The Battle of Cape Spada

On the morning of 19 July 1940, off the north-western tip of Crete, two fast Italian light cruisers, Giovanni delle Bande Nere and Bartolomeo Colleoni, came upon four British destroyers and set off in pursuit. An hour later the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney unexpectedly opened fire on them out of the haze to the north. The Italians turned away and tried to escape, but Colleoni, hit in the engine room, came to a stop and was finished off by the destroyers’ torpedoes. Bande Nere managed to break away and reached Libya. The action, named after Cape Spada (in Greek, Spatha), cost the Regia Marina the first cruiser it lost in this war and gave Australia one of the most celebrated victories of its young navy.

Cruisers for the Aegean

Ten days earlier, on 9 July, the British and Italian fleets had fought the first major battle of this war in the Mediterranean, the Battle of Calabria (Punta Stilo). Both sides were then covering their own convoys: the Italians were carrying troops, tanks and supplies to Benghazi for their army in Libya, while the British were escorting ships from Malta to Alexandria. Rear Admiral Ferdinando Casardi’s 2nd Cruiser Division sailed in close cover of the Italian convoy: Giovanni delle Bande Nere, flying his flag, and Bartolomeo Colleoni, commanded by Captain Umberto Novaro. Sydney fought on the opposing side, in the cruiser squadron of Admiral Andrew Cunningham’s fleet.

After the battle both Italian cruisers moved from Benghazi to Tripoli, further from the British airfields in Egypt. The Regia Marina’s high command, Supermarina, considered sending them to bombard British positions near Sollum on the Libyan–Egyptian border, but in the end decided to transfer them to Leros in the Dodecanese, then Italian territory. From there they were to attack British shipping in the Aegean Sea, above all the convoys gathering ships from Greek and Turkish ports for Egypt. According to Italian studies, the immediate reason for the sortie was an intelligence report from Istanbul about a convoy then being assembled. The ships left Tripoli on the evening of 17 July and headed north-east to enter the Aegean through the straits between Crete and the island of Kythira.

Both ships belonged to the first series of Italian light cruisers known as the Condottieri, the Alberto di Giussano class, named after Renaissance condottieri – Bartolomeo Colleoni and Lodovico de’ Medici, known as Giovanni delle Bande Nere. They had been designed in the late 1920s to counter the large French destroyers: they carried eight 152 mm (6-inch) guns and had a record-breaking speed, but their side armour was a mere 24 mm thick. The trial records of over 39 knots had been achieved without full equipment on board. In service, in a rough sea, the cruisers could sustain about thirty knots, not much more than Sydney. In Italy they were half-jokingly called “paper cruisers”.

The destroyers and Sydney

At the same time Cunningham sent two groups into the waters around Crete. Four destroyers of the 2nd Flotilla – Hyperion, Ilex, Hero and Hasty, under Commander H. St. L. Nicholson – were sweeping the channel between Crete and Kythira for submarines ahead of the passage of a convoy from the Aegean. Sydney, with the destroyer Havock, was meanwhile to search for Italian shipping in the Gulf of Athens. Sydney’s captain, Captain John Collins, judged that supporting the destroyers, which would be defenceless if they met cruisers, was more important than the patrol. Without breaking radio silence, he moved south out of his assigned area and kept some tens of nautical miles from Nicholson’s group. This independent decision settled the outcome of the action.

Sydney was a light cruiser of the modified Leander class, built in Britain as HMS Phaeton and bought by Australia before her launch in 1934. She too carried eight 152 mm guns; she was slower than the Italians but better armoured. She had been serving with the Mediterranean Fleet since May 1940 and already had to her credit the bombardment of Bardia, the sinking of the destroyer Espero in the action off Crete on 28 June and the Battle of Calabria.

The chase

Times in British and Italian sources differ by an hour, because the ships of the two sides kept different time. According to the British official history, Nicholson’s destroyers sighted the Italian cruisers at 7.22 a.m. while steaming west along the north-western coast of Crete. Nicholson reported the enemy and immediately turned away, hoping in this way to draw the Italians towards Sydney. Casardi could then have run down the weaker and fewer ships with the full advantage of his speed and the range of his guns. He decided, however, that destroyers spread out in line might be screening heavier units, and he opened fire at long range, around seventeen kilometres, without scoring any hits. Nor did he launch his reconnaissance seaplanes: in the swell, catapulting them would have been difficult and would have meant slowing down. Aircraft from Rhodes, asked to reconnoitre, failed to spot Collins’s force.

Sydney, guided by Nicholson’s reports, was racing south at full speed. At 8.26 a.m. according to Playfair (8.29 according to the ship’s log), the flash of her guns to the north took the Italians by surprise; in the haze they could see only the gun flashes, and for a time they believed they faced two cruisers. One of the first shells hit Bande Nere’s aircraft hangar, killing four sailors. With the destroyers barring the way east and the coast of Crete approaching from the south, Casardi turned south-west to round the western tip of the island beyond Cape Spada, laying smoke screens and altering course. These manoeuvres cost him his advantage in speed, and Sydney and the destroyers gradually closed the range.

The chase turned into a gunnery duel in which it was mainly the Australians who did the shooting. The Italian ships were rolling heavily in the swell and aiming at an almost invisible enemy. The only shell to reach Sydney pierced her forward funnel and slightly wounded one sailor. Sydney concentrated her fire on the nearer Colleoni. Shells that struck the ship amidships jammed her rudder, wrecked her boilers and condenser and cut the power supply to the turrets. According to the British official history the cruiser was seen to be stopped at 9.23 a.m. Another shell struck the control position and killed many men on the bridge. The crew kept firing with hand-worked 100 mm guns, but the ship lay motionless a few miles west of the cape, and Captain Novaro gave the order to abandon ship.

Collins left the crippled cruiser to the destroyers Hyperion, Ilex and Havock and went after Bande Nere himself with Hero and Hasty. The first torpedoes missed. A torpedo from Ilex then blew off Colleoni’s bow, and a second, from Hyperion, struck her amidships. The cruiser capsized and sank at around ten o’clock. Bande Nere turned back briefly towards the sinking ship, but Casardi concluded that he could not help her and made off at full speed. A second shell from Sydney exploded in the flagship’s bow section, killing another four men and wounding twelve. At around 10.30 a.m. Collins broke off the chase: the range was opening, smoke and haze made it impossible to correct his fire, and only a few rounds per gun remained in the magazines of the forward turrets. Bande Nere reached Benghazi.

Survivors and prisoners

More than five hundred Italians were pulled from the water – according to the British official history, Hyperion and Ilex picked up more than 280 men and Havock another 260; other tallies give a total of 525–555 rescued. The rescue was interrupted around midday by the arrival of Italian Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 and SM.81 bombers from Rhodes. A near miss damaged a boiler in Havock, which had to leave at full speed with the prisoners on board. Some of the survivors tried to swim to Crete. A few of them were picked up by Greek fishermen. According to Italian figures, 121 members of Colleoni’s crew were killed. The wounded Captain Novaro died on 23 July aboard a British hospital ship in Alexandria. He was buried with military honours, his coffin borne by the captains of the ships that had sunk his cruiser. He was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valour.

When the first reports reached him, Cunningham took the fleet out of Alexandria in case larger Italian forces were following the cruisers, and held back the departure of a convoy from Port Said to the Aegean. By evening it was clear that Bande Nere was out of reach, and the fleet returned to port. The experience with Havock led him to warn his captains against taking excessive risks when rescuing enemy survivors. Sydney and the destroyers entered Alexandria on 20 July, cheered by the crews of every ship in the harbour. Collins was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath, his officers and men received a number of decorations, and the ship added “Spada 1940” to her battle honours.

Assessment

The action did not change the balance of power in the Mediterranean, but it confirmed what earlier skirmishes had already shown. British naval gunnery was more effective: according to Vincent O’Hara, the two Italian cruisers fired around five hundred shells and scored one hit, while Sydney alone fired around 1,300 and scored several. The historians Jack Greene and Alessandro Massignani fault Casardi for excessive caution in the first phase, when he could have destroyed the destroyers, and consider it a mistake to have sent only two light cruisers into the Aegean. Italian studies point to the lack of air reconnaissance and to the late and ineffective attacks by aircraft from the Dodecanese, which bombed from high altitude. The problem of cooperation between the fleet and an independent air force, which had already weighed on the outcome of the fighting off Punta Stilo, was to dog the Regia Marina throughout the war. After the loss of Colleoni the 2nd Cruiser Division was disbanded.

Sydney’s fame

In Australia the victory was greeted with enthusiasm. It was the Royal Australian Navy’s first clear-cut success of the war, won by a ship commanded by one of the first graduates of the Australian naval college. When in February 1941 Sydney returned to Sydney after eight months in the Mediterranean, crowds were waiting at Circular Quay, and the ship was welcomed by the Governor-General, Lord Gowrie (Alexander Hore-Ruthven), and the Navy Minister, Billy Hughes. On 11 February the crew marched through Martin Place to a reception at the Town Hall, and the sailors were presented with commemorative medallions whose inscription honoured a “gallant fight against superior speed and firepower”.

Place in the war

The ship’s fame proved short-lived. On 19 November 1941 Sydney was lost with all 645 of her crew in an action with the German auxiliary cruiser Kormoran off the west coast of Australia – the greatest single loss in the history of the Royal Australian Navy; the wrecks of both ships were found only in 2008. Collins was no longer on board by then. From 1941 he served in Singapore and Java; in 1944 he commanded the Australian squadron; in October of that year he was badly wounded when a Japanese aircraft crashed into his flagship, Australia; and in September 1945 he represented Australia at the signing of the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay. From 1948 to 1955 he was Chief of the Naval Staff, and Australian submarines bear his name today. Giovanni delle Bande Nere survived for less than two more years: on 1 April 1942 she was sunk by the British submarine Urge. Casardi later commanded other cruiser divisions and after the war became a senator.

The Battle of Cape Spada was a minor but telling episode of the first weeks of the war in the Mediterranean. It showed that the Italian light cruisers, fast as they were, could not withstand accurate fire, and that the Royal Navy could impose its will on them in actions between light forces too. For Cunningham, who since the beginning of the siege of Malta and after the Battle of Calabria had been pressing London for reinforcements, it was further proof that the fleet at Alexandria could take the offensive rather than merely defend itself against the enemy.