by David Wragg
There were three reasons for failing to make full use of the French maritime booty. The first was that increasingly the Germans saw a blockade of the British Isles using submarines as a way to force the United Kingdom into starvation and capitulation, and did not see a strategic plan in which naval forces would play a major role. This was due to the continental, land-centred, mentality. The second was that Hitler quickly became disillusioned with the German surface fleet’s performance, whose one great success of the war was the sinking of the British battlecruiser Hood. When the Germans lost the Bismarck, the pride of the Kriegsmarine, shortly afterwards, it was the second in a growing list of major German warship losses, following on from the Graf Spee.
Perhaps most telling of all, there was a third reason for not making use of the French fleet, the German fuel situation. It was simply not possible to maintain the Panzer units and the Luftwaffe and also have a thirsty surface fleet. The situation was so bad that many minor warships, including minesweepers, were converted to coal-firing, as this was the one natural resource that Germany had in abundance. The manpower needs of burning coal in warships and the reduced range, as well as the time taken to re-coal, was a major drawback and indicative of the extent of the fuel crisis. Increasingly, the Germans found it difficult to spare sufficient fuel to keep the navy of their Italian ally, the Regia Navale, in the war.
Yet, in August 1940, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, the second highest member of the Nazi regime, demanded the complete exploitation of the occupied territories.
Meanwhile, from summer 1940 through to November 1942, the surviving units of the French Navy were allowed to protect Vichy convoys between France and her North African colonies, a reminder to the British that here was a great naval asset that could be used against them.
Eventually, after French forces in North Africa surrendered to the Allies following the invasion, on 27 November, the Germans tried to seize those French warships stationed at Toulon in the South of France.
At Toulon, the French commanders had been ordered by Darlan to move their ships to Dakar, out of reach of the Germans and for the time-being at least, difficult for the Allies as well. Toulon was home to the two powerful battlecruisers, Strasbourg and Dunkerque, although the latter had been badly damaged in her encounter with Force H at Mers-el-Kebir. There were three elderly heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, ten large ‘super’ destroyers of the contre-torpilleur type as well as three smaller destroyers. There was the battleship Provence and the seaplane tender Almirante Teste, two destroyers, four torpedo boats and ten submarines. In addition to these ships, fully or nearly fully-manned, there were another two cruisers, eight contre-torpilleur destroyers, six smaller destroyers and ten submarines decommissioned under the armistice terms and which simply had skeleton crews aboard. There were also minesweepers and other minor naval vessels and auxiliaries.
The major fleet units, including the destroyers but not the submarines, were steam-powered, which meant that steam had to be raised before they could leave port. Since it could take six hours to raise steam, once the Germans were at the gates of the dockyard, flight was not an option.
When the Germans were seen advancing on the port area at Toulon, all commanding officers were ordered to raise steam on their ships, and to be on their guard to prevent the Germans boarding any vessel. Then the order to scuttle was re-issued, and then repeated as the Germans attempted to enter the dockyard area, but encountered fierce resistance from Vichy forces, who had also been alerted by a despatch rider sent by a gendarmerie outpost. In the confusion, five submarines, Venus, Casablanca, Marsouin, Iris and Glorieux with their diesel engines providing power almost immediately, managed to slip away and out to sea. The ease with which they did this, their crews manning their deck armament, suggests that the whole procedure had already been rehearsed. They were bombed, strafed and depth charged by the Luftwaffe, leaving Venus so damaged that she had to be scuttled, while Iris, also damaged, was taken by her commanding officer and crew to Spain, where they spent the rest of the war in internment, but the other three boats reached North Africa.
When the Germans reached the piers alongside which the Strasbourg had been moored, they found that she was already drifting away after her crew had cast of all lines to the shore. A German tank fired an 88mm shell into ‘B’ turret, fatally wounding a gunnery officer. The crew responded, with machine guns and other light weapons. The officer in command of the German troops demanded that the ship be returned to the pier, but scuttling had already started and the ship was settling slowly in the water, accompanied by the first of a series of loud explosions that ripped through the ship, while the crew set about wrecking the ship’s machinery with hand grenades and oxy-acetylene cutters. There wasn’t enough depth of water for the ship to sink completely, but instead she settled on the bed of the port, leaving her distinctive superstructure sticking out of the water.
Nearby, the crew of the heavy cruiser Algerie, 13,900 tons, also had opened her sea cocks and her main armament had been destroyed by explosives. The ship continued to burn for the next two days during which occasional explosions could be heard as her ammunition blew up. This was far from a record, as the light cruiser Marseillaise, which had settled at an angle, took more than a week to burn herself out. Another cruiser, the Colbert, was boarded by a German party, but when they saw fuses being set and one of her officers setting fire to his floatplane, they left promptly, but only just in time before her magazine blew the ship apart. The German party that had set foot aboard another cruiser, the Dupleix, also had a narrow escape when she blew up.
Scuttling on its own often causes little damage, and ships scuttled in shallow port waters can be re-floated and salvaged, which was one reason why so much emphasis was given to setting off the magazines and ready use ammunition, not to mention the attacks by grenade and oxy-acetylene cutters. This point was brought home later when another cruiser, a sister ship of the Marseillaise, La Galissonniere, was scuttled, but then re-floated and taken by the Italian navy, but returned to the French in 1944.
In the confusion, the elderly battleship Provence was one ship that was nearly taken by the Germans, as her commanding officer hesitated when he was given the message that the Vichy premier, Pierre Laval, had ordered that there were to be no ‘incidents’. Nevertheless, while he sent an officer to seek clarification, his crew, seeing the other ships sinking and blowing up, opened the sea cocks and the ship began to settle in the water even while the Germans argued with her CO on the bridge.
The battlecruiser Dunkerque, sister ship of the Strasbourg and pride of the prewar French navy, was in dry dock and rather than being refitted and returned to service, she suffered the ignominy of being scrapped by a large gang of Italian workers imported for the purpose, so that she could be sent to Italy in pieces as part of a scrap metal drive intended to rebuild Italy’s dwindling stocks of war materials.
The Italians also gained three out of the eight contre-torpilleur destroyers, Lion, Tigre and Panthere which were being refitted so their skeleton crews did not have enough time to sabotage them effectively, along with the smaller destroyer Trombe.
Four submarines that were left behind at Toulon were scuttled at their moorings.
German delay in seizing the ships had allowed the French to honour their pledge to scuttle their ships rather than surrender them, yet the way ships were handed over to Italy, shows that German intentions had been simply to honour the armistice only for as long as it suited them. Delay also meant something else, for the fuel situation from this time onwards became increasing critical and by 1943, the Italian fleet was largely confined to port.
CHAPTER NINE
Using the Italian Fleet
While Italy had pledged to be an ally of Germany before the war, the country’s leadership did not declare war on Poland on 1 September 1939 and did not declare war on Great Britain and France on 3 September. It was not until the Battle of France had almost ended, on 10 June 1940, that Italy declared war. This
late entry into the war, after most of the fighting had been done but just in time to share in the spoils, earned the scorn of many Germans, especially in the military.
Modern Italy was not a maritime nation, although it had a relatively short land frontier compared with its long coastline as the ‘leg’ of Italy stretched across and almost bisected the Mediterranean. After Mussolini’s rise to power in 1925, and his successful conquest of Libya, he liked to feel that Italy controlled the Mediterranean, which he called Mare Nostrum, ‘Our Sea’. This was nonsense as both the British and French navies maintained a substantial presence, with the former having strong bases at Gibraltar, Malta and Alexandria, and the latter in France and in Algeria.
Despite having been allies during the First World War, for most of the period between the two world wars, France and Italy viewed each other as the most likely enemy. This was due to the rhetoric and expansionist policies of Mussolini. Indeed, when Italy marched into Abyssinia in 1935 against League of Nations objections, war seemed imminent between Great Britain and Italy, but French reluctance meant that no action was taken, even though it would have been easy for the British and French to have stopped Italian shipping from using the Suez Canal. In 1939, Italy invaded Albania, and during the Second World War was to launch a disastrous invasion of Greece from which Hitler had to rescue her by committing German troops for the invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece.
A WASTED ASSET
When Italy finally entered the Second World War in June 1940, Hitler’s expectation would be that his new ally would send her fleet and air force to bombard and then take the island fortress of Malta, which had been the British Mediterranean Fleet’s main base. This would cut the Mediterranean in two and make it difficult for the British to resupply their forces in Egypt, defending the Suez Canal. While air raids on Malta started from the early hours of 11 June, the fleet remained in port, a wasted asset.
On entry into World War II, the Italian Navy had six battleships and seven heavy cruisers, as well as fourteen light cruisers. This was a powerful force for a nation with few maritime pretensions. Lighter forces included 122 destroyers and torpedo boats, and, something usually overlooked, there were 119 submarines, twice as many as the Germany Kriegsmarine possessed in 1939!
Mere numbers were not enough, however, and, while a modern fleet, the Regia Navale suffered from many shortcomings. Italian warship designers had placed more emphasis on style and speed than on effective armament and armour protection, but, more important still, they lacked radar. According to Britain’s naval commander in the Mediterranean, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, the Italians ‘were no further advanced than we had been at Jutland twenty-five years before.’ While an aircraft carrier was under construction, this was never finished.
The main bases for the Italian fleet were in the south 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. Of these, only Taranto was well placed as a forward base as the war developed. It was close to Malta, and also provided the shortest mainland shipping route to North Africa, where Italian ground and air forces needed to be kept supplied. It was also close to Greece, and ships based on Taranto could effectively cut the entrance to the Adriatic. Indeed, an active fleet based on Taranto could have cut the Mediterranean in half.
A sheltered anchorage with both an outer harbour, the Mar Grande, and an inner harbour, the Mar Piccolo, Taranto offered everything a naval base could be expected to provide. The outer harbour provided moorings for the battleships, while the cruisers and destroyers could use both harbours. A large breakwater shielded the outer harbour from the full force of the elements, for even the Mediterranean can be unkind in winter. In the inner harbour, ships used what was known as ‘Mediterranean mooring’, that is instead of berthing alongside, they were berthed stern to the quayside, packed close together ‘like sardines in a tin’ as one British airman put it. This had the incidental advantage of making a torpedo attack on any one ship very difficult.
A seaplane station was also provided at Taranto, largely for the aircraft that would be used by the battleships and cruisers once they were at sea, literally the ‘eyes of the fleet’, and without radar the only eyes for Italian warships other than their own lookouts. The ship repair facilities were enhanced for wartime by the use of floating docks, while there was also a large oil storage depot.
Italy’s geographical position, aided by air bases in Sicily, Sardinia and the Dodecanese, meant that the absence of an aircraft carrier in the Italian fleet was not so serious a drawback as it might seem. Italian aircraft could cover all of the Adriatic as well as a substantial proportion of the Mediterranean from shore bases, especially after the Greek islands started to be occupied, and, of course, after the fall of Greece and then of Crete.
THE REGIA NAVALE
On paper, major units of the Italian fleet sounded impressive enough. The Andrea Doria-class of battleships, which included the Conte di Cavour and the Caio Duilo, were vessels from the First World War, reconstructed between the wars, as indeed were a number of units in the British fleet. Nevertheless, their relatively low displacement of 22,964 tons and 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, made them obsolescent, despite a reasonable speed of 27 knots,.
More modern and more impressive were the Impero-class, under construction just before the outbreak of war and intended to make full use of the maximum dimensions permitted by the Washington Treaty. The four ships included the Littorio. 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 six-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.
Domination on paper was not the same as domination in reality. The Italian Navy had not been faced with a serious conflict since the Balkan Wars thirty years’ earlier. They had not engaged the Austro-Hungarian Navy during the First World War, although the Italian Army had suffered a major defeat at the hands of their northern neighbours during the war.
Training was poor, and so too was the study of naval warfare by the officers.
On the other hand, it would be wrong to overlook the fact that the Italian Navy, and the other Italian armed forces, did excel in using small specialised forces, such as the two-man crews of the human torpedoes. These were a big success, known officially as the Siluro a Lenta Corsa, or ‘slow running torpedo’, but to their two-man crews as the Maiale, or ‘pig’. These were ridden by their operators who sat on top, and once inside an enemy harbour and under the target ship, the warhead could be detached and fastened to the hull. The intrepid crew could then make their escape on the torpedo. Apart from the obvious dangers and difficulties of penetrating an enemy harbour at night, getting clear was important since the percussive effects of underwater blast meant that the crew were greatly at risk while close to the target. In fact, Italian and, later, British experience of human torpedoes was that their crews seldom managed to make a successful escape.
Skill, courage and imagination meant that such teams were a potent threat, but a wider esprit de corps was usually missing. Instances of Italian ships being well fought during the war in the Mediterranean were rare, although Cunningham’s autobiography does mention one outstanding destroyer action.
While Italy had a major shipbuilding industry, the other problem faced by the Italian armed forces was the shortage of fuel. Britain had the fuel resources of the Middle East and, at times, North America, even after the loss of those in the Dutch East Indies and Burma. Italy depended on the Balkans, and on whatever Germany would offer
her increasingly despised ally. Fuel was to be one of the objectives in Germany’s ill-judged thrust eastwards into the Soviet Union, and later in the war, as this failed, so the Italian war machine also suffered and eventually faltered.
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.
Undoubtedly a pessimistic forecast, but very realistic, and certainly more so than that of the Italian Army. A convoy system had to be hastily instigated, but here the lack of Italian preparation was soon to be felt, as often one or two warships would guard a number of merchantmen, but not only were such convoy escorts insufficient in numbers, they were often the wrong kind of vessel, as when cruisers escorted convoys but were unable to provide protection against submarines.
COULD GERMANY HAVE TAKEN OVER?
