by Mike Carlton
Force B, the 7th Cruiser Squadron, had blundered into the Italian trap. Admiral Iachino had them in his sights. Flashes of flame were rippling from the muzzles of Vittorio Veneto’s great guns like winking lights on a Christmas tree. And Cunningham was still more than a hundred kilometres and almost three hours away to the south. Time to get out of there. Pridham-Wippell rattled off orders by flag and wireless.
‘Make smoke by all available means.’
‘Turn together to 180 degrees.’
‘Proceed at your utmost speed.’
In Perth’s engine room, the brass telegraphs clanged for full ahead. The throttles were thrown open for maximum revolutions. The Engineer Commander, Dolly Gray, ordered the settings that would send a filthy black smoke billowing from her two funnels. That would take a couple of knots off her speed but it would help conceal her from the pursuing Italians, who, without radar, would be firing blind. There were also chemical smoke floats on Perth’s upper deck, which emitted a thick, foggy white cloud that rolled out across the sea and would help blanket them from their pursuers. The four cruisers put their helms hard over and wheeled around to starboard, the Italian battleship’s salvoes screaming around them through the lowering smoke and throwing up tall fountains of dirty brown water. Bowyer-Smyth watched the shells explode with detached professional calm. ‘I had no idea fifteen-inch splashes were so big,’ he said to the knot of officers beside him.4
At his station on the flag deck, Brian Sheedy strained to follow the action:
From the ship ahead of Perth – Ajax – I read the flag signal DB. As a signalman, many signals are committed to memory. This group was easy. The signal decoded was ‘proceed independently’.
In the vernacular, this meant ‘Get to buggery out of it’, or ‘Every ship for itself’.
The four ships broke line ahead formation and each strove to out sprint the other. Perth pulled out of line to starboard and strove to overtake Ajax, drawing level with her. The destroyers were finding it hard to keep up with the cruisers. Speed and more speed. We were doing 34 knots with the quarterdeck sunk almost from sight as the ship’s four propellors dug deep into the sea.
There was order here, too. For four ships in a straight line presented an Aunt Sally shooting gallery target. Proceeding independently presented four different ranges for the enemy range finders. Perth’s engines were actually making speed for 36 knots; the making of black smoke absorbed two knots of speed. It was a glorious sight all round: the colour, the noise, the flags streaming bar taut with the speed of our passage.
And so the race went on, the enemy trying to hit us, and we trying to escape. Gloucester, who was nearest the enemy, unhidden by smoke screen, received the full brunt, the three enemy cruisers bringing their concentrated fire to bear on her. Salvo after salvo of heavy shells crashed into the sea around her, but she went on, not deviating from her course, it seemed to us observing her plight.5
Bowyer-Smyth demanded to know why his lookouts had not spotted the battleship. It was another comic moment. The masthead lookout, summoned to the bridge for a dressing-down, explained that he had tried to report a sighting but his false teeth had fallen into the voice pipe. A shipwright was summoned, the pipe was opened and the teeth were ceremonially handed back to their owner, to laughter all round.
But they were now in great peril. With luck, the Allied cruisers might manage their withdrawal under cover of the smoke, but if one were hit and crippled, or even slowed, the game would be lost. To the south, in Warspite, Cunningham knew immediately from Pridham-Wippell’s first signals that his cruisers had encountered the main force of the enemy. He ordered Valiant, his fastest battleship, to go on ahead to support them. And now came the moment upon which the battle would turn.
Just as Admiral Iachino appeared to have a significant victory within his grasp, with the happy prospect of annihilating no fewer than four British cruisers on a sunny afternoon in Mare Nostrum, fate and history moved against him. Cunningham seized command of the air. The British Admiral did it reluctantly, because it would inevitably give away the presence of his aircraft carrier, Formidable. That in turn would tell his opposite number that British battleships were also present, losing any remaining element of surprise. But, with the cruisers in such danger, he had no choice. He ordered a torpedo strike by Formidable’s aircraft. Six Albacores of the Fleet Air Arm’s 826 Squadron lumbered off the carrier’s flight deck, a torpedo slung beneath each fuselage. They headed north and pressed home an attack on the Italian battleship through a hail of anti-aircraft fire. All six torpedoes missed, passing either for’ard or astern. But for Iachino it was enough. He had no air power of his own, no carrier that could return the strike, and no immediate, if any, prospect of air support from ashore. At 11.30 am, he turned tail and ran for it.
This was a mixed blessing for the British. The cruisers had been saved from destruction, and an hour later they came under the battle fleet’s umbrella, shaken but unharmed. But the Italian ships were faster than Cunningham’s. They were now heading for home at full speed with every chance of escaping, unless Formidable’s aircraft could somehow make a hit and slow them down.
Cunningham ordered up another air strike. In the early afternoon, three Albacores and two Swordfish took off and headed north-west, escorted by three Fulmar fighters through the clear blue skies, to find the Italians. At about the same time, Vittorio Veneto and several of the Italian cruisers were attacked from high altitude by RAF Blenheim bombers flown from Crete, but little damage was done.
At 3.19 pm, the Albacores swooped out of the sun. Two of the Fulmars strafed Vittorio Veneto’s bridge and upperworks with their wing-mounted machine guns to distract the Italian gunnery. In the lead Albacore, Lieutenant-Commander John Dalyell-Stead of the Fleet Air Arm flew through a storm of anti-aircraft fire to drop his torpedo just 1000 metres from Vittorio Veneto’s unprotected stern. Then he was shot down and killed, crashing into the sea before he could see the results of his handiwork. But he had done his job. His was the only torpedo that hit. The great battleship staggered under the shock. Thousands of tons of water rushed into the hole punched in her side, both her port shafts were put out of action – one permanently – and the rudder jammed. She was down by the stern and listing to port, partly crippled.
After an hour of furious work by her engine room and damage control parties, she managed to get her speed back up to about 19 knots, still heading for home, the cruisers and destroyers grouped about her. Iachino urgently radioed for fighter cover from Italy, but none ever arrived. And he was now slower than his British pursuers. But with the distance that still separated the two fleets, Cunningham feared that he might not overhaul the Italians before nightfall, so he ordered yet another air strike. In the long rays of a glorious twilight, more Albacores and Swordfish dived upon the enemy, jinking through a curtain of fire that could be seen by both Brian Sheedy and Roy Norris far away in Perth. ‘A parabola of brilliantly coloured anti-aircraft fire – red, white, blue, orange and green tracer fire – filled a tiny part of the wide horizon all curving in arcs,’ Sheedy wrote. ‘It went on for half an hour.’6
Despite some optimistic claims by the pilots to the contrary, the aircraft did not hit Vittorio Veneto. But one Swordfish, piloted by Lieutenant Michael Torrens-Spence RN, planted a torpedo into the engine room of the heavy cruiser Pola, which lurched to a halt, never to move again. In the last light of the setting sun, this sealed the encounter.
In the days before efficient radar, a night action at sea was fraught with added danger. Friend and foe were hard to distinguish. A dim and speedy silhouette, ill lit by moonlight, could easily appear like a small destroyer but turn out to be a heavy cruiser, and there was always the danger of collision in the turmoil. It took a confident admiral and a well-trained fleet to pursue a battle at night. Andrew Browne Cunningham was a confident admiral. Angelo Iachino was not. The Regia Marina had never been schooled in night fighting.
On the admiral’s bridge in Warspite, Cunningham
asked his staff for their opinions. On top of the hazards of battle at night, he faced additional risks. A concerted torpedo attack by the Italian destroyers could do him immense damage. And if he could not catch the Italians during the hours of darkness, he might be left naked in the morning daylight, well within the range of enemy dive-bombers based in Sicily. It was, the British thought, an inexplicable miracle that the Luftwaffe or the Regia Aeronautica had not been on to them by now. They could not know that Iachino had been calling desperately for air support but had failed to receive it.
Cunningham’s staff dutifully put their views to him. But, as one officer wrote later:
The well-known steely look was in ABC’s eye, and the staff had no doubt there was going to be a party. I think that ABC had probably made up his mind by about 8 pm to send the light forces into the attack and to follow up with the battlefleet but he, nevertheless, on this occasion, went through the formality of asking the opinion of certain staff officers. Neither the staff officer operations, or the master of the fleet liked the idea very much, and said so in their very different ways. The fleet gunnery officer said he was keen to let the guns go off, but the battleships hadn’t had a night practice for months and there might well be a pot mess with star-shells and searchlights if we got into a confused night action.
ABC took one look at his supposed helpers and said, ‘You’re a pack of yellow-livered skunks. I’ll go and have my supper now and see after supper if my morale isn’t higher than yours.’7
From this point, Perth played only a spectator role at Matapan. She had won her battle honours in the chase by daylight. Hec Waller in Stuart, leading the 10th Destroyer Flotilla, would now carry the Australian standard.
At first, Waller felt he was being sidelined. Cunningham ordered a pack of destroyers to chase after the Italians, and they shot off into the starry night, but he kept Stuart and the 10th Flotilla with him as a screen for the battleships. Disappointed, Waller moved Stuart out to the starboard wing. As it turned out, it was the other destroyers and Pridham-Wippell’s cruisers who would miss the climax of the battle. A confusion in their orders and a mistaken positioning led them to pass by the Italian main force in the night.
At 10.30 pm, Valiant’s radar detected a large ship stopped eight kilometres ahead, off to port. This was the heavy cruiser Pola, torpedoed at dusk and now dead in the water. Only minutes later, a young bridge lookout in Stuart sighted six darkened masses on a starboard bearing and on a course that would lead them across the British fleet.
‘Ships bearing green four-oh!’
Cruisers and destroyers. They could only be Italian. Waller rapidly informed his Commander-in-Chief. But, in Warspite, Cunningham and his officers had seen them at the same time through their binoculars. Startled, they identified two 8-inch heavy cruisers of the Zara class, with some escorting destroyers. But what on earth were they doing there? The answer, discovered only much later, was extraordinary. Admiral Iachino had sent Fiume and Zara back to the aid of Pola, their stricken sister ship. Incredibly, the Italian Commander had no idea of his enemy’s position and that he was despatching two of his biggest ships into the midst of the British battle fleet. And, without radar, Zara and Fiume were unaware of their peril; their lookouts had seen nothing. They steamed on: perfect targets at a point-blank range of less than 4000 metres.
Cunningham wrote in his memoirs that never in his life had he experienced a more thrilling moment. More like a young midshipman than a Commander-in-Chief, he bounded from his admiral’s bridge to the compass platform above, where the ship was conned and where he could get a better view. There was a breathless silence – it seemed unending – as Warspite’s turrets trained towards the enemy. It was broken by the calm report from the Gunnery Director Tower above: ‘Director layer sees the target.’
It must have been the Fleet Gunnery Officer, Commander Geoffrey Barnard, who gave the final order to open fire. One heard the ‘ting-ting-ting’ of the firing gongs. Then came the great orange flash and the violent shudder as the six big guns bearing were fired simultaneously. At the very same instant the destroyer Greyhound, on the screen, switched her searchlight on to one of the enemy cruisers, showing her momentarily up as a silvery-blue shape in the darkness. Our searchlights shone out with the full salvo, and provided the illumination for what was a ghastly sight. Full in the beam I saw our six great projectiles flying through the air. Five out of the six hit a few feet below the level of the cruiser’s upper deck and burst with splashes of brilliant flame. The Italians were quite unprepared. Their guns were trained fore and aft. They were helplessly shattered before they could put up any resistance. In the midst of all this there was one milder diversion of note. Captain Douglas Fisher, the captain of the Warspite, was a gunnery officer of note. When he saw the first salvo hit he was heard to say in a voice of wondering surprise: ‘Good Lord! We’ve hit her!’8
Barham and Valiant opened up as well on the two cruisers. The carnage was tremendous. Watchers on the British ships saw gun turrets and huge chunks of debris fly into the air and masts come crashing down. Almost instantly, the Italians erupted in orange flame, burning from stem to stern, sending heavy pillars of oily black smoke billowing into the night sky. Fiume would sink within three-quarters of an hour. Zara, on fire and out of control, drifted away.
To their credit, the Italian destroyers accompanying the cruisers attempted a bold counter-attack, causing Cunningham to ‘comb the tracks’, as it was called – turning away so that any torpedoes fired would, with luck, pass harmlessly down his ships’ sides. Just before 11 o’clock, he unleashed the destroyers of his own screen, the 10th Flotilla. It was the moment Waller and Stuart had been waiting for. The old Scrap Iron Flotilla leader leaped forward like a thoroughbred racehorse, the scene lit by the hellish flames from the cruisers, the eerie glow of star shells and the stabbing silver fingers of searchlights.
‘Alarm starboard!’
‘Shift target to cruiser bearing green six five!’
‘Director: target!’
‘Fire!’
It was the burning Zara. Stuart’s 4.7-inch guns pumped a salvo into her, tongues of flame and black and yellow smoke belching from the muzzles. Multicoloured tracer shells streaked through the night like some hellish fireworks display. Then Waller ordered a torpedo attack.
‘Turning to fire torpedoes!’
‘Thirty degrees to go, sir.’
In Stuart’s waist, the Commissioned Gunner (T), Frank ‘Shorty’ Ley, aimed his tubes, six of them, each armed with a 21-inch torpedo.
‘Twenty degrees to go, sir.’
‘Very good.’
‘Ten degrees to go, sir.’
‘Fire one. Fire two. Fire three.’
The watchers on the bridge saw an explosion in the Zara. At least one torpedo hit, they thought. From there, the action became confused. It was like a dockyard brawl, a knife-fight in a darkened bar, ships weaving and circling and grappling in the fog of war. Shapes would come and go in the gloom. Suddenly, an Italian destroyer appeared out of the murk, heading straight for them. Waller flung Stuart into an emergency turn to port, and the enemy – probably the Giosue Carducci – raced by to starboard less than 150 metres away. Stuart pumped some shells into her from the 4.7s, but there was no reply.
Minutes later, they fired another salvo into the Zara. Then Stuart heeled over again as yet another Italian destroyer shot past, illuminated by a convenient explosion in one of the damaged cruisers.9
This was the Vittorio Alfieri, a fast fleet destroyer named, curiously, after a playwright considered the founder of Italian dramatic tragedy. Another Italian tragedy was unfolding. Signalman Les Clifford was on Stuart’s bridge that night:
‘Hard a’port!’ shouted Captain Waller as the destroyer Vittorio Alfieri flashed by.
At the same moment the Gunnery Officer10 shouted: ‘Engage destroyer bearing green seven oh!’
The guns swung round to the new bearing, their crews sweating as they rammed home the shells.
The order to fire was given simultaneously with the first salvo crashing into the Italian’s bridge and forward gun platform. A second salvo tore gaping holes in her superstructure fore and aft, and a third, fired by the after guns, caused big explosions in the stern of the destroyer.
The Italian had apparently suffered damage to her steering gear, for she began to go round in circles.
Havock, who was following in the wake of Stuart, was directed to finish off the Alfieri, and this was promptly executed with the aid of torpedoes.11
Eventually, at 11.18 pm, Cunningham sent out a general signal: ‘All forces not engaged in sinking the enemy retire to the north-east.’
This, as he later admitted himself, was a mistake. The order had been intended only for the destroyers, but it caused Pridham-Wippell and his cruisers to end their attempt to get in touch with the Vittorio Veneto. Admiral Iachino and the body of his fleet thus managed to break away to the north-west, back home to Taranto.
Stuart, her crew still fired with the lust of battle, reluctantly disengaged along with the rest. The last great act came long after midnight. Zara, a flaming wreck, sank herself with scuttling charges. Shortly after 3 am, another group of destroyers finally encountered the cruiser Pola, still wallowing lifeless and now irretrievably alone. The destroyer Jervis circled her warily, guns and torpedo tubes training as she went, but she need not have bothered with the precaution. With their engines dead and their electrical circuits burned out, the fight had gone out of the Italians. The destroyers’ searchlights revealed a tableau of horror. Someone had hung out a white flag of surrender – a bed sheet or a tablecloth – and the open door to an after gun turret swung listlessly in the slight swell. There was a fire burning on Pola’s quarterdeck, which was strewn with rubbish and personal belongings, and it was appallingly plain that half her crew were drunk, lurching about on deck in a litter of empty bottles. Others, panic-stricken, some naked, were leaping over the side. The destroyers rescued as many as they could in the glare of the searchlights.