War in the Mediterranean
The history of the Second World War in the Mediterranean tends to be dominated by the Fleet Air Arm’s daring and highly successful attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto, and by the great siege of Malta. True, most accounts also give much consideration to the German invasion of Crete, but that always emerges as an airborne attack for the simple reason that the German parachute and glider-borne assault on the island, although extremely costly, won the day while the seaborne assault was tackled by the Royal Navy so effectively that it was an irrelevance.
All of this overlooks what happened in Greece and to a lesser extent Albania, as well as in North Africa, and although both of these were army matters with increasingly strong and effective support by the British Empire air forces in the latter, the Royal Navy was also involved in both, even with a secret base in Albania for the Fleet Air Arm. Then there was also the Battle of Matapan, a major naval engagement, and many minor actions at sea and off the North African coast, while Force H raided naval bases in northern Italy.
Taranto and Malta both deserve chapters of their own, as in Chapters 8 and 13 respectively. The fall of France also brought the Royal Navy into conflict with what had been its only ally outside the British Empire, and while conflict was avoided by common sense and diplomacy at Alexandria, the action at Mers-el-Kébir and Oran damaged Anglo-French relations for the rest of the war and many years beyond, while there was further action in the Atlantic off Dakar in West Africa as well.
As elsewhere, when looking at the naval aspects of the Second World War, the convoy battles loom large. Convoys across the Mediterranean have sometimes been overlooked by the layman as for the people at home in the British Isles, those across the North Atlantic and the Bay of Biscay, bringing food and fuel, were vital for the country’s survival and so very important. Next were the Arctic convoys to Murmansk and Archangel in the far north of the Soviet Union, on which the weather was as much a threat to survival as action by the enemy. Yet, it was in the Mediterranean where it could be argued that convoys were most at risk. The shipping situation was so bad that Allied forces in North Africa could not be supplied by the direct route across the Mediterranean, but instead had to take the roundabout route via the Cape of Good Hope and then north up the coast of East Africa and through the Suez Canal. A more roundabout route would be hard to devise. The Suez Canal was no longer available as a short cut to India and Australia.
We will see in Chapter 13 how instead of using merchant shipping, at times Malta was only kept in the war by using fast minelayers and large minelaying submarines to carry essential supplies as convoys could not get through, whether running from Gibraltar in the west or Alexandria in the east.
For the Royal Navy, playing very much a secondary role in the war in the Pacific, only in the Mediterranean was a major sea battle possible, with the Italian Regia Marina having six battleships while the British Mediterranean Fleet had three. There were two major naval engagements between Italy entering the war on 10 June 1940 and Italian surrender in 1943 after the landings at Salerno, after which the bulk of the Italian fleet was escorted to Malta.
Bringing the Enemy to Battle
It would have been reasonable to expect the Italians to have sent their six battleships to bombard Malta as soon as Italy entered the war, but instead the opening rounds were by the Italian air force, the Regia Aeronautica, which initiated a bombing campaign starting early on 11 June.
On 8 July 1940 the British submarine Phoenix alerted Admiral Sir Andrew ‘ABC’ Cunningham, Commander-in-Chief of the British Mediterranean Fleet, that two Italian battleships were at sea 200 miles east of Malta and on a southerly course. Aerial reconnaissance found that the battleships were escorted by six cruisers and seven destroyers and this force was escorting a large convoy. Cunningham decided to put his ships between the Italians and their major naval base at Taranto.
The following morning, a Malta-based flying boat found the Italians 145 miles west of the Mediterranean Fleet at 0730. This was later confirmed by aircraft flown off the aircraft carrier Eagle. By noon the distance between the fleet and the convoy had closed to 80 miles and it was not until then that the Italian commander, Admiral Campioni, heading for Sicily and shore-based air cover, realized the proximity of the Mediterranean Fleet when it was discovered by a seaplane catapulted from his flagship, Giulio Cesare.
With the exception of Warspite, Cunningham’s flagship, most of the British ships were outgunned by the Italians. To slow the Italians down, Eagle launched two strikes using Fairey Swordfish armed with torpedoes with the first before noon and the second wave at 1600, but neither scored any hits and failed to slow the larger ships or even sink a cruiser. Shortly before 1500, two British cruisers spotted four of the Italian cruisers who opened fire with their 8in guns, outranging their British opponents who only had 6in guns. Cunningham, ahead of his other two battleships, raced ahead to intervene and save his cruisers, opening fire at a range of just under 15 miles and forcing the Italians to withdraw under a smokescreen.
Eagle and the two older battleships, Malaya and Royal Sovereign, struggled to catch up with Warspite and were met by fire from two Italian heavy cruisers. As the two older ships caught up with Warspite, they opened fire. At 1600, both sides had their battleships within range and sight of one another and almost immediately after the second Swordfish strike at 1600, the Battle of Punto Stilo, also known as the Battle of Calabria, got under way. The Italians managed to straddle the British ships with ranging shots, but the Giulio Cesare was hit at the base of her funnels by a salvo of 15in shells and this led the Italians to break off the engagement under cover of a heavy smokescreen. Cunningham also turned, realizing that the bulk of his force could not catch the Italians and that there was a risk of Italian submarine or air attack. Shortly afterwards, Italian bombers arrived to attack the Mediterranean Fleet but bombed their own ships by mistake, witnessed with delight by the crew of Warspite’s Swordfish floatplane which had been in the air throughout the action helping with gunnery control.
This was the only naval engagement during the Second World War between two full battle fleets. The Imperial Japanese Navy attempted to force such an engagement in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, but again failed as carrier-borne aircraft took over. All other naval engagements either involved a single capital ship on one side or the other, or more usually were between carrier fleets with the opposing ships out of sight of one another.
More typical of the actions between the British and Italian navies in the Mediterranean was that off Cape Spada in Crete on 19 July 1940. Two Italian light cruisers, Bartolomeo Colleoni and Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, engaged the Australian light cruiser HMAS Sydney, accompanied by five destroyers. The Italians had the advantage at the start of this engagement as their ships outgunned the destroyers and they outnumbered the Australian cruiser. This changed when a direct hit by Sydney put the Colleoni’s boilers out of action and she lost way before sinking. Bande Nere hit Sydney but the Australian ship struck back and damaged the Italian vessel, which then took refuge in Benghazi, Libya.
In mid-August 1940, expecting an Italian thrust towards the Suez Canal, Cunningham took his three battleships and the newly-arrived heavy cruiser Kent to bombard coastal positions around Bardia and Fort Capuzzo, near Sollum, now Salum. In addition to fighters from Eagle, RAF fighters also supported the operation flying from a base in Egypt. The fighters accounted for twelve of the Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 heavy bombers sent to attack the British ships. More typical of the war in the Mediterranean was the night of 22/23 August when destroyers were sent to bombard the seaplane base at Bomba, west of Tobruk, and three of Eagle’s Swordfish attacked enemy shipping. The Swordfish were led by Captain Oliver ‘Olly’ Patch of the Royal Marines. At Bomba, they found a large Italian depot ship with a destroyer on one side and a submarine lying on the other, while a second larger submarine lay astern. Patch torpedoed and sank the larger submarine, while the other two aircraft dealt with the other submarine and the destroyer alongside the depot ship, which also sank. Cunningham noted that it was ‘a most daring and gallant effort on the part of our young men from the Eagle’.
The light cruiser Ajax had a busy war, especially during the early years as she was also present at the Battle of the River Plate. On the night of 11/12 October, she encountered four Italian destroyers and three motor torpedo boats off the coast of Tunisia. In the action that ensued, she sank one of the destroyers and two of the MTBs.
The next big event in the Mediterranean was the attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto, covered earlier (see Chapter 8).
On 27 November Force H, based on Gibraltar and under the command of Vice Admiral (later Admiral of the Fleet) Sir James Somerville with the battleship Ramillies, battle-cruiser Renown and the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, was escorting three fast freighters from Gibraltar to Alexandria when Admiral Campioni was sent with two battleships, Vittorio Veneto and Giulio Cesare, to intercept them. The Italians were spotted by British reconnaissance aircraft off Cape Teulada in Sardinia and Somerville turned Force H towards them. Both sides were supported by cruisers, five British against six Italian, and these were the first to engage. The elderly Ramillies soon fell behind but Renown followed closely on the British cruisers and when she joined the action the Italian cruisers withdrew behind their battleships, which then opened fire. Ark Royal sent her Swordfish to attack the Italians and although no torpedo strikes were made, this encouraged Campioni to break off the battle, having no aircraft of his own. The outcome was that one Italian destroyer was badly damaged, as was the British cruiser Berwick. The convoy, Somerville’s priority, was untouched.
Towards the end of the year on 18 December the Mediterranean Fleet sent two battleships, Warspite and Valiant – the latter a new arrival in the Mediterranean – to bombard the port of Valona in Albania which was being used by the Italians for their invasion of Greece. This was followed on 20 December by a rare visit to Malta by Cunningham aboard Warspite, where he received a warm welcome. At the time, no one ashore in Malta or aboard the ship could have realized that it was to be the last visit to Malta for a very long time and that after a promising start, the situation in the Mediterranean was to change for the worse.
On the Defensive
The year 1941 had started badly and was to get worse. Illustrious was badly disabled by the attack on 10 January, covered in Chapter 8. The following day, the Luftwaffe found the two cruisers Gloucester and Southampton escorting four merchantmen towards Alexandria and in the subsequent attack Southampton had to be abandoned. The four cargo ships survived and reached their destination safely.
This was an interesting tactic as the Luftwaffe was more concerned about sinking British warships than sinking cargo ships at the time, when in fact sinking the cargo ships would have had a greater and more immediate impact on the war in the desert and even on the Royal Navy as supplies would have run short. One criticism of the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific War was that it concentrated more on warships than troopships and by the time it turned its attention to the troopships, it was too late as the troops aboard had already landed ashore. The lesson was always that warships could wait for another day.
Force H continued to do all it could to maintain pressure on the Axis forces in the Mediterranean. On 9 February Somerville took the battleship Malaya, battle-cruiser Renown and the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, with a cruiser and ten destroyers as escorts, into the Gulf of Genoa, steaming into a relatively confined area close to the mainland of Italy. Ark Royal’s aircraft dropped bombs on the port of Leghorn and dropped mines in the approaches to the naval base of La Spezia, while the two capital ships bombarded Genoa itself. In response, the Italian battleships Vittorio Veneto, Giulio Cesare and Andrea Doria, with three cruisers and ten destroyers, were sent to intercept Force H which they outgunned and outnumbered but failed to make contact, otherwise Somerville would have had the decisive naval engagement that Cunningham had been seeking.
This was a rare bright spot. On 25 March Italian torpedo boats sank a tanker in the anchorage of Suda Bay, Crete, and the next day they inflicted such serious damage on the heavy cruiser York that her commanding officer had to run her aground to avoid sinking but, as she lay stranded, Luftwaffe bombers appeared and destroyed her.
Nevertheless, a major naval engagement was in the offing. The Germans were willing to help their Italian allies in the invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece, even though this played a part in the delayed start of the planned invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation BARBAROSSA. In return, they expected the Regia Marina to cut British sea communications between Alexandria and Athens. Italian ships were sent into the waters south of Greece to attack British convoys, but were soon spotted by British aerial reconnaissance.
Considerable effort was devoted to convincing the many Axis spies in Alexandria that the Mediterranean Fleet was staying in port, even down to officers going ashore with suitcases and a formal reception planned for the evening. Later, the officers returned after dark, the reception was cancelled and late in the evening of 27 March 1941 the fleet slipped out of Alexandria, ready for what would become known as the Battle of Matapan.
The Battle of Matapan started on the morning of 28 March when the aircraft carrier Formidable, ordered to the Mediterranean to replace Illustrious, flew off aircraft for reconnaissance, fighter air patrols and anti-submarine patrols. Shortly afterwards reports were received of cruisers and destroyers. What was happening was that British light cruisers were being pursued by Italian heavy cruisers, joined by the Italian battleship Vittorio Veneto. Formidable flew off six Fairey Albacores escorted by Fulmar fighters.
As the Fulmars shot down a Junkers Ju 88 fighter that was attempting to attack the Albacores and drove another off, the six Albacores dived down through heavy anti-aircraft fire to torpedo the Vittorio Veneto. No strikes were made but the Italian battleship broke off its pursuit of the British cruisers.
Next, two Italian bombers attempted to attack Formidable, which flew off a strike of three Albacores and two Swordfish, escorted once again by Fulmar fighters. The Fulmars machine-gunned the Veneto’s AA defences while the Albacores pressed home their torpedo attack, with the leading aircraft dropping its torpedo 1,000 yards ahead of the ship. The torpedo struck the ship almost immediately after the plane crashed, hitting her 15 feet below the waterline and allowing water to gush in just above the port outer screw so that within minutes the engines stopped. Damage-control parties laboured to get the ship under way again using her two starboard engines, but she could only manage 15 knots.
Formidable then sent a third air strike that arrived over the Veneto at dusk, with the battleship laying a dense smokescreen and using searchlights to dazzle the attackers as well as using AA fire. The attack was unsuccessful. Meanwhile, an aircraft flying from Maleme in Crete spotted the Italian heavy cruiser Pola and torpedoed it, causing such severe damage that she lost speed and drifted out of position. Two other heavy cruisers, Zara and Fiume, were sent to provide assistance to the crippled ship.
The Italians were unprepared for a night action, being weak in night gunnery, so Cunningham decided to press home his advantage. The opposing fleets were off Cape Matapan, usually described as Akra Tainaron in modern atlases. Cunningham at first thought the Pola was the Vittorio Veneto, but as his ships prepared to open fire the Zara and the Fiume raced across his path, illuminated by a searchlight aboard a destroyer. In the battle that followed, both these heavy cruisers and two destroyers were sunk by the 15in guns of Cunningham’s three battleships, while a torpedo attack by three destroyers sank the Pola.
Next morning, the Mediterranean Fleet rescued 900 Italian survivors before the threat of an Italian air attack stopped the rescue. Cunningham relayed the position of the remaining survivors to Rome, saving many more lives. This was a noble and humanitarian gesture as it inevitably also gave the Italians the position of his fleet.
This proof of continued British dominance of the Eastern Mediterranean did not stop the Germans starting their assault on Yugoslavia and Greece on 6 April. In true blitzkrieg tradition, the attack began with air attacks by the Luftwaffe. On one raid a British ammunition ship was blown up in Piraeus, taking ten other ships with her and damaging the port’s facilities so badly that it was put out of action, creating a major problem for the British expeditionary force ashore. By 23 April the Greek army had surrendered and the Mediterranean Fleet was busy evacuating British forces to Crete under heavy aerial attack. Had Crete been used simply as a convenient staging post for a planned withdrawal to Egypt, all might have been well, but the decision was taken to defend the island despite the shortage of aircraft and heavy weapons and, crucially as it happened, communications equipment.
Behind Enemy Lines
While the Greek campaign was in full swing, a most unusual and even irregular operation was being mounted by the Royal Air Force and the Fleet Air Arm. This started even before the German assault on Greece, while the fighting was still between Greece and Italy.
No. 815 Naval Air Squadron had been based on Crete, with its Fairey Swordfish being used mainly on patrols looking for and attacking German and Italian submarines. While Germany was not engaged in war with Greece, the possibility of German intervention to help the Italians was growing daily, especially when German forces invaded Bulgaria on 2 March 1941.
On 10 March, 815 was moved to Athens, using the then civil airport at Eleusis. There was an air of unreality about the place with German officers off duty on the streets in full uniform, ‘attached to the German embassy’, passing British soldiers, sailors and airmen, also in full uniform.
Two days later, while remaining based on Eleusis No. 815 NAS was allocated a forward base for a strike against enemy shipping using the harbour at Valona, now known as Vlorë, in neighbouring Albania. Despite the base being behind enemy lines, high up in the mountains, it had remained undiscovered by the Italians, even though it was being used by two RAF bomber squadrons, one with Bristol Blenheims and the other with Vickers Wellingtons. It soon became clear why the base had not been discovered. First 815’s Swordfish had to fly to Corfu, and from that island’s southernmost tip fly the 10 miles east to Albania, unless spotted by enemy aircraft, in which case they were ordered to turn back rather than lead the enemy to the secret base in the valley of Paramythia. An air vice marshal made it perfectly clear that it would be better to lose the entire Swordfish squadron than reveal the location, indeed the existence, of the base.
Flying from Corfu to Albania, the Swordfish crews would see a large range of mountains to starboard and select the highest mountain, just over 7,000 feet high, or as one officer put it, ‘the third on the right’, after which they would come across a wide dry river bed at the foot of the mountain. The river bed would then lead them north, albeit with many curves, and they were comforted by the knowledge that if a Blenheim could do it, so could a Swordfish!
Paramythia, or ‘the Valley of Fairy Tales’, was 10 miles long and 3,000 feet deep, with the surrounding mountains rising to 7,000 feet. A Swordfish, laden with a torpedo, had to climb 3,000 feet after take-off before it could set course for Valona. This meant that the airspeed would fall to just 70 knots and require the aircraft to circle as it climbed. These conditions were so demanding that even the faster and more powerful Blenheims and Wellingtons confined their sorties to daylight. Lieutenant Commander Jackie Jago, 815’s commanding officer, pointed out to the air vice marshal that his unit was a night-flying squadron and that they would rather risk hitting a mountain at night than attack a well-defended port in their slow aircraft in broad daylight. In the end a compromise was reached: the aircraft would take off on a clear moonlit night to minimize the risk of hitting a mountain, while the return would be timed so that the Swordfish came across the river bed at dawn. Another precaution was that the squadron would visit Paramythia a day early to allow time for practice take-offs and landings without torpedoes.
There were other problems with the airfield. Apart from speed and high mountains, there was no means of pilots flying into Paramythia obtaining an accurate local barometric pressure reading because of the need to maintain radio silence. One pilot noted that on his first flight, his altimeter showed him to be flying at less than 2,000 feet, even though the airfield was at 3,000 feet. Fuel had to be flown in by Douglas Bostons carrying large fuel drums and as a result, so that the fuel could be saved for the two RAF squadrons, the Fleet Air Arm squadron would only be allowed to top up when landing at Paramythia after a sortie, with the crew having a quick meal before returning to Eleusis. On the outward flight, they would have to carry their torpedoes as otherwise not only would the weapons have to be stocked at Paramythia, there would also have to be trolleys and skilled ratings at the base for them to be loaded onto the Swordfish.
Valona was an important target because the port was closest to the frontier with Greece, giving the shortest overland supply line for Italian forces bogged down in fierce fighting with the Greeks. The only alternative port was Durazzo, 60 miles to the north by air or sea, but more than 100 miles further by road. If Valona could be made untenable, instead of an 80-mile journey over a mountain road so exposed that it could only be used at night, the Italian supply lorries would be faced with a journey of more than 180 miles.
With a large harbour and an anchorage some 10 miles long and 5 miles wide, Valona was surrounded by hills and mountains to seaward as well as to the south, with the peaks at between 1,000 and 3,000 feet. The Swordfish had to fly from Eleusis to Paramythia, refuel and then take off again and fly towards Corfu, climbing over the sea to an altitude of 10,000 feet, which was cold even in summer in an open cockpit, and would take half an hour with the aircraft carrying a 1,750lb torpedo slung under the fuselage. The aircraft would then turn towards Valona, descending on half throttle before entering the harbour through a gap, 1,250 feet high, between a hill and a small mountain village. This did allow altimeters to be adjusted because of the known height of the gap and by making an estimate of the aircraft’s height above it. The plan was to arrive over the anchorage at an altitude of just 60 feet, at least in theory.
The first raid was on 13 March, with the aircraft taking off shortly before 0300 from Paramythia. An hour later, the first flight of Swordfish passed through the gap, with the pilots hastily resetting their altimeters to 1,300 feet while continuing to descend towards the harbour. It was known that at least six large merchant vessels would be in the harbour. The leading aircraft was flown by the squadron commander, Lieutenant Commander Jago, but its blue formation light suddenly disappeared, leaving the following aircraft’s pilot unsure whether the first aircraft had been shot down by the heavy anti-aircraft fire that had just started or had suffered sudden mechanical failure. The second aircraft, flown by Lieutenant Charles Lamb, took the lead, as Lamb recalled later:
I thought that I had plenty of height to reach the shipping at anchor right ahead…when my wheels struck the water with a terrible lurch, and my throat constricted in the awful spasm which people have in mind when they say ‘my heart leapt into my mouth’. Instinctively, I held the aircraft steady in case it somersaulted, and opened the throttle wide and pressed the release button because the water would have activated the Duplex pistol on the nose of the torpedo and started the pistol’s propeller. The sudden deceleration only lasted for about two seconds…but they were the longest two seconds I have ever known. Fortunately, we were within fifteen hundred yards of a big ship, right ahead, her hulk a black shape against a searchlight wavering about from the town behind her, so my fish wasn’t wasted. But after that experience I set my altimeter with very great care when coming through that gap, and insisted on the aircraft entering the harbour in very open formation, so that there was time to do so.
It says a great deal for the sturdy construction of the Swordfish undercarriage that it could be dipped into the sea at a speed of ninety knots or more, and held there for a few seconds without being torn off; and for the power of the Bristol engine and the stability of the aircraft as a whole that the ailerons and wings were sufficiently strong to keep it steady with such a sudden deceleration, and force through the water and into the air again without any damage whatsoever.
The instinctive reaction of most pilots would have been to yank back the control column as hard as possible, but it was important to hold the aircraft steady to avoid somersaulting or stalling. Lamb was sufficiently concerned to ask his telegraphist/air-gunner to lean over the side to see if the aircraft still had its undercarriage so that he would know whether or not he should prepare for a belly-landing.
At least three ships had been set on fire during the attack. The Italians claimed that no damage had been done and that three aircraft had been shot down and their crews taken prisoner. This at least indicated to the rest of 815’s air-crew that their commander had survived.
Following this first attack, it was decided to divide the squadron in two, with half held at Paramythia ready to attack while the other half was rearming at Eleusis. Four nights of further attacks followed, resulting in the masters of the merchant vessels refusing to remain in harbour after dark and instead anchoring off the coast, which made finding the ships more difficult for 815. The squadron was divided yet again, with the half making the attack being split between those going into the harbour at Valona and the remainder ranging north along the coast towards Durazzo.
Meanwhile, the Italians had improved their air defences. They worked out the approach taken by the Swordfish on their way to the harbour and moored a flak ship to cover the approach and placed additional flak ships in the harbour itself. One pilot discovered these additional ships for the first time on a night when there was no worthwhile merchant shipping in the harbour, so he used his torpedo on one of the flak ships and literally blew the small vessel out of the water!
Far cleverer was the placing of a large illuminated buoy ‘as big as the Albert Hall’ in the middle of the harbour, so brightly lit that no matter from which direction the Swordfish approached, they would be highlighted against it for the benefit of the AA gunners. Unfortunately for the Italians, when the ‘tail-end Charlie’ Swordfish pilot saw all five aircraft ahead of him highlighted by the buoy, he dropped his torpedo in its direction, blowing it up and extinguishing all the lights at once. The Italians claimed that the Fleet Air Arm had sunk a hospital ship but the pilots did not see any red crosses.
Flying at night, encounters with enemy fighters were a rare event. Charles Lamb was flying from Eleusis to Paramythia after debriefing a senior RAF officer on a raid against Durazzo. He was giving a young sub-lieutenant observer a lift, not because he needed a navigator but because he needed someone to watch the skies behind his aircraft for fighters and to make sure that they were not tracked heading into Paramythia. This was fortunate because at 5,000 feet over Corfu, the observer suddenly shouted: ‘Fighters astern – on both sides!’ Looking over his shoulder, Lamb saw two Fiat CR.22 biplane fighters, each fitted with twin 12.7mm machine guns. These aircraft would have posed no threat at all to many aircraft of the day, but they were a very real hazard for a plodding Stringbag*, as the Swordfish was affectionately known to the Fleet Air Arm.
Lamb immediately jettisoned his torpedo and started the defensive manoeuvre he had been taught and that he had earlier rehearsed when his ship was working-up in Bermuda. He stood the Swordfish on its tail as the two Fiats opened fire, causing them to shoot past. He then dived vertically on full power, hoping that his observer was safely strapped in and that the wings wouldn’t tear off as he reached almost 200 knots. He levelled out closer to the sea than he had ever done before, prior to climbing so steeply that his observer blacked out briefly. He saw the two Fiats approach again, still in formation rather than in line which he felt might have given them a greater chance of success, and repeated his stall, dive and climb manoeuvre again, glancing around just to see the two fighters crashing into the sea.
On checking with his observer that he was all right, all Lamb got in reply was a murmur. On landing, he looked into the rear cockpit to see if the observer was in fact fine, only to find that the young man had been violently sick and was in tears; probably, Lamb thought, at being discovered in such a mess.
They had in fact been very lucky, as when Lamb pulled his parachute out of the aircraft, it fell apart. His aircraft had been hit and a machine-gun shell had lodged just inches away from what he described as his ‘most sensitive anatomy’.
There were further operations from Paramythia, starting on 9 April and continuing for eight days. In these operations another four significant merchant vessels were sunk and, even more importantly, the Axis powers stopped using the port.
The slow and obsolescent Swordfish did well, for by the time operations ceased, all the Wellingtons had been lost in their daylight raids, except for one that could not be flown as there were no surviving pilots for the aircraft. There was an even bigger problem, not on the horizon but seen by those at Paramythia waiting to make their one last sortie on 17 April: a Junkers Ju 88 landed at the airfield! The aircraft was carrying King Peter of Yugoslavia into exile, but it was clear that the base was no longer secret and therefore no longer usable. The Ju 88 had been shadowed by a squadron of Heinkel He 111s that attacked but could inflict little damage in the failing light without flying into the sides of the mountains.
Crete
Despite the valiant efforts of those who flew out of Paramythia, it was clear that the battle for Greece had been lost. Even at Eleusis, the squadron was not safe and two Swordfish were lost in bombing raids. No. 815 NAS was moved to Crete and started flying anti-submarine patrols, but a series of engine failures soon saw them down to three aircraft, with the remaining five unserviceable. This was a squadron that at its peak had had twenty-two aircraft. The three aircraft were flown to Egypt with some difficulty with faltering engines, with one pilot considering ditching when he saw ships of the Mediterranean Fleet and only changed his mind when he realized that the approaching Fairey Fulmar fighters hadn’t recognized his aircraft and were prepared to shoot him down. He sought refuge in a cloud. Another aircraft made a dead-stick landing after its engine finally failed.
Evacuating British forces to Crete was sensible and eased the evacuation of Greece, but attempting to establish Crete as a base was over-optimistic. It was fine as a staging post, but the British forces in Crete had had to abandon artillery, vehicles and communications equipment in their escape from Greece and were in no state to defend the island when, on 20 May, the German airborne invasion began.
Few could have foreseen that the German assault would come by air, despite earlier experience in Norway and the Low Countries. As they arrived, the Germans were helped by the fact that most of the British and Greek forces defending the island had been deployed to the coast, expecting a seaborne invasion. Göring had persuaded Hitler that the Luftwaffe’s paratroops** should mount the invasion with the army and navy playing a supporting role. The army used barges for the invasion and suffered serious casualties, with the Royal Navy completely wiping out one convoy. Despite the British and Greek forces’ lack of weaponry and communications equipment, the invasion proved so costly that for a time Hitler banned all further airborne assaults. Gliders lay burnt out on the landing-grounds while the bodies of paratroopers hung lifeless in the trees, and it was only the lack of good communications between the defending units that prevented the German assault being repelled.
At sea, during the night of 21/22 May the cruisers Ajax, Dido and Orion with four destroyers completely destroyed one convoy carrying troops and munitions. The Luftwaffe responded on 22 May with a crippling attack on the Mediterranean Fleet, sinking the cruisers Fiji and Gloucester and badly damaging Warspite and the cruisers Carlisle and Naiad. Cunningham sent the battleships Queen Elizabeth and Barham with nine destroyers to attack Axis airfields in the Dodecanese; these were aided by aircraft from Formidable but by this time the carrier’s air power was extremely limited due to a shortage of aircraft and she could do little to defend herself when the Luftwaffe turned its attention on her, causing serious damage. Even so, the Mediterranean Fleet continued to evacuate the last of the 17,000 British, Empire and Greek troops from Crete long after the deadline set by the Admiralty.
Yet, the stark truth was that for the second time in five months during the war in the Mediterranean, an aircraft carrier was damaged beyond local repair and had to be sent away. This time, there was no replacement available.
Withdrawing the British Mediterranean Fleet from Malta to Alexandria in Egypt was not simply a good idea but also a necessity. The fleet would have been a sitting duck in Malta’s Grand Harbour and too far away at Gibraltar for operations off Greece and for the later invasion of Syria, as well as support for the British Eighth Army in Egypt. However, Alexandria – ‘Alex’ to those stationed there – was not the ideal naval base for a large fleet. It lacked the repair facilities needed by capital ships, which by this time could fairly be said to include aircraft carriers as well as battleships and battle-cruisers. A floating dry dock was useful for anything up to and including a cruiser but not for major fleet units. There was also the question of skilled dockyard manpower.
While the Egyptian authorities had, if sometimes reluctantly, rounded up German and then Italian nationals and sent the diplomats home, there were still German and Italian spies in the country. Events were also to prove that Alexandria was far from secure in any sense.
The night of 18/19 December 1941 was a bad one for the British Mediterranean Fleet, leaving it at the nadir of its misfortunes. That night, the Malta-based Force K, a cruiser and destroyer raiding force, ran into an Italian minefield off Tripoli. The cruiser Neptune was sunk with a destroyer and two other cruisers, Aurora and Penelope, were badly damaged.
Almost 1,000 miles to the east, an Italian submarine surfaced in the darkness just over a mile from the entrance to the harbour at Alexandria and released three two-man human torpedoes into the water. The attackers were lucky, for as they arrived the harbour defences were opened for Rear Admiral Philip Vian’s destroyers. The human torpedoes were intended for the British battleships. Acting with considerable bravery, one of the Italians who had arrived with the human torpedoes, Luigi de la Penne, fixed his warhead to the bottom of the battleship Valiant but he and his companion then lost their torpedo and had to swim to a buoy from which they were rescued and taken prisoner by the British. Another pair managed to blow the stern off the tanker Sagona and also damage the destroyer Jervis that was lying alongside. Unable to escape through the dock entrance through which they had entered the harbour, they went ashore but were soon spotted and arrested. The third two-man team fixed their charge to the bottom of the battleship Queen Elizabeth and also attempted to escape, hoping to be picked up by a submarine. They too were spotted and arrested after coming ashore, giving themselves away by trying to spend English £5 notes that were no longer legal tender in Egypt.
Despite being detained aboard Valiant, de la Penne kept quiet about his explosive charge until it exploded and the battleship’s hull ripped open below the waterline and she settled in the harbour. The same happened to the Queen Elizabeth.
Fortunately for the Royal Navy, both these major ships were in shallow water and aerial reconnaissance showed them sitting in the harbour as if they were undamaged. The crews of the human torpedoes had failed to return, so there was no indication that they had been successful. Better still, the discovery of one of the torpedoes enabled the Royal Navy to embark on its own programme of human torpedoes, which became known to the service as ‘chariots’; a far kinder name than that used by the Italians that translated simply and unglamorously as ‘pigs’. Yet, at this time Cunningham was without an operational battleship or, more serious still, an aircraft carrier.
Somerville was not that much better off. On 13 November, off Gibraltar, U-81 had torpedoed Force H’s aircraft carrier, Ark Royal, knocking out her engine rooms and, of course, pumps, so that she sank the next day. The irony was that most naval officers had expected her to succumb to aerial attack, given the thin plating of her unarmoured flight deck.
As the winter drew on and fighting in Russia became virtually impossible, the Luftwaffe units deployed east returned to increase the pressure on the Mediterranean Fleet and Malta.
*The Swordfish was known as the ‘Stringbag’ because of its spidery construction and the fact that it could carry such an assortment of munitions, akin to the variety one might find in a housewife’s string bag.
**In contrast to the practice in most countries, German paratroops were part of the air force, the Luftwaffe, rather than the army.