Important to the United Kingdom throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Malta eventually had the best maintenance and repair facilities for the Royal Navy between Portsmouth and Singapore, far more extensive than those at Gibraltar, where many Maltese had settled whilst working for the Crown. A posting to the Mediterranean Fleet was an attractive proposition for any naval officer, both socially and in the sense of advancing a career. It was one of the best postings away from the Grand Fleet, or later the Home Fleet.
Malta was far less attractive from the point of view of the professional soldier. There weren’t for them the opportunities enjoyed by the sailors to ‘show the flag’, visiting foreign ports, while training facilities were constrained by the small size of the islands. A military presence was essential because of Malta’s importance, but there were not the challenges of insurrection, inter-communal or tribal conflict, or possible invasion that were part and parcel of life elsewhere in the British Empire.
From the point of view of the airmen, Malta didn’t figure highly other than for flying-boat operations from Kalafrana and, while it was under RAF control, Fleet Air Arm visits to Hal Far when the Mediterranean Fleet was in port. Malaya was far more important. Malta fitted into the chain of British air stations. It was an important staging post for military aircraft on the way to the Middle East and beyond, although bypassed by the mainstream of the Imperial Airways’ services. Hal Far’s importance was all the greater because of the lack of airport facilities at Gibraltar until the outbreak of the Second World War.
The Mediterranean was also important to France, the other great European colonial power after the collapse of Spain’s Latin American empire. Britain and France co-owned the Suez Canal. Like the Royal Navy, the French Navy, the Marine Nationale, had to divide its forces between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean and widely scattered overseas possessions.
Italy’s entry into the Second World War coincided with the fall of France, so the French presence can be discounted. The forces that mattered were those of Italy, and later those of Germany, but only the former had major surface fleet units as German wartime activity in the Mediterranean was confined to submarines and motor-torpedo boats, or U-boats and E-boats.
After Italy entered the Second World War, it soon became clear that the dominant force was the Regia Aeronautica, the Italian Air Force. As the British were soon to learn, control of the sea was dependent upon control of the skies.
By June, 1940 the Regia Aeronautica, had some 5,400 aircraft, of which 400 were elderly types based in Italian East Africa. Most aircraft were divided between Italy and North Africa, ready for a push into Egypt, with a frontline strength of 975 bombers and 803 fighters and fighter-bombers, more than 400 reconnaissance aircraft and 285 maritime-reconnaissance aircraft, but fewer than eighty transports. The remaining 2,000 aircraft were operated by flying schools and technical and specialist units.
Backbone of the Italian bomber force was the three-engined Savoia-Marchetti SM79 Sparviero, or Hawk. If the Italian Navy’s warships had seen little action, the same could not be said of the SM79, used in the one-sided confrontations between Italian forces and Abyssinian tribesmen. The SM79 could carry up to 2,200 lbs of bombs or, in the anti-shipping units, or Aerosiluranti, two torpedoes.
Built mainly of wood, the SM79 had a low wing, limiting the size of bomb that could be carried. Three Alfa-Romeo RC34 engines each provided 750hp, with a cruising speed of 200 mph and a maximum speed of 225 mph. The three-engined configuration placed the bomb-aimer’s position under the fuselage behind the middle engine. Defensive armament was poor, just four machine guns, with no provision for a tail-gunner. Thick armoured plating behind their seats protected the two pilots, but not the wireless operator or the engineer sitting behind them!
Other aircraft included the Fiat BR20M Cicogna bomber, CR42 and CR50 fighters, and the Macchi C200 fighter. The latter aircraft’s 840-hp Fiat A74 radial gave it a maximum speed of just over 300mph, pitifully inadequate by this time. Worse still was its armament of just two 12.7-mm machine guns, at a time when British pilots felt that four machine guns were inadequate, eight machine guns, in the early Hurricanes and Spitfires, only just adequate, and that a successful fighter should have four 20-mm cannon.
As a defensive force, the Regia Aeronautica was weak and poorly organized, despite its large numbers of fighters, a situation not helped by the absence of radar, but as an offensive force, it was ideally positioned to cut the Mediterranean in two. The land mass of Italy, the famous ‘leg’ almost did this, added to which there were bases in Sicily and Sardinia, and to the east, bases in the Dodecanese taken by Italy from Turkey in 1912, as well as in present day Libya.
Despite their support for the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, the Regia Aeronautica gave the distinct impression of having had little experience of modern warfare against a determined, well-trained and well-equipped opponent. They repeated the mistake made by the RAF during the first year or two of warfare, sending bombers in relatively small numbers which meant that they did relatively little harm and were exposed to the full force of defending fire.
In June, 1940, the Italian Navy, the Regia Navale, was the single most powerful maritime force in the Mediterranean, with six battleships, seven heavy cruisers and fourteen light cruisers: under the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty, ‘heavy’ cruisers had eight-inch guns, and ‘light’ had six-inch guns. Supporting these major warships were 122 destroyers and torpedo boats and no less than 119 submarines, almost twice as many as the German Kriegsmarine had possessed in 1939!
These warships showed Italy’s lack of experience in modern warfare. There was more emphasis on style and speed than on armament and armour protection. The Andrea Doria-class of battleships, which included the Conte di Cavour and the Caio Duilio, dated from the First World War, although reconstructed between the wars. These ships had a tonnage of 22,964 tons, were capable of 27 knots, and had a main armament of ten 12.6-inch guns, with a secondary armament of twelve 5.2-inch, ten 3.5-inch and nineteen 37-mm, the last being primarily for anti-aircraft protection.
The new Commander-in-Chief of the British Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham, ‘ABC’ to his men, relates how, in 1938, the two Italian battleships, Guilio Cesare and the Conte di Cavour, under the command of Admiral Riccardi, paid a courtesy visit to Malta. The nature of such visits was that the hosts and guests embarked on a round of entertaining and inspections. In return for British hospitality, Cunningham and his senior officers were invited aboard.
We lunched on board the Conte di Cavour with Admiral Riccardi, and came to the conclusion that he must have embarked the whole catering staff and band from one of the best hotels in Rome, so distinguished was his entertainment. Afterwards he took us round his palatial and highly decorated private apartments . . .4
In other words, the Conte di Cavour was really an admiral’s yacht!
More modern and more impressive were the Littorio-class, built just before the outbreak of war to make full use of the maximum dimensions permitted by the Washington Treaty. These were ships of 35,000 tons, capable of 30.5 knots. Their main armament consisted of nine 15-inch guns, with a secondary armament of twelve 6-inch and four 4.7-inch, twelve 3.5-inch, twenty 37-mm and thirty-two 20-mm. For comparison, the British Prince of Wales also weighed in at 35,000 tons, but was only capable of 28.5 knots. Her main armament was ten 14-inch guns, with a secondary armament of sixteen 5.25-inch, forty-eight 2-pounder pom-poms, a single 40-mm and twenty 20-mm.
The fatal Italian weakness at the outset of what was to be an increasingly sophisticated and technological war was the absence of radar, whether on the ships, ashore or in the air. Cunningham thought that the Italians ‘were no further advanced than we had been at Jutland twenty-five years before’.5
The main bases for the Italian fleet were at Taranto in Italy’s ‘instep’, Genoa in the north-west, and La Spezzia, slightly further south, as well as Trieste at the northern end of the Adriatic, close to the border with Yugoslavia. Taranto was closest to Malta, and as the war progressed, it was the base best suited for supplies to North Africa and to support naval operations during the invasion of Greece.
A weakness of the Italian strategic position was that in addition to forces in Libya, it also had forces in Eritrea and Somaliland, as well as Abyssinia, who could only be reached through the Suez Canal, a route controlled by the British.
Domination on paper was not the same as domination in reality. The Italian armed forces had done relatively little in the First World War and not been faced with a serious conflict since the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913. Italy’s naval history, such as it was, was that of pre-unification Genoa and Venice, with the latter state having played a major role in the important Battle of Lepanto in 1571. The ‘leg of Italy’ created that unusual phenomenon of a country virtually surrounded by the sea, and yet not a maritime power in the true sense.
The British had strategically-located bases in the colonies of Gibraltar and Malta, as well as in Egypt, theoretically an independent kingdom, but run almost as a colony, and on Cyprus. The British armed forces were even more stretched than those of France, with a combination of colonies and protectorates and there was hardly a continent without a British presence.
British defence planning between the two world wars was severely constrained, one might even say ‘blighted’, by the so-called ‘Ten Year Rule’, that decreed that the country would have ten years in which to prepare for war. The fallacy of this can easily be judged by the fact that Hitler seized absolute power in 1933 and war broke out in 1939, after a close shave averted by the Munich Crisis of the previous year. In fact, war almost came even earlier, as a result of the Abyssinian Crisis of 1935 following Italy’s invasion, and the use of gas and the other instruments of modern warfare against tribesmen often armed with nothing more potent than old rifles. The poor state of Britain’s defences may well have been behind the decision not to pursue the matter with the rigour that many members of the public would have liked, and which would have at least shown the Axis Powers that the democracies meant business. There were other reasons for not acting, of course, including the inadequacies of the League of Nations and French opposition to sanctions against Italy.
The extra time bought by the Munich Agreement was put to good use by the British in many ways. True, they continued to build obsolescent aircraft types, but they did at least complete the CH, for ‘Chain Home’, radar stations, and they ordered extra aircraft carriers and other warships. Earlier, the decision had been taken to transfer naval aviation from the RAF and back to the Admiralty. A new class of fast armoured aircraft carriers was already under construction, the Illustrious-class. Yet the years of neglect could not be resolved within a year or two. The defence of Singapore and Malaya was neglected, while closer to home, Malta did not have fighters, although the AA defences were reinforced and the island had radar.
The Royal Air Force had called for volunteers to take the first transportable radar station to be sent abroad to Malta in January 1939. Reginald Townson, then a corporal but later a flight lieutenant, was one of the volunteers, having known and liked Malta from a previous visit. He recalls being sent out on a British India liner, by then already part of P&O, with two lorries, one containing the transmitter and a Meadows petrol-engined generating set on one lorry, the receiver on another, and two trailers with Merryweather seventy-feet telescopic wooden masts to carry the two aerials.
‘The site was already selected for us and we were put out at Dingli which . . . has a site height according to the ordnance survey map of 817 feet, the highest point of the island,’ he recalled.
As luck would have it, it turned out to be a very good site and particularly from the point of view of detecting Italians. I’m afraid the equipment was rather, well, it was well put together all right, Met-Vic (Metropolitan-Vickers) never put anything together unless it was like a battleship but as far as the radio frequency side was concerned it wasn’t very brilliant. And we found that the transmitter in fact, we used to wind it up to put 25,000 volts on the final anodes, but when we got up to 5,000 volts instead of the transmitter putting out pulses it went into continuous wave which would trip out all the breakers and you’d have to start all over again.6
Fortunately, they had the services of a civilian engineer, believed to have been from the BBC, and with his help they effectively rebuilt the transmitter and got it to work. Many items of equipment had to be changed, for radar was in its infancy and this was the first time that a portable unit had been allowed so far from home. They also had problems with the transmitter overheating in the Maltese summer, and the Meadows generating set, possibly the least sophisticated part of the whole arrangement, proved to be far less reliable than it should have been.
But by the time September 1939 came along we’d got it working reasonably well and we were in fact achieving one or two operational successes with the set but by no means could you say that it was in a state to hand over. And then of course . . . when September 3rd came along the war was declared and there we were, stuck with it. And so there we had to stay.7
Townson and his colleagues were seen as oddities by the people in the RAF’s headquarters in Malta, who would try to get in to see the equipment.
‘. . . they’d have a giggle among themselves about these funny people out at Dingli, you know, and telling us that they can see aeroplanes seventy miles away,’ Townson continued.
Well, we fetched in three Blenheims . . . one night that had got themselves lost and were wandering around the Med. And fortunately we picked them up on the radar. And we had not W/T (wireless telegraph) to communicate with them and anyway it would have breached security if we’d gone on the air and told them which way to steer. But by hooking us up by landline with an ordinary D/F (direction finding) station at Hal Far we passed the information, the position information, to Hal Far. They would pass it up as a bearing which of course is a perfectly normal thing for a D/F station to do and this way the Blenheims were brought in. And that did produce a signal of congratulations from the AOC the next morning . . . By and large, HQ Med just did not believe what we could do . . . And it wasn’t until the first hostiles actually appeared on the screen, we passed down the information that there they were and what range they were and then gave the decreasing ranges as they came in, and lo and behold when we said they were nearly overhead there some Italians were, dropping bombs on us.8
The small radar team was headed by a flight sergeant, and when he was invalided home in late 1940, Townson was promoted first to sergeant and then to flight sergeant in his place.
More than any other single feature, the presence of radar on the island was to be the saving of Malta and of many Maltese lives. It helped too that the Italians did not have radar, and almost certainly could hardly understand it. This aspect of Malta’s air defences was dependent on the work of just nine people.
. . . there were nine of us altogether which we split up into three crews of three to operate over as much of the twenty-four hours as we could. The big snag was the Meadows generating set which was far from stable but then, you know, it had never been designed to do that sort of job. We had to have a stable mains supply which was never designed for it. We took it out of its van and stuck it into a little stone building that works and bricks put up for us in a hurry which made it a lot better but it still wasn’t very good . . . we just felt that we just could not run that, or the transmitter come to that, for twenty-four hours a day. And so we used to shut down at night for a few hours, let it all cool off and start up again the next morning before dawn. And three watches of three to do that lot.
We used to have one chap in the receiver, one chap in the transmitter, and one chap looking after the Meadows. As simple as that. And then swap them around. Hour on the tube and then change around and off they go.9
The state of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet in 1940 was such that the balance of naval power lay firmly with the Italians once France was out of the war. As Pound, who had been recalled home to become First Sea Lord, had hoped, ships were indeed brought back from the Far East to reinforce the British Mediterranean Fleet, but these ‘reinforcements’, including the elderly aircraft carrier HMS Eagle, recalled from the Indian Ocean, were in reality replacements, as his successor, Andrew Cunningham, had lost Glorious, recalled home to take part in the Norwegian Campaign. Cunningham’s own flagship, HMS Warspite, was an elderly battleship that had been commissioned in time for the First World War and had seen action at Jutland. She and her sisters of the Queen Elizabeth-class had been some of the first major British warships to be fuelled by oil, something which many senor naval officers during the early years of the twentieth century regarded with suspicion, not out of any conservative attachment to coal, but because of the uncertainty over oil supplies. Warspite had been extensively modernized between the two world wars, and in 1940, she had a full load tonnage of 36,450 tons, and was capable of more than 25 knots. In addition to her eight 15-inch guns in four turrets that comprised her main armament, she had a secondary armament of eight 6-inch guns, eight 4-inch guns, thirty-two 2-pounder pom-poms, often described as the ‘best close-in anti-aircraft weapon of the war’ by many naval officers, and fifteen 12.7-mm machine guns. This was the one warship available to Cunningham on Italy’s entry into the war that could fight on an equal footing with the Italian battleships and cruisers.
Cunningham also had two other battleships, but neither had been modernized to the same extent as Warspite. These two ships, Malaya and Royal Sovereign, were both too slow by the standards of 1939. Supporting these ships were five cruisers and a number of destroyers and submarines.
In Malta, on 3 September 1939, there were just four battalions of British infantry, some of them under strength, while a Maltese infantry battalion was forming and would in due course be the 1st Battalion of the King’s Own Malta Regiment. The British battalions were the 2nd Battalion, Devonshire Regiment; 2nd Battalion, Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment; 1st Battalion, Dorsetshire Regiment, and 2nd Battalion, Royal Irish Fusiliers. There was also the 7 AA Regiment, Royal Artillery.
These forces were barely adequate to deter an Italian invasion. Urgent attention was already being paid to reinforcements. First of these were two territorial battalions of the King’s Own Malta Regiment, which were ready by the end of September 1939, aided by the creation of the Malta Auxiliary Corps to provide reinforcements for the existing support arms on the island. Additional manpower arrived in November once the garrison was classed as a division. The following year saw additional resources provided, despite the desperate situation in France, with the 8th Battalion, Manchester Regiment, arriving in May 1940.
Meanwhile, additional AA defences were built up with the arrival of the 27 HAA, while the 7 AA Regiment was renamed the 7 HAA, reflecting the heavier calibre of its weapons. The Royal Malta Artillery was also expanded.
In the final year of peace, Colonel Martin Hastings was a second lieutenant in the 2nd Battalion, Devonshire Regiment. He had been posted to Malta in July 1938, where his unit practised beach and island defence roles until the outbreak of war in September 1939, when his role changed.
‘I had an interesting job given to me which was to be a . . . recruit training officer of the Malta Artisan Section of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, which I did and became temporary ordnance officer and earned an extra two shillings a day which was very fortunate for an impecunious second lieutenant,’ he recalls.10
It was great fun and we enlisted, I suppose, about forty of them or so. They were now what you would call REME and they were the first lot of Maltese to be enlisted into the British Army outside Malta.
They were keen young men. Their main problems I think was English (sic) but they went off and they became good soldiers and I’ve often wondered what their eventual life was like in the army in Egypt . . . They were very keen. There was tremendous competition to get into the little unit. They had a very good colonel who was quite a character, called Colonel de Wolf, who was a bit deaf and everybody knew Colonel de Wolf in Malta. And he kept a very close eye on us and great interest and we finished up by marching through Valletta and we were inspected by the Governor on the Palace Square with the whole of Malta who seemed to be watching and cheering.11
Martin Hastings was soon promoted to captain.
The French fleet was coming in and out of Malta taking African troops to the south of France and we had a number of soldiers who went off with the Navy to provide guards on various ships which they would intercept and order into port. Other than that we hardly knew that a war was on.
It wasn’t until Italy declared war that things changed . . . The Fleet moved out of Malta of course and went off to Alex and Gib and we had, as you know, just those basically three aeroplanes, Faith, Hope and Charity, the three small fighters, Gloster Gladiators.
When Italy came in, of course, the first day they sent over, I think it was, ten bombers and we all watched these bombers come over in a big circle high above the sky and our little planes were somewhere up there . . . But gradually it started to build up and we gradually started to build our defences and our role of beach defence and airfield defence around Hal Far aerodrome, which was the Fleet Air Arm base mainly, and Kalafrana where the flying boats up to then had come in on their imperial lines of communication.12
While the Italian Navy must have understood that war was likely, and that the United Kingdom would be the most likely opponent from the start of the Abyssinian adventure in the mid-1930s, no official indication was given to the armed forces until April 1940, that Italy would expect to fight alongside the Germans. Mussolini listened to and consulted the army, who dominated the Supreme Command, leaving the sailors and airmen to do as they were told.
The Chief of the Italian Naval Staff, Admiral Domenico Cavagnari, also held the political post of Under Secretary of State for the Navy, and should have had great influence. He wrote to Mussolini, effectively complaining that entering a war once it had already started meant that any chance of surprise had gone. In the circumstances, Italy was in a weak position. He thought that Britain and France could block the Mediterranean at both ends and starve Italy of the fuel and raw materials needed to survive, let alone prosecute a war, or seek combat, in which case both sides could expect heavy losses. He stressed the difficulties inherent on being dependent on the cooperation and goodwill of the Regia Aeronautica.
This was a pessimistic forecast, and one that was overtaken by the collapse of French resistance. It was certainly more realistic about wartime conditions than the Italian Army. That the Army hadn’t properly considered the impact of maritime strategy in wartime soon became apparent. On the eve of war, the Italian Army maintained that it had six months’ supplies in Libya. Once fighting started, and especially after Marshal Graziani, Italy’s commander in North Africa, invaded Egypt on 13 September, the demand for supplies of all kinds soared. A convoy system had to be hastily instigated, but here the lack of Italian preparation and inexperience of modern warfare was soon to be seen, as often one or two small warships would guard a number of merchantmen.
As war drew closer, everyone knew that the situation in Malta was likely to be serious. Cunningham, who had spent much time on the island, was well aware of this. The British Mediterranean Fleet was moved from Malta to Alexandria in Egypt, a safer haven for the ships. This was a wise move, and as events were to prove, Cunningham had no choice, for within three days of Italy entering the war, Italian warships sank three British submarines, Grampus, Odin and Orpheus. Nevertheless, it did mean that the Mediterranean Fleet now found itself more than 1,000 miles from Malta, and twice that distance from Gibraltar.
A partial solution lay in creating what was in effect a fleet for the Western Mediterranean, Force H, based on Gibraltar and under the command of Vice Admiral Sir James Somerville. Force H also ventured into the Atlantic, as circumstances demanded, and included the still new aircraft carrier, HMS Ark Royal.
On the eve of war in the Mediterranean, the Mediterranean Fleet itself was, like Malta, without fighter aircraft, having just eighteen Swordfish for bombing, torpedo attacks, minelaying and anti-submarine operations. The Swordfish was a plodding biplane, much liked by those who flew in it, but despite training in defensive tactics, liable to be vulnerable to enemy fighters. Determined to do something about it, Eagle’s Commander Flying, Commander C. L. Keighley-Peach, found three Gloster Sea Gladiator fighters, the last biplane fighter and obsolete even when it entered service, and put these antiques into service, flying one himself and training two Swordfish pilots as fighter pilots. Such aircraft could cope with the enemy’s reconnaissance seaplanes, hampered by the drag of their floats, but were scarcely able to handle the enemy bombers. It was fortunate indeed that the Italians did not have fighters of the calibre of the Messerschmitt Bf109.
While the Admiralty was determined that the islands should be held, and Cunningham took the same view, he realized that there were many practical measures to be taken.
Before Italy entered the war, many British civilians and deped-dants had already been sent home aboard the Orient Lines ship Oronsay, on passage from Australia, while both the Mediterranean and the Bay of Biscay were still free from enemy attack. The fact that most of the army wives who sailed on the Oronsay felt that their departure was to some extent enforced led to her being called the ‘slave ship’, although it seems that they were well looked after despite the growing crisis in Europe.
Most of the remaining British civilians including the dependants of service personnel were evacuated in a convoy that departed on 10 July 1940, sending them by sea to Alexandria as a first step in what was to be a long journey home. A fast convoy carried the civilians, while a slow convoy carried the naval stores regarded as being superfluous in Malta and needed elsewhere as the fleet redeployed eastwards to Alexandria, out of range of enemy aircraft. These arrangements demonstrated the weakness of Malta’s position. In normal times, the fast convoy carrying the dependants and civilians would have headed for Gibraltar and home, but with the whole of the coastline of North Africa between Malta and ‘Gib’ now open to the enemy’s aircraft, it had to head for Alexandria, but even that course was not immune from enemy air attack.
The slow convoy would have gone to Alexandria anyway, as the Royal Navy built up that base to take the place of Malta. Creating what was, in effect, a new home for the Mediterranean Fleet was a major task. It even involved moving a floating dock from the UK because of the limited facilities at Alexandria, and the poor state of the floating dock already in Malta. Alexandria was too far away to provide an effective base from which to interrupt Italian supply convoys on their way to North Africa. Malta was ideally situated to harass Italian convoys across the Mediterranean, but 1,000 miles there and 1,000 miles back was too much for many of the ships, especially the smaller ones such as destroyers. The Royal Navy’s warships were notoriously ‘short-legged’, a legacy born from the complacency of having so many well situated refuelling bases, such as Malta, in a far flung empire. Realizing that Malta would be a danger if the Royal Navy dared base warships or submarines there, the Italian Navy pressed for its invasion, but Mussolini held back.
For the passage to Alexandria, both convoys enjoyed the protection of the Mediterranean Fleet, with Cunningham hoping also to bring the Italian Admiral Inigo Campioni to battle.
In a foretaste of Italian strategy for the next three years, they didn’t send their fleet, but instead sent Regia Aeronautica’s bombers to attack the ships. Those who had been living in Malta had already grown accustomed to this, but for many of the seafarers, it was their first experience of bombing. Dropped from 12,000 feet, the bombs screamed down, while the ships thudded and shook to the sound and recoil of their own AA guns. Ships disappeared from sight as bombs sent fountains of water, stained black by the explosive, high above their decks, while pieces of shrapnel struck the sides.
‘It was a comfort to remember that there was always more water than ship,’ commented Cunningham. ‘But not very much, for a ship stood up huge, bare and exposed, above the absorbing flat acres of the sea.’13
Cunningham was one of the very small minority who believed that Italian bombing was excellent, later recalling that: ‘It is not too much to say of those early months that the Italian high-level bombing was the best I have ever seen, far better than the German . . . I shall always remember it with respect.’
The three Sea Gladiators led by Keighley-Peach nevertheless accounted for five Italian aircraft that day, and before being replaced by Fairey Fulmars, these obsolete aircraft were to account for a further six Italian aircraft.
Only one British ship, the cruiser HMS Gloucester, received a direct hit, but this was serious enough. She was hit on the bridge, killing seven officers, including her captain, and eleven ratings. Prompt action saw the fires extinguished and control regained as she was steered from her emergency position aft. Near misses also caused damage to the thin hulls of the destroyers, and the ‘mining’ effect of close underwater explosions caused internal damage.
The outlook that summer was bleak. The British Empire literally stood alone. The British Army had kept most of its men, but lost most of its equipment, and had seen nothing but defeat. The RAF was under pressure as the Luftwaffe tried to destroy it in the Battle of Britain, the outcome of which was still far from certain. The Royal Navy was under pressure and thinly stretched.