Admiral Cunningham’s strategic triumph at Taranto was all out of proportion to its tactical effect. Incredibly, no ships were sunk. The Littorio had suffered more than enough damage to have wrecked practically any other battleship in the world, but was out of danger and towed to La Spezia for repairs after an unexploded magnetic torpedo was carefully extricated from her hull.
Just five months later, she re-entered service, a tremendous shock to Winston Churchill, who was sure at least three capital ships, she among them, had been completely destroyed by the November raid. At the time, he told the House of Commons that his Swordfish torpedo-bombers had “annihilated the Italian Fleet forever.”2 The reappearance of the torpedoed Duilio less than two months after the Littorio compounded the Prime Minister’s consternation. In fact, only the Cavour was permanently knocked out of action; dry-dock workers were still putting her back into shape at the time of the 1943 armistice.
But the high objective of Admiral Cunningham’s raid had been achieved. To push the enemy’s capital ships even further away from his convoy routes, a large-scale bomber formation flying from bases on the island of Malta attacked Naples, where the Italians presumed their battleships and cruisers were beyond the range of RAF raiders. Typically, not a single Regia Aeronautica fighter was scrambled to intercept the intruders, but the harbor’s anti-aircraft defenses were sufficiently intense to keep the Wellingtons and Whitleys at altitudes too high for bombing accuracy. On 14 December 1941, the cruiser Pola did receive some damage, however, and the Italian Admiralty ordered the fleet removed yet further to the west, thereby canceling out whatever threat the capital ships may have still posed to the Royal Navy. As they divided into two groups, sailing for Maddalena and Caglari, the Mediterranean seemed to have changed hands.
The Regia Marina was additionally compromised by a looming fuel crisis. The Navy had begun the war with approximately two million tons of oil, sufficient to keep all its vessels in operation, strategists calculated, for about eighteen months of combat. But by January 1941, 671,000 tons had already been used, while the Minister of Corporations requisitioned another quarter-million for industry and the Regia Aeronautica. Placed in tin containers which spoiled its allotment, the Air Force mistake was made good by 50,000 tons of gasoline Supermarina commanders were loathe to give up to the generally unhelpful flyers. Before year’s end, the Regia Marina received 10,000 tons of low-grade fuel from increased domestic production and 15,000 tons from Rumania, but these quantities lagged far behind demand.
In planning for a short war, the Duce erred within the context of the times. If recent events were anything to go by, hostilities should not have lasted more than a few months or even weeks. It was, after all, the era of the Blitzkrieg. Campaigns in Poland, the Low Countries, Scandinavia and France were intensely fought, though soon ended. A trend in modern warfare seemed to have been established. His own conquests of Ethiopia and Albania were brief affairs. Had Mussolini’s reluctant Marshal in Libya kept the Italian offensive rolling forward, the same kind of ‘lightning war’ would have similarly brought the fighting in North Africa to a speedy, victorious conclusion. Having lost that initiative, Graziani presented Italy with an extended war she, in contrast to the British Empire, was not rich enough in natural resources to carry on for an extended period. Her only hope lay in forcing the enemy to a final decision as soon as possible, before the rapidly dwindling fuel supplies ran out.
To that end, just two weeks after the disaster at Taranto, the fleet was dispatched to hunt down the Royal Navy. On 27 November, it waylaid a convoy escorted by several cruisers. The Italians got in the first shots, scoring two heavy hits on the Berwick, forcing her to retire in the direction of Gibraltar. HMS Renown returned fire with a broadside of 32cm shells that left the destroyer Lanciere dead in the water, an action that misled Admiral Campioni in the belief that his forces were badly outnumbered. Regia Aeronautica reconnaissance, had there been any, would have convinced him otherwise.
His opposite, Admiral Somerville, was never without aircraft, and he sent eleven of them after the Fiume and Vittorio Veneto. But both cruiser and battleship skillfully eluded their torpedoes, then joined the rest of the fleet in opening fire again on the enemy vessels, which covered their rapid retreat behind a thick smoke-screen. Wrongly suspecting a numerically superior force lay just beyond the obscuring billows, Campioni recalled his ships and returned to Naples with the disabled Lanciere in tow.
Although Admiral Somerville was hauled before a board of enquiry into his speedy withdrawal from the battle, the Italians had not stopped the convoy from reaching its destination, and they missed a decisive encounter with the Royal Navy. Once again, lack of any aerial support was to blame, even though the action off Cape Teulada had taken place literally a few miles from Sardinia, where squadrons of Regia Aeronautica bombers and fighters sat idly by at their well-equipped airfield. Had but one reconnaissance plane been on hand to scout behind the smoke-screen laid down by Admiral Somerville, Campioni could have pursued his advantage with devastating consequences for the British warships and convoy.
The engagement had nevertheless given the lie to Churchill’s boast that the Italian Fleet was dead. Its surprising reappearance in strength so soon after the carnage at Taranto left Admiral Cunningham nonplussed, and he ordered his ships to avoid all contact with enemy surface units for the rest of the year. Admiral Campioni had, therefore, somewhat minimized the worst effects of the 10 November raid. Now his carpet-mining in the Sicilian Channel, along the Italian coast and around Malta would be allowed to proceed unmolested. While less dramatic than fleet confrontations, the warships engaged in this tedious, dangerous work were planting the seeds of future British tragedies.
Moreover, Regia Marina crews were justifiably proud of the 197,742 tons of equipment, arms and fuel they transported to North Africa in just four months minus any losses during October and November 1940; only 7% of materiel was lost in December and January. But this abundance of supplies could not prevent the British Desert Army from investing Bardia and Tobruk. Even after both cities were entirely surrounded and under siege, the Italians received weapons, ammunition, food and fresh water by submarines arriving after dark, unloading their cargoes during the night, and slipping out unnoticed before dawn. The operations incurred no losses and sufficiently re-fortified the defenders, a success which so inspired observers of the Japanese Imperial Navy that they modeled a new class of submarines devoted exclusively to transport duties after the Regia Marina example.
Tobruk was a different story, however. Supermarina commanders could spare no surface ships for its defense, save the aged San Giorgio, a veteran of hostilities against Turkey in 1911, making her among the oldest ships still in service during World War Two. The ancient cruiser had been immobilized off shore and modified into a kind of floating anti-aircraft battery heaped with sandbags and enveloped in sub-surface steel-mesh netting. Incredibly, she survived everything the RAF threw at her, from repeated strafing runs to bombs and torpedoes. Her oft-machine-gunned decks awash with near-misses, gunners aboard the inert San Giorgio kept the attackers at bay for more than seven months, in the meantime downing numerous Swordfish and Fulmars.
Only after British land forces were able to bring up their artillery on the coast facing her was she doomed. But the Italians would not allow the old lady to be humbled by enemy landlubbers. Before they could zero in on the stationary target, the San Giorgio exploded and sank, scuttled by her own men, three of whom–the captain, an officer and torpedo specialist–chose to go down with their beloved ship. An unconscious Commander Pugliese was pulled from the water. Although badly wounded, he recovered.
But more than such heroics were needed to reverse the dire consequences of Taranto. Taking advantage of the Italian Fleet’s withdrawal from the Central Mediterranean, a December convoy set out from Alexandria to Malta. By the time Regia Aeronautica reconnaissance planes reported the enemy’s position, the moment had long since passed for interception by surface units. A lone submarine, the Serpente, happened to be on patrol in the area to sink the destroyer HMS Hyperion just southeast of Malta, where all the freighters offloaded their invaluable cargo without further incident. Stung by convoy success in slipping past virtually unnoticed, Supermarina commanders ordered all their capital ships returned to Naples for offensive operations, regardless of threats from RAF bombers, and redoubled the harbor’s anti-aircraft defenses. They were soon put to the test.
On 8 January 1941, Italian military intelligence officers learned that the aircraft-carrier Ark Royal, escorted by cruisers and destroyers, had entered the western Mediterranean Sea, although the great warship’s precise location was so far unknown. Soon thereafter, Regia Aeronautica spotter-planes lost track of its whereabouts, and Supermarina strategists assumed the British force had returned to Gibraltar. A few days later, however, carrier-launched bombers attacked Naples by surprise, scoring hits on the Giulio Cesare and knocking her out of commission. Since the Italian Fleet was now down to a single operational battleship, Vittorio Veneto accompanied the damaged Cesare to distant La Spezia for repairs.
Admiral Cunningham was not slow to make good use of their departure. The next day, he dispatched cruisers from Alexandria to escort a supply convoy bound for Malta, by now England’s most important base in the Mediterranean Theater. All the Italians could muster was a pair of destroyer escorts. Hideously out-numbered and out-gunned, Circe and Vega boldly turned to confront HMS Southampton and Bonaventure accompanied by two destroyers, Gallant and Hereward, off Cape Bon, near the Italian island-fortress of Pantelleria. In the teeth of intense broadsides, the escorts kept up their own, over-matched return fire, and got off four torpedoes, which were adroitly side-stepped by their intended targets, then simultaneously circled away from each other to disengage from the action.
Although Circe escaped with only splinter damage, Vega took the brunt of a fatal salvo. Commander Fontana turned his listing ship back toward the enemy, eventually coming so close to the Southampton he was able to rake the cruiser with machine-gun fire. Although his ship was being furiously pummelled by the concentrated shelling of four superior warships, he kept firing to the very last moment. As she was finally going down, Commander Fontana gave his own life-jacket to an enlisted sailor, then disappeared with his ship into the sea. His sacrifice was not in vain. Distracted by the fight he put up, the Gallant wandered into a mine-field, where an explosion sheered off her bow. Barely able to stay afloat, the destroyer was towed to Malta, where her rusting carcass waited out the rest of the war.
The success of smaller vessels like the Circe and Vega contrasted dramatically in Mussolini’s mind with the ponderous liability his capital ships had become after Taranto. Conscious, too, of Italy’s rapidly dwindling fuel reserves, he concluded that a few, down-sized craft were not only more effective than the oil-guzzling battleships, but wasted far less of the precious black gold, the Regia Marina’s life-blood. Less was more, and he planned to replace the Fleet’s major vessels with increased numbers of torpedo-boats, sub-chasers, submarines, mine-layers, destroyers, and destroyer escorts, together with some innovative designs, like explosive speed-boats, mini-subs and human torpedoes. The only new capital ships to be built would be aircraft-carriers, in view of the Regia Aeronautica’s failure to use the Italian peninsula as its own ‘natural aircraft-carrier’.
The radical changes he proposed were predictably resisted by the House of Savoy’s traditionalist naval strategists, who refused to admit that the days of their beloved battleships had been numbered by a handful of enemy aircraft. Over the conservatives’ strenuous objections, the Duce got his way, and results were immediately forthcoming, when the Free French submarine, Narval, was sunk by the Clio torpedo-boat, off the coast of Tobruk.
The Duce had more reason to hope for a reversal of Italian fortunes at sea when a combination of German Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica reconnaissance aircraft identified enemy carrier-planes in the vicinity of the Balearic Islands on 8 February 1941. The enemy appeared to have come from the Ark Royal, so Admiral Campioni sortied with the Veneto, Cesare and Doria out of La Spezia. The last two had just completed repairs to their combat damage of only a few weeks before, unbeknownst to British pilots, who dropped mines at the entrance to La Spezia after Campioni had already left to intercept their own aircraft-carrier. He was joined by a trio of cruisers–the Trieste, Trento and Bolzano – along with a squadron of destroyers from Messina. But the Ark Royal, protected by battleships Renown and Malaya, the cruiser Sheffield and ten destroyers, had given him the slip, and were raiding Genoa.
When news reached Campioni of the bombardment, he swung his forces about and streamed at high speed to catch the enemy between them and Italian coastal defenses. These were striving unsuccessfully to hit back at the attacking warships hidden behind a thick fog that spread over the entire gulf. The shore batteries aimed blindly in the general direction of momentary muzzle flashes punctuating the dense layer of mist, without effect. This natural cover proved no hindrance to the British, whose pilots circling high overhead provided radio-directed fire on Genoese targets below. The city suffered extensive damage, and four cargo ships were sunk at their moorings, along with the Garaventa, an old training vessel set aside for children orphaned by the deaths of their fathers on duty in the Regia Marina. The main objective of the raid–destroying the Duilio, in Genoa for repairs of damage sustained at Taranto–was not, however, accomplished, because no shells hit the recuperating battleship.
After half-an-hour of unrelieved carnage, the enemy withdrew into the impenetrable fog still lying over the entire Ligurian Sea. Every available German and Italian aircraft was scrambled in a thorough search for the Ark Royal and her escorts, including an additional eighty bombers flying in from Sicily. But, invisible in the fog, luck was with the British again, and they returned to Gibraltar sight unseen. Although sorely frustrated and disappointed by this apparently lost opportunity to inflict a crushing blow on the enemy’s surface forces, the Italians were getting their supply convoys to North Africa, the primary objective of the war at sea. Churchill sent urgent appeals to Cunningham, urging him to remove the Mediterranean fleet from Alexandria to Malta if necessary to stop the growing number of freighters getting through to Marshal Graziani’s army in Libya.
“Every possible step must be taken by the Navy,” he insisted, “to prevent supplies from reaching Libya. Failure by the Navy to concentrate on prevention of such movements will be considered as having let our side down.”3 He even suggested that the British battleship, Barham, be scuttled at Tripoli to bottle up the port entrance. But the Admiral dismissed his Prime Minister’s suggestions as folly, and refused to budge from the relative safety of Egyptian waters until the arrival of additional naval and aerial reinforcements. Bowing under pressure from the Home Office, he reluctantly sent HMS Valiant and Queen Elizabeth to shell the harbor at Tripoli after it had been subjected to a ferocious, two-hour aerial bombardment. Convinced the raid would end in disaster, he was relieved to learn that the capital ships had been spared by the failure of Regia Aeronautica reconnaissance to locate them before, during, or after the attack. Thus unalerted, another opportunity for a decisive success slipped through the Supermarina’s fingers.
Cunningham understood his battleships “had been incredibly fortunate, or perhaps the object again of Divine favour”, and refused to ever again subject the Alexandrian Fleet to further “considerable and unjustified risks” on behalf of such negative results, as achieved in the raid on Tripoli.4 While the city itself was almost reduced to ruin, the Admiral’s only objective–the port–was not damaged, and the transfer of Axis supplies continued without a break. Churchill had been particularly irked by Cunningham’s failure to prevent the appearance of General Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps in Libya, an event that would radically alter the entire Campaign. All 129,463 Germans arrived safely, except for a few individuals lost when an Italian transatlantic liner doubling as a troop-carrier, the Conte Rosso, was torpedoed and sunk by a submarine near Syracuse on 24 May. Otherwise, Rommel’s men and their equipment had been transferred to North Africa intact, a singular achievement that won the Regia Marina high praise from Berlin.
In a Wehrmacht telegram, Mussolini was told, “Particularly gratifying is the fact that this operation could be carried out with so few losses, notwithstanding the great difficulties and the dangers of enemy action. We are convinced that it has been successful principally because of the prompt use of numerous naval units to escort the convoys, as well as the measures adopted by the Italian Navy’s General Staff implementing the operational plans–plans which invariably were the right ones for meeting the situation.”5 German appreciation originated in part from the 79,183 tons of February supplies that reached North Africa on Italian vessels at a time when the Axis forces there required 70,000 tons per month. Losses amounted to just 1.5%. Although they rose to 9% in March, they declined to 6% over the following months.
Aware he had to do something to stem the flow of enemy equipment and arms, but still wary of risking his capital ships, Admiral Cunningham dispatched a quartet of destroyers from the 14th Flotilla to Malta in mid-April. From there, HMS Janus, Jervis, Mohawk and Nubia jumped a convoy spotted by their own reconnaissance planes near Kerkenah Banks. A direct hit struck the bridge of the lead Italian destroyer, Luca Tarigo. Commander Pietro De Cristofaro’s leg was severed by a shell fragment, but he strapped up the ragged stump with his trouser’s belt, and continued to direct return fire until he died from loss of blood.
HMS Mohawk moved in at high speed intent on delivering a coup de gröce to the listing warship, when an ensign ordered a spread of three torpedoes launched at close range. Explosions lifted the bow of the Mohawk out of the water, beneath which she plunged instantly afterward with all hands. Meanwhile, the doomed Luca Tarigo, her steering gear wrecked and deck-houses in flames, continued shooting at the three remaining British destroyers. Her aft gunners, among the last men still alive aboard the doomed warship, were still lobbing shells at the enemy as the seas broke over the decks.
The captain and all officers of another Italian destroyer were killed outright by an opening salvo which almost sank the Baleno. Surviving ship’s hands managed to beach her on the Banks, where she lingered for another two days before slipping beneath the waves. The last surviving Italian destroyer did not abandon her convoy, but turned on the overwhelming enemy, unloosing torpedoes and firing all her guns. Riddled and sinking, with more than half her crew dead or wounded, the Lampo also ran aground on the Banks. Unlike the Baleno, however, five months later the ship was towed to Italy, where she was repaired and recommissioned.
Janus, Jervis and Nubia had all suffered damage, including numerous casualties, and were in no condition to continue pursuit of the convoy. Although three of its merchant ships were sunk during the course of close-quarters engagement, two others successfully beached themselves. The British, more interested in rescuing survivors of the vanished Mohawk, left them alone, and their cargos were eventually transferred to other Italian freighters bound for North Africa.
The encounter at Kerkenah Banks represented Cunningham’s only serious attempt, and a costly one, that year to interfere with Axis convoys. The most supplies they delivered were a remarkable 125,076 tons in June. By then, 457,715 tons of equipment and fuel-oil had been off-loaded, with deleterious effects for British fortunes in the Libyan Desert. But the Admiral’s lack of success was not confined to the Central Mediterranean. In late February, he ordered the seizure of Castelorizzo, a small island between Rhodes and Cyprus, from which to invade nearby Leros, where the Italians operated a strategically influential naval base in the Aegean Sea. Before dawn on the 25th, a landing ship escorted by an entire cruiser division put ashore 500 British commandos.
Castelorizzo was defended by a few dozen sailors and police, who radioed for assistance and held off the invaders for the rest of the day until help arrived. It came after dark in the form of Italian destroyers and torpedo-boats carrying 240 infantrymen from Rhodes. Despite the more than two-to-one odds against them, they managed to surround the British troops and force their surrender after only two days of fighting. Admiral Cunningham complained to his superiors in London that the Italians “reacted with utmost vigour and enterprise”, making a “rotten business” of his attempted Castelorizzo take-over.6