The Battle of the Duisburg convoy

Shortly before one in the morning on 9 November 1941, in the Ionian Sea some 135 nautical miles east of Syracuse, four British warships from Malta – two light cruisers and two destroyers – attacked at close range an Italian convoy carrying supplies to Libya. In less than an hour, directing their fire by radar, they sank all seven ships of the convoy and one escorting destroyer, and damaged several others. They themselves returned to base almost without a scratch, although the convoy was covered by two Italian heavy cruisers and ten destroyers. The Italians called the convoy “Beta”, but in the literature it is known by the name of its largest ship, the German steamer Duisburg. On the morning of the same day a British submarine sank a further Italian destroyer that was rescuing survivors.

It is sometimes stated that Force K sank “7 merchant ships, a tanker and 1 destroyer”. This needs some qualification: the convoy consisted of seven ships including two tankers, not eight, and all seven went to the bottom. The second Italian destroyer, Libeccio, was not lost in the night action but was torpedoed a few hours later, on the morning of 9 November, by the submarine Upholder, and sank before noon that day; some accounts, counting from the convoy’s departure, speak of “the following day”.

Force K returns to Malta

In the autumn of 1941 the course of the war in North Africa depended largely on how much fuel, ammunition and vehicles could get across from Italy to Libya. Erwin Rommel’s forces and the Italian divisions in Cyrenaica were preparing to storm Tobruk, while the British in Egypt were preparing an offensive to break the siege of the fortress. Every ship sunk on the route to Tripoli and Benghazi was a loss for Rommel that he could not make good locally.

Malta was the only British base from which this route could be attacked continuously. In the summer of 1941, after the German air force had left Sicily, the submarines of the 10th Flotilla and aircraft from the island were sinking more and more Axis ships. According to the British official history, between June and October 1941 forces from Malta and Egypt sank some 220,000 tons of Axis shipping on the African routes. All that was lacking was a force of surface ships that could destroy whole convoys at night, as Captain Philip Mack’s destroyers had done in April in the Battle of the Tarigo convoy. After that April success, however, the Maltese destroyers had had to be sent to Greece and Crete, and since May the island had had no surface force of its own.

In the autumn the Admiralty, prodded by Winston Churchill, decided to re-form one. On 21 October, the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, the light cruisers Aurora and Penelope and the destroyers Lance and Lively of Force H arrived from Gibraltar in Grand Harbour, Valletta. They were named Force K. It was commanded by Captain William Gladstone Agnew in Aurora. The two Arethusa-class cruisers each carried six 6-inch (152 mm) guns, and the L-class destroyers eight 4-inch (102 mm) guns and eight torpedo tubes each. What mattered most, however, was equipment and training: all four ships had radar, the cruisers had been given new, more powerful searchlights, and the crews had trained above all for night fighting. Formally the force came under the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Andrew Cunningham, in Alexandria.

Italian air reconnaissance spotted the British cruisers at Malta almost at once. Supermarina, the Italian naval high command, temporarily suspended sailings to Tripoli and routed ships to Benghazi, a less well-equipped port further from Malta. Stocks in Libya were dwindling fast, however, and Rommel was pressing for supplies before the planned assault on Tobruk. At the beginning of November the Italians decided to run a large convoy to Tripoli under an escort that was meant to deter Force K.

The Beta convoy

The ships put to sea on 7 November: five from Naples and two from Messina. They were the German steamers Duisburg and San Marco, the Italian motor ships Maria and Rina Corrado, the steamer Sagitta, and the tankers Conte di Misurata and Minatitlan. According to Italian figures they carried 389 vehicles, some 34,500 tons of cargo, including ammunition and fuel in drums, and several hundred soldiers and passengers; the tankers had more than 17,000 tons of fuel aboard, including aviation fuel. On the morning of 8 November, south of the Strait of Messina, they were joined by the close escort – six destroyers under Captain (capitano di vascello) Ugo Bisciani in Maestrale: Grecale, Libeccio, Alfredo Oriani, Euro and Fulmine. Behind the convoy sailed the distant escort under Rear Admiral Bruno Brivonesi: the Trento-class heavy cruisers Trieste and Trento, with 8-inch (203 mm) guns, and four destroyers of the 13th Squadron.

The convoy sailed at a mere nine knots, not along the Tunisian coast but in a wide arc east of Malta. The Italians expected above all night attacks by torpedo aircraft. According to post-war Italian and British analyses, Supermarina and Brivonesi underestimated the fact that the British ships had radar and could fight as effectively at night as by day. The Italian ships had no radar, and their crews were trained mainly for daylight action. The cruisers of the distant escort zigzagged a few miles astern of the convoy, since that was the direction from which an attack was expected.

The British knew about the convoy in advance. Codebreakers at Bletchley Park were reading Italian naval signals about shipping movements to Africa, as well as German air force reports enciphered with Enigma. This knowledge, later called “Ultra”, was closely guarded. So that the Italians should not guess how the British knew their routes, on the afternoon of 8 November a Martin Maryland reconnaissance aircraft of No. 69 Squadron RAF was sent out from Malta over the convoy; according to some accounts it was flown by the celebrated Adrian Warburton. The aircraft “happened” to find the ships and reported their position. At around 5.30 p.m. Force K left Malta and headed north-east at 28 knots.

The night of 9 November

At about 12.40 a.m. Aurora’s radar detected the ships. Agnew’s orders were to attack the nearest escorts first, then the merchant ships, and to deal with the rest of the escort when it appeared. A weak moon hung in the east, so the British worked round the convoy so that the silhouettes of the Italian ships stood out against the sky while their own ships remained in darkness. They slowed to 20 knots, and the gun crews were told to fire calmly and accurately rather than fast. According to British studies, Lively also jammed Italian radio traffic, so that a warning received by Trieste never reached the close escort.

At about 12.57 a.m. Aurora opened fire at a range of some five kilometres. The first salvoes crippled the destroyer Grecale and set her on fire, Penelope found the range of Maestrale, and the destroyers and the cruisers’ secondary armament shelled the merchant ships. For the first few minutes the Italians thought they were being attacked by aircraft and did not know where the fire was coming from. A shell carried away Maestrale’s radio aerial, so Bisciani lost contact with the rest of the escort. Before that he had managed to order the destroyers to gather round him on the far side of the convoy and lay a smokescreen, believing that the attack had come from the port side. In doing so he drew the ships away from the scene of the fighting. The destroyer Euro closed to about two kilometres from the British ships, but her captain took them for his own cruisers and, after Bisciani’s order, called off his torpedo attack. Moments later the British opened fire on her: six shells passed clean through the ship without exploding, but killed some twenty sailors.

The bravest fight was put up by Fulmine, which made for the British and came under concentrated fire. After a few minutes, at about 1.06 a.m., she capsized and sank. Her captain, Lieutenant Commander (capitano di corvetta) Mario Milano, though badly wounded, remained at his post to the end and was killed. According to Italian sources some 140 of Fulmine’s crew died.

Meanwhile the merchant ships, which made no attempt to manoeuvre, caught fire one after another as shells and torpedoes struck them. The tankers turned into torches, and Duisburg and the other ammunition ships blew up. Brivonesi’s cruisers, at the far end of a zigzag a few miles from the convoy, headed in the direction from which the enemy had earlier been reported. According to Italian figures they fired 207 8-inch shells and several dozen 100 mm rounds, but without radar or night rangefinders they did not score a single hit; the British, screened by smoke and the glare of the burning ships, did not even notice them at first. Splinters damaged only Lively’s funnel. At about 2.05 a.m. Force K, with no targets left in sight, headed back towards Malta. Not a single man aboard had been killed.

Morning: Upholder and Libeccio

On their way back the British came across the submarine Upholder of Lieutenant Commander Malcolm David Wanklyn, which was patrolling the area. Wanklyn approached the scene of the battle. According to Italian figures, at about 6.40 a.m. his torpedo struck the stern of the destroyer Libeccio, which was lying stopped, picking up survivors – mostly sailors from Fulmine. The explosion killed many of those rescued and of the rescuers who were on the stern. Euro tried to tow the damaged ship, but the bulkheads gave way and at about 11 a.m. Libeccio sank. Her captain, Commander Corrado Tagliamonte, stayed on the bridge and went down with his ship. According to Italian tallies, 27 of her crew were killed, not counting the survivors she had picked up. The torpedoes Upholder fired at the cruiser Trento missed.

In the morning Force K was also attacked by Italian torpedo aircraft, which claimed hits on the cruisers, but no torpedo struck home. Shortly after 1 p.m. Agnew’s ships entered harbour at Malta. Italian warships and seaplanes picked up more than 700 survivors from the sea. The sources do not agree on the total number killed aboard the merchant ships and warships; it ran into the hundreds.

The reckoning and the shock in Rome

According to the British official history, Force K sank nearly 40,000 tons of shipping in a single night. All the convoy’s vehicles, all its ammunition and all its fuel went to the bottom. The Italian naval historian Marc’Antonio Bragadin called that night a heavy defeat in which individual sailors showed great courage but the escort acted without coordination. The American historian Vincent O’Hara judged it one of the most brilliant victories of British surface ships in the war, achieved through better equipment, training and leadership, but also through surprise, luck and the enemy’s mistakes.

The Germans were outraged. The German admiral attached to the Italian navy, Vice Admiral Eberhard Weichold, accused Brivonesi of incompetence and the Italians of lacking training in night fighting. Grand Admiral Erich Raeder reported to Hitler that the enemy had complete superiority at sea and in the air on the routes to Africa and that the Italians were incapable of changing this. Berlin demanded that German liaison officers be placed in Supermarina and even aboard Italian warships. Brivonesi was relieved of his command and court-martialled; he was restored to duty in June 1942.

Supermarina changed its tactics: instead of large convoys it sent ships singly, in pairs or in small groups from several ports at once, and some cargoes were carried by warships and submarines. The British, reading the Italian signals, saw through this ruse as well. According to a report Rommel sent to Berlin in November, of 60,000 men who were to have reached Benghazi, little more than 8,000 had arrived. According to post-war Italian figures cited in the British official history, more than 60 per cent of the cargoes sent to Libya in November 1941 were sunk.

Place in the war

The destruction of the Duisburg convoy came at the worst possible moment for the Axis, nine days before the start of the British offensive in Libya. On 18 November the Eighth Army set off in Operation Crusader, and Rommel had to fight with less and less fuel. Further attempts to run convoys through ended badly: on 21 November British submarines and aircraft from Malta damaged the heavy cruiser Trieste and the light cruiser Duca degli Abruzzi, and the convoy turned back; on 24 November Force K sank two German ships carrying aviation fuel west of Crete. At the beginning of December Rommel abandoned the siege of Tobruk and began to retreat from Cyrenaica.

The German answer was a return to the Mediterranean. Hitler had sent the first U-boats there as early as September, and more followed in November. In December the Luftwaffe returned to Sicily with II Air Corps, and Field Marshal Albert Kesselring set himself the aim of neutralising Malta. Force K itself did not survive for long: on 19 December 1941 it ran into an Italian minefield off Tripoli, losing the cruiser Neptune and the destroyer Kandahar, while Aurora and Penelope were damaged. In 1942 Malta, bombed day and night, ceased for many months to be a base for surface ships. The night of 9 November 1941 nonetheless remained proof that radar and intelligence could give a handful of ships the upper hand over an enemy several times more numerous, and the fullest illustration of what Malta meant for the war in Africa.