By the time their first clash of arms took place in the Libyan Desert, Britain and Italy had already begun to fight it out on the high seas. On 12 June, two days after Mussolini’s declaration of war, the Giovanni Berta, a small gunboat on patrol off Tobruk, was gunned down by a pair of British cruisers. Within the next twenty-four hours, a British submarine, the Odin, was dispatched by the destroyer Strale in the Gulf of Taranto, followed to the bottom shortly thereafter by her sister-boat, Oswald, south of Calabria under the depth-charges of another destroyer, the Vivaldi.
The toll on Royal Navy submarines continued to climb with the destruction of the Grampus and Tempest to depth-charges hurled at them by C-110 and Circe torpedo-boats off Augusta on 24 June; the Pandora, blasted by Regia Aeronautica bombers at Malta; and Phoenix, which would never rise again after her fatal encounter near Sicily with the torpedo-boat Albatross. Other British submarine losses included the Triton, sunk by the torpedo-boat Clio in the Adriatic, together with the Triumph, Tigris, Triad, Talisman, Tetrarch, Traveller and Trooper. Eventually, fourteen of the twenty-two boats belonging to the T-class alone were lost, all but one of them in the Mediterranean.
Italian forces had gone far in extirpating British influence from the Mediterranean Sea, an achievement made all the more remarkable by the odds stacked against them. When Italy entered the war, her navy, the Regia Marina, was badly outnumbered in its own home waters by the combined French and British fleets. With the abrupt fall of France, however, the numerical balance of power shifted suddenly in favor of the Supermarina, the Italian Naval High Command. Despite his late and short-lived invasion of France, Mussolini’s unexpectedly magnanimous behavior, such as his personal tribute paid to the stubborn French defenders of La Turra, seemed to dissolve previous years of growing tension between the two nations.
In any case, what he failed to win through force of arms he intended to gain through diplomacy. The same negotiating skills that won him laurels during the Czech Crisis he now applied toward France with positive results. A favorable French attitude meant that Supermarina commanders did not have to worry about a defeated, resentful neighbor at their back. On the contrary, Vichy France voluntarily assisted the Regia Marina in relaying Royal Navy ship movements and Allied convoy schedules, whenever such priceless information was made known to them.
But Mussolini had his own convoys to worry about. They comprised the lifeline of supplies to Italian armies in North Africa, and completed their runs without incident for weeks after the opening of hostilities. In late June, however, an encounter took place which mystified and alarmed his naval commanders. On the 27th, Captain Baroni was the squadrilla commander of three destroyers–the Espero, Ostro and Zefiro – on a high-speed run out of the Regia Marina’s chief port at Taranto. Aboard were 120 tons of ammunition, ten anti-tank guns and 162 artillerymen. By the time they reached the open sea, his convoy was complete when the Pilo and Missori, escort vessels carrying another fifty-two infantry and additional tons of military supplies, joined up. The vessels were shadowed ominously the next day for several hours by a reconnaissance plane which kept its distance, but there was otherwise no sign of the enemy.
As evening descended on the calm sea, a barrage of eight-inch shells flew out of the blinding sunset. An unknown number of warships were attacking from more than twenty kilometers away. Baroni ordered the convoy to make a dash for North Africa, while he covered their escape with his destroyer. Alone, the Espero turned to confront the overwhelming firepower of five cruisers closing fast. Through skillful helmsmanship, he distracted the British for nearly two hours of unrelenting maneuvering, so much so they were unable to score a hit on him until their fifteenth salvo. Captain Baroni was last seen saluting his men through the smoke that enveloped his ship, in which he perished with most of her crew. Their self-sacrifice allowed the Ostra, Zefiro, Pilo and Missori to arrive unscathed in Tobruk with their valuable cargoes.
However, the serious inadequacy–or, in the Espero’s case, total lack–of Italian aerial reconnaissance had been brought home to Supermarina. It began the war with little more than 100 observation planes, deemed a sufficient number on behalf of foreseen fleet operations. But in the reality of war, they were swallowed by the immensity of the Mediterranean Sea. At least three times as many scout-planes were needed. The developing failure of Italian aerial reconnaissance could not be blamed on its crews, whose skill and courage were never called into question. They flew seaplanes by CANT, the single-engine Gabbiano, and tri-motor Airone, successful veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Rugged construction and respective ranges of 1,000 and 2,750 kilometers made them effective eyes of the fleet, as far as their few numbers allowed. The Gabbiano was nearly 65 km/hr faster than its enemy counterparts–the Seagull V or Walrus Mk I and II–and could fly thirty-five kilometers further. It was the tight inter-action between ships and planes, however, that gave a decisive advantage to the British.
Moreover, both the Gabbiano and Airone were too slow and under-gunned to fight off enemy carrier-based interceptors, like the Fairey Fulmar, with its eight wing-mounted .303mm machine-guns. However, neither Italian aircraft was precisely defenseless, and the extraordinary skills of their crews often made up for technical deficiencies. A case in point was Pietro Bonannini, who served with the 170th Squadriglia, 83rd Gruppo, stationed at the Augusta float-plane base on Sicily’s east coast. The only non-pilot double-ace in the Regia Aeronautica, Aiutante di Battaglia Bonannini shot down ten British fighters, warding off an unknown number of others as a gunner aboard Gabbiano and Airone seaplanes.
Poor inter-service cooperation stemmed in part from the Regia Aeronautica attitude that warships had been replaced by aircraft as the decisive factor in the war at sea. To test the hypothesis, a bomber unit specifically trained and equipped for the anti-shipping role began flying out of Libyan coastal bases against enemy vessels in the Mediterranean from late August 1940. Military aviation theorists did not have long to wait for the vindication of their faith in naval warplanes. On 17 September, crews of the Reparto Sperimentale Aerosiluranti disabled a 14,200-ton cruiser, H.M.S. Kent, so badly she had to be towed back to Alexandria. The following month, they crippled another cruiser, the 11,350-ton Liverpool, with a direct hit on her bow.