Small causes, great effects - Canale di Sicilia, January 1941

12/01/15

l 10 January 1941 the Italian torpedo boats Circe (captain of corvette Tommaso Ferrieri Caputi) and Vega (captain of corvette Giuseppe Fontana) sighted and attacked an English convoy headed from Gibraltar to Malta. The British advanced escort (3 cruisers and 5 destroyers) engaged the Italian ships.

Although the first to hit was the Vega, damaging the cruiser Bonaventure, the battle ended, inevitably, 40 minutes later, with the sinking of the Italian torpedo (6 only surviving sailors) and the damage to the twin unit, succeeded in back to the base.

On the other hand, the question of whether or not to engage the enemy in all circumstances had already been freely debated in the Italian press in June 1940 on the occasion of the action of the torpedo boat Calatafimi against a French naval division and was closed , in the end, with a sharp sentence issued by the General Staff of the Regia Marina: the question was ethical, not tactical. Consequently, throughout the conflict, whenever there was a clash, it was never the Italian surface units that retreated first, whatever the balance of forces.

That January story, however, does not end here. The British ships crossed, after dawn, that precise stretch of sea as the Admiralty in London had established, the previous month, that it was better to avoid the nocturnal attacks of the Italian torpedo boats. On the night of November 28, 1940, in fact, two torpedoes from the torpedo boat Calliope, launched into the darkness after having silently climbed an opposing formation for half an hour without being seen, had touched the prow of the large New Zealand motor ship. The British themselves had only a few days later reconstructed what had happened thanks to a decryption. Since the order of magnitude appreciated by the British in 1940 with regard to the accuracy of Italian horizontal bombers amounted to 1%, the Royal Navy had decided, as Admiral Sir Roger Keyes wrote in his book "Combined Operations" in 1943, to pass into the light of day, thus being able to guard against the opposing torpedo boats. On paper, the reasoning was flawless.

It was a pity, however, that the British team, forced to approach the south waiting for the avant-garde escort to carry out its task against the two torpedo boats, ended up on a mined barrage. The destroyer Gallant thus lost the prow and, towed to Malta, was then thrown out there as it was deemed unrepairable. Is one.

Too bad (and two) that in that same circumstance 3 dive bombers Ju.87 Stuka of the Regia Aeronautica damaged the Southampton cruiser, found in broad daylight, to the limit of the autonomy of the planes, without the protection of the darkness (the English ship it was then hit, and this time sunk, the next day, by 35 Ju.87 of the Luftwaffe).

Too bad (and three) that always for the same reason 43 Ju.87 Germans surprised, shortly after midday of the 10, the English aircraft carrier Illustrious, centering it in full four times. The ship, struck a fifth time in the afternoon by an Italian 5 Ju.87 team, was repaired in the United States and did not return to the squad until February 1942. Unfortunately, the British battleship Warspite and Valiant also complained that damage that day minor from shrapnel following the explosion of over 80 500 and 1.000 kg bombs dropped by 36 horizontal bombers He.111 and 14 Ju.87 of the Luftwaffe.

This hard experience confirmed the non-opportunity, for the major units of the Royal Navy, to sail in the central Mediterranean (ie in the area of ​​our convoys with Libya) already recorded six months earlier during the battle of Punta Stilo. Finally, the modest precision of Italian horizontal bombers (and as we have seen, Germans) was not, in reality, a mystery to anyone. Admiral Alberto Lais, a naval clerk in Washington, had the opportunity to read, in fact, the English report dedicated to the Italian air strikes of Punta Stilo, where they spoke, in fact, of an 1% of centers. The British document in question (after the war) was identical to the one found "by Lais on the desk of the Director of the Bureau of Ships - Navy Department.

The moral of the above is always the same: you have to beat the sea, always, in peace and in war. The results, in the long run, are never lacking and only the absent are wrong.

Source: Military Navy