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As Somerville himself admitted, his assumption that he would not have to fight–that the French would abandon their vessels if he opened fire–led him to botch the battle. Although the British gunfire hit the Dunkerque, it missed the Strasbourg entirely. She was able to cast off from the middle of the harbour, escape from the anchorage and head off east before Somerville could react. By the time Force H swung around and gave chase, one of the fastest battleships in the world had a 25-mile head start and was beyond recall. Strasbourg made her way, unmolested, across the Mediterranean to berth with the rest of the French fleet in Toulon. ‘I’m somewhat appalled by my apparent lack of foresight,’ Somerville confided in his wife,‘I never expected for one single moment that they would attempt to take their ships out of harbour under such conditions.’
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The situation in Alexandria was very different. Cunningham had no intention of attacking his erstwhile allies. He and René Godfroy, the officer commanding Force X, had most cordial relations, Cunningham went so far as to describe them as ‘exceptionally friendly’. The French had accepted Cunninghams refusal to allow Force X to sail for Beirut with good grace.
(#litres_trial_promo) Cunningham even believed that he would be able to talk Godfroy away from his allegiance to Darlan.
(#litres_trial_promo) That hope soon faded but Godfroy had enough trust in Cunningham that, on the same day as Somerville was sinking his compatriots in Algeria, he was willing to pinnace across the harbour to the British flagship, Warspite, to continue their conversation.
(#litres_trial_promo) Their talks went on long into the night, as Cunningham tried to talk Godfroy into handing over his ships. Just past midnight on the day of Mers el-Kébir he conceded: ‘I have failed.’ Despite London’s demands for action, however, he stuck to the view that a battle should be avoided, ‘at almost any cost’.
(#litres_trial_promo) If Godfroy discharged all his fuel into the harbour, thus rendering his ships unable to leave, Cunningham gave his word that his ships would remain unmolested.
(#litres_trial_promo) Knowing that he could do no better, Godfroy accepted. It was a strange situation. The French squadron lay alongside the British, entirely reliant on them for water and provisions, but simmering with hostility. The officers adopted an attitude of super-patriotism. Each day the chaplains prayed for Pétain, equating him with the hammer of the English, Saint Joan. Officers prefaced all their remarks with reference to the Marshal’s sayings, as if that ended any argument. Only one senior member of Force X defected to the British.
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The battle in the west, and the non-battle in the east, cast a pall over the Mediterranean for the rest of the year. Somerville’s judgement that ‘it was the biggest political blunder of modern times and I imagine will rouse the world against us’ was too tinged with emotion to be entirely convincing.
(#litres_trial_promo) The British action did, after all, win many admirers: Ciano and Cavagnari, for instance, were ‘disturbed’ at such proof that ‘the fighting spirit of the Royal Navy is quite alive, and still has the aggressive ruthlessness of the captains and pirates of the seventeenth century’.
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The naval commanders in the Mediterranean had to be alive to the possibility that France could turn on them at any minute. In particular they feared that whilst they were engaged with the Italians, the French would run the Straits of Gibraltar. On 11 September 1940 their fears were realized when a French cruiser force sailed through the Straits heading for Casablanca.
(#litres_trial_promo) French aircraft bombed Gibraltar from their North African airfields. Darlan assembled naval officers in their newly established capital at Vichy to assure them that ‘a state of war exists with Britain’ and ‘this is not finished’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Mediterranean cruiser force turned an Anglo-Gaullist attempt to seize Dakar in West Africa into a fiasco. The air raids continued in response to each new British ‘outrage’. In September 1940 French bombers gave Force H ‘an absolute plastering’ in Gibraltar harbour.
(#litres_trial_promo) The result, Somerville recorded, was that British warships were steaming around the Mediterranean in ‘a ghastly muddle’. ‘We simply don’t know where we are or who we are supposed to be fighting.’ The Germans and Italians, he feared, ‘must be chuckling with joy.
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The Germans were chuckling rather harder than the Italians. Mussolini had proved a master of twitting the British in peace time, but his skills were wasted in war. He had declared war on France expecting easy gains. None had been won on the battlefield–embarrassingly French troops had to maintain their supposed conquerors in the small area the Italians had occupied before the Armistice. The victorious Germans appeared to have a cosier relationship with their defeated enemies than their allies. If the French managed to slip into the ‘anti-British camp’, Italy might be ‘defrauded of our booty’. Four days after Mers el-Kébir, with the crisis still smouldering, Ciano hung up his bomber boots and headed for Berlin. It was not a successful visit. There was an odd atmosphere, jovial to the point of edginess, not least because Ciano knew that the Germans had captured documents from the French in which he personally had described them most unflatteringly Ciano spoke to Hitler, ‘as if the war was already definitively won’. The Italian press was full of officially planted stories of his expected success. This was the meeting in which Italy would finally claim absolute dominance in the Mediterranean basin, its rightful ‘living space’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Ciano’s demands tumbled out: ‘Nice, Corsica and Malta would be annexed to Italy, which would also have assumed a protectorate over Tunisia and the better part of Algeria’. The Germans around Hitler shifted between embarrassment and amusement at the Italian’s territorial incontinence. The Führer himself was simply unmoved; he ignored Ciano’s great speech. The Italians had missed the bus. Now it was too late to discuss anything before England was defeated. Afterwards, Ribbentrop sidled up to tell his opposite number that he should not have eyes bigger than his belly
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Mussolini’s first gamble, that the war would be over within weeks, had failed. His second gamble, that Italy would be able to land a spectacular blow on Britain in the Mediterranean, failed whilst Ciano was still away. Mussolini’s declaration that half of Britain’s naval strength in the Mediterranean had been eliminated was a reflection of his political need, rather than military reality.
(#litres_trial_promo) The two fleets clashed at Punta Stilo, off the south-east coast of Italy, on 9 July 1940. Punta Stilo was the classic Mediterranean battle, entirely based on movement around the basins. Cunningham was at sea to rendezvous with Somerville so that they could pass a convoy from west to east.
(#litres_trial_promo) His Italian opposite number, Campioni, was at sea to prevent Cunningham intercepting a convoy that was swinging around the east of Sicily on its way from Naples to Benghazi. Both sides suspected that the other was there–they both had detailed signals intelligence–but the actual meeting was quite accidental’. The British were not too sure why the battle had occurred.
(#litres_trial_promo) Militarily, as Cunningham conceded, the Italians probably had the better of it. He admired their ‘impressive’ use of smoke to obscure the battle space, and the accuracy of their guns. On his own side he conceded that his flagship had been lucky to achieve any hits, whilst his torpedo-bombers couldn’t hit the side of a barn door, at least if it moved, which Italian battleships did, with rapidity. The Italian convoy reached Benghazi unscathed, whereas the British convoy suffered constant attack.
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The British and Italians had quite different perceptions of the performance of the Regia Aeronautica. Upon his return Ciano was ‘incredulous’ to find that ‘the real controversy in naval affairs is not between us and the British but between our air force and our navy’. He was horrified to learn that ‘our air force was completely absent during the first phase of the encounter, but that when it finally came it was directed against our own ships, which for six hours withstood bombing from our [own aircraft]’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Cunningham on the other hand reported that his convoy had been bombed continuously from the Sicily coast, then from Cyrenaica, then from the Dodecanese, ‘literally we have had to fight our way back to Alexandria’. He feared that the Italian airmen would only improve with practice, that ‘the worst is yet to come’ and doubted whether he would be able to overcome this formidable air power.
(#litres_trial_promo) From the other side of the Sicilian Narrows, Somerville too concluded, that, ‘as a result of this, our first contact with the Italian air force,’ the risk to his capital ships was too great. He had turned them around and headed away to the west.
(#litres_trial_promo) Churchill was livid with his admirals, thundering that ‘warships are meant to go under fire’.
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He was only mildly propitiated when an Australian cruiser intercepted an Italian cruiser on its way from Tripoli to Leros and sank her with an outstanding display of gunnery
(#litres_trial_promo) Conversely, Mussolini was ‘depressed on account of the loss of the Colleoni, not so much because of the sinking itself as because he feels the Italians did not fight well’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The battle of Cape Spada, as the sinking of the Colleoni was called, made more of an impression than Punta Stilo. It occasioned another round of mutual denunciations between the Regia Aeronautica and the Regia Marina–Italian aircraft responded to the Colleoni’s demands for assistance only when it was too late. They instead bombed the British destroyers which were trying to pick up Italian survivors, provoking Cunningham’s order that in future, ‘difficult and distasteful as it is’, shipwrecked sailors should be left to fend for themselves.
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Failure made Mussolini and Churchill gamblers. There were striking parallels between them. They both met their advisers on the same day in August 1940. They both demanded a new approach to Mediterranean conflict. The difference was that Churchill, although dictatorial, was not a dictator. His military chiefs fought back against his demands. Mussolini was a tyrant: when his military advisers displeased him, he found others who would agree with him. Churchill’s gripe was the supposed impassability of the Mediterranean. In the debates of the 1930s he had been a partisan of battleships over aeroplanes. He was not minded to change his view. Somerville and Cunningham should stop pussyfooting around and force supplies through the central Mediterranean to Egypt.
(#litres_trial_promo) In particular Churchill was fascinated with the possibilities of large merchant vessels converted to carry tanks. If, Churchill believed, he could send a rapid supply of tanks through the Mediterranean, he could force a reluctant Wavell to attack Libya. The admirals were ‘unduly pessimistic’ about the risks. The ships could pass ‘without great difficulty’. The dangers of sending tank reinforcements to Egypt ‘had been exaggerated.’ It was lucky for Somerville and Cunningham–particularly lucky for Somerville who had sailed back to Britain to argue the case–that no one in the military hierarchy could be found to break ranks and endorse Churchill’s belief.
(#litres_trial_promo) In the end Churchill could not quite bring himself to overrule the admirals, generals and air marshals based solely on his own judgement–his political leadership would not have survived a slaughter in the central Mediterranean.
(#litres_trial_promo) What he wanted was a merchant convoy–what he got, after a great battle’, was ‘Hands Across the Sea, a mission to send major warship reinforcements east to Cunningham.
(#litres_trial_promo) Not that he conceded the point. Instead of congratulating Somerville and Cunningham for their excellent handling of the mission, he claimed that it showed that he had been right, they wrong.
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Mussolini’s gamble was of a quite different order. Before the outbreak of war, troops had been rushed to Libya to defend it against the nonexistent British legions that Italian intelligence estimated were present in Egypt. When the weakness of the British became apparent, Mussolini demanded that his army should attack. Churchill firmly believed that his generals and admirals were deliberately smothering his plans–they were, he complained, ‘very wily when they don’t want to do anything’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Mussolini suspected the same. General Rodolfo Graziani, the chief of staff of the Army and the commander of forces in Libya, suggested that it was too hot to fight in Egypt and that it would be much better to wait until the next spring before any action was considered. He offered the poor compensation of a minor campaign, in the not notably cooler Somaliland instead.
(#litres_trial_promo) Graziani used every wile at his disposal to avoid attacking Egypt. British intelligence had every right to be confused. There seemed to be endless orders for Graziani to attack, British forces braced themselves and then nothing happened.
(#litres_trial_promo) Instead Graziani retired to his Mediterranean bungalow to be soothed by ‘escapades’. In the first week of September 1940, Mussolini finally lost patience: he gave Graziani an ultimatum. If after a weekend of contemplation he could not bring himself to do anything, then he was to come home in dishonour–not a pleasant experience in the Fascist regime.
(#litres_trial_promo) The fear of loss of emoluments, or worse, was too much for Graziani to bear.
(#litres_trial_promo) Mussolini had given the world’s most reluctant warrior little choice but to act. At the same time he consoled him with the thought that his campaign need be nothing more than a demonstration. It would be nice if he could sweep along the Mediterranean coast and capture the British fleet base at Alexandria. But Mussolini did not demand this. He did not even demand that Graziani should reach the first coastal town that the British held in strength. There were no ‘fixed territorial objectives’, he just had to do something.
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Mussolini’s gamble was to twin his attack on Egypt with an attack on Greece. This was a course that the disgruntled viceroy of the Dodecanese, De Vecchi, had been urging almost since the war began. De Vecchi hated the Greeks–as indeed the Greeks hated him. From the beginning of the war Cunningham had gone ‘so far as to say that we shall never be able to control the Central Mediterranean’ until the fleet could operate from a base in the Greek islands. The location he desired above all others was Suda Bay on the north coast of Crete.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Greeks had no intention of giving it to him. Indeed the Greeks protested vigorously on each occasion they believed that the British had entered their territorial waters. Metaxas held no brief for the British war effort, victory in the Mediterranean meant little to him, only the safety offered by neutrality. That was the reality, but De Vecchi worked himself up into such a rage against the Greeks, he would never believe it was so. His reports to Rome were stridently insistent that the Greeks were allowing the British to operate from Suda, and that all the denials they issued were nothing more than dirty lies. De Vecchi was unapologetic about the indiscriminate bombing of Greek ships in their own waters–Greeks, British were all the same in his eyes. ‘To your fine diplomats who whine about me (who has had to amuse himself with Greeks here for four years),’ he scolded Ciano, ‘I can answer that in French “Greek” means “swindler”.’
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Project G, the attack on Greece, was hatched in August 1940, after only a few days’ discussion, with the hope of an easy victory. Its architects were Ciano and his henchmen in Albania. Their motives were opportunistic. Mussolini wanted something to happen. The Ciano équipe were sucking money out of Albania for their own enrichment and glory–Ciano had renamed an Albanian port Edda, after his wife. If Albania got bigger then there would be more money and fame to suck. They quickly cobbled together all the border disputes that existed between Albania and Greece in Epirus and claimed all the land for Albania. They threw in the island of Corsica for good measure. This done, Ciano wheeled his men in to see Mussolini. To Ciano’s delight Mussolini thought the plan a good one. The first stage was his long-preferred method of intimidation. The movement of troops to the border and the use of terrorism might make ‘the Greeks cave in’. If threats didn’t work he was willing ‘to go to the limit’.
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Mussolini may have thought the plan good; his military commanders were aghast. The happiest man was De Vecchi. If there was going to be a war, the Italians wanted a casus belli. De Vecchi already had the means of inflammation in his own hands. Mussolini and Ciano were mulling over a ‘pirate submarine’ campaign of the kind they had used against Spain. The very evening that the idea was suggested to De Vecchi, he ordered the submarine Delfino out of Rhodes. The captain was told that he was to strike the first blow in an inevitable, if undeclared, war. De Vecchi’s haste was dictated by local knowledge: the next day marked the Panayia, the great Cycladic religious festival held on the Lourdes of the Aegean, Tinos. Each 15 August since 1822, the wonder-working icon of Our Lady of Tinos had been paraded from her shrine. There to do her honour in 1940 was the Greek cruiser EM. Predictably, given the nature of the occasion, the crew had given more thought to their decorations–the ship was bedecked with bunting–than their antisubmarine precautions. The Delfino slipped into the bay and torpedoed the Elli before sailing away, entirely unnoticed.
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Despite this spectacular violence to one of the Mediterranean’s most famous festivals, Mussolini engaged in weeks of hand-wringing about his decision. Ships were loaded with stores at Brindisi and Bari, they were then unloaded and the stores dispersed. Men were mobilized for transfer to Albania, then the army high command rescinded the order and the men stood down. Then the men were remobilized on the proviso that when they reached Albania they were not to go to the Greek frontier until further consideration had been given to the issue. There the matter lay. Before Mussolini would do anything he wanted to know whether his instrument in Africa, Graziani, would act.
Graziani did not, in the end, disappoint. Given no option, he ordered his forces into Egypt. To say that he led them into Egypt would be too strong a statement. The Marshal had taken a great liking to the Greek tombs of Cyrene. Not because of their historical value, but because they gave excellent shelter from attacks by British aircraft. Nevertheless, in his own way, he conducted a model operation. Mussolini had given him no territorial objective, he himself had no wish to advance. The best answer was surely to advance for the shortest distance possible. Graziani took as his target not the first town across the frontier, Sollum, but the second town, Sidi Barrani, some twenty miles into Egypt. As an indefensible position that the British had no intention of holding, it couldn’t be bettered. Six days of confusion saw it seized for Fascism. The Italian flag at last flew over a piece of Egyptian real estate. Sidi Barrani was the final stop, travelling east–west, on the British coast road. Sidi Barrani thus had some claims of being a point of moderate importance on the Mediterranean coast. Before 1940 the traveller heading west ate a great deal of dust until he could reach the Balbia. Graziani’s men stopped and began the task of making the place habitable. They built themselves a proper road, ‘the Victory Way’, between Sollum and Sidi Barrani, considerably improving on previous British efforts. A tent city of most excellent quality was erected. History has not been kind to this operation, finding in it a means of mocking Italian martial virtues. But at the time it was enough. Mussolini was ‘radiant’ at the success of the operation. At last Italy had scored a ‘success in Egypt which gives her the glory she has sought in vain for three centuries’.
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The ‘triumph’ of Sidi Barrani was useful to Mussolini because he had before him a difficult set of manoeuvres. Hitler had set aside October 1940 as the month in which he would consult with his friends in the Mediterranean and decide on whom he wished to bestow his favour. Punta Stilo and Sidi Barrani do not measure up well to ‘total war’ but in the context of the autumn of 1940 they were rather more impressive than the abject defeat of France or the inglorious inaction of Spain. It was in Mussolini’s interest to belittle both. He had no reason to welcome a Hitler–Franco alliance, which would see the whole balance of the Mediterranean shift towards the struggle for Gibraltar.
(#litres_trial_promo) Mussolini was confident, however, that Franco’s caution would keep him out of the war. He was much less sanguine about Pétain or his henchmen Darlan and Laval. On the surface it would be a good thing if the French acted on their hatred of the British; the Mediterranean would undoubtedly become the centre of the war, ‘which is good for us’. Looking deeper, however, Mussolini saw the French only as a problem. French arrogance would simply lead to one thing, ‘a bill’. What was the point of fighting the British if, at the end of it all, an equally noxious French power would wax in the south
(#litres_trial_promo) An alliance with France was ‘a cup of hemlock’.
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Mussolini and Hitler met twice in October 1940, on the Brenner at the beginning of the month and in Florence at the end. Mussolini had some difficulty in reading Hitler’s mind. The Führer and his minions were studies in ambivalence. Historians have had little more success in deciding for certain on Hitler’s intentions, even with access to diaries, documents and memoirs. Later writers divide into two schools of thought. Some believe that Hitler was content to let Mussolini fight a ‘parallel war’ in the Mediterranean–and strictly in the Mediterranean–and that there was a genuine alliance, if not of equals, then of partners. Others prefer the image of a ‘brutal friendship’ in which Hitler always intended to predate the Italians. The Germans certainly explored both options. The best that can be said is that Hitler himself had not made up his mind. He was awaiting events on his whistlestop tour of the minor railway stations and major railway tunnels of Europe.
(#litres_trial_promo) Waiting for Hitler to reveal his plans irked Mussolini, the twenty-four days between their two meetings being marked by fits of pique at not being privy to the Germans’ plans. Mussolini talked of paying back Hitler ‘in his own coin’; he could ‘find out from the papers that I have occupied Greece’.
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Franco certainly lived up to Mussolini’s billing. Hitler’s intelligence chief and Spanish expert, Wilhelm Canaris, warned him that when he arrived at the pleasant French railway station of Hendaye he would find ‘not a hero but a little pipsqueak’. So indeed it proved: the Führer was irritated by the Caudillo’s ‘monotonous sing-song reminiscent of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer’. He told Mussolini: ‘rather than go through that again, I would prefer to have three or four teeth taken out’. Doubtless, the fat little Spanish dictator was without charm. At root, however, the Hendaye fiasco–reinforcing racial stereotypes, Franco’s train was late, whereas Hitler’s super-express, Amerika, was bang on time–was about the universal greed of the Fascists. Franco wanted something for nothing, massive German subsidies and a Mediterranean empire. Amerika had come from another small French station, Montoire, where Pierre Laval had been the guest, and shuttled back there the next day so that Hitler could interview Pétain. The Frenchmen both said the same thing, protect us from Spain. There was no grand Mediterranean alliance for the Germans to stitch together.
(#litres_trial_promo) Britain’s enemies, whether in Madrid or Vichy, each wanted to ‘displace England from the Mediterranean’, but would act only if Hitler gave them terms mutually damaging each to the other.
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On this note, Hitler and Mussolini greeted each other in Florence. That morning Italian forces crossed the Albanian border into Greece. Hitler warmly congratulated the Duce on his bold action. Unlike the scratchy meetings at Hendaye and Montoire, Florence was a triumph of Axis amity. ‘German solidarity has not failed us,’ declared a triumphant and relieved Ciano.
(#litres_trial_promo) Mussolini had his ‘parallel war’; he had sprung a surprise–although the preparations, if not the exact timing, of the invasion were apparent to the Germans.
28 October 1940 was Mussolini’s best day in the Mediterranean. His armies were firmly encamped in Egypt, and on the move in Epirus. His ally was full of encouragement and compliments, his Mediterranean rivals had shown their weakness, the British were confused. In hindsight, of course, no one had much good to say for the day. It presaged an Italian military disaster. The only people who remembered the date with any warmth were the Greeks. It gave them a rare opportunity for military glory, magnified years later when the victor of 1940, the army’s commander-in-chief, Alexander Papagos, became dictator.
For a few hours it seemed that all would be well for the Italians. The Albanian-Greek border was divided into two sectors, and the Italians allocated an army to each. Epirus, the more southerly front, ran down to the Adriatic. The Italian goal in Epirus was the coastal city of Prevesa. Across a narrow seaway from Prevesa lay Corfu, Italy’s key Mediterranean claim on Greece. The more northerly Pindus front was wholly inland. Both frontiers were mountainous, offering few goat tracks and even fewer roads. The Greeks recoiled at the first Italian assault, more so in the Pindus. For a moment it seemed that the Italian commander had achieved the holy grail of operational art, the encirclement battle, his army in the south pinning the Greeks, whilst his northern army swept behind them for a rear attack. Within days, however, the Greeks launched a counter-attack and did the unthinkable: they pushed all Italian troops off their soil and invaded Albania.
(#litres_trial_promo) Prevesa and the Adriatic coast became a distant dream. Italian troops in Epirus may have been fighting mere tens of miles from the Mediterranean but they were in a different world. That difference was summed up by the fate of the Siena Division, comprising recruits from southern Italy. Tortured by blizzards and severe cold, slain as much by frostbite as by the Greeks, the Siena broke and fled before an exploratory mortar attack from Greek reconnaissance troops.
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The Greek campaign set in motion changes around the Mediterranean basin. Badoglio had been the Cassandra of the Greek operation. His constant predictions of disaster had irritated Mussolini and had allowed his enemies to deride his cowardice. Few had listened to his specific suggestions and warnings. In his last conversation with Ciano before the invasion, Italy’s senior military leader had pointed out that if the British were operating freely from Greek waters then the fleet at Taranto would no longer be safe’.
(#litres_trial_promo) No one listened to Badoglio. Taranto offered the huge sheltered expanse of the Mar Grande. As soon as the fleet sallied out of Taranto it was in the right place. The port had hummed with activity throughout 1940 as, one by one, Caio Duilio, Vittorio Veneto, Andrea Doria, Italy’s battleships were completed or completed modernization there. Along with the Littorio, the Cavour and the Giulio Cesare they comprised Italy’s entire battleship fleet. When the invasion of Greece still seemed a glorious triumph, the fleet at Taranto was blessed with a visit from Mussolini and Ciano. It was a shining symbol of Italian power and modernity.
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Cunningham had harboured a plan to attack Taranto for months but it barely seemed practicable, ‘the bridge between planning and execution’ being a wide one’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Five factors improved the chances of success in the autumn of 1940: the arrival of the modern aircraft-carrier Illustrious via the Suez Canal, the invention of long-range fuel tanks for the elderly torpedo-bombers used by the British, the upgraded detonation systems for British torpedoes, reconnaissance aircraft on Malta, and unseasonably good weather.
(#litres_trial_promo) The operation was still a long shot. It was also a sideshow.
(#litres_trial_promo) The main event was a combined Mediterranean Fleet and Force H operation to bridge the Mediterranean gap by passing a battleship, Barham, from west to east. The secondary objective was to run a major convoy from the eastern Mediterranean into Malta. The tertiary objective was linked with the Greek campaign. With Suda Bay now open to him, Cunningham intended to escort ships marooned in Malta out to Crete. It was only once he had achieved his central goal of temporarily opening the Mediterranean that Cunningham could afford to give his offensive instincts rein. Even then Taranto was but one of two subsidiary attacks. The other was a dash by cruisers and destroyers through the Straits of Otranto, between Italy and Greece, so that they might attack Italian supply convoys plying between Brindisi and Albania. Doubtless, this daring operation, which after all constituted the main element of the ‘not very much’ aid to Greece, would have attracted more attention if it had not got caught in the lee of Taranto.
The Illustrious and her escorts left the fleet after the main mission was completed on the evening of 11 November 1940, and sailed to Cephalonia, 170 miles away from Taranto. Twenty-one aircraft torpedo-bombers, bombers and flare-droppers, curved round to hit the Mar Grande in two waves from the west. Success was instantaneous: the lead aircraft of ‘Hooch’ Williamson and ‘Blood’ Scarlett, coming in so low that its wings touched the sea, scored the best hit–its torpedo sank the battleship Cavour. By the time both waves had passed through the harbour, three more torpedoes had hit the Littorio, the most powerful ship in the Italian fleet. Perhaps even more remarkably, the surviving aircraft were able to fly back to the Illustrious which in turn rejoined the Mediterranean Fleet. It was hard to know whether the Italians or the British were more surprised by their success. Early press reports attributed the attack to the RAF rather than the Fleet Air Arm; Cunningham was thought mealy-mouthed for not thinking to put Williamson up for the VC.
No one knew what effect Taranto would truly have.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Italians had lost two battleships–but it was unclear for how long. Those assessing the raid were right to be cautious because despite the three holes in its hull, the Littorio did not sink; it was rapidly repaired. Even worse, the remaining battleships had fled Taranto. They headed for Naples. No aircraft spotted them, no intercepts revealed their whereabouts. A still formidable battlefleet was at sea and the British had no idea where it was or what it was doing. Somerville was cautious; faced with the possibility of the Italian fleet emerging unexpectedly from any fog bank, he argued that nothing had changed.
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Taranto momentarily divided the Cunningham–Somerville alliance in the Mediterranean. Having had time to consider his own triumph, Cunningham declared that it had opened the Mediterranean.
(#litres_trial_promo) The time had come to embrace what they had both hitherto branded as madness: Churchill’s plan to take a convoy, not only of warships, but slow-moving tank ships all the way through the Mediterranean, west to east from Gibraltar to Alexandria.
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Somerville had no hope of competing with a Churchill–Cunningham alliance. He was an unwilling cog in an inexorable post-Taranto wheel. The tank ships were to go from Gibraltar to Alexandria, the battleship Ramillies was to pass in the opposite direction back to Gibraltar, escort ships were to sail from the western to the eastern basin, convoys too would sail into Malta from both east and west. The Mediterranean would be free for the British to do as they wished. Somerville was far from convinced. The obvious strategy for the Italians, he believed, was to strike back against their setback in the eastern basin with an offensive in the west. What was he supposed to do, he enquired, if wallowing around south of Sardinia with a battleship, an aircraft-carrier useless at short range, a few light cruisers, and a convoy of slow supply ships, he was ambushed by all those battleships and heavy cruisers evicted from Taranto? He was told to stop complaining.
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Since the 1930s two opposing concepts of the Italian threat in the Mediterranean had butted up against each other in British thinking. Should one respect the modern ships, the concentration of the fleet, the good bases, the fine seamanship, or should one dismiss all these advantages because of an ill-defined but powerful feeling that the Italians were not ‘up for it’? It was a big gamble to take, since nearly everyone who had argued for the superiority of morale over firepower in modern warfare had been proved catastrophically wrong. The battle of Cape Spartivento on 27 November 1940 resolved none of these arguments.
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It was a close-run thing. Somerville rendezvoused with his convoy just after half-past nine on the morning of 27 November 1940. He was in the ‘danger zone’ south of Sardinia that he had identified before sailing. Three-quarters of an hour later, a spotter aircraft landed on Ark Royal. Its report led to the conclusion that the Italian fleet was nearby. Further aircraft were flown off; they were able to report the Italian fleet turning south towards Somerville.
(#litres_trial_promo) Force H was facing Admiral Campioni with the battleships Vittorio Veneto and Giulio Cesare escorted by a powerful cruiser force. For one and a quarter hours, Somerville was convinced he was in for a desperate capital-ship battle against superior forces. He, rightly, had no confidence that his torpedo-bombers, whatever their recently proved excellence against ships at anchor, could hit fast warships at sea.
(#litres_trial_promo) His saving grace was the appearance of Ramillies, heading west as planned. Although the Ramillies was an old and slow warship, two battleships against two evened up the odds. That was most certainly Campioni’s view: he turned his battleships round and they ‘ran like stags’ up the east coast of Sardinia.
(#litres_trial_promo) Somerville gave chase but in less than half an hour, ‘in view of our rapid approach to the enemy coast, now 30 miles distant, I had to decide whether a continuation of the chase justified’. In his view from the bridge, it was not. His primary mission was to escort the convoy, not to chance his warships. He turned away from Sardinia and headed back to the south.
(#litres_trial_promo) Somerville’s choice was undoubtedly correct: taking capital ships within easy range of a militarized enemy coast was potentially suicidal. The enemy would have had to have been Lilliputian rather than Italian. Not that he received any thanks for his good sense. Cunningham’s lustre dimmed his own. The flags that met him in Gibraltar were quickly pulled down, Churchill accused him of cowardice; dismissal from the service was mooted. In the end Cunningham’s support saved him.
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It was Cavagnari and Campioni who lost their jobs. De Vecchi and Badoglio too, were dismissed. In order to protect its leader, the revolution began to eat itself.
(#litres_trial_promo) Days later, further humiliation was heaped on the Italians. Wavell, well equipped with supplies delivered from both the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, ordered an attack in North Africa. Wavell’s idea was to secure Egypt by the recapture of Sidi Barrani. He did not believe that he was launching a great offensive, indeed his intention was to shift the main direction of operations against Mussolini’s swollen east African empire, once he had secured the Libyan position. This was not quite what Churchill had in mind: that the Italians should be ‘ripped off the African shore. Wavell’s operation was more in the nature of a raid. Whilst a diversionary force made its way along the coast road from Mersa Matruh towards Sidi Barrani, the main ‘Western Desert Force’ swung through the desert to the south. Their targets were the huge camps that Graziani had been happily building around Sidi Barrani. As the troops reached the target, they peeled off to the left and right, each unit taking its assigned camp. Although the movement of British forces was spotted by Italian aircraft, surprise was almost complete. The camp-dwellers either surrendered or fled back down the coast.
Within a few days all the settlements along the Egyptian coast were back in British hands. Sollum, ‘the most distinctive spot in the Western Desert’, where immense 600-foot-high cliffs falling from the desert plateau clipped the Mediterranean coast, was recaptured on 16 December 1940. From upper Sollum, the British once more surveyed the great curve of the bay to the Libyan frontier. They were as impressed by the Italian improvements to the comfort of life as they were disparaging about Italian efforts at fighting. Emboldened by this success Wavell met with Cunningham and Arthur Longmore in Cairo. They agreed that they could move part of the way with Churchill’s demand for ‘ripping the shore’. An advance into Cyrenaica would be possible in the New Year, its target Mediterranean ports, first Bardia, but ultimately Tobruk.
