 days of coal stocks. Like the
British at Malta, the French limited themselves to using their big naval base at
Bizerte for light forces (destroyers and submarines), given the Italian bomber
menace, the RM’s large mine elds and submarines, and their night-time
torpedo boats and MAS patrols. On 16 June, the French Admiral François
Darlan, commander-in-chief of the MN, declared to the French government
that Italian control of the Strait of Sicily meant that Allied navies and air forces
could not prevent the arrival within a couple of months of a German corps in
Libya. is force would be able to advance to Morocco before Britain, still
disarmed after Dunkirk, could send any help to the ‘unreinforçable’, badly
equipped French army stationed between Tunisia and Casablanca. is
statement was the last nail in the coffin for a French continuation of the war in
Africa, supported by only a minority of the Reynaud cabinet (who resigned
later that evening).
Eastern Mediterranean, 8 July 1940. HMS Malaya slightly damaged by a near-miss bomb
dropped by a Cant Z 506 flying boat. Splinters temporarily impaired her forward HA guns.
This accident was not reported in the British official report. (AC)

On 25 June, the Axis’ armistices with France came into effect and Bern
immediately opened its railways to coal traffic bound for Italy, which would
continue until February 1945. For years, Switzerland also supplied the many
extra trains necessary for the task.
e MN battleforce was divided between Mers-el-Kébir and Alexandria, and
its fate was respectively in the hands of Vice-Admiral James Somerville’s
recently formed Force H at Gibraltar, and Vice-Admiral Andrew Browne
Cunningham. With the French out of the war, it was an Anglo-Italian con ict,
as the now-Prime Minister Churchill broadcast on 18 June: ‘ere is a general
curiosity in the British Fleet to nd out whether the Italians are up to the level
they were at in the last war or whether they have fallen off at all’.
e rst move by Cunningham, commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean
Fleet, was to send a wireless message to the Admiralty on 4 July with his battle
order and plan for a demonstration off the Eastern Sicilian coast. He could
have used the cables between Egypt, Malta, Gibraltar and Britain as the last
underwater telegraphic link between the Rock and the Grand Harbour would
only be severed by the Italians the following month, but he was in a hurry after
the many signals from Churchill urging him to neutralize the French squadron
in Alexandria and had no time for the many relays it demanded. His signal was
decrypted by the RM codebreakers on the night of 4/5 July and Supermarina
decided to give battle to the Italian battle eet,7 which had just escorted a
decisive convoy to Benghazi, ferrying the only 72 medium tanks (M11/39
type) existing in Italy there.

The Action off Calabria (Battaglia di Punta Stilo)

From early morning onwards on 9 July, despite some gaps, British air
reconnaissance was able to follow the Italian battleforce, now formed by I
Squadra with battleships Cesare, Campioni’s agship, and Cavour, plus ve
heavy cruisers; also the scouting force II Squadra, led by Admiral Riccardo
Paladini in his agship Pola, and eight light cruisers, escorted by 29 destroyers,
off the coast of Calabria. Italian aircraft saw and signalled the presence of the
Mediterranean Fleet for the rst time at 1330hrs: battleships Warspite
(Cunningham’s agship), Royal Sovereign and Malaya, with carrier Eagle; the
scouting force was Admiral Tovey’s 7th Cruiser Squadron, with agship Orion
and a further four light cruisers and 17 destroyers. Supermarina was aware of
the enemy’s overwhelming advantage in repower and armour (8in guns were
unable at any range to pierce the battleships’ protection), but placed their
con dence in the Cavours’ speed advantage over the British battleships, which
would allow them to stay out of range. Italian naval intelligence about RN re-
direction had been updated until the mid-1930s but was not aware of later
progress, including the increasingly automatic Admiralty-Fire-Control-Table
Mark VII tted in Warspite in 1937. It therefore reported that the British were
unable to match the long range of the Cavours’ 12.6in while the AP shells of
the Italian guns (bored-out old 12in weapons) were considered as very
effective. It was believed too that RN re-control was not as effective as the
Italians’. As the main action began, it was soon discovered that Warspite,
modernized in 1934–37, had increased her 15in guns’ elevation to 30 degrees
and that her re-control was excellent even though other RN cruisers were
con rmed to be out of line (most of them were equipped with less expensive
Fire-Control-Tables). What the RM did not know was that the middle deck
(now with an overall 5in protection over the magazines) of Cunningham’s
agship could not be pierced at any range by the reconstructed Italian
battleships.
According to the British Official Report on the Action off Calabria, dated
29 January 1941, the rst phase of the battle, involving scouting forces, was an
engagement between four heavy cruisers of the Zara class and four RN light
cruisers (HMS Gloucester, hit by a bomb the day before by a surprise attack
from out of nowhere, was at that time escorting Eagle as her ghting efficiency
had been impaired). e Italian force was only composed of the light cruisers
Abruzzi (Admiral Antonio Legnani) and Garibaldi, forming VIII Divisione
with four destroyers – the original report by HMS Neptune con rms both their
number and the fact they were correctly identi ed. e steady re of the semi-
automatic 6in of the Garibaldis straddled the 7th Cruiser Squadron almost at
once, whose course had soon to be altered away to avoid getting too heavily
engaged. Neptune was slightly damaged amidships by splinters which were
identi ed, given the excellent fragmentation of the Italian navy shells, as being
from 12in projectiles. According to the RN rules of engagement, Cunningham
was in the vanguard position relative to his other battleships, to act as a sort of
battlecruiser. He was thus able to give his support some minutes later, ring at
VIII Divisione. In his memoirs Cunningham wrote he steamed at ank speed
(23kt) to support his cruisers, but the Navigational Record of Warspite states
he slowed from 20 to 17kt so as not to stray too far from his slower two
battleships astern, it being necessary to concentrate his forces at the crucial
moment.
Warspite began ineffective re against the Garibaldis. Legnani in Abruzzi did
not alter his course, in order to perform his scouting mission to the best of his
ability. en, not having been sighted by the British, the light cruisers Alberto
di Giussano and Alberico da Barbiano, joined the action and opened re against
Warspite. At 1527hrs, Di Giussano (the agship of Rear-Admiral Da Zara)
observed a direct hit on the forebridge of the British battleship which
immediately made a round 360-degree turn.
However, the British official report, published in 1948 (itself a digest of the
Battle Summary made in 1942 for RN internal use) offered an alternative
explanation: that the explosion had not been a shell hit from the RM ships,
but one of Warspite’s Sword sh oatplanes on the catapult that was damaged
by X turret’s muzzle blast and subsequently jettisoned. e official version is
not backed by the primary evidence.8
Legnani and, some minutes later, the two small Condottieris (IV Divisione)
emerged unscathed and turned away at 1530hrs after accomplishing their
scouting task which gave Campioni and Paladini the chance to establish the
best course and position of tactical advantage, before joining the action.
When the main action between the battleships began, at 1553hrs, Warspite
was still too far from Royal Sovereign and Malaya, but Campioni, deceived by
the visual perspective, believed the enemy force had reunited. He changed the
previous order of concentrating his two battleships’ re against Warspite,
instead ordering each to concentrate on the two nearest battleships out of the
three. Although Campioni was a very brilliant officer and gunnery expert, who
in 1936 had introduced the modern RM re-control doctrine (almost identical
to the RN’s), he was becoming elderly and un t. His staff considered his visual
interpretation of the situation wrong, but the very rigid rules of the RM did
not encourage subordinates to contradict him. Only his CoS, Bergamini,
would have had the chance to correct the commander-in-chief of the Squadre
riunite (the joint I and II Squadra) but, as the father of the new 15in gun
system, he had been sent to Taranto in May to x the many teething troubles
of the brand new Littorios, not yet in service, and his role had been lled by
Admiral Bruto Brivonesi, commander of V Divisione (the two Cavours) and
unfortunately perhaps the most rigid officer in the whole navy.
9 JULY 1940, 1557hrs: THE ACTION OFF
CALABRIA (BATTAGLIA DI PUNTA STILO)
Between June 1940 and May 1943, the defence of the Sicilian Strait and the Ionian
Sea was an Italian prerogative. In the illustration, an 8in shell directly hits Warspite’s
main topmast. The HE projectile fired at Warspite is from the heavy cruiser Trento.
Italian crews then observed a hard turn of the ship, manoeuvering to evade and
closing her X and Y arcs. Until June 1943, Italian naval strategy was based on the
experience of this battle: the Cavours had been able to fight modernized British
battleships; Admiral Fioravanzo’s theory that initial long-range attack was decisive
in breaking the psycological balance was proved accurate; and the subsequent
medium-range phase, during which the rate of fire could increase, might not
materialize depending on the superiority of the opposing forces. These experiences
equated to the RN doctrine of initial rapid, accurate fire in order to establish early
fire-dominance in a battle. For the RM, almost everything depended on the
psychology of the enemy, and the RM was convinced they had gained the upper
hand during this action.
In 1957, Captain Roskill wrote in his book HMS Warspite that there were so many
unpublished Admiralty documents about Warspite that the critical reader could not
have access to them: ‘I have therefore felt it preferable to omit all references to
unpublished sources, even though I realise the dangers and disadvantages of doing
so’.
Action off Calabria, 9 July 1940. The battleship Cesare, seen from her sistership Cavour,
has just fired her first half salvo (five rounds) against HMS Malaya. (AC)

Cesare thus began to re at Malaya, and Cavour against Royal Sovereign at

the extreme range of 31,000yds. In spite of such an astronomical distance,
Cavour’s opening salvo was fairly accurate and straddled its target before the
British battleship was covered by changing its place in line with the faster
Malaya. Royal Sovereign suffered some minor underwater damage, such as
rivets having popped and sea water getting into the fresh water tanks and her
speed dropped from 18 to 16.5kt. She was temporarily repaired at Durban,
South Africa, two months later and then at Gibraltar. ese accidents were
later imputed to bombs but the Bombing Summaries do not support this
version as the nearest bomb (which missed her) during the whole six-day
operation was on 10 July, 100yds from her starboard side.
Only Warspite replied, as the other two battleships were out of range: turrets
A and B red on Cesare and X and Y on Cavour. One gun from each turret
red in each salvo, but her rate of re was (according to British tradition since
Crécy) rapid over accurate, in order to establish early re-dominance. e
Italian modernized battleships red only at half the rate of re of the enemy’s;
their guns had to be loaded at +12 degrees with a maximum elevating speed of
6 degrees/sec (Warspite +5 degrees and Malaya +20 degrees, both 5 degree/sec).
Each ship red ve or six projectiles in each salvo.

Action off Calabria, 9 July 1940, 1603hrs. A near-miss 12.6 shell fired by turret Y of
Cesare which fell over, seen from HMS Malaya a few seconds after the explosion. It
detonated abreast the starboard quarter of the unprotected bow of HMS Warspite. The
200ft-tall water columns behind the ship are from the previous half salvo (two rounds)
fired by turrets X and Y about 15 seconds before. Warspite’s speed is 17kt. (AC)

Admiral Carlo Cattaneo (III Divisione), whose agship Trento was the last
of the line of II Squadra after it had turned 180 degrees in unison, saw some
minutes after that Cunningham’s agship was not engaged by any Italian ships;
he opened re on Warspite on his own initiative for as long as the range of his
8in guns allowed him to, while heading north with the other Italian heavy
cruisers to engage the 7th Cruiser Squadron. Trento’s First Gunnery Officer
saw the range passing from salvos to broadsides. At 1557hrs, an 8in HE direct
hit by Trento was seen on the battleship aft, both by the Italian ships and the
Ro.43 oatplanes catapulted by the RM cruisers. It was followed by some blue
smoke.
e British official report stated later the Italian shooting during the action
was not good and that most of the salvos fell within 1,000yds from Warspite
except for one closely bunched salvo which fell about two cables from
Cunningham’s agship. But the original reports written in July 1940 tell a
different story, from ‘extremely accurate’ Italian shooting against Warspite to:
‘1554 … Splashes seen falling round Warspite.’9 e damage was along the
ying deck on the starboard side. e M.3 pom-pom was put out of service
and its ready-to-use magazine was ignited by splinters while the .50in machine
gun crews on X turret were blown over. Other super cial damage from
splinters were: the crane topping lift wire cut, a hole in the aft end of the
funnel and another in the crow’s nest; some Carley oats and boats were also
pierced.10
After the hit observed on Warspite, the Italians recorded that the battleship
had swung out of line to port, heading south-west along a new, and this time
diverging, route compared to the Italian one, while Trento was, by now, too far
to re against that target.
e signals among the British warships included a sharp reprimand to
Malaya, made during the same minute of that swing to port, to follow the
agship’s movements. However, the issue with Malaya was that at 1600hrs the
wheel in the Upper Conning Tower had jammed to coincide with a straddled
salvo by Cesare, and orders to the Control Engine Room steering had to be
passed from the Compass Platform by voicepipe.
Malaya was docked for ve days between 5 and 10 August 1940 for
permanent repairs as soon as the new moon granted a certain security against
enemy air raids. Warspite was taken in hand for permanent repairs during the
following two days. Repairs to Cesare were nished on 31 July.
One shell (labelled by Cunningham as ‘lucky’) of the last salvo red by
Warspite, before her alteration of course affected ring, hit Cesare’s aft funnel at
1559hrs, exploding inside it. e cap was projected outside the funnel and was
stopped by the internal face of the main armoured belt, but during its run it
set re to 4.7in charges stored in a lower-deck unprotected storeroom. is was
against regulations and a bad way to increase the secondary armament’s rate of
re. e smoke caused the shutdown, for some minutes, of four boilers. e
course remained steady and Cesare passed to shoot against Warspite, while
Cavour was still ring at Royal Sovereign.
At 1603hrs, the First Gunnery Officer of Cesare observed what was
considered as a near-miss, noting Warspite was suddenly bow-heavy and listing
at a considerable angle to starboard. A second later, one 12.6in direct hit was
observed (con rmed by the photo on page 46). e Ro.43 of the cruiser
Eugenio reported what was called ‘una zampata’ (a blow with a paw) on the
British agship. Warspite recorded and assigned credit for some further minor
damages by splinters, this time in the starboard after the end of the screen
around the Admiral’s bridge; the Flag Deck, Signal Deck, HA range nder and
searchlight platform, from a bomb never claimed by the Italian Air Force.
Cunningham’s agship stopped shooting for some minutes and Malaya, while
still out of range, red for the rst time. e distant and too-slow Royal
Sovereign remained silent. Meanwhile, by 1605hrs the speed of Cesare was
dropping from 25 to 18kt. ree minutes later, the Italian battleships turned
north-west under the protection of a smokescreen laid, from 1606hrs, by two
attending destroyers. II Squadra followed, ghting the 7th Cruiser Squadron
until 1620hrs.

ACTION OFF CALABRIA: THE MAIN PHASE,

PART II
After firing and inflicting mutual damage, the battleships Cesare and Warspite were
divided by a smokescreen laid by the Italian destroyers. Warspite had
counterbalanced a list to starboard down by the stern and was able to fire again
with her main armament, this time against the destroyers of the XII Squadriglia
through a gap in the smoke curtain. She too was sighted, however, across a similar
gap, by the cruiser Zara which shot 30 8in HE rounds. Two near-misses damaged
the battleship’s hull and waterplane area, and she developed an immediate list to
port. Warspite turned away, not shooting a single round, and Malaya replied, firing
five salvos, all short, until both sides were covered, once more, by the smoke
curtain. Admiral Cunningham, according to a commander of his staff, was very
irritated and, on the morning of 13 July, back at Alexandria, wrote to the First Lord,
Admiral Pound, about the ‘disappointing action’ and the fact that: ‘The shooting of
the enemy cruisers and battleships was generally reported as being of fairly high
standard’, adding that ‘The damaged ship is a nightmare especially one 900 miles
from her base’. He also added that the Italian ships with their ‘excess of at least five
knots’ outmanoeuvred the Mediterranean Fleet.
The RN original reports after the Action off Calabria stated: ‘Italian shooting fairly
good’, noting the ‘remarkable accuracy’, the ‘extremely accurate fire’ of the RM’s
12.6, 8, 6 and 4.7in guns and that: ‘Enemy re-opened fire, his fire being extremely
accurate’; and ‘The fire of the 8in cruisers was again very accurate and I had to turn
Starboard …’. It was the Ministry of Information’s propaganda mill which created the
myth of the high dispersion rate of the RM’s projectiles, possibly to help British
morale after the disappointing battle and before the emergence of the Blitz Spirit
after the day raids against London on 7 September 1940.
 Warspite at Alexandria, August 1940, in the foreground, after repairs. The plating of the
stem post peppered by a 12.6in near-miss has been substituted with new red plates yet
to be finally painted. Near the waterline, ahead of turret A, can be seen the effects of an
oblique (about 28°) direct hit observed by Cesare at 1603hrs that penetrated the armour
deck, bursting behind the plates after hitting the vessel. The explosion’s blast and fire
were mild, and material damage was slight. The hard cap made a hole in the upper 6in belt
while some fragments pierced the ship’s side above. (AWM 18539972)

At 1610hrs, the heavy cruiser Zara sighted, through a gap in the smoke,
Warspite (which, according to the Italian narrative, had rapidly righted herself )
and began to re HE broadsides against her. e British agship did not
answer, but hauled hard to port and Malaya had to intervene, again without
success. Zara appreciated having scored two near-misses, observing that
Warspite’s trim was down by the head and the ship was rapidly heeling to port,
not lurching, but listing heavily, taking on water forward. is incident too is
supported by photographic evidence. A couple of minutes later, everything
disappeared in the smoke. e Italian oatplane Eugenio independently
con rmed all these statements, as did a photograph taken by the Navy observer
of a S.81 bomber at 1643hrs.
Warspite could have counter ooded easily and within a few minutes to
minimize the list caused by the 12.6in near-miss to her stempost that the
Italians had noted, transferring some hundred tons of fuel oil and water,
however, RN doctrine was not to add sea water for counter ooding. is was
because of the cautionary tale of the battleship Marlborough which was
torpedoed at Jutland with initially relatively little damage and only 800t of salt
water inside, but ooding worsened during the following day and threatened
to sink her.
With Malta too dangerous for a stay of longer than one night, Warspite
would take at least two days to arrive at Alexandria – a harbour whose narrow
‘Great Pass’ was so shallow that a battleship with a 10-degree list would be
unable to enter.
On 12 July, an Italian aircraft photographed what was identi ed as a
battleship proceeding independently to Alexandria (Warspite that day) with a
list of 7 degrees to port; a trim that would have been quite uncomfortable for
the crew.

Alexandria, July 1940. Further evident signs of the gunfire damage sustained by Warspite.
The hole (a 6in HE direct hit by the cruiser Di Giussano) in the charthouse and the damage
to the waterline under turret X caused by two 8in HE near-misses fired by the cruiser Zara
at 1613hrs. (AWM 18539972)

On the morning of the 13 July, Warspite entered Alexandria. Cunningham

wrote in his memoirs that people were perturbed to notice that the battleship
was heeling over. He explained the battleship had been purposely listed to see
if the bulges had been damaged by near-misses, a possibility ruled out by the
Bombing Summaries, also because the trim of any ship is constantly monitored
and controlled by the inclinometer on the navigating bridge, by the pitch and
roll equipment in the engine room, and by the draft marks painted on the
sides of any vessel. Temporary patch-up repairs only (according to Italian
HUMINT intelligence reports) helped to gain time to weld the torn plating of
the hull and the weakened bulges later in the oating dock.
It is worth noting that in August 1940, on the basis of the recent action, the
Vice-Chief of Naval Staff, Rear-Admiral T.S.V. Phillips, decided to reduce the
thickness of armour abreast the machinery and on the barbettes from 15in to
14in on the planned, future battleships of the Lion class, and to add a 1½in
splinter belt on the waterline fore and aft of the citadel, 1in transverse splinter
bulkheads between the lower and middle decks, and additional splinter plating
to the bridges. e purpose was to prevent the loss of waterplane area at the
ends of the ships caused by splinters from shells or bombs exploding outboard,
peppering the waterline, and to reduce the area of splinter damage onboard. A
similar description of damages was observed by the Italians on 9 July. A
con rmation, after the only 19,000–7,000yds Action of the River Plate, that
near-misses were possible, and more frequent than envisaged, during the
battleships’ long-range encounters, and that protection against big guns’ heavy
splinters had thus to be extended.
During the last phase of this confused action, the Mediterranean Fleet
steamed north, from 1620hrs until 1708hrs, according to the Official Report,
trying to engage the enemy battle eet again. e Italians, who were steaming
west until 1645hrs, when Cesare recovered her original speed, said the British
course was south-west towards Malta. e four destroyers of the Italian 12ª
Squadriglia engaged for more than half an hour what they regarded as the
Mediterranean Fleet sailing south, dodging inside and outside their
smokescreen, ring spasmodically and launching torpedoes before coming
back under the cover of their curtain, being counterattacked and targeted by
the British. e Proceeding of the destroyer Hereward con rms the course
south of the RN squadron at 1640hrs. At 1700hrs, the Italian level bombers –
which had to attack before gunnery action – appeared, dropping their bombs,
by that time too far away from each other to engage again. e carrier Eagle,
the destroyer Hero and the cruisers Gorizia and Luigi Cadorna had some small
splinter damage to their decks and some casualties.
 9 July 1940, 1643hrs. HMS Warspite seen by a S. 81 bomber. The battleship is stern-
heavy and has taken a port list confirmed by the two different wakes. Eddies starboard
are connected to the holes in the stem post and the gash caused by the 12.6in cone as
seen above. Her pumps are able to control the flooding by clever damage-control
procedures. (AC)

Intelligence was supplied to Italy by a Hungarian military attaché in Egypt

who had seen (using his binoculars) the warships (two battleships, one carrier,
three cruisers and ve destroyers) damaged at Alexandria. e information was
con rmed, on 21 July, by one member of the crew of a Sword sh oatplane
lent by Malaya to Warspite two days before, who had ditched after an engine
failure near Tobruk before being rescued by the Italians. Mussolini himself
(who supervised the Italian war bulletins) announced on 22 July the names of
the RN warships which had suffered major damage during the recent action
(Warspite and Gloucester, actually hit by a bomb on 8 July and some fragments
the next day), information which until then had not been published anywhere.
In London, the Ministry of Information denied this at once, but a few days
later the obituary, published by the British press, of the captain of Gloucester
and of 33 men of his warship, turned out to be a catalyst which prompted the
press to be more accurate in future reporting.
Consequences of the Battle
Italian records weren’t impartial, and with records varying so much, some
details of the battle cannot be satisfactorily established. What matters, however,
are the following conclusions from the day of action.
To Cunningham, the battle con rmed what the Admiralty had tested at
home and then observed in Spain between 1935 and 1939: that high-level
bombers had very little chance of hitting a moving battleship, only ships
moored in a harbour; also that the submarine menace could only be combated
by the recently introduced ASDIC (sonar).11 us, only the Italian battleforce
was able to seriously interfere with the RN operations in the Ionian Sea
because Italian long-range gunnery and the 12.6in AP shells were effective.
e Italian admirals considered the Action off Calabria (they called it:
Battaglia di Punta Stilo) a tactical and strategic success. Campioni and Paladini
ended the battle with a Parthian shot, complimenting each other by wireless
that afternoon. eir signals were intercepted. ere is no trace, however, in
the ‘Action off Calabria 9th July 1940 – List of Enemy Signals Intercepted’
record of the alleged submarine trap which would have induced Cunningham
(like Lord Jellicoe in 1916) not to pursue the battle. After having asked – and
obtained – plenty of reinforcements (battleships, armoured carriers, heavy
cruisers, etc.) to shore-up the Mediterranean Fleet, the commander-in-chief
wrote about what was later called, because of the battle’s unsatisfactory result,
the ‘myth of moral ascendancy’.
From a tactical point of view, Cunningham described Calabria as a ‘very
disappointing’ action. e rest of the strategic story is pretty clear. For men
born in the 19th century, formed by reading Mahan on the ‘great naval
decisive battle’, the Action off Calabria was the missed opportunity of the
con ict. It could be compared to the Battle of Ouessant fought between the
French and the British on 27 July 1778, an apparently indecisive action which
opened the Atlantic sea routes from continental Europe to North America
during the United States War of Independence.
ere was, however, a fundamental difference. In 1778, Rochambeau and
Lafayette had embarked a sufficient number of expeditionary corps, adequately
trained and equipped to take on the British Army in North America, while in
1940, the 72 M11/39 tanks of the Regio Esercito (that the naval convoy had
safely landed at Benghazi) had to face, between 8 July and late September
1940, no fewer than 85 British A9 and A10 medium tanks which were waiting
for them, with better-trained crews, south of Marsa Matruh. And 23 of the 72
Italian tanks were out of order for months after the advance to Sidi Barrani in
September 1940. At that time, Suez was already able to receive three times the
number of merchant vessels entering Libyan harbours every month. It is
evident that Fioravanzo’s theory that the army was the decisive force, and the
navy’s role was just to open the gates of naval traffic and control local seas, was
awed. More sensible was Cavagnari’s idea to win the war at sea, and by sea
only, bleeding white British tonnage. Italy could survive with sufficient
supplies from Europe delivered mainly by railways; the huge British Empire
needed, instead, large amounts of maritime traffic whose total tonnage was,
since June 1940, declining every month.
e Action off Calabria was the biggest battle at sea fought in Europe,
Africa and America during World War II. A further six major daytime actions
followed and dozens of other ones, most of them at night (where the RN
enjoyed a clear advantage after developing new strategies and radar sets) until
the Italian armistice was announced on 8 September 1943.

The Convoy War

After this not-so-decisive ‘great naval battle’, the Mediterranean naval war
turned into a daily guerrilla war fought by expendable means (aircraft,
submarines, mines, sometimes light forces) against Axis communications with
North Africa and the Balkans. According to reports, 83.49 per cent of the
materials and 91.99 per cent of the personnel sent by sea to Libya, Egypt and
Tunisia arrived safely, not to mention the respective 99.6 and 99.9 per cent
which arrived safe and well in the Balkans.
e average amount of materials delivered to North African ports on a
monthly basis was, during the campaign, 65,000t, i.e. the maximum load the
poorly equipped harbours could handle and transfer with the insufficient
number of trucks available (except during the few periods of standstill along
the front, when more lorries were available). ere was only one month of
crisis, November 1941, when only 37.67 per cent of the supplies sent arrived
in Libya, but this didn’t affect things as much as it could have, rstly, because
Axis stocks in North Africa were always sufficient for one to two months and
secondly, the build-up for the planned German and Italian offensive against
Tobruk was completed by September 1941 (it was deferred only by the two
months’ delay needed to complete the Strada dell’Asse (Axis Road) around the
besieged Tobruk fortress beyond the range of the British heavy artillery);
thirdly, the materials lost at sea in November 1941 (49,395t) were partially
replaced between December 1941 and January 1942, by French deliveries from
Tunisia and Algeria, of at least 22,000t of food and gasoline as Vichy was,
during that period, in full accordance with Berlin, believing the war with the
USSR would soon conclude with peace with Moscow and German victory in
Europe; nally, the total weapons lost at sea between 1 August 1941 and 18
January 1942 was: 12 eld guns, 67 anti-tank guns, 25 0.787in AA MGs, 338
trucks and 46 tanks (all lost on 23 January 1942 and replaced in May, being all
Italian M14/41). ese were the weapons for the Italian Division ‘Sabratha’,
which had been reconstructed, but had not been included in the planned
offensive in Cyrenaica as its task was only to guard the Tunisian frontier. e
division became combat-ready by new deliveries in February 1942.
Bay of Suda, November 1941. The torpedo boat Cassiopea is refuelling from the stranded
full-load British tanker Eleonora Maersk (10,694 gross tons). A blessing, given the
shortage of fuel oil suffered by the Axis navies in the Mediterranean during autumn 1941.
(AC)

e British (and later American) war against Axis tonnage often cost the
attackers dearly, and was not always a success, notwithstanding numerous
claims to the contrary. On 10 June 1940, the Axis had available 2,101,492t of
Italian shipping and 203,513t of German freighters to give a total of
2,305,005t. roughout the war, new ship construction and seizures from
Yugoslavia, Greece, France and Britain kept Axis tonnage a oat. On 8
September 1943, the gures were respectively 1,860,777t for the Italians and
263,776t for the Germans (a total of 2,124,553t), not considering some
further 100,000 Axis tons in the Black Sea, which opened again to
Mediterranean commerce from April 1941 after the surrender of Greece.
roughout the same period, the Allies sank 1,669,707 Axis tons in the
Mediterranean, losing little more than 1.7 million tons of their own shipping
in the process.
 Between 11 June 1940 and 8 September 1943, the Italian shipping loss rate
– taking into account all routes, civilian included, and all fronts and areas that
had to be kept supplied in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea – was 0.8 per
cent, a gure comparable to the 0.7 per cent Captain Roskill submits for the
British escorted trade convoys 1939–45 in e Navy at War.
Within this picture, the little more than 1.2 million tons of shipping sunk
or captured by the Italian Navy12 (not considering the French merchant vessels
found in France and Tunisia in November 1942) amounted to just 10 per cent
of the German successes over the same period but the RM score was
comparable to the contemporary Japanese total. However, with respect to
Italian interests, these losses had a disproportionate impact at the time. If we
consider the progress of the Battle of the Atlantic between mid-December
1942 (when the Allies lost their original hopes to rapidly conquer Tunisia and
thus open the Mediterranean again) and early June 1943, when British
codebreakers read Dönitz’s order of 24 May 1943 which stated he was
temporarily withdrawing U-boats from the North Atlantic in the face of the
new Allied ASW tactics and weapons, the disruption was most certainly
effective.
Furthermore, on 29 March 1943, the British government had, indeed, to
accept American terms imposing a single pool of Allied merchant shipping,
dominated by Washington, thus passing the leadership of the ‘strange alliance’
– born almost by chance in 1941 – to the USA. is was the price of British
logistical and nancial dependence upon the United States, with stocks of
imported food and raw materials at home now almost running out.
at day, the Italian war, at least according to the dominant thinking in
Rome, had a change of values: from a feared, vindictive British peace to the
much more manageable Americans, generally on good terms with Italy since
the late 19th century. eir overwhelming power had materialized rst-hand in
November 1942 with the landings in French North Africa, and victories in
Tunisia in May 1943 and Sicily two months later.

The Rest of 1940

On 19 July 1940, in the action off Cape Spada, a brief sortie into the Aegean
Sea by two Italian rst generation Condottieri cruisers to disrupt the British
trade in that area, HMAS Sydney hit the cruiser Colleoni twice which was then
sunk by two torpedoes red by British destroyers. Bande Nere, Sydney and
Havock all experienced minor gunnery damage.
Con dent the British would no longer interfere in the Central
Mediterranean, on 27 July, Supermarina sent the biggest convoy of the war to
Libya, named ‘TVL’ (Trasporto Veloce e Lento: fast and slow transport as there
were two convoys) formed of nine freighters. It arrived safely, but the port’s
congestion demonstrated that only a small, daily convoy could be unloaded in
a workable manner.
On 1 August, Mussolini refused Cavagnari’s proposal to convert the liners
Rex and Conte di Savoia into fast (26kt) carriers, razing their superstructures.
ese huge ships would have been very vulnerable to underwater attacks and
had, according to the Italian Minister of Communications, a high commercial
value. Only the old liner Roma was available and so the RM began a new study
to convert her into a fast carrier inspired by the British Ark Royal, using the
almost completed machinery of two light cruisers of the Capitani Romani class
whose construction had been stopped in June 1940.
Italian navy intelligence broke the information on 4 August that Hood had
been damaged on 1 August by a bomb which had struck the bridge front
without detonating. e battlecruiser, worn out and unable to do more than
22kt, would soon sail for Britain. Just over a week later, on 13 August, the
codebreakers discovered that Royal Sovereign had left the Mediterranean for
repairs and re t at Durban.
On 15 August, ve recently activated RA S.M.79 torpedo bombers attacked,
without result, the Mediterranean Fleet at Alexandria. e base was judged too
well defended and the two weapons launched got stuck in the mud. Two days
later, the Mediterranean Fleet shelled the still-undefended town of Bardia,
Libya. Cunningham wrote that the enemy’s skill in dispersing motor transports
and stores over wide areas of desert rendered this type of operation
unjusti able. at day, the Comando Supremo recorded one dead and some
motorbikes damaged. With the value of this tactic proved, Italian forces would
always disperse their supplies over the following years.
 THE STRATEGIC PICTURE, THE
MEDITERRANEAN SEA

On 21 August, FAA Sword sh sank the submarine Iride in the Gulf of

Bomba, Libya. In the rst operation of the Italian navy special attack craft
force, later named X MAS Flotilla, Iride had been due to mount an SLC
human torpedo attack against the Mediterranean Fleet at Alexandria.
Having just arrived at Alexandria on 10 September, the captain of the carrier
Illustrious proposed a night raid against the Italian battle eet at Taranto.
Illustrious had recently delivered new night cockpits to Egypt for the Sword sh
torpedo-bombers and advanced auxiliary tanks which allowed take-off from
the nearby Greek Ionian islands. e attack would be based on air
reconnaissance from Malta by the recently arrived, fast two-engined Martin
Maryland bombers. e operation was scheduled for 21 October by Illustrious
and Eagle.
A new SLC attack against Alexandria, this time by the submarine Gondar,
was aborted on 29 September because the Mediterranean Fleet was at sea. e
day after, the boat was sunk by British and Australian destroyers supported by
an RAF Sunderland ying boat. e same day, the submarine Sciré received the
order to cancel a similar operation against Gibraltar when 50 miles from the
target, as the always-busy Force H was away.
On 14 October, Italian S.M.79 bombers damaged the carrier Eagle. Only
Illustrious would attack Taranto with just 24 instead of 30 originally planned
Sword sh. Only one aircraft – which would miss its target – was thus reserved
for Veneto.

THE WILD GOOSE CHASES: AUGUST /

SEPTEMBER 1940
On the afternoon of 9 July 1940, after the Action off Calabria, Admiral Cunningham
was waiting for the reinforcements he had asked for for the Mediterranean Fleet: at
least two up-to-date modernized battleships, one more fleet carrier, heavy cruisers
and much more. The idea, cultivated since 1937, of a knockout blow through a
decisive battle for control of the Mediterranean was over. The RM’s battleline was
reinforced, with much propaganda, in August 1940, with the addition of three
battleships. However, this reinforcement was a bluff as training and, above all, the
new 15in guns’ teething problems, would continue until early November 1940. The
distances between Taranto and Alexandria, the problems of the Italian naval air
reconnaissance (too few floatplanes with no night capabilities until January 1942)
and the RM’s destroyer range did not allow for a timely sortie that would intercept
the British battleforce. But confrontations did happen on 31 August 1940 and on 30
September 1940. During the first episode at 1815hrs, two Cavours, seven cruisers
and eight destroyers were sighted 140 miles north-west by a Swordfish from Eagle.
Admiral Cunningham turned south with his two battleships, one carrier, five cruisers
and 13 destroyers, waiting for the night and close to a convoy (three transports and
four destroyers) bound for Malta. After the war, he stated that his air
reconnaissance had signalled five Italian battleships. The Italian line was actually
four battleships, two of them not yet truly operational (the purpose of this bluff
being to avoid a shore bombardment of Southern Italy or the shelling of the
important harbour of Benghazi). No night search from either side was attempted in
spite of the British advantage in terms of range and training, and no surface attack
developed, only some bomb damage to the merchant vessel Cornwall and the
Polish destroyer Garland. On 30 September, the episode was repeated after a
Swordfish from Illustrious sighted five Italian battleships 116 miles away. Only
 Warspite sustained splinter damage and casualties, off Sidi Barrani, by bombs
dropped by 18 S.M.79 bombers from Rhodes.

e submarine Scirè launched her three SLCs towards the Rock on 29

October. Teething troubles with the engines of the underwater attack craft
compromised the mission. Only one ‘pig’ made it into harbour, and was 75yds
from Barham when it sank, exploding harmlessly a few hours later. Barham
joined the Mediterranean Fleet on 11 November 1940.

Taranto and its Aftermath

On 6 November, the two Littorios were considered combat-ready. ey were
going to sail, on 12 November, with the battleforce to cover a bombardment of
the Bay of Suda by heavy cruisers. e operation was cancelled after the FAA
raid against Taranto on 11 November.
 e operation in Taranto was helped by Italy’s lack of anti-torpedo nets to
protect its battleships. It had been discovered, on 20 June, that the British had
effective net cutters able to penetrate World War I single nets, and that double-
netting, or new, more robust nets, would not be available before spring 1941,
both because the industry could not deliver the new materials in time and
because of lack of tugs. e overhead balloon barrage had mostly been blown
away some days before by a sudden strong wind and the Italian Army
(responsible for their maintenance) had been unable to replace them. Despite a
timely warning before the raid, the FAA torpedo bombers from Illustrious were
able to hit Cavour, Duilio and Littorio. e British assessment the day after was
that the rst would need one year to be repaired and the other two six months.
Despite the availability by mid-November of ve battleships and two
carriers, the Mediterranean Fleet did not try to force another eet action.
Britain was too weak and overstretched in 1940–41 to win in the
Mediterranean by brute force and as General Sir John Dill, Chief of the
Imperial General Staff, said, Britain had to stake everything on an indirect
approach, trying to topple Mussolini and, by domino effect, his German
counterpart.
e Italian Vittorio Veneto, then the most modern and powerful battleship in
the world, sailed with Cesare and Doria on 12 November for Naples. ey
would remain there until their new anti-torpedo boxes were ready at Taranto
from late spring 1941. However, the undamaged battleships were not
husbanded. On 17 November, Force H was on a mission to supply new
aircraft to Malta. After its carrier-based air reconnaissance discovered the
Italian battleforce (Veneto and Cesare) steaming to intercept them, Somerville
decided to launch 14 aircraft towards Malta and retire. Being too far, nine of
them crashed at sea or were shot down.

Cape Spartivento (Capo Teulada)

On 27 November, Vittorio Veneto and Cesare, with six heavy cruisers and 14
destroyers, fought a long-range action against Force H (the battleships Renown,
agship of Vice-Admiral Somerville, Ramillies, carrier Ark Royal, ve cruisers
and 14 destroyers) escorting a convoy (three motor vessels)) bound for Malta
and Alexandria and protected by two light cruisers, two destroyers and four
corvettes.
It was a one-hour affair. At rst, the opposing cruisers engaged and the
heavy cruiser Berwick sustained two 8in direct hits disabling X turret; the light
cruiser Southampton was seen straddled, sustaining splinter damage and
hauling to starboard. According to a signal intercepted at 1337hrs, but
decrypted by the Italians only the day after, Southampton informed Renown
that she was able to do only 12.5kt, a circumstance not con rmed by the
British version. Renown arrived at ank speed, 27kt, leaving behind the
outranged Ramillies at 20.7kt, to sustain the RN scouting force of Admiral
Lancelot Holland. Her shooting caused near-miss damage to the cruiser
Bolzano’s rudder. When Renown and the remaining four British cruisers were
within range of Vittorio Veneto’s 15in guns, the Italian battleships red seven
salvos at 1305hrs, with turret 3, observing that they twice hit, at 1308hrs, the
bow of the second enemy ship of the line (Renown). Both sides disengaged.
Somerville at 1309hrs because, according to the official report, there was not a
chance of engaging the fast Italian vessels. Campioni at 1310hrs because,
according to the information broadcast at noon by Supermarina, air
reconnaissance had wrongly reported the presence of three RN battleships. A
CANT Z.501 land-based ying boat signalled, at 1320hrs, a re on the bow of
a slow-moving British battleship, but this news was broadcast from Rome to
Campioni only two hours later. At 1445hrs, ten Italian S.M.79 bombers
attacked without results, Force H observing the re reported previously by the
CANT.
Later, on 29 November, the Italian coastwatchers based at Algeciras
informed Supermarina that a Kent-class cruiser (Berwick) had been docked
(Dock 2) with damage at her stern. On 30 November, it was the turn of
Renown to enter Dock 1 for a week at Gibraltar with damages on her bow and
a glancing blow against turret A. HUMINT (Spanish workers in Gibraltar)
con rmed the damages to HMS Renown were caused by two direct shell hits,
one of them a partially detonated one, on both sides which were repaired
within two weeks.
e British version recorded only the direct hits on Berwick. e 18th
Cruiser Squadron War Diary adds Manchester at 1332hrs. No mention is made
about Renown, and Southampton was repaired at Durban in December 1940.
e Italian destroyer Lanciere, slowed by a previous machinery defect, was hit
twice (one of them a dud) by HMS Newcastle.

South of Sardinia, 27 November 1940. British 6in guns shooting against an Italian heavy
cruiser. The salvos are closely bunched, but the accuracy is average. British spotting of
line and deflection were always considered weak by the Italians during long-range
actions. (AC)

Supermarina’s nal conclusion was that the Action off Cape Spartivento

(Capo Teulada) was the litmus test of the RM’s long-range gunnery pro ciency
and advantage over the RN’s gunnery – much criticized except for the recently
modernized RN battleships – proving that Fioravanzo’s doctrine about the
decisive psychological effect in favour of those able to draw rst blood was
sound. e convoy to Malta had, however, got through and the general
political mood after Taranto favoured the removal of Cavagnari and Somigli
and the appointment of Iachino replacing Campioni.
27 November 1940. The cruiser Fiume during the Action off Cape Spartivento. On 29 and
30 November 1940, Italian coastal watchers at Algeciras and HUMINT in Gibraltar
signalled the battleship Renown as having been damaged fore by two 15in (one of them a
partially exploded one) direct hits. She was in Dock 1 while the cruiser Berwick, damaged
(turret Y) by two 8in shells, was in Dock 2. Renown’s temporary repairs were over by mid-
December 1940. The RM concluded it was satisfied with its gunnery and had confirmed
its upper hand in the Central Mediterranean. (AC)

1941
Despite some warning by the RM codebreakers about a pending British action
off Vlorë (Albania) and three previous attempts at night ambushes by Italian
cruisers and destroyers, on 19 December the battleships of the Mediterranean
Fleet were able to conduct a brief, blind night shelling from 26,000yds in the
direction of the harbour. ree FIAT CR.42 ghters were damaged on an
airstrip.
 Bardia, which had been besieged from 13 December 1940, was bombarded
on 3 January by Warspite, Valiant and Barham. It was a very brief action as the
Italian sailors had increased the elevation of the four 4.7in guns along the coast
which had been defending the fortress since mid-August 1940. According to a
sailor with Warspite: ‘Splinters hit the Barham and our ship but no serious
damage had been done’.
On the morning of 6 January, the breaking of Greek ciphers by RM
codebreakers allowed the four destroyers of IX Squadriglia to surprise two of
the three Hellenic Army regiments of heavy artillery (French-made 155mm
howitzers) on the coastal road near Himarë in Albania, along the decisive front
of Vlorë. e movement of the guns had been delayed the night before by a
bombardment from two Italian torpedo boats and the destroyers arrived
steaming at 32kt. Some RAF bombers tried, with no results, to counterattack
the bombarding Italians. at day the Greek Army cancelled its last, desperate
offensive towards Vlorë.
On 7 January, Mussolini reneged on his earlier carrier decisions, ordering
the conversion of the liner Roma into a eet carrier within 12, or better eight
months. However, the RA CoS, General Pricolo, stopped the programme
within three weeks, explaining that his air force had no suitable aircraft or the
necessary know-how. In Rome, everyone believed that the war would be over
after the conquest of Greece and the opening of the Italian maritime route for
the Black Sea.
A raid by RAF bombers based in Malta on 8 January caused minor damages
to Cesare. While smokescreen defences at Naples were improved, the
battleforce left for La Spezia.
On 10 January, German and Italian Ju 87 dive bombers seriously damaged
the carrier Illustrious 60 miles west of Malta. e ship would leave the
Mediterranean to be repaired in the USA, and was replaced on 10 March by
her twin Formidable. With Eagle worn out and too vulnerable (retiring from
the Mediterranean in April 1941), the Mediterranean Fleet’s activity was
hampered for two months. e three fast (18kt) landing ships Glenearn,
Glengyle and Glenroy, with a brigade of commandos, which were meant to be
the spearhead of an invasion rst of Pantelleria in late January and, later, of
Rhodes, planned since October 1940, consequently had to follow the Cape
Route, losing two months.
e damage to Illustrious sparked an absurd battleship sortie to intercept her
from Liguria on 11 January, which was ordered personally by Mussolini and
undone the day after. It was a waste of oil, which was already precious.
Genoa was bombarded on 9 February by Force H (HMS Renown, Malaya
and Ark Royal with one cruiser and eight destroyers). Covered by a heavy fog
and shooting down immediately the only Italian oatplane which sighted the
squadron, Admiral Somerville was able to shell the town. e fog, however,
was an obstacle to the ships’ aims and no serious damage was achieved. e
only ship de nitively lost was the Garaventa, a training ship for teenage boys.
Many of the shells did not explode. e fog was also a problem for the shore
batteries.
Poor visibility (3,200–4,300yds) then prevented an encounter with the
Italian battleforce (Veneto, Cesare and Doria with three cruisers and ten
destroyers), which was still at sea to intercept a supposed raid by the three
Glen-class landing ships in Sardinia. Iachino decided not to heed the advice
from Supermarina and missed by less than 20 miles the opportunity to engage
Force H off Corsica beyond the fog and with very good visibility. e blame
for the raid was placed on Admiral Campioni and Supermarina, which was still
in its running-in phase.
 Winter 1940–41. Admiral Angelo Iachino (left), the new commander of the battlefleet, on
Vittorio Veneto. Behind him is a Ro.43 floatplane, a good aircraft for spotter tasks. In
autumn 1942, the three Littorios also embarked one or two Re.2000 fighters. (AC)

During a secret meeting in Athens on 12 March, Yugoslavian plotters, in

touch with the British SOE intelligence agency since January, were persuaded
that the RN, master of the Mediterranean, would steam into the Adriatic Sea
to protect their planned revolt against the Axis. After seizing power at home,
the generals in Belgrade accordingly activated their plan for a retreat to
Dalmatia, waiting for British aid. After the end of the brief Yugoslavian
campaign, it turned out this had been a misunderstanding. e small
Yugoslavian Navy was all seized by the RM on 17 April 1941, except for a
worn-out submarine and two MTBs.
At dawn on 26 March, an explosive boat hit HMS York at Souda Bay, Crete,
and the ship was beached. York was the last RN heavy cruiser available for
operations in the Mediterranean able to do 30kt. e modernized Kent had a
similar speed, but had been torpedoed by an S.M.79 bomber on 17 September
1940, and the damage suffered by the 27-knotter Berwick two months later at
the hands of the Italian heavy cruisers Trieste and Pola con rmed that the
remaining RN heavy cruisers were too slow for the Mediterranean. On 1 May
1941, all efforts to save York ceased and the wreck became the favourite target
of German bombers during the campaign for Crete. Future battles between
opposing scouting forces would always involve Italian 8in guns against British
6in and 5.25in guns until April 1943; a tactical advantage for the RM.

Gavdos Island, 28 March 1941. The 15in near-miss which damaged HMS Orion and
caused some minor flooding. (AC)

On the night of 21/22 April, the Mediterranean Fleet bombarded the

harbour of Tripoli. Two empty freighters were sunk, and there was some
splinter damage, but the harbour’s efficiency was not affected. A oating mine
slightly damaged Valiant. A later plan to block Tripoli by scuttling the old
target vessel Centurion was compromised by the machinery defects of the
intended blockship.
 An RN squadron of two cruisers and six destroyers had to embark troops at
Kalamata on 28 April during the retreat from continental Greece. Italian
wireless signals that were intercepted but not decrypted (as the main RM
ciphers were unreadable) induced the senior captain to abandon the operation,
fearing that he would be engaged the next morning off Crete by Italian
cruisers. However, the Italian ships in the area were only occupying Kefalonia.
e memory of Gavdos thus caused three-quarters of the British and Imperial
POWs to be taken on the mainland of Greece and the loss of the Yugoslavian
plotters (about 1,500 officers and their families) from the 27 March Coup.
By 8 May 1941, Littorio was back in service at Taranto, and, the day after,
Queen Elizabeth joined the Mediterranean Fleet, steaming eastward from
Gibraltar with the Egypt-bound Operation Tiger convoy – the last merchant
vessels which would arrive there without taking the Cape route for the
following two years. Due to low clouds, fog and rain, Italian air reconnaissance
had failed to sight them in time for a sortie by the RM battleforce (Cesare and
Doria) based at Naples. Churchill’s ideas about Force H shelling Naples on the
way, or basing the battleship at Malta to stop the Axis traffic with Libya, had
been discarded by the more prudent First Lord Admiral Sir Dudley Pound.
North of Crete, at 0914hrs on 22 May, the torpedo boat Sagittario claimed a
torpedo struck the cruiser Naiad starboard. e 15th Cruiser Squadron retired
immediately and did not attack the slow convoy of motor shing vessels
ferrying German troops, escorted by Sagittario. At 0930hrs, Luftwaffe aircraft
attacked but had used up their last torpedo the day before.13 However,
Lieutenant Louis E. Le Bailly described a torpedo punching a hole through his
ship stem and a huge hole port side. Other witnesses14 and photographic
evidence con rm this version. It is another of many unresolvable cases.
Steaming at 16kt, the crippled Naiad slowed down the squadron and Warspite
and Valiant, patrolling west of Crete to repulse any RM menace, had to enter
the Luftwaffe’s range of action to support the 15th Cruiser Squadron. Both
battleships were damaged by German bombs and Warspite departed in June for
repairs in the USA.
 North of Crete, 22 May 1941. The torpedo boat Sagittario is dodging the British and
Australian cruisers’ salvos after having fired her two starboard torpedoes. Note the 6in or
5.25 shells did not explode. (AC)

South of Crete on 27 May, German and Italian bombers damaged the

carrier Formidable, Barham (escorting against RM cruisers) and the destroyer
Nubian. ey all left the Mediterranean to be repaired in the USA, South
Africa and India. e same day, three SLCs ferried by the submarine Sciré
failed to carry out a new attack against Force H at Gibraltar, due to mechanical
problems.
On 16 June, the Taranto-damaged battleship Duilio returned to service. e
next month the Germans withdrew their promises of oil supplies from
Romania because the war against the USSR, unleashed by Berlin on 22 June,
needed every drop of fuel available. Rome could thus only trust the production
of the Italian concession of Ploesti. e rst effect of this news was to reduce
almost to zero the missions of the modernized RM battleships.
On 8 July, the liner Roma began, despite the RA’s stubborn opposition, to be
converted into a carrier, named Aquila, to be completed in February 1942.
Unfortunately, in September 1941, Germany’s offer of spare equipment from
the planned twin of their carrier Graf Zeppelin was accepted. is meant that
the German trolley and catapult system would be tted, instead of the original,
easier free-take-off method devised by the RM. is compromised the
commissioning of the carrier, as did the delays to the arrester wire system. In
July 1943, the trials with Re.2001 ghters were still ongoing, with modest
success.
Damaged at Cape Matapan by a British torpedo bomber, Veneto was back in
service on 22 July; a day later, Renown was damaged by Italian S.M.79
bombers in the western Mediterranean, her speed restricted to 20kt by torn
plating in the starboard bulge. Repairs in Britain would be completed in
December 1941.
Barham returned to Alexandria from the repair yard on 15 September. On
20 September, three SLCs launched by the submarine Sciré attacked Force H
at Gibraltar. RN motor launches repulsed two of them, which later sank a
storage hulk and damaged a merchant vessel. e third penetrated the boom,
and damaged the tanker Denbydale with its mine, trying to set the harbour on
re with the tanker’s fuel oil. is attempt failed due to British fuel being of
better quality than the Italian one (not to mention the dangerous synthetic
German one), with a lower ash point.
November was a costly month for the RN in the Mediterranean. On 13
November, Ark Royal was torpedoed by the German submarine U-81 and sank
the next day, while on 25 November, Barham was torpedoed and sunk by U-
331. Given the Italian battleforce threat, the battle squadron of the
Mediterranean Fleet had been escorting a cruiser squadron that was to
bombard the Halfaya Pass shore road.
However, in the Night Action of Cape Bon, on 13 December 1941, Allied
destroyers sank the light cruisers Di Giussano and Da Barbiano. Vittorio Veneto
was torpedoed by the submarine HMS Urge on 14 December while escorting a
convoy to Libya.

THE REALITIES BEHIND SEA POWER: THE

FIRST BATTLE OF SIRTE
At a critical moment during the British offensive, Operation Crusader, in North
Africa, and after brilliant actions by Force K, Italian Navy personnel struck back at
sunset on 17 December 1941.
Since June 1941, the RM had had more powerful battleships than the
Mediterranean Fleet but they mostly remained in their own waters. The RM’s night
fighting capabilities, being still without radar sets, had been confirmed obsolete, and
sea power was, until 1944, a daylight matter using battleships.
The 17 December 1941 action was a brief, 11-minute engagement before darkness:
three Italian battleships, two cruisers and ten destroyers against four RN cruisers
and 12 destroyers (one of them Australian and another Dutch) who were escorting
the camouflaged tanker Breconshire (which German and Italian air reconnaissance
had signalled to be a battleship). Littorio’s 15in guns straddled the tanker from
35,000yds with her first half salvo; Breconshire turned south at once, escorted by
two destroyers laying smoke; RN cruisers gave additional support but were
repulsed by Italian shooting and RM destroyer counterattack. ‘An image of fantastic
beauty in the dusk’ wrote Admiral Iachino. One British and one Australian destroyer
were damaged. During the following night, the RM’s task was to protect an
important convoy of German tanks bound to Benghazi. Iachino’s well-known ability
as a skilled manoeuverer avoided any British interception. The Italian crews
assumed the British were deterred, also at night, by the big guns of their battleships.
The RM’s 1941 crisis of confidence was over after 40 hard days.
Recalling the events of the sunset of 17 December 1941, a British sailor on the
cruiser HMS Euryalus remembered that after the surprise of seeing smoke
starboard, without fair warning, a flash on the horizon announced the first half salvo
(of 32cm shells) fired by the battleship Doria, which fell ‘uncomfortably close’.
Thanks to the arrival of dusk, a large smokescreen and the attack of the escort
force charging, the British managed, after ten minutes of fighting, to recover the
protection of darkness from the Italian warships. Malta received 5,000t of oil;
Benghazi, a battalion of German tanks which made the difference the following
month to curtailing Churchill’s dreams for the end of the war in Libya, and an
anticipated passage through French North Africa for the Allies.
North of Crete, 22 May 1941. HMS Naiad punctured starboard side by a torpedo launched
by Sagittario which later exploded opening a ‘huge hole’ port above, confirmed by the
light through the first leak. This accident was denied at first, but confirmed after the war
by the then Lt. (E) Louis Le Bailly. (AC)

On 19 December, three SLCs launched off Alexandria by the submarine

Sciré seriously damaged Queen Elizabeth and Valiant. e attempt to set the
harbour on re by mining the tanker Sagona crippled the ship, but nothing
else. Churchill stated: ‘six Italians equipped with poor laughable materials,
made totter the military balance in the Mediterranean Sea, advantaging the
Axis’.

1942
In February, Duilio (Admiral Bergamini’s agship) sortied with four cruisers
and 11 destroyers to intercept a convoy from Alexandria to Malta (four
cruisers, 15 destroyers and three freighters). One of the merchant vessels,
damaged by aircraft, went to Tobruk; the other two, hit by the Luftwaffe, were
scuttled and the escort force turned back to Egypt.
A similar situation involving a convoy from Alexandria to Malta culminated,
on 22 March, in the Second Battle of Sirte. is action marked the evolution
of Iachino’s principles. e Italian Admiral, considered too young and
inexperienced by Cavagnari in 1940, planned the encounter believing, like
Gavdos the year before, that the British, heirs to Nelson, would follow the
three cruisers and four destroyers of the III Divisione (Admiral Angelo Parona)
into a trap, nding themselves surrounded between Parona’s ships and the
Littorio with three further destroyers. e RN force led by Rear-Admiral Philip
Vian (four cruisers and 11 destroyers) was careful not to do this, and after a
brief long-range exchange came back to escort the convoy (four merchant
vessels with a direct escort formed by the old anti-aircraft cruiser Carlisle and
six Hunt-class destroyers). As a storm was approaching fast, Iachino
understood he had no time to duck around the enemy and decided to position
his force to cut the route to Malta and engage, until sunset, despite the bad
weather, low visibility, and being to leeward of the enemy. His declared
purpose was to gain time to give the Axis’ bombers the possibility of a lucky
shot the next morning and he dared to expose Littorio, the only true Italian
battleship then available, to within 6,000yds from the British destroyers, which
were behind their own smoke curtain and ready to sortie and launch their
torpedoes. e cruisers Cleopatra and Euryalus and the destroyers Kingston,
Legion, Havock, Sikh and Lively were damaged while Littorio was hit by one
4.7in on her starboard aft deck breaking a pair of teak planks. e day after,
the convoy sustained a further ordeal from aircraft and mines, so much so that
the Governor of Malta lamented to the War Cabinet that only 877t of
supplies, including some bicycles, had arrived, of the 32,249t originally
shipped. During a storm that night, the Italians lost two destroyers (Lanciere
and Scirocco) and the British recorded, over the following weeks, the loss of the
crippled destroyers Kingston, Legion and Havock to bombers and submarines
On 9 May, USS Wasp launched Spit res for Malta with HMS Eagle. e US
carrier had already conducted a similar operation alone, on 20 April 1942. On
13 May, torpedo-damaged Vittorio Veneto returned to service, and the next day
the submarine Ambra launched three SLCs to attack Queen Elizabeth in the
oating drydock and the submarine depot ship Medway. e action failed.
On 14–16 June, 1942 Iachino, leading Littorio, Vittorio Veneto, four cruisers
and 12 destroyers, con rmed his determination by repulsing the Vigorous
convoy (seven cruisers and 25 destroyers escorting 11 merchant vessels, the old
anti-aircraft cruiser Coventry, two rescue vessels, the dummy battleship
Centurion, four corvettes and two eet minesweepers) from Alexandria to
Malta in spite of many air and submarine attacks. e cruiser Trento was
torpedoed twice and lost and Littorio was hit by a torpedo, while the Axis light
forces sunk the cruiser Hermione, three destroyers and two freighters. e War
Cabinet, somewhat embarrassed, on 22 June ordered the record be ‘amend[ed]
to show that E. Convoy turned back for lack of fuel’.

BEFORE THE BATTLE OF PANTELLERIA, 15

JUNE 1942
At dawn, relaxation at last on the bridge. The RN’s superiority at night was a
recognized hard fact by November 1941, and British air attacks during darkness
were another clear and present danger from that autumn. The RM night combat
doctrine was, in 1940, like that of the British at Jutland, and later hasty
improvements were not enough. But when the sun rose, the Italian Navy was always
confident about its ability to face the enemy with gunnery, superior speed and
maneuverability. During the Action off Pantelleria, on 15 June 1942, Admiral Da
Zara, commanding the VII Divisione (cruisers Eugenio di Savoia and Montecuccoli
with five destroyers) made the best use of these qualities, sinking the destroyer
Bedouin, the tanker Kentucky and the freighters Chant (torpedoed by the destroyer
Vivaldi, it exploded one hour later) and Burdwan. The old anti-aircraft cruiser Cairo,
the destroyer Partridge and the fleet minesweeper Hebe were damaged by gunfire.
The Italians claimed a direct hit on the destroyer Matchless too; this incident was
denied by the British, but it is confirmed by a clear photo made with the telephoto
lens on board Eugenio at 0725hrs.
In the iluustration, the Ro.43 floatplanes (one for each cruiser) have just been
catapulted and, on the Admiral’s bridge, Da Zara can enjoy his cup of coffee, a taste
any sailor after a long night-watch knows well. According to regulations, the Admiral
band rank had to be on the right, not the left side of his berretto di navigazione (the
service at sea cap), but Da Zara was well known for his non-conformist and
unauthorized (fuori ordinanza) habits. A riding champion, fluent in English (in his
cabin he had an autographed picture of the future Duchess of Windsor, treasured
since the 1920s when he commanded a river gunboat in China), he was beloved by
his staff and crews.
 The Battle of Pantelleria, 15 June 1942. HMS Bedouin sinking. Leading a gallant charge
against the Italian cruisers, she was damaged (12 direct hits), immobilized and, at last,
finished by a Regia Aeronautica S.M.79 torpedo bomber. (AC)

Two bad days for the British eet began when the British carrier Eagle was
sunk in the Western Mediterranean by the German submarine U-73 on 11
August. e carriers Furious and Victorious also suffered damage (respectively
two days and two and a half months of repairs) after a collision necessary to
avoid three torpedoes launched by the Italian submarine Uarsciek. e
following day the carrier Indomitable was severely damaged by German
bombers in the Western Mediterranean, and the carrier Victorious was hit, with
little effect, by an Italian Re.2001 ghter-bomber. Rodney was damaged near
the Strait of Sicily by an Italian Ju 87 which dropped its bomb abaft her stern
before disappearing into the sea.
e night of 12/13 August, Luftwaffe air reconnaissance communicated,
mistakenly, that a British battleship and a carrier had rounded Cape Bon. is
piece of news and the Luftwaffe’s preference to reserve Italians and their own
ghters for bomber escort, caused the cancellation of a mission by six Italian
cruisers and 11 destroyers to intercept the Pedestal convoy off Pantelleria the
next morning. Only ve of the total 14 merchant vessels of the convoy arrived
at Malta after three days of Axis air, submarine and MTBs attacks. e famous
tanker Ohio (sunk a few days later due to the damage suffered) wasn’t carrying
avgas (whose stocks in the besieged island would suffice until December 1942),
but fuel oil for a landing from Malta at Sfax (Tunisia), scheduled for
November 1942 and annulled because of lack of local sea control a few days
before the invasion of French North Africa. Most of the supplies were, indeed
ammunition, and the few food and comfort items available were reserved for
the garrison and British families. e event had consequences on public
opinion as seen in this article published in September 1942 in the Times of
Malta: ‘We have put up with bombing, blasting, nights in uncomfortable
shelters, low pay, black market, Victory Kitchens, lack of electric lighting, lack
of buses, lack of meat, lack of milk, restricted rations with little grumbling, but
what is the last straw is the evidence of preferential treatment’.
e new battleship Roma joined La Squadra at Taranto on 22 August. Four
days later, Littorio completed her repairs following the torpedo damage which
had occurred on the night of 15/16 June 1942.

Allied Landings Begin

Operation Torch began on 8 November. e American and British landings in
French North Africa were protected in the Mediterranean by Duke of York,
Nelson, Rodney and Renown, and the carriers Victorious, Formidable and Furious
against a possible sortie of the French battleship Strasbourg (the MN Forces de
haute mer was the only battleforce which could react in time in the Western
Mediterranean). After the French armistice was signed in North Africa on 11
November, Nelson, Rodney and the carrier Formidable moved intermittently
between Gibraltar, Mers-el-Kébir and Algiers thwarting, during the rst half of
1943, the RM plans for a craft attack operation against them using new MTR
explosive boats ferried by the submarine Ambra. e British believed they had
repulsed, on 23 March 1943, an attack by ‘pigs’ at Mers-el-Kébir, but it was a
false alarm.

The Battle of Pantelleria, 15 June 1942. HMS Matchless on fire photographed from
Montecuccoli. The RN official report and narratives stated there was no damage
whatsoever. (AC)

e three Littorios moved from Taranto to Naples on 12 November, hoping

for a German supply of oil which would not materialize because the Soviets
had attacked unexpectedly on the Eastern Front on 19 November, encircling
Stalingrad four days later.
A USAAF raid over Naples on 4 December caused the loss of the light
cruiser Muzio Attendolo, and damage to Raimondo Montecuccoli and Eugenio.
e battleforce would leave two days later for the much better protected base
of La Spezia. Geographically, the range from Algiers was always the same, but
the con rmed lack of oil would compromise any offensive move both by the
battleships and the two heavy cruisers Gorizia and Trieste now based at La
Maddalena.
 Having conducted two successful operations by frogmen on 14 July and 15
September against the merchant vessels in the anchorage outside Gibraltar, a
new attack was made on 9 December by three SLCs against Force H inside the
harbour. e operation failed and only MV Forest was slightly damaged. Two
further successful attacks were made on 8 May and 4 August 1943 against the
freighters moored off the harbour.
On 30 December, Cesare whose electrical system had been made in 1936
with autarchic materials as a consequence of sanctions (aluminium for copper
and resins for mica isolators), was sent to Pola to serve as a gunnery training
ship. She had to be replaced, according to the programme, in May 1943 by
Cavour, cabled in autumn 1942 from scratch with better materials.
RM staff still believed the war would be won in North Africa, as the
Germans had promised powerful divisions and supplies for the new front in
Tunisia with its large harbours and facilities at Bizerte and Tunis. Accordingly,
a document rich in wishful thinking was sent on 14 January to Mussolini
about plans to expand the RM. For the moment, there was no fuel except for
destroyers, but once the Maikop oil production was reactivated or, better, a
separate peace with the USSR signed, by 1944 the RM battleforce would be
able to eld four Littorios and three modernized battleships. In 1946, these
would be strengthened by the addition of the two former French Dunkerques,
scuttled at Toulon on 27 November 1942, but then re oated and repaired. e
eet carrier Aquila would be joined, in 1944, by the similar Sparviero (former
liner Augustus) as new, powerful diesel engines would be available at last. Two
light carriers, the former heavy cruisers Bolzano and the French Foch (also
scuttled at Toulon) would follow in 1945–46. However, on 29 January
Mussolini changed his mind about any expansion. He and King Victor
Emmanuel III believed the war would be over, one way or another, in 1943, as
Italy could not sustain a longer period of warfare.
Rome, spring 1943. Mussolini, Grossadmiral Dönitz and, standing up, General Ambrosio,
Chief of the Comando Supremo. On 12 May 1943, it was confirmed that it was impossible
for La Squadra to act east and south of Sicily. (AC)

On 10 April, the rst long-range USAAF raid was made against La

Maddalena (which is often subject to strong winds, compromising any
smokescreen), sinking the cruiser Trieste and severely damaging Gorizia on the
eve of a raid by III Divisione against some small convoys going from Algiers to
Bône. From this point onwards, the opposing scouting forces were on equal
(6in gun) terms.
is was followed, on 14 April, by the rst of a series of raids against La
Spezia by Bomber Command and the USAAF. Surrounded by hills, the base
was a difficult target. e RAF also studied an attack using bouncing bombs.
 Admiral Dönitz, the new commander-in-chief of the German Navy since 30
January 1943, told Mussolini on 12 May, during a meeting in Rome, that the
Italian battleforce could not engage the enemy east of Sicily, as since August
1942 the area had been dominated by the RAF’s electronic superiority. It
would be left to the Axis armies and air forces to stop an Allied landing along
the beaches. It was also con rmed that the submarine war by conventional
boats was lost, until the planned, revolutionary new electric U-Boot could be
commissioned. Allied trade would suffer only sporadic losses for the rest of the
war.
Another USAAF raid on 5 June damaged Veneto (repaired by 1 July) and
Roma, which returned to service on 13 August. However, between May and
July 1943, the USN had sent the modern battleships Alabama and South
Dakota to Scapa Flow, allowing Warspite, Valiant, Nelson, Rodney and the
carrier Indomitable to leave Britain on 23 June to join King George V, Howe (at
Gibraltar since May 1943) and the eet carrier Formidable in the Western
Mediterranean. Any enduring Italian hope to pit their battleforce against the
enemy armada was thus relinquished.

Landings in Italy
e Allied landings in Sicily began on 10 July 1943. At noon, Mussolini
decided not to send the battle eet (Littorio and Vittorio Veneto with six light
cruisers and 11 destroyers) against the six battleships and two eet carriers (not
to mention 15 cruisers, 128 destroyers, three monitors, 83 escort vessels, 243
British MTBs, MGBs and MMS, and US Navy PTs (comprising 1,742
landing ships and craft and 342 merchant vessels). An action off Augusta on
the afternoon of 11 July would be too late as British armoured cars and tanks
were by then rolling towards the 12-mile-long naval line defending Augusta
from the rear.
At Taranto, only the cruiser Cadorna and the destroyer Nicoloso Da Recco
were available, as the fuel for Duilio and Doria would arrive from Bari on 20
July and these two modernized battleships would only be able to do their rst
training sortie, after one year moored with skeleton crews, on 27 July. e Axis
air forces, with merely 200 attack aircraft in ying condition over Sicily during
the rst week of the invasion and much less later, could barely achieve
pinpricks.
However, RA Re.2002 dive bombers claimed Nelson damaged by three near-
miss bombs on 13 July.15 Nelson had gone to Malta that day to repair minor
damage to some tubes of her superheater. On 16 July, the carrier Indomitable
was torpedoed and seriously damaged at night by a S.M.79 torpedo bomber.
On 20 July, German bombers made, unbeknown to the Italians, a night raid
against the British battleships and carriers now at Malta using, for the rst
time, their secret guided bombs. ey scored no results. e attack was
repeated on the night of 25/26 July, still without success.
e US Army occupied Messina on 17 August 1943, and the campaign for
Sicily was over. e next day the carriers Illustrious and Unicorn arrived at
Gibraltar. ey were followed by the American-built RN escort carriers
Attacker, Battler, Hunter and Stalker, which would, along with HMS Unicorn,
make available Sea re ghters for a British landing at Crotone, Calabria,
scheduled for September. In October it would be time for an American
landing in southern Sardinia, followed by a further invasion, to be supported
later by French reinforcements in Corsica. King George V and Howe would be
replaced for the October landings by the battleships Queen Elizabeth and
Richelieu.
On 19 August, the USN carrier Ranger replaced Illustrious at Scapa Flow,
which in turn would substitute Indomitable in the Mediterranean. e brand-
new USN battleship Iowa was sent to Newfoundland, arriving on 27 August,
allowing the RN to keep the two King George Vs in the Mediterranean until
October 1943.
An attack against an Italian battleship at Taranto by a single Chariot (the
British version of the Italian ‘pigs’) ferried by the submarine Ultor was
cancelled on 28 August because the planned Allied landing at Crotone had just
been hurriedly replaced by a new invasion at Salerno. Ultor was scheduled to
launch her Chariot off Spezia, but the Armistice would be announced before it
could take place. Meanwhile the X MAS Flotilla was organizing a desperate
full attack, at dawn, scheduled for October, against one battleship based at
Gibraltar by the combined action of new types of surface and underwater
attack craft.
 During summer 1943, it was impossible for La Squadra to fight for East Sicily (not to
mention southern Sicily). Only Sea Denial using fast coastal forces and submarines was
possible – naval guerrilla warfare without much strategic effect. This is one of the 60t MS
‘motosiluranti’ introduced by the RM from August 1942, replacing the smaller (24t) and
less seaworthy MAS.

On 3 September, a British and Canadian corps landed in Calabria and

advanced slowly north. Under the double Allied and German threat, Italy had
to sue for an armistice. e battle eet was ready to sail on 8 September against
the Allied landing force directed towards Salerno. Smelling a rat, Admiral
Raffaele de Courten, the new Minister and CoS of the Navy after the fall of
Mussolini, ordered the battleforce to sail at once, giving up the air cover by the
RA and Luftwaffe scheduled for 9 September. General Vittorio Ambrosio,
leader of the Comando Supremo from 1 February 1943, replacing Cavallero,
and the mastermind of the fall of Mussolini and of the Armistice with the
Allies, twice ordered at noon it not to leave La Spezia. In the afternoon, after
King Victor Emmanuel III decided, against the advice of his counsellors, to
con rm the Armistice signed ve days before by the new Prime Minister
Marshal Badoglio, the agreement between Italy and the Allies was con rmed
worldwide at 1947hrs.
For La Squadra it was a shock. e rst reaction was to scuttle everywhere
and De Courten was forced to impose himself on Bergamini. e Secretary of
State, Cordell Hull, wrote in his memoirs:
 In line with this thought, the surrender of Italy the following month, although ostensibly on an
unconditional basis, was actually, as I have previously mentioned, a negotiated surrender, and the
terms of the Armistice were agreed to in discussions in Lisbon, Portugal, between representatives of
the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff and Marshal Badoglio.

The End of the War

General Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean, and
Cunningham, Commander-In-Chief of Allied Naval Forces in the MTO
(Mediterranean eatre of Operations) since 8 November 1942, decided from
the beginning not to ask for humiliating conditions for the RM’s fate. For their
part, Supermarina and Bergamini refused to follow Allied instructions about
the transfer of the Italian warships and merchant vessels in Anglo-American-
controlled harbours. e battleforce thus sailed from La Spezia and Genoa,
early on 9 September, for La Maddalena; it was a case of wait and see. e
common opinion was the Germans would leave southern and central Italy and
the European war would be over, anyway, within some weeks with the fall of
Hitler. Doria and Duilio had to stay at Taranto and Cesare sailed for Cattaro, in
Dalmatia. On 9 September, at 1000hrs, a false report about German
paratroopers advancing unopposed towards Taranto induced Admiral
Fioravanzo, then commander of the local naval department, to persuade Da
Zara not to scuttle his squadron, but to sail for Malta, explaining that as long
as he had the control of his armed warships, ready to be scuttled at any time
with the Italian ag not hauled down, nothing would be compromised, while
the destruction of the eet would have given the British that total victory they
had vainly pursued during the war. Da Zara accepted and his little force (two
battleships, two unprotected cruisers and a lone destroyer) left in the
afternoon. ey were attacked, without damages, by a few German Fw 190
ghter-bombers and the Italian anti-aircraft guns replied.
Naples, 26 June 1942. Mussolini on the cruiser Montecuccoli after the sweeping surface
victory of Pantelleria. Admiral Da Zara is on the right; the CoS of the navy, Admiral
Riccardi, behind the dictator. In front of Il Duce is the young secretary of the party, Aldo
Vidussoni. (AC)

e battleforce that left La Spezia had a much more tragic ending. Some
islands of the La Maddalena archipelago were occupied by German
commandos (Küstenjäger) at noon on 9 September. Supermarina informed
Bergamini, and La Squadra changed course to sail outside the Strait of
Bonifacio. It was attacked, soon after, by German bombers armed with guided
weapons. It was the rst time that high-altitude bombing had been effective in
the Mediterranean against warships manoeuvring at high speed. In spite of AA
re, Roma, Bergamini’s agship, was hit twice and sunk and her sister ship
Italia (former Littorio) was damaged. Bergamini died, along with all his staff.
e new commander of the battleforce, Admiral Romeo Oliva, turned south
that night.
On 10 September, Da Zara, escorted by King George V, arrived at Malta.
e British sent boarding parties, but the Italians did not allow them to access
below decks or to touch the wireless antennas. An uneasy balance was
established and the night and day after passed without trouble, helped by the
politeness of the British sailors who had orders to avoid incidents. e next day
the main Italian battleforce sighted Warspite, Valiant and seven destroyers. e
courteous behaviour of the Allied crews, quite different from the jeers that had
greeted the German eet at Scapa Flow on 21 November 1918, diffused the
tension. Oliva’s warships arrived at Malta a few hours later, this time with no
boarding parties. In the afternoon, there was a meeting between Da Zara (the
senior RM officer at Malta) and Cunningham. e Italian admiral was greeted
with full military honours. Cunningham accepted Da Zara’s word about
respect of the Armistice terms and the ve boarding parties were withdrawn at
sunset. On 12 September, as the Kingdom of Italy reacted to German
aggression unleashed a quarter of an hour after the broadcast con rming the
Armistice, the Allies asked Da Zara to send two RM destroyers to Corsica to
ferry munitions plus American troops to the Italian Army ghting the
Germans there. e proposal was accepted at once. Cunningham, a loyal
adversary and a man of common sense, wrote on 14 September: ‘I am quite
convinced that all the ships are prepared to scuttle should things not be to
their liking’.
Malta, 11 September 1943. HMS Warspite sailors according the honours of war to Admiral
Da Zara, commander of La Squadra. A never forgotten act of loyalty quite different from
the German surrenders in November 1918 and May 1945. (AC)

In fact, a tug-of-war was going on between Roosevelt and Churchill about

the fate of the Italian battleforce. e British wanted to seize it, to tropicalize
the two Littorios and to send them, ying the White Ensign, to the Paci c to
politically balance the American dominance there since the beginning of the
war with Japan. e USA preferred to have the battleships in the South Paci c
with Italian ags and crews.16 eir short range would matter less, as similarly
short-legged British warships found refuelling and resupplying at sea practical
in the Paci c in 1944–45.
King Victor Emmanuel and De Courten would welcome such a use for La
Squadra and, in October 1943, Admiral Louis Hamilton, Flag Officer in
Malta, told Da Zara the Littorios, with the Italian ag, would sail to the USA
to be re tted (radar sets, new anti-aircraft batteries and directors) for the South
Paci c to act as battlecruisers for the old USN battleships, while the two
Duilios would join, as RM ships, the British Eastern Fleet. King Victor
Emmanuel asked in return for an immediate peace treaty, granting his
kingdom the 1922 borders. It was too high a political price, and as a result,
Italy limited itself to declaring war on Germany as a cobelligerent on 13
October. On 16 October, Veneto and Italia were thus con ned in the Great
Bitter Lake, in the Suez Canal, until February 1947. e American request was
renewed in mid-October 1944, and the new government led by Prime
Minister Ivanoe Bonomi17 asked again for the terms of the year before, but
with the same outcome.
In June 1945, the new Italian government, led after the end of the war in
Europe by Ferruccio Parri, a partisan leader who trusted in American goodwill
after the US Army had removed Tito’s troops from Trieste, Gorizia, Pola and
Monfalcone and sent back the French after the Germans retreated from the
Alps on 23 April 1945. Parri accepted without pre-conditions to declare war
on Japan (15 July 1945) and to send the battle eet to join the Eastern Fleet,
where the sloop Eritrea and the destroyer Carabiniere had been serving since
September 1943 (France had, during summer 1945, two destroyers and the
Richelieu stationed there). is decision was never put into practice due to the
end of the con ict in the Paci c in August 1945.

ANALYSIS
e RM battleforce had been conceived to control the Ionian Sea and the
Strait of Sicily. is aim was achieved until the Allied conquest of Tunisia, in
May 1943, and of Sicily the following August.
Supermarina never failed to see what mattered and executed its strategies
sensibly and clinically in order to win the naval war by ‘bleeding white the Red
Ensign’, or to facilitate a land victory by enabling the Army to conquer the
Suez Canal or, brie y in 1943, to support an advance from Tunisia to
Morocco. Plans for the invasion of Malta, a materially impossible task in
1940–41 in front of the British coastal defences, were prepared in 1941–42,
but in June 1942 the Germans refused their indispensable support.
 e basic instrument of the Italian battleforce, the battleships, worked well.
Except for the delayed recommissioning of Cavour, damaged by a magnetic
pistol torpedo, the protection of the other battleships, mainly the Littorios,
proved solid. e RM’s supposed excessive gunnery dispersion is merely a
myth. e numbers speak for themselves.
During the seven major surface day actions fought between the Royal Navy
and the Regia Marina (night actions were dictated by different logic and
tactics), the direct hits, number of shells red and con rmed near-misses from
the officially recognized records are as follows:
DIRECT HITS
Battle Regia Marina Ships Hit Royal Navy Ships Hit
Calabria Cesare (one 15in), Bolzano
(three 6in)

Cape Spada Colleoni (two 6in), Bande Sydney (one 6in)

Nere (two 4.7in)

Cape Lanciere (two 6in) Berwick (two 8in)

Spartivento

Second Sirte Littorio (one 4.7in) Cleopatra (one 6in), Euryalus (one 15in),
Kingston (one 8in)

Pantelleria Montecuccoli (one 4.7in), Cairo (one 6in; one 5.512in), Bedouin (11
Eugenio (one 4.7in), Vivaldi 6in; one 4.7in), Partridge (three 6in),
(one 4.7in) Hebe (one 6in)

Total hits, RM 24 RN 14
confirmed by
both sides

Warships Italian 9 British 9

damaged*

*Two warships, both unprotected, were immobilized by shells and finished by

torpedoes: Colleoni and Bedouin.

NUMBER OF SHELLS FIRED

Italian British and Range in
Australian yards
Calabria about about 2,400 33.3k–9.3k
1,200
Cape Spada about 2,038 21k–17k
500
Cape Spartivento 677 about 1,300 34k–16k
Gavdos Island 629 36 31.7k–
23.5k
First Sirte 140 about 580 35k–13.8k

Second Sirte 1,490 2,807 23k–6k

Pantelleria 3,371 about 3,400 22.4k–5.2k
% direct hits to shells 0.299% 0.111 %
fired

CONFIRMED NEAR-MISSES
Calabria Alfieri, Neptune (two times), Sydney, Nubian,
Freccia Hereward
Cape – Havock
Spada
Cape Bolzano, Manchester
Spartivento Libeccio
Gavdos – Orion, Gloucester, Ajax, Perth
Island
First Sirte – Kipling, Nizam

Second Gorizia Euryalus, Cleopatra, Penelope, Havock,

Sirte Lively, Lance, Sikh, Zulu, Legion

Pantelleria – Cairo (7 shorts), Marne, Matchless

 Instances of mis res, drill errors, guns not being ready, mechanical
breakdown, etc. were evenly balanced between the two sides. On 28 March
1941, Veneto lamented 11 mis res from expending 92 15in shells (11.95 per
cent). On 24 May 1941, the German battleship Bismarck recorded 15 per cent
and the British Prince of Wales, 25 per cent. ree days later, during the
destruction of Bismarck, between 25,000 and 2,200yds, about 200 of the
2.876 rounds red by the British against this stationary target mis red.
Different guns and ranges, of course, but the law of averages suggests that some
unexamined assumptions about Italian naval gunnery during World War II
invite differing conclusions to those of popular and even scholarly accounts,
which are too often based on biased accounts written soon after the end of the
war by some German admirals, including Dönitz and Eberhard Weichold
(liaison officer with the RM between 1940 and 1943), during their captivity.
Colombo (Ceylon), 1 June 1945. The destroyer Carabiniere. When war against Japan was
declared by Rome on 15 July 1945, Carabiniere was still sailing with the Eastern Fleet as a
plane guard destroyer for search and rescue purposes. (AC)

RM pattern size spreads for line and range appeared to be effective.

Cunningham admitted, in July 1941, in a secret memorandum to the
Admiralty: ‘the enemy’s range accuracy in long range day action has on
occasions been better than ours’ and ‘e only satisfactory day action … was
H.M.A.S. Sydney v. Colleoni’.
e two navies historically had two different doctrines: the RN traditionally
favoured rate of re despite the Admiralty’s instructions which stated: ‘In
action, there is a grave temptation for a director layer to “get rid of the salvo”,
and it is most desirable to educate all director personnel that Accuracy is more
important than Speed’. In a sense then, the Regia Marina’s gunnery was, thus,
more truly British than the Royal Navy’s as the Italian rule of thumb was for a
slower, but more accurate, ring cycle.
Other aspects of the RM’s performance, other than gunnery, con rm the
reliability of the eet’s machinery and its ability to reach the real projected (not
the ones claimed by Jane’s) speed.
Underwater protection was excellent for the Littorios, which survived six
torpedoes. e heavy and the second generation of the light cruisers sustained
seven torpedo hits without sinking. e loss of Trento was caused by a second
torpedo hit which detonated an 8in magazine, while the crippling of Cavour
and Pola was caused by magnetic pistols exploding under the hull, where only
the Yamatos had protection. However, the rst generation 5,000t Condottieri
cruisers proved to be no better than the 5,600t British Didos: two torpedoes
each sank Colleoni, Diaz, Di Giussano, Da Barbiano and Bande Nere.
Armour was little tested in battle, but Cesare, Bolzano, Bande Nere,
Montecuccoli and Eugenio dealt well with the shells they were forced to endure.
e Regia Marina was not a well-balanced navy due to the lack of carriers.
Its core, the battleships, had limits, some known and others unsuspected. It
was obvious that the modernized Cavours and Duilios were not a match for
the Nelsons or the modern KGVs (King George V class). Not by chance the
British considered them a sort of battlecruiser.
e only true Italian battleships were the Littorios. It was not known that
the 32cm (12.6in) AP shell in fact had the highest-piercing qualities expected
from its excellent design, steel and thick walls, but its blast and destructive
power was relatively weak because its TNT burster was only 14lb compared to
the 39.6lb of the old Italian 12in shell, not to mention the modern British
15in AP shell (48lb). At Jutland, Warspite was hit (but her armour not pierced)
by 15 German shells between 11 and 12in. e Italian 12.6in shell (1,157lb
compared to the old 12in 997lb) was able to pierce the armour deck, but with
little effect. e Ballistic Research Laboratory of Fort Halstead, and the Royal
Gunpowder Factory at Waltham Abbey, criticized the Italian AP fuses, but
based on the numbers of the duds they were better than the Germans and
comparable to the British.
 Lack of effective radar sets until May 1942 was, of course, a further
handicap at night and for air warning. But it did not affect, until the Italian
Armistice, re-control, as the clear sky of the Mediterranean allowed Italian
range nders and director systems to work well while contemporary RN low-
angle surface re control radar sets had a range of 24,000yds at best.
In conclusion, the complete picture of the different strategies of the Regia
Marina and the Royal Navy is often misunderstood. Italian strategy was a
subtle and multilateral approach led by political and economic long-term
motives. Given the dire economic situation Italy faced, it was a political
miracle to have fought and resisted so tenaciously under the circumstances,
and La Squadra, by far the most important part of the Italian forces, made a
substantial difference.

6 Churchill, W.S., Step by Step, Thornton Butterworth Ltd, London, 1939.

7 Like most of the apparently indecisive naval actions made by the RM, the wartime British and
Italian narratives of events differ. Here the RM version is described – much less known outside
Italy.

8 The testimony of Warspite’s Swordfish pilot (recorded by Iain Ballantyne in his book Warspite)
stated that that day the battleship only had one Swordfish which was catapulted at 1548hrs, as the
Italians also observed. The other Swordfish had been shot down near Tobruk, on 21 June, by two
FIAT CR.32 fighters and its aircrew, recovered at sea the next day, would become inmates of the
Italian Navy camp of Poveglia, near Venice. To compensate for that loss, the British decided to
convert one of Eagle’s 18 Swordfish to a floatplane, but the British historian Ray Sturtivant
documented in The Swordfish Story that conversion was completed at Dekheila only at the end of
July. An accident to a Swordfish floatplane put out of action by a blast did happen on 9 July, but
it was on Malaya, at 1608hrs, and only because a defect had jammed the ship’s double-ended
catapult. Further 6in damage recorded by Warspite abreast No.2-4in mounting caused minor
structural damage, mainly splinter effect, and was ascribed to a near-miss bomb dropped on 8
July, but the Bombing Summary for that day says: ‘nearest bomb 70yds from Warspite; no
damage or casualties’.

9 HMS Hasty Proceeding.

10 According to a later version dated 1942 Warspite also received a near-miss bomb on 12 July
damaging that part of the ship, but the Bombing Summary did not record the damage.

11 The latter was just what was missing during the confrontations with Italy between summer 1935
and summer 1937, when the possible loss of a battleship to a submarine or mine would have
altered the delicate balance of power in the Far East to a critical extent. Until winter 1938/39,
Britain considered a possible reconstruction of the old battleship Iron Duke to make up for the
loss of a capital ship to torpedoes or mines in the Mediterranean.
12 The Italian Air Force sank less than 100,000gwt. About 2,000,000gwt were also damaged, to a
more or less serious degree, by RM and RA in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean
and the Red Sea between June 1940 and May 1943.

13 Schmidt Rudi, Achtung-Torpedo los!, Bernhard & Graefe, Koblenz, 1991.

14 Harker, Jack S., Well Done Leander, Collins, Auckland, 1971 and Hartfield Hatfield, George,
H.M.A.S. Perth 1939–1941, Springwood, Faulconbridge, 2009.

15 Iain Ballantyne recorded interviews about this.

16 It was one of the many Allied leaders’ fancies, like the Alaskas large cruisers built to answer the
non-existent Japanese pocket battleship threat or Churchill’s idea to complete, in Britain, the
French battleship Jean Bart.

17 The previous PM Badoglio, a lone, very ambitious man considered too submissive towards the
British, had been sacked, in June 1944, by the Crown and the new democratic Italian parties.
FURTHER READING
Primary Sources
Archive Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge. Committee Report on the Accuracy of Naval Guns, Feb.
1944, Oliver Papers, OLVR 2/7
Archivio dell’Ufficio Storico della Marina Militare (AUSMM), Rome, Italy
Fondo Comandi navali complessi
Fondo Commissione d’inchiesta speciale, Navi
Fondo Commissione d’inchiesta speciale, Personale
Fondo Considerazioni e relazioni su avvenimenti della Seconda Guerra Mondiale
Fondo Promemoria di Supermarina
Fondo Scontri navali e operazioni di guerra
Fondo Squadra Navale 1 e 2
Fondo Supermarina-Comando Supremo
Fondo Supermarina, Diari. Titolario S10
Fondo Supermarina-Santa Rosa
e National Archives (TNA), Kew Garden, Surrey, UK
ADM 199/396, ‘18th Cruiser Squadron, War Diary 1.3.1940–31.12.1940’
ADM 199/897, Reports of Proceedings by HMS Aurora
ADM 199/1048, ‘Action off Calabria, 9th July 1940’
ADM 199/2378, ‘Preliminary Narrative of the War at Sea’, 1946
ADM 205/10, Note by H.R.M. to Pound, 9 December 1941
ADM 223/89, Report of Medical Intelligence Centre
ADM 234/444, ‘H.M. Ships Damaged or Sunk by Enemy Action 3 Sept. 1939 to 2 Sept. 1945’, 1952

Secondary Sources
‘Admiral of the Fleet H.R.H. Philip’, After the Battle, No. 7, 1975
Bagnasco, Erminio, ‘Q&A’, World War Studies Quarterly, Vol. 6, no.1/2009
Bagnasco, Erminio and De Toro Augusto, e Littorio Class: Italy’s Last and Largest Battleships 1937–
1948, NIP, Annapolis, Maryland, 2011
Bagnasco, Erminio and De Toro Augusto, Italian Battleships: Conte di Cavour and Duilio Classes 1911–
1956, NIP, Annapolis, Maryland, 2021
Ballantyne, Iain, Warspite, Pen & Sword, Barnsley, 2000
Black, Jeremy, Strategy and the Second World War, Robinson, London, 2021
Carne, William (author), Carne, Mark (compiler), e Making of a Royal Navy Officer, Uniform Press
Brighton, 2021
Cernuschi, Enrico, Sea Power the Italian Way, Ufficio Storico della Marina Militare, Rome, 2023
Churchill, W.S., Step by Step, ornton Butterworth Ltd, London, 1939
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from the Artillery Perspective’, History & Mathematics: Trends and Cycles, 2014
Harker, Jack S., Well Done Leander, Collins, Auckland, 1971
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War, Vol. 1, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979
Le Bailly, Louis, e Man Around the Engine, Kenneth Mason Ltd., Fareham, 1990
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McBride, Keith, ‘Six-inch Guns in Pairs’, Warship 1997–1998, Conway Maritime Press, London, 1997
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e Australian War Memorial, Rex Cooper Diary, Accession Number AWM2018.20.22. Collection
Number PR01950

Winter 1940–41. The crew of the heavy cruiser Zara. (AC)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Enrico Cernuschi is a naval historian based in Pavia, Italy. He has written
dozens of books and more than 500 articles in Italian, English and French.
He has contributed chapters to US Naval Institute books and has published
extensively for Italy’s professional naval organizations. His major works
include “Ultra” La fine di un mito (2014 Mursia, Milan) and Sea Power the
Italian Way (2016), Ufficio Storico della Marina Militare. He is a regular
contributor to Warship.
ILLUSTRATOR
Edouard A. Groult grew up inspired by watching historical documentaries
with his father and developed a fascination for historical and fantasy art.
Following art studies in both Paris and Belgium, he worked as a concept
artist in the videogame industry and in recent years, has also undertaken
historical commissions for magazines. He lives and works near London.
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is electronic edition published in 2024 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

OSPREY is a trademark of Osprey Publishing Ltd

First published in Great Britain in 2024

© Osprey Publishing Ltd, 2024

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
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PB ISBN: 9781472860590
eBook ISBN: 9781472860606
ePDF ISBN: 9781472860576
XML ISBN: 9781472860583

Maps by www.bounford.com
Diagrams by Adam Tooby
Typeset by PDQ

Photographs
All photos in this book are from the Author’s Collection (AC) except where indicated.

Author’s Note
Most British histories about the naval con ict fought in the Mediterranean during World War II raise
serious doubts about some of its central beliefs and strategies. After 1945, many English-speaking
secondary sources limited themselves to copying and pasting old wartime pamphlets, producing books
and articles which have set the general standards of the eld; yet failed to make use of translations of
Italian original documents like the fundamental Diari di Supermarina (the Italian Navy Central
Command daily records). e conventional picture presented is therefore, unavoidably, misleading.
Research into unpublished sources such as the original warships’ proceedings and logs – British,
Australian and Italian – allows us to understand differing perspectives of the same episodes which can
explain some of the unresolved issues.
It is natural that old adversaries saw things differently during and after the battle. Anyone can legitimately
think certain things are important and others are not, but details of a narrative can transform the
outcome of an event and, today, there is no excuse for ignoring historical evidence, on either side.
As the ancient Greek historian and geographer Herodotus wryly concluded: ‘It seems indeed to be easier
to deceive a multitude than one man’. e reader is that man.

Front Cover: Art by Edouard A. Groult, © Osprey Publishing

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Glossary of terms
CoS Chief of Staff
Decima Flottiglia MAS (also known as La Decima or X MAS)
MAS Motoscafo Anti Sommergibili (a small MTB)
MGBs Motor Gun Boats
MTBs Motor Torpedo Boats
MMS Motor Mine Sweepers
PTs Patrol Torpedo boats