The Battle of Calabria

On the afternoon of 9 July 1940, in the Ionian Sea, some thirty nautical miles east of Punta Stilo in Calabria, Admiral Andrew Cunningham’s British Mediterranean Fleet met the main force of the Italian Regia Marina under Admiral Inigo Campioni. It was the first battle of the war in which British and Italian battleships fired at each other and, according to Italian historians, also the largest concentration of warships in the Mediterranean until the Allied landings of 1943. The action lasted little more than an hour and a half. The British battleship Warspite hit the Italian flagship Giulio Cesare at a range of about 24 kilometres, Campioni withdrew towards Messina under cover of smokescreens, and Cunningham was unable to catch him. The engagement was essentially inconclusive, and no ship was sunk in it. After the battle, however, in the following days of the same operation, the British lost a destroyer and the Italians had a destroyer sunk in harbour (she was later raised). The British call it the Action off Calabria, the Italians the Battle of Punta Stilo, and Polish writers the battle off Cape Stilo.

Two convoys

The battle came about almost by chance: both fleets had put to sea to cover their own convoys, and both hoped to deal the enemy a blow along the way. Ever since Italy declared war, the command in Libya had been demanding men and equipment. Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, who had taken command in Libya after Italo Balbo’s death, had no intention of advancing on Egypt without tanks. The Regia Marina, which had so far been delivering supplies in single merchant ships, destroyers and submarines, therefore prepared its first large convoy. On 6 July four ships left Naples, joined the next day by a fifth from Catania. They carried 2,190 troops, 72 M11/39 medium tanks, 232 other vehicles, more than ten thousand tons of supplies and about 5,700 tons of fuel to Benghazi. The close escort consisted of torpedo boats, destroyers and two light cruisers. When the Italian air force mistakenly reported British cruisers at Malta, the naval high command (Supermarina) sent almost the entire fleet to sea: on 7 July two battleships, Giulio Cesare and Conte di Cavour, six heavy and a dozen or so light cruisers and several dozen destroyers sailed from Taranto, Messina, Augusta and Palermo.

The British had their own reason for putting to sea. Since the start of the siege of Malta, ships had been waiting at the island to be escorted to Egypt, carrying evacuated civilians, mainly women and children, and fleet stores. Their departure had been postponed at the end of June, when the cruisers had fired off most of their ammunition chasing the destroyer Espero. Two convoys were formed, the fast MF 1 and the slow MS 1. On the evening of 7 July the whole Mediterranean Fleet sailed from Alexandria in three forces. Force A, under Vice-Admiral John Tovey, consisted of five light cruisers, including the Australian Sydney. Force B was Cunningham’s flagship, the battleship Warspite, with destroyers. Force C, under Rear Admiral Henry Pridham-Wippell, comprised two older battleships, Malaya and Royal Sovereign, the aircraft carrier Eagle and eleven destroyers. Cunningham also wanted to use the occasion to draw the Italians into battle. Each side soon learned of the other: the Italians had partly read British signals, and the British had air reports and radio intelligence.

At the same time Vice-Admiral James Somerville’s Force H, which a few days earlier had shelled the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir, sailed from Gibraltar. It was to divert the Italians’ attention with a raid by aircraft from Ark Royal on the airfields at Cagliari in Sardinia. Attacked by Italian bombers on 9 July, it abandoned the raid and turned back. On the way home, on 11 July, the destroyer HMS Escort, torpedoed by the Italian submarine Guglielmo Marconi, sank under tow.

8 July: bombs from high altitude

On the morning of 8 July the British submarine Phoenix sighted the Italian battleships halfway between Taranto and Benghazi and fired torpedoes at them without result. From then on British flying boats from Malta shadowed Campioni’s fleet. Meanwhile aircraft of the Regia Aeronautica from the Dodecanese and Libya appeared over Cunningham’s forces. From morning to evening successive waves of Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 and SM.81 bombers dropped their bombs from about three thousand metres, in formation, without diving. According to various tallies several hundred bombs fell. Only one found its mark: a bomb struck the bridge of the cruiser HMS Gloucester. Eighteen men were killed, among them the ship’s captain, Captain Frederick Garside, and his executive officer, and the cruiser, her fire-control position wrecked, was sent to screen the carrier. The Italian convoy, meanwhile, reached Benghazi unhindered on the evening of 8 July, according to Italian figures. Campioni’s main task had thus been accomplished before a shot was fired.

Cunningham, now knowing where the Italians were, steered the fleet towards Taranto to cut off their way back to base. The Italian high command did not want to risk a night action and ordered Campioni to avoid contact until the next day and then to accept battle close to his own coast, within range of the air force in Sicily and Calabria. Some of the Italian destroyers had to leave for Sicilian ports to refuel, and two light cruisers suffered engine breakdowns.

9 July: the battleship duel

At noon some 90 nautical miles separated the fleets. Warspite had drawn ahead of her slower battleships: Royal Sovereign, with a speed of under twenty knots, could not keep up. Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers from Eagle twice attacked the Italian ships, but scored no hits. At about 3.15 p.m. the Italian cruisers opened fire on Tovey’s cruisers at a range of more than twenty kilometres. The Italians quickly found the range; the British fired concentrated salvoes. Splinters from a shell fired by the cruiser Giuseppe Garibaldi destroyed the catapult and seaplane aboard HMS Neptune. When the British cruisers got into difficulties, Warspite came to their aid and her guns drove off the Italian light cruisers.

At 3.52 p.m. Giulio Cesare opened fire on Warspite at a range of about 26 kilometres. Conte di Cavour stayed silent: in accordance with Italian doctrine each battleship was to fight its own duel, and Cavour had been allotted Malaya, which was still out of range. Cesare’s shells fell ever closer, and splinters from one salvo damaged the British destroyers Hereward and Decoy. Just before 4 p.m., when the Italian salvoes were already straddling Warspite, one of her 381 mm shells struck Giulio Cesare at a range of about 24 kilometres (26,000 yards). It was one of the longest-range hits on a moving target in the history of naval gunnery. The shell pierced the after funnel and exploded on deck, setting fire to the ammunition of an anti-aircraft gun. Smoke drawn in by the ventilators forced the crew to shut down half the boilers, and the ship’s speed fell to 18 knots. Two sailors were killed and several were wounded or overcome by smoke. A few minutes later the heavy cruiser Bolzano was hit by three 152 mm shells from Neptune, which temporarily jammed her rudder.

Campioni, whose flagship had lost speed, concluded that with one battleship in fighting order he could not take on three British battleships and a carrier. He ordered his destroyers to lay a smokescreen and attack with torpedoes, and turned his battleships towards the Strait of Messina. The British destroyers went out to meet the Italian ones, and for several dozen minutes the two sides exchanged gunfire and torpedoes at long range without scoring any hits. Cunningham did not plunge into the smoke, behind which torpedoes and submarines might be waiting, and at about 4.50 p.m., having closed to within thirty miles of the Calabrian coast, he broke off the pursuit. Italian bombers then arrived – more than a hundred, according to Italian tallies. They bombed the British ships, and some of them, mistaking their targets, spent a long time attacking their own fleet. No bomb hit. The airmen nevertheless reported hits on Eagle, Warspite and Malaya, and Italian propaganda presented the battle as a victory.

After the battle

On the night of 9–10 July both convoys left Malta and, under the fleet’s cover and bombed by the Italian air force, reached Alexandria on 13 and 15 July. On the evening of 10 July nine Swordfish from Eagle attacked the harbour of Augusta in Sicily and sank the destroyer Leone Pancaldo, which had taken part in the battle a day or so earlier. The ship settled in shallow water and was later raised and returned to service. Giulio Cesare and Bolzano went in for repairs and were back in the line within a few weeks.

Assessments of the battle diverged from the start. British historiography, following Cunningham, wrote that the Royal Navy had gained a “moral ascendancy” over the Italian fleet: the Italians had withdrawn after the first hit, and from then on the British could operate in the central Mediterranean with growing boldness. Italian writers point out that Campioni accomplished his task, since the convoy reached Libya, accepted battle with a stronger opponent and brought his ships out of it. Campioni himself wrote that his crews had become convinced they could meet the British as equals. Italian critics, on the other hand, note that a fleet with superiority in cruisers, fighting close to its own bases and within range of its own air force, achieved nothing, and that the reports revealed two of its weaknesses: the wide dispersion of its salvoes and an almost complete lack of cooperation with the air force, which in Italy was a separate armed service. The new battleships Littorio and Vittorio Veneto were lying at Taranto at the time, not yet ready for action.

Cunningham was not satisfied either. The slow Royal Sovereign and Malaya could not catch the Italians, and their guns were outranged by the Italian ones. In his report he asked the Admiralty for faster battleships, a new carrier with an armoured flight deck, and heavy cruisers. He also noted that the Italian air force, despite the hundreds of bombs dropped over several days, had scored only one hit, but that without fighters of its own the fleet would remain constantly exposed.

Place in the war

As Italian historians emphasise, the Battle of Calabria proved to be the only engagement of the entire war in which Italian and British battleships exchanged fire. It decided nothing, but it set the pattern for the years that followed: the Italian navy, husbanding ships it could not replace, avoided a decisive battle, while the British fleet sought one with growing self-confidence. Only ten days later, on 19 July, the Australian cruiser Sydney and her destroyers sank the Italian cruiser Bartolomeo Colleoni off Cape Spada in Crete. Cunningham’s requests were partly met at the beginning of September 1940, when the battleship Valiant and the carrier Illustrious arrived at Alexandria. On the night of 11–12 November 1940 aircraft from that carrier attacked Taranto and put three Italian battleships out of action, among them Conte di Cavour, which never returned to service. In March 1941 Cunningham destroyed Italian cruisers at the Battle of Cape Matapan.

Admiral Campioni lost command of the fleet in December 1940 and later became Governor of the Dodecanese. After Italy’s capitulation in September 1943 the Germans took him prisoner on Rhodes. He refused to collaborate with Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic, was convicted of treason and shot at Parma on 24 May 1944. He was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valour. Giulio Cesare survived the war, was allotted to the Soviet Union afterwards and, as Novorossiysk, sank at Sevastopol in 1955 after an explosion, most probably of an old German mine. Warspite, which in 1940 had scored one of the longest-range hits in history, went on to fight at Matapan, off Crete, at the Sicily landings, at Salerno and in Normandy. The convoys to Libya over which this battle had been fought remained the pivot of the war in the Mediterranean for years to come.