These attacks against capital ships were only high-profile success of the 278th Squadriglia Autonoma Aerosiluranti, as the R.S.A. was henceforward known, its torpedo-bombers accounting for numerous, less glamorous, but more important victims among the British merchant marine. While the flyers’ motto, Pauci sed semper immites (‘Few, but always aggressive’) accurately characterized the bellicosity of their Squadron, it also pointed up the lack of sufficient numbers made available for anti-shipping duties. Indeed, Italy’s too few long-range aircraft combined with British radar and the RAF’s close protection of Royal Navy warships to render the Regia Marina relatively blind.

Nowhere was this more true than after dark, because the Italians never developed night air-sea reconnaissance, unlike the British, who excelled in this often decisive technique from the beginning of the war. Inequalities were compounded further still by the inability of understrength hydroplane squadrons to achieve comparable cooperation with Italian warships. Their failure lay primarily in the chain of command itself.

A ship’s captain in need of air support appealed to the Supermarina, which forwarded his request to the Regia Aeronautica. Officers there convened to appraise the situation and draw up an appropriate plan. These were then sent on to the appropriate squadron leaders, who had to formulate their own course of action before actually carrying it out. By that time, the enemy usually escaped after carrying out his attack. Yet, until 1942, aerial reconnaissance represented the Regia Marina’s only early warning system, unlike the British, who had the benefit of radar from not long after the beginning of hostilities. Italian commanders operated in a darkness that was no barrier for their enemies.

As Mussolini told his naval chief-of-staff, Admiral Iachini, after the disastrous Battle of Matapan–in which three Regia Marina cruisers went down with 2,400 men–“Your ships were like blind invalids being set upon by armed killers.”² Italy’s inability to equip her vessels with radar was among the leading causes for their destruction and even the outcome of the war itself. It seems particularly ironic then, that the inventor of radar was an Italian who proposed such an instrument to American audiences in the same year Mussolini rose to power.

After the Italian air force, the navy was the most Fascist of all services, but conservatives from the House of Savoy still played influential roles in the Supermarina. As in the Regia Aeronautica, this ideological imbalance manifested itself in stress between traditionalists trusting long-established modes and usually younger officers anxious to incorporate new technologies. These included the application of a device first described in a memorandum presented to members of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers on 20 June 1922 by the renowned inventor of wireless telegraphy.

Guglielmo Marconi believed that radio waves striking any solid object were detected by a receiver in such a way that the target’s position could be accurately identified. His proposal was seriously examined by scientists in other parts of the world, especially in Britain, where its transformation into a navigational instrument was the special interest of physicists Richard Appleton and William Barnett just two years later. By 1935, Professor Watson Watt had taken their research so far forward his work won generous funding from the British High Command. The investment paid off after just five years in an early-warning radar network that played its key role during the Battle of Britain.

But Marconi had not been idle. Two years before Dr. Watt won lavish support from Britain’s military establishment, Marconi successfully demonstrated history’s first operational radar set to high-ranking members of Italy’s Commando Supremo. His device produced signal fluctuations caused by automobiles passing through a powerful radio transmission on the road between Rome and Castengandolfo. The aristocrat officers were little more than amused, and failed to grasp the instrument’s military potential. Only Ugo Tibero, a young sub-lieutenant in the reserves, completing his service at Rome’s Istituto Militare Superiore Trasmissioni, was excited about what he had seen. Through his encouragement, Marconi continued to develop the new receiver, and it was entirely because of Tibero’s influence that the military agreed to another demonstration, this one of an up-graded version referred to as a radioecometro.

Its performance was markedly improved over the prototype, but considered too weak to be of any military use in 1935, the same year Professor Watt got the backing of the British High Command. In sad contrast, Marconi’s device was consigned to leisurely evaluation tests conducted by an armed forces’ commission made up of several different ministries. The commission was badly underfunded, and, by the time Marconi died two years later, his radar invention, referred to unenthusiastically as the ‘E.C.’, was still granted low priority, and would have certainly died of neglect, had not Professor Tiburo furthered its research and promoted its acceptance. Even so, his only support came in the form of a few technicians and a meager 20,000 lira, about £28,000.

With the success of his ‘E.C’. detectors on the eve of World War Two, the Regia Marina finally began to take real interest in radar, and an important Milan radio factory was put at Tiburo’s disposal. But there were far too few electrical researchers, engineers or technicians available. These rare individuals were already deeply engaged in duties given higher priority. E.C.detectors were still being tested when the disastrous naval battle off Cape Matapan took place. Sure now that the British were using radar aboard their warships, the E.C. prototypes were rushed into service aboard Italian vessels. Emergency accelerated development resulted in improvements known as Folaga and Gufo; the former was used for coastal surveillance, while the later served aboard ships. Both versions performed with an efficiency that surprised even Professor Tiburo.

Operating at a frequency between 150 and 300 MHz, Folaga detected an incoming flight of American bombers in May 1943 during tests at a university campus, and was thereafter ordered into full-scale production. Five months later, Mussolini was deposed. Before that event, the Regia Marina received only four Folagas, not enough to make a significant difference that late in the war. The delivery of thirteen Gufos to the navy was marginally more successful, and plans were actively under way to equip every military vessel, from battleships to torpedo-boats, with radar. Again, such good intentions were too late and overtaken by events that rendered deployment impossible.

The crisis was entirely preventable and should have never arisen, because just four days after Italy joined the Third Reich in fighting the Allies, Commando Supremo officers were in Germany being shown the latest technological advances in naval warfare, including the Freya radar. After their visit, some of the apparatuses were sent to Italy, where they actually equipped a few warships as early as summer 1940–long before the Regia Marina’s calamitous defeats that could have been avoided by proper use of the devices. Incredibly, the Italians never bothered to develop the Freya sets into their own electronic detectors, nor to even operate them with better advantage. Their failure to carry on the lead in this field initiated by Marconi and developed by their generous ally was unquestionably among the most important contributions to ultimate defeat.

Ironically, the Italians led the world in the development of sonar. As early as the Spanish Civil War, the 334-ton submarine chaser, Albatross, operated the petiteo, an experimental sonar set, under combat conditions. Application of sonar helped the Regia Marina score heavily against Allied submarines from the outset of the Mediterranean Campaign, when nine British submarines were lost in as many months during 1940. If the Italians could have developed and perfected sonar, they could have done the same for radar.

But the Mediterranean Theater was the real arena where naval supremacy would be won or lost. At the outbreak of hostilities, Mussolini had at his disposal six battleships against five British counterparts moored at Alexandria, the Royal Navy base. There, Admiral Cunningham operated an additional twenty destroyers, seven cruisers, twelve submarines and one aircraft-carrier, the Eagle. But of all the Italian services, only the Regia Marina stood at an acceptable level of readiness. Two million tons of fuel oil available could keep its ships in full operation for more than a year before calling upon reserves.

The newly completed Littorio and Vittorio Veneto were outstanding battleships, the pride of the Italian Navy. Each displaced 45,000 tons and mounted nine fifteen-inch guns in three triple turrets, two fore and one aft. The Italian battleships were superior to their British counterparts not only in firepower, but speed, with a substantial three-to five-knot edge over the Barham, Malaya, Ramillies, Royal Sovereign and Warspite. The Conti di Cavour and Giulio Cesare were older, but had been refitted in 1937 with 12-inch guns, and subjected to a thorough modernization process that lasted until called upon to serve three years later. Both could top twenty seven knots, despite an innovative anti-torpedo bulge protruding below the water-line.