The sinking of the Queen Elizabeth, which took 18 months to raise and repair, and the damage to the Valiant was a grave setback for the British fleet in the East Mediterranean, even if the Royal Navy pretended otherwise. It denied Italian claims of the Valiant having suffered a similar fate to that of the Queen Elizabeth and to prove it, released photos to the press of the ship at anchor at Alexandria. What the photographs carried by the British papers didn’t show, however, was the extensive damage that de la Penne and Bianchi’s torpedo had caused to the Valiant below the waterline. It was another year before the battleship was able to resume operations. ‘For the first (and last) time in the course of the war,’ wrote Borghese, ‘the Italian Navy achieved crushing superiority and dominated the Mediterranean; it could therefore resume, with practical immunity, supplies to the armies overseas and carry out transport of the German Afrika Korps to Libya, thus causing the defeat, a few months later, of the British Army which was driven out of Cyrenaica.’19
Despite his satisfaction with the attack on Alexandria, Borghese was astounded to discover that his superiors were not going to exploit the success to its maximum advantage; with the British fleet all but out of action, a large-scale assault on the island of Malta – for so long a thorn in the side of the Axis – would almost certainly have succeeded. Borghese later divided the blame at this missed opportunity between the hesitancy of the Italian general staff and the refusal of the German High Command to supply the fuel for aircraft and warships.
Bianchi, who along with his five fellow saboteurs was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, agreed with the sentiments of his commander concerning Malta. ‘The island was exhausted, we could have taken it with little risk, but we never got there,’ he reflected years later. The six saboteurs were all conferred with the Gold Medal upon their return from captivity and in an act of high irony, de la Penne received his decoration from the new chief of the Allied naval mission to Italy – none other than Captain Charles Morgan, erstwhile commander of the Valiant.
Borghese received the Military Order of Savoy for his role in the attacks on Alexandria Harbour, the citation praising his ‘great technical competence and shrewdness … and cool determination’. What delighted Borghese even more, however, though he didn’t hear of it for a long time after, was the speech given by Winston Churchill to a secret session of the House of Commons on 23 April 1942. It was the British Prime Minister’s grave duty to inform the House about the details of the attack:
Extreme precautions have been taken for some time past against the varieties of human torpedo or one-man submarine entering our harbours. Not only are nets and other obstructions used but underwater charges are exploded at irregular intervals in the fairway. None the less these men had penetrated the harbour. Four hours later explosions occurred in the bottoms of the Valiant and the Queen Elizabeth, produced by limpet bombs [sic] fixed with extraordinary courage and ingenuity, the effect of which was to blow large holes in the bottoms of both ships and to flood several compartments, thus putting them both out of action for many months.20
Thrilled at the success of the attacks on Alexandria, the Italian admiralty instructed Borghese to relinquish command of the submarine Scire and focus all his efforts on leading the Underwater Division of the Tenth Light Flotilla.* Borghese formulated a brazen plan to return to Alexandria and finish what they’d started in December, by destroying the Valiant and Queen Elizabeth as the two vessels lay in the large repair dock. The date of the attack was set for May 1942, and as in the previous mission a submarine, the Ambra, sailed from La Spezia to Leros where it took on board the six operators.
Although the saboteurs were deposited close to the target the attack failed; the British defences had been strengthened considerably in the wake of the previous assault with ‘searchlights, star-shells, aircraft and cruising patrol vessels’ sweeping the harbour continuously. In addition the operators lacked the experience of their predecessors, who had been, as Borghese described them, the ‘pick of the bunch’. Finally, the captain of the submarine Ambra was an inferior pilot to Borghese and was at least a mile west of the pre-arranged drop-off point. All in all it was a dispiriting mission with none of the saboteurs getting close to their target. Borghese knew he must look for fresh ideas with which to disrupt British shipping.
Borghese’s skills and savoir faire were now much in demand and he was invited to Berlin in the summer of 1942 to discuss widening his scope of operations from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and beyond. An attack on New York was mooted, as was a raid against British targets in Freetown, Sierra Leone. From Berlin Borghese travelled to Paris, where he met Admiral Dönitz, Commander-in-Chief of the German submarine fleet at his headquarters in the Bois de Boulogne, and he then headed south to the German submarine base at the Atlantic port of Bordeaux. Despite being well received by the German submariners, Borghese struggled to impress upon them the potential of human torpedoes. This, he wrote, was because they were not ‘suited to the German military mind, since they demanded, in addition to skill in the water and seamanlike qualities, conspicuous gifts of personal initiative and individual enterprise’.
Borghese had another reason for visiting Bordeaux, other than to meet and greet his German allies, and that was to test a new craft in which he harboured high hopes of success. It was a pocket two-man submarine, weighing 12 tons and carrying two torpedoes, that would be launched against targets in North America. His original intention had been for a German U-boat to carry the mini-submarine across the Atlantic in a specially adapted ‘pouch’, but in Bordeaux Borghese carried out several tests that convinced him the most practical method of transportation was for the U-boat to carry the mini-submarine in a bed on its deck. ‘An important step forward had been taken on the road to the realization of our plans for the future, which was certainly on the audacious side,’ wrote Borghese of his time at Bordeaux.
Back in Italy, Borghese turned his thoughts once more to Gibraltar. The port was now busier than ever, with a huge flow of shipping coming in and out of the harbour, so much so that many merchant supply ships were anchored outside the harbour defences in the bay of Algeciras. Using a false name, Borghese rented a cottage on the north coast of the bay, a little over two miles from Gibraltar, but on Spanish territory. A Spanish woman moved in and soon she was joined by her husband, an Italian naval officer, as well as a team of 12 assault swimmers from the Tenth Light Flotilla. From the front room of the cottage the men observed the Allied steamers at anchor in the bay and formulated their plan of attack. On the night of 13 July 1942 the dozen frogmen crept from the cottage to the sea and swam out to the supply ships, where charges were laid against four vessels. Though none were sunk in the resultant explosions, all required a considerable period in the repair yards. Two months later another attack was carried out by three frogmen and this time the 1,787-ton steamer Raven’s Point was sunk.
By early 1943 the tide of the war in North Africa had turned against the Axis, and Italy in particular was under threat from the Allies. Ethiopia had been lost and Mussolini’s forces had been thrown out of North Africa, retreating towards Tunisia before withdrawing across the Mediterranean to Italy. The Italian Navy no longer ruled the waves in the region and British air assaults had forced them to sail north to the safe haven of La Spezia and Genoa. ‘The Tenth [Light Flotilla] therefore had to bear the burden of developing such offensive activity as, in the naval sphere, might be suggested by circumstances,’ remembered Borghese. On 8 May 1943 three ‘pigs’ attacked merchant vessels in Gibraltar and achieved the sinking of three supply ships totalling 20,000 tons. It was another daring act by Borghese’s men but he knew in the great scheme of things such destruction was but a minor inconvenience to the dominant Allies.
Shortly afterwards the Tenth Light Flotilla, both the Underwater and Surface Divisions, was withdrawn to Sicily to await the inevitable invasion. When it began on 10 July, the Surface Division carried out numerous ambushes on Allied shipping, but again they were of little consequenc
e other than to prove the courageous defiance of the motorboat crews. As if in acknowledgement of the impending defeat, the Italian Admiralty awarded the Tenth a Gold Medal for its work of the previous three years. The citation included the passage:
In numerous undertakings of great daring, in contempt of all danger, against difficulties of every kind, created as much by natural conditions as by the effectiveness of defensive installations at the harbours, the gallant men of the assault divisions of the Navy, trained and directed by the Tenth Light Flotilla, have contrived to reach the enemy in the secure retreats of fortified harbours, sinking two battleships, two cruisers [in reality one cruiser, York], a destroyer and a large number of steamers, totalling more than 100,000 tons.21
The citation, however, was the unit’s epitaph, for although a lone frogman named Luigi Ferraro carried out a bold solo mission in Alexandretta Harbour, Turkey, in July 1943, sinking the 7,000-ton Orion, Italy was invaded on 3 September and five days later declared an armistice with the Allies.
With Mussolini held captive by his fellow Italians at Gran Sasso in the mountains of Abruzzo (although he was freed on 12 September by a daring German commando operation led by Otto Skorzeny), Borghese despaired of the internecine warfare erupting among his fellow Italians, writing that ‘the atmosphere of defeat and betrayal was everywhere’. It was still Borghese’s intention to launch a mini-submarine raid against New York, an attack planned for December 1943, but on the evening of 8 September, at the Tenth’s base in La Spezia, he heard by radio the declaration of an armistice.
Still a committed fascist, Borghese joined the Repubblica di Salò (Republic of Salo), founded on 23 September as a state of southern Europe led by Mussolini and loyal to Germany. He took with him those men of the Tenth Light Flotilla who shared his political views,* and although there were no further human torpedo attacks, they fought alongside the Nazis for the rest of the war.
Borghese formed a close friendship with Otto Skorzeny, the German Special Forces commander, who had led the daring mission in September 1943 to liberate Mussolini from the Campo Imperatore Hotel on top of the Gran Sasso mountain in central Italy. Borghese was one of the few Italians that Skorzeny respected, writing in his wartime memoirs that he was ‘the model of what an officer should be’. On one occasion in 1944 the pair discussed the likely outcome for Europe if the Allies triumphed and Borghese’s comments left a deep impression on Skorzeny: ‘In this war,’ Borghese explained, ‘Europe, the real Europe, is fighting against Asia. If Germany fails, the true core of Europe will disappear and so I and my men are prepared to stand at your [Germany’s] side to the bitter end and fight on at the gates of Berlin, if need be. The Western Allies, who are now helping to overthrow Germany, will bitterly regret their action.’22
It was during the final year of the war that Borghese earned his grim sobriquet ‘The Black Prince’. As the Germans and fascist Italians were pushed relentlessly northwards up Italy towards the Austrian border, they were subjected to hit-and-run attacks from partisans. Borghese’s response to these raids was brutal, involving torture and execution, not just of captured partisans but of those villagers suspected of involvement.
The Tenth Light Flotilla was officially disbanded on 26 April 1945, although by then Borghese had already taken steps to ensure he did not meet summary justice at the hands of the partisans. An agent from the American Office of Strategic Services, James Angleton, took him into custody and spirited him to Rome. Subsequent reports allege that the Americans were interested in developing Borghese’s naval guerrilla warfare for use against the Japanese but the rapid conclusion of the war in the Pacific cancelled such a partnership.
When Borghese was finally brought before a court, friends in high places ensured that the majority of charges against him were dropped or dismissed. On 17 February 1949 he was found guilty of collaborating with the Germans and of involvement in the deaths of eight partisans, yet he was immediately freed as part of a general amnesty, and on account of his war record prior to September 1943.
But if the Italian authorities had hoped such clemency would result in Borghese drifting quietly off to some backwater, they were mistaken. He joined the Italian Social Movement and in 1951 became its chairman. In the 1960s Borghese founded the Italian National Front and in 1970 planned a coup d’état to end what he saw as the country’s descent into left-wing anarchy. The uprising – said at the time to involve 4,000 men under the command of the former submariner – failed and Borghese fled to Spain and sought exile under General Franco.
Few in Italy, save for a few fascists, mourned the death of Borghese four years later. This, after all, was the Black Prince, a vicious slayer of partisans and a man who fought alongside the Nazis until the bitter end. Yet the post-war vilification of Borghese has obscured the fact that for three years this Italian aristocrat was not only a brilliant submarine commander but the bold and innovative leader of the Tenth Light Flotilla, the first naval Special Forces unit.
* In its first mission without Borghese the Scire was sunk by a British torpedo-boat off Haifa with the loss of all hands.
* Luigi Durand de la Penne was not one of them. On release from prison he chose to fight against the Germans, while Emilio Bianchi’s health was so poor that he took no further active part in the war.
BARON VON DER HEYDTE
FALLSCHIRMJÄGER
From an early age Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte despised the Nazi Party, a dislike that was mutual. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, commander of the German Luftwaffe, mocked his devout Catholicism by referring to him as the ‘Rosary Paratrooper’.1 Such was the level of antipathy between von der Heydte and the German National Socialist party that had he not been such an outstanding soldier, one of their few great Special Forces leaders, he might well have faced a Nazi firing squad long before the end of the war.
Von der Heydte was a scion of the Bavarian aristocracy, born in Munich on 30 March 1907. His father, a Freiherr (the equivalent of a British baron) had served in the Royal Bavarian Army and his mother was of French origin. Both were devout Catholics, a piety that their son inherited, and which was nurtured when he enrolled at the Munich Catholic school. However, WorldWar I – during which Friedrich was a pageboy to the Royal Court of the House of Wittelsbach – destroyed all hope the von der Heydtes held of young Friedrich enjoying the privileged life of a nobleman, and with the abolition of the German monarchy following the end of the conflict Friedrich von der Heydte enlisted in the army as an officer cadet in the 18th Cavalry Regiment.
In 1927 von der Heydte enrolled at Innsbruck University to read law and economics, his studies sponsored by the military as his indigent family could not afford the fees. In his adolescence it had been Communism against which the politically aware von der Heydte had railed but, on moving to Berlin after completing his bachelor’s degree, he found a new enemy – the National Socialists. His time at Berlin University was marked by several confrontations with the emerging Nazis, confrontations that frequently ended in fistfights as von der Heydte defended his liberal views.
Disgusted with the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, von der Heydte left Berlin for Vienna where he became a student at the Austrian Consular Academy. In 1934, a year after Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany, von der Heydte took out Austrian citizenship and in 1935 he spent some time studying in Holland. However, the same year he was recalled to the army as the German military began a programme of secret expansion. Despite being known to the Gestapo as an anti-fascist, von der Heydte escaped the purge of officers deemed to lack the ‘revolutionary spirit’ that Hitler wanted in his armed forces.
By late 1937 von der Heydte’s cavalry regiment had been formed into an anti-tank unit, much to his chagrin as he loved horses, and two years later, after attending an officers course at the War Academy, he was appointed commander of the 246th Anti-tank Battalion of the 246th Infantry Division, and he led his men first into Poland and then westwards through the Low Countries where he was awarded th
e Iron Cross, 1st Class.
On 1 August 1940, von der Heydte transferred to the Airborne Corps, the Fallschirmjäger, and, on successfully completing Jump School in October, was appointed to command of 1st Battalion, 3rd Parachute Regiment. Six months later, in April 1941, the regiment was growing increasingly frustrated at its lack of action. The 600 men of the regiment had just completed a six-week training course and were desperate to be blooded now that the German military machine was on the move once more, attacking Yugoslavia and Greece.
Like von der Heydte, many were former infantrymen who had volunteered to become paratroopers, motivated either by idealism, ambition or adventure. ‘The idealists were by far the most difficult to handle,’ recalled von der Heydte in his memoirs.
‘Quite a lot of them, who had been in the Hitler Youth and were saturated with national slogans, failed when they came to recognize that a soldier’s trade is rough and that in time of war enthusiasm has value only when paired with knowledge, endurance, toughness and self control. Many times in the course of the war did I see a soldier lose his nerve and go literally mad under the pressure of heavy combat. And in all these cases the type of man who broke to pieces under the inexorably gruesome hardness of a soldier’s war was the fundamentally soft idealist.’2
The ambitious volunteers also presented problems, reflected von der Heydte, because their desire to better themselves as individuals often impaired their esprit de corps. The best sort of volunteer were the adventurers, men like von der Heydte, who ‘had jumped easily into life and [who] found it worth living for, whatever it brought along, provided that it did not become monotonous’.3
Towards the end of April a rumour passed among von der Heydte’s men that General Kurt Student, commanding officer of the German Airborne Corps, had been summoned to see Hermann Göring to receive operational orders for an imminent mission for his troops. A few days later von der Heydte learned that there had indeed been substance to the rumours – his battalion, the entire regiment, was to break camp and entrain for an unknown destination.
The Daring Dozen Page 22