The Battle of Matapan 1941

by Mark Simmons

  Since Iachino had taken command of the Italian surface fleet he had been itching to get at the enemy. He was well aware of increased British convoys to Greece from Egyptian ports and felt something should and could be done in the eastern Mediterranean, but only by the faster modern Italian ships. His older slower battleships were unsuitable for the hit-and-run tactics he had in mind. At that time only the Vittorio Veneto was ready for sea, in his plan to be accompanied by numerous cruisers and destroyers.

  He wrote an outline of the operation, typing it up himself, and at the end of February sent it to the Naval Chief of Staff Admiral Riccardi, who quickly replied stating the High Command had been thinking along similar lines, and certainly intended to implement such action when the battle fleet returned to Taranto once the harbour defences there were improved.

  He felt certain changes would affect the plan; the British were no longer using Benghazi for convoys to Greece, restricting themselves to Tobruk and the Egyptian ports. This would mean the focus of the operation would be further east, but the fleet was still operating under strict fuel economy.

  However after the German communication of 19 March, Iachino was summoned to Supermarina at Rome for a meeting with the ChiefofStaff, when he was told his plan was to be implemented, with some variation. The plan consisted of two offensive sweeps to be carried out simultaneously, one south of the small island of Gavdos 30 miles southwest of Crete; the other north of Crete into the western Aegean, areas where Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft were reporting daily that British convoys were operating. Secrecy was vital, particularly in the Italian ports where there were many British agents and sympathisers. The execution order from Rome to the various fleet commanders would be sent by telegram.

  Vittorio Veneto was moved from La Spezia to Naples on 22 March. The operation was scheduled for 24 March, but the date was postponed for two days at the request of the Luftwaffe.

  The Germans wished to come to direct agreement with Admiral Iachino in determining the details of their air assistance, since on this occasion X Cat [German air command in the Mediterranean] was collaborating with the Italian Navy for the first time. Among the things decided was that X Cat would carry out an escort and ship identification exercise with a large number of aircraft on the day that the Italian naval forces passed out of the straits of Messina.8

  On 25 March two German officers from Fliegerkorps X arrived aboard Vittorio Veneto, Captain Withus and Lieutenant Maser along with Lieutenant Colussi, the liaison officer between the Regia Marina and the Luftwaffe in Sicily. Although they had little time, a rudimentary plan was worked out for cooperation at sea between Fliegerkorps X and the Italian navy. Maser and Colussi, it was decided, would remain on board with a German radio operator throughout the operation. That night a courier from Rome arrived on the flagship; he carried documents detailing the agreements between Supermarina and the two air forces which provided for reconnaissance over Alexandria and Suda Bay and the areas south of the toe of Italy and east of Sicily, plus the fighter sweeps and bomber raids against Malta and attacks on British bases on Crete.

  Admiral Iachino went over these plans in fine detail with his air liaison officer, Major Fantana, who soon gave in his opinion that the aircraft would be unable to supply the fleet with adequate air cover, mainly for the reason the aircraft involved simply did not have the range or endurance. Iachino telephoned Supermarina, informing Admiral Campioni, Vice Chief of the Naval Staff, that the air cover he insisted on was in some doubt. Campioni was in no mood to go through it all again, but finally reluctantly agreed to do so. This still did not satisfy Iachino who went to the Chief of Staff Admiral Riccardi, who promised him if the air cover was not up to scratch the operation would be cancelled.

  Iachino put his doubts in a letter to Riccardi, worrying that the various high commands would continue arguing after he had sailed, but he held off sending it while waiting for a telephone call from Campioni which came through minutes before sailing and was still vague. He was to regret not sending the letter.

  Vittorio Veneto slipped her moorings from the buoys near the San Vincenzo mole on the evening of 26 March. She had been moored there behind heavy torpedo nets and away from prying Neapolitan eyes. She fell in line behind her four escorting destroyers taking the southerly channel, kept swept of mines, between Point Campanella and the Isle of Capri. The 1st Division consisting of the heavy cruisers Zara, Pola and Fiume with four destroyers sailed from Taranto under the command of Admiral Cattaneo. From Brindisi came Admiral Legnani with the 8th Division with the light cruisers Abruzzi and Garibaldi and two destroyers. At dawn on the 27th Vittorio Veneto passed through the straits of Messina where she was led by the 3rd Division which had left Messina shortly before, consisting of the heavy cruisers Trieste,Trento, Bolzano and three destroyers under the command of Admiral Sansonetti. By 11:00 all groups had joined the flagship.

  From this moment the fleet would sail southeast toward Apollonia (Cyrenaica) until 20:00. By that time, being off the west coast of Crete, the 1st and 8th Divisions were to push into the Aegean Sea as far as the extreme eastern longitude of Crete, which they expected to reach about 08:00 on 28 March. From there they were to reverse course rejoining the rest of the fleet at about 15:00, 90 miles south of Navarino. Vittorio Veneto and the 3rd Division were to sail south of Crete to a point near the island of Gavdos at about 07:00; if no contact was made they would reverse their course.9

  As the Italian fleet moved down the straits of Messina, a Sirocco wind began to blow, unusual at that time of the year. The sea became choppy, the wind rising to a force 4, accompanied by a mist reducing visibility to 5,000 yards.

  Admiral Iachino welcomed the weather; it would aid concealment and operational surprise, providing it did not deteriorate much further and affect the speed of the destroyers. However the weather giving one advantage took away another: the German aircraft did not turn up for the agreed combined exercises because of poor visibility. Even in the afternoon when the mist partially cleared, only a few aircraft from the Luftwaffe were sighted.

  The clearing mist brought another problem when at 12:20 the Trieste reported a British Sunderland reconnaissance aircraft which circled for about half an hour in the distance and then disappeared. The poor visibility meant the Sunderland crew only sighted the 3rd Division, as was learned from its radio reports decoded by cipher experts on the flagship. They had not spotted Vittorio Veneto and the other cruisers which were following further back. However, ‘the sighting eliminated the first prerequisite of the operation, surprise.’10

  Admiral Iachino must have been disheartened by this turn of events. Even his change of course to the south to try and fool the watching aircraft went unreported. He was sure Admiral Cunningham would now know the Regia Marina was at sea, and this was to his disadvantage. Unknown to Iachino, or anybody on the Italian side, Cunningham had been aware of the Italian plans for days.

  Notes

  1 Denham, H.M. The Aegean p.3

  2 Bragadin, M.A. The Italian Navy in World War II p.81–82

  3 Ibid p83

  4 Kesselring, A. The Memories of Field Marshal Kesselring

  5 Bragadin, p.84

  6 Seth, Ronald, Two Fleets Surprised: The Battle of Matapan p.20

  7 Eppler, John, Operation Condor: Rommel’s Spy p.141

  8 Bragadin, p.84–85

  9 Ibid p.85

  10 Ibid p.86

  10

  Hut 8

  No warning came from enigma or any other source of the raid by Italian explosive motor boats in Suda Bay on 26 March. Once again Italian Special Forces managed to maintain secrecy.1

  In the early morning Suda Bay was attacked by six explosive motor boats. The heavy cruiser York was badly damaged, her boiler and engine rooms flooded; in an effort to save her she was beached. A grave loss at the time as she was the centre of communications between the fleet and Fleet Air Arm units based on Crete. Able Seaman Christopher Buist was on board at the time:

  I was below d
ecks when we heard these engines revving outside in the bay. We fuelled from the oiler and there was this thump followed by a mighty bang and a flash of flame right through the mess deck. The ship lifted up in the air, then down with a crash, all the lights and power went dead and it was black as hell. We went up on the fo’c’sle where all the rest of the ship’s company were assembling. The ship was pulled onto the beach bows-on. As the quarterdeck was under water we lost all our stores, rum etc. We were real chokka, I can tell you.2

  The tanker Pericles was also hit and holed, though the bulk of her cargo was saved. Admiral Cunningham wrote of the attack:

  Our only 8-inch gun cruiser was out of action. Once more we had paid the penalty for the inadequate defence of a fleet base.

  Six prisoners were picked up on rafts, and it seemed that the explosive motor boats were sent off from two torpedo boats, and that the boats were abandoned by their crews before reaching the target. While the Italians on the whole displayed little enterprise and initiative at sea, it always amazed me how good they were at these sort of individual attacks. They certainly had men capable of the most gallant exploits.3

  The beached York became a frequent target for air attacks; attempts to salvage the cruiser were abandoned in May.4 The shipless Able Seaman Buist went on to fight with the British Army during the German invasion of Crete. He walked over the mountains to the south coast to escape capture. From there he went in a Greek caique to Egypt from which he was picked up by a British destroyer when the caique ran out of fuel and drifted.5

  By 24/25 March Cunningham was aware from intelligence reports with some certainty that the Italian fleet would put to sea for operations in the eastern Mediterranean. It was Luftwaffe Enigma communications that first raised suspicions that the Axis forces were planning something in the central-eastern Mediterranean.

  At first a landing on the Libyan coast seemed likely, but on 25 March Fliegerkorps X’s Enigma revealed to the British that all twin-engine fighters from Libya were ordered to move to Palermo ‘for special operations.’ An Italian naval Enigma message was decoded the same day mentioning ‘d minus 3’ for an operation involving the Rhodes command. Another reason alarm bells were ringing loud was that the Regia Marina rarely used the Enigma code system. On 26 March further messages indicated that the targets to be attacked were airfields in the Aegean area, and there were requests for further information about British convoy movements between Alexandria and Greece, and that all this message traffic referred to the same operation.6

  Admiral Cunningham held out the bait to the Axis for as long as he could by keeping the Lustre convoys to Piraeus and Suda Bay running. Then on the eve of the operation, the evening of the 26th, when Vittorio Veneto was leaving Naples, he made a series of concise signals, ‘for the most part precise but giving scope for independent action. As his Flag Lieutenant at the time, Captain Hugh Lee has observed, Cunningham possessed a first rate operational mind.’7

  Cunningham cancelled a southbound convoy from Piraeus. A convoy heading for Piraeus was to reverse course only after dark, to avoid arousing suspicion and he ordered a cruiser force to be south of Crete at dawn on 28 March. Also a Sunderland flying boat was ordered to reveal itself to the Italians so as to protect the Ultra sources.

  In May 1940 Mavis Lever, at the age of nineteen, interrupted her German degree course at University College London to join the staff at the wartime deciphering centre at Bletchley Park. She was allocated to the team led by Dillwyn Knox and tasked with breaking the Italian naval Enigma code. Knox was a brilliant classical scholar, papyrologist and cryptographer who in 1917 succeeded in breaking much of the German naval code. He would break the Abwehr Enigma before dying of stomach cancer in 1943. Mavis Lever wrote of her time at Bletchley Park:

  the administration had settled in the mansion and they established their quarters in the cottage in the stable yard. Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman and John Jefferies were recruited and contact was resumed with the Polish mathematicians who had escaped to Paris from now occupied Poland.

  Hut 6 became the army and air force code site, Hut 3 processed intelligence, while Hut 8 became the naval Enigma decoding site. Mavis arrived in May 1940.

  In June Mussolini joined the war and it was imperative to find out which of the Enigma machines he would be using; fortunately for their Naval High Command, or Supermarina as we soon found out it was called, it proved to be a machine without a plugboard, used by the Italian Navy in the Spanish Civil War-for which Dilly had already worked out his theoretical rodding solution.8

  On 25 March 1941 Mavis read the encoded Supermarina message which referred to ‘Today is X-3’ referring to ‘Operation Gaudo’. The team worked day and night on the flow of messages.

  Each of the three days had a different setting, of course, and each message had to be broken separately. This was the Cottage triumph of the Battle of Matapan.

  Dilly was ready with a poem to celebrate the occasion. Each verse began. ‘When Cunningham won at Matapan by the grace of God and … mentioning all his girls with a rhyming tribute, the rhyme for Mavis conveniently began with the flattering ‘rara avis.’ All very heady stuff for a nineteen-year-old.9

  Mavis met her future husband Keith Batey while working at Bletchley Park, who had been seconded from Cambridge for his technical approach. For a brief period Keith served in the Fleet Air Arm but with Knox terminally ill he was recalled to Bletchley Park. In August 1943 he solved the Enigma ciphers of the Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi Party’s own intelligence service, and later broke the cipher used by the Spanish military attaches in Berlin and Rome to report back to Madrid on German and Italian military plans and assessments, often working beside his wife. Keith Batey passed away during the writing of this book.

  Mavis was a linguist looking for human elements and word patterns. ‘It is just like driving a car’ she said. ‘We can both do it, but Keith understands what goes on under the bonnet.’10, 11

  Notes

  1 Hinsley, F.H. British Intelligence in the Second World War p.404

  romoted to Vice Admiral in 2 Poolman, Kenneth, Experiences of War: The British Sailor p.127

  3 Cunningham, A. B. A Sailor’s Odyssey p.323

  4 Hinsley, p.404

  5 Poolman, p.128

  6 The Cunningham Papers Vol.1:The Mediterranean Fleet 1939–1942 p.236–237

  7 Erskine Ralph & Michael Smith, Action this Day p.100

  8 Ibid p.103

  9 Ibid p.105–106

  10 Daily Telegraph. 4/10/2001

  11 Ibid 5/6/2004

  11

  The British Fleet at Alexandria

  On 23 March the Eastern Mediterranean Fleet had covered a successful convoy through to beleaguered Malta, the first since January. By 24 March it was back in Alexandria harbour. The fleet had its hands full at this time with moving the army to Greece – Operation Lustre – which had begun on 4 March. However Malta had an even higher priority. Therefore much of the fleet was used to cover the convoy of four merchant ships, three from Haifa and one from Alexandria carrying coal, cement and a mixed cargo of foodstuffs. The convoy was routed to pass close to the south coast of Crete so the Fleet Air Arm could provide fighter support from Maleme. The convoy avoided air attack thanks to low cloud and this routing. The merchant ships were damaged while alongside in Malta but most supplies were unloaded safely.

  On 24 March Surgeon Commander E.R. Sorley of the Barham, who had been with the ship for a year, wrote home.

  I hope you haven’t been listening to the Rome Radio broadcasts. You remember that in my last letter I said something about a spot of excitement from which we emerged quite unscathed. It seems that I can now reveal that this was an attack by torpedo bombers at dusk, and we did not think much about it until Rome announced triumphantly that it was definitely known that the Barham had been hit by two torpedoes. Take it from me, this, like most of the Axis claims is complete ‘baloney.’1

  Malta’s striking forces had been unable to prevent advanced elements
of Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps reaching Tripoli. By the end of March, 25,000 men with 8,500 vehicles were ashore.2

  Andrew Browne Cunningham, commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, was 58 in 1941, born in Dublin of Scottish parents in January 1883. He joined the Royal Navy aged fourteen at the training ship HMS Britannia moored at Dartmouth. He was slim, even slight, with a thin angular face quick to show humour, although his blue eyes revealed iron determination. His voice was seldom raised. ‘It was a friendly voice even in anger. It did not matter what words he used to a defaulter, or in giving orders. The voice had a charm which endeared him to everyone, even if they did not realise it.’3

  He served in the Naval Brigade during the Boer War and during the First World War in the Dardanelles commanding the destroyer Scorpion and took a minor part in the Zebrugge Raid in 1918. He became captain of the then new 34,000-ton battleship Rodney in 1929–1930. He was not a big-ship man at that time, having commanded nothing larger than a light cruiser.

  Lieutenant Commander Geoffrey Oliver was the gunnery officer, and he found the ship to be a

  … happy and successful one also. Bob Burnett the commander [Executive Officer] had an excellent way with the men, and it was a sad day when he and ABC [Cunningham] left at the same time … [maybe] things would have gone differently in 1931 at Invergordon had they been there.4

  However whether Cunningham was so understood, or even liked, at that time by the ordinary sailors and marines is a matter of conjecture for his ‘tough managerial style was not always understood by members of the Lower Deck who found themselves joining up more out of economic necessity rather than a love of navy life.’5

  In 1937 Cunningham commanded the Battlecruiser Squadron flying his flag in HMS Hood, having been promoted to Vice Admiral in 1936, in June 1939 becoming C-in-C Mediterranean Fleet.