The Battle of the Tarigo convoy

Shortly after two in the morning of 16 April 1941, on the shoals off the Kerkennah Islands on the east coast of Tunisia, four British destroyers from Malta surprised a convoy sailing from Naples to Tripoli. In less than an hour of close-range fighting they destroyed all five merchant ships – four German and one Italian – and the three Italian destroyers of the escort. The British lost one ship, HMS Mohawk, torpedoed by the already sinking Italian flagship. The clash is known as the Battle of the Tarigo convoy, after that flagship, the destroyer Luca Tarigo; the British also call it the “action off Sfax”, after the nearby Tunisian port of Sfax.

The event is sometimes placed under 15 April, with the statement that British destroyers sank “all five transports and the three Italian destroyers escorting them”. The ships left Malta on the evening of 15 April, but the fighting began only after midnight, which is why British and Italian studies give the date as 16 April. The tally itself needs some refinement: some of the merchant ships and one of the Italian destroyers did not go straight to the bottom but ran aground on the shoals in flames, and the Italians later raised the destroyer Lampo and returned her to service. For the Axis, however, the loss was almost total.

Rommel’s bottleneck

At the beginning of April 1941 the forces of Erwin Rommel were pushing across Cyrenaica. After taking Benghazi and Derna, their spearheads reached Tobruk, which from 10 April was under siege. Yet every soldier, tank, drum of fuel and case of ammunition of the Afrika Korps first had to cross the sea. The main route ran from Naples and Palermo west of Sicily and then along the east coast of French Tunisia to Tripoli, the only well-equipped port in Libya. According to the British official history, the route was some 400 nautical miles long. The convoys covered the middle stretch, out of range of fighters from Sicily and Libya, by night, slipping through the buoyed channel around the Kerkennah shoals – the same shoals off which, in February, a British submarine had sunk the cruiser Armando Diaz.

The convoys usually consisted of four or five ships and sailed every two or three days. German troops travelled mainly in German ships, but the escort and the whole management of the traffic were in the hands of the Italian navy, the Regia Marina. According to the British official history, by the end of March fifteen convoys had carried to Tripoli 25,000 men, 8,500 vehicles and 26,000 tons of supplies for the German 5th Light Division, and in April and May the 15th Panzer Division crossed the sea. Losses were slight, because Malta, the only base from which the British could permanently threaten the route, had been paralysed since January by the raids of the German X Fliegerkorps. The bombers and flying boats had been withdrawn from the island to Egypt, and surface ships could not be based there.

London presses Cunningham

Rommel’s offensive alarmed London. As early as 4 April the Admiralty suggested to the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Andrew Cunningham, that he bombard Tripoli from the sea, or even block the harbour with an old battleship. Cunningham believed that a bombardment would do no lasting damage while exposing his ships to air attack from Libya and Sicily. He had another idea. He had long intended to base a light striking force on Malta as soon as the island’s anti-aircraft defences allowed, and in April the pressure from X Fliegerkorps eased somewhat: some of the German aircraft had left for Africa and the Balkans, and on 3 April twelve new Hurricane Mk IIs flew in to Malta. On 8 April Cunningham decided to send to the island four of the fleet’s most modern destroyers, even though this weakened the screen for his battleships should the Italians put to sea again despite their defeat off Cape Matapan.

This was Captain Philip Mack’s 14th Destroyer Flotilla: the flotilla leader HMS Jervis and HMS Janus – modern J-class destroyers with six 4.7-inch (120 mm) guns and ten torpedo tubes – and the larger Tribal-class destroyers HMS Nubian and HMS Mohawk, armed with eight guns of the same calibre but only four torpedo tubes. Three of the four ships already had radar. The flotilla sailed from Suda Bay in Crete on 10 April and entered Malta’s Grand Harbour on the morning of 11 April.

The first sorties failed. On 11 April itself, barely refuelled, the destroyers went out to meet a convoy sighted by aircraft but did not find it – it turned out to be sailing more slowly than reported, and a correction from the submarine Unique did not arrive in time. The next night another convoy, aware that it was being shadowed by a British aircraft, turned back north, and two Swordfish of the Fleet Air Arm’s No. 830 Squadron were lost attacking its escort. The Italians now knew that British destroyers were lying at Malta.

The convoy from Naples

On the evening of 13 April, delayed by bad weather, the twentieth German transport convoy left Naples for Tripoli: the ships Adana (4,205 GRT), Iserlohn (3,704 GRT), Arta (2,452 GRT) and Aegina (2,447 GRT), and the Italian Sabaudia (1,590 GRT), which was carrying ammunition. On board were German troops, some three hundred vehicles and supplies for the forces in Libya. The escort consisted of three Italian destroyers: the large Luca Tarigo of the Navigatori class, commanded by Commander (capitano di fregata) Pietro de Cristofaro, who was in command of the whole convoy, and two smaller destroyers of the Folgore class, Baleno and Lampo. According to Italian accounts, Supermarina, the Italian naval high command, had planned the voyage so that the convoy would pass closest to Malta by day, under air cover. Beyond the Egadi Islands, however, it ran into a gale that scattered the ships and slowed its progress.

On the morning of 15 April the convoy was spotted by a British Martin Maryland reconnaissance aircraft of No. 69 Squadron RAF from Malta. In the afternoon another Maryland reported its composition, its southerly course and its speed – a mere eight or nine knots. The British also knew of the convoy’s departure from intercepted enemy signals. Some authors credit a role to “Ultra” decrypts, while others deny that it played any direct part in this case; what settled the interception was air reconnaissance. At 6 p.m. Mack’s flotilla left Malta in rain under low cloud. Supermarina intercepted the British sighting report, so de Cristofaro knew that the convoy had been detected. He asked for fighter cover and reconnaissance ahead of his route, but the gale had grounded the Italian air force. Of the two bombers that were to take off from Syracuse, one got into the air and returned without having sighted the British ships. The Italian commander sailed on, unaware that the enemy was at sea.

The fight at No. 4 buoy

Mack led the destroyers in line ahead at 26 knots towards Kerkennah No. 4 buoy, where he expected to cross the convoy’s path. At the appointed time, however, the sea was empty. The British commander concluded that the slow convoy must have been hugging the Tunisian coast more closely, and turned towards No. 1 buoy. A few minutes before two in the morning, by moonlight, lookouts on Jervis sighted the silhouettes of five merchant ships and three escorts at a range of about six miles. Mack worked round the convoy so that it lay between the flotilla and the moon. The Italian ships, lit from behind, stood out sharply against the sky, while the British ones remained in darkness.

At 2.20 a.m. Jervis opened fire on the destroyer Baleno, which was on the convoy’s flank, at a range of about 2,200 metres. Janus joined in moments later. The first salvoes wrecked Baleno’s bridge, killing or wounding her captain and almost all her officers; her crew managed to run the burning ship aground, but she soon sank. At the same time Nubian engaged Sabaudia, at the rear of the convoy, and then Iserlohn and Aegina. A confused mêlée began at ranges from a few dozen to two thousand metres. According to the British official history, the convoy’s ships tried several times to ram the destroyers. At around 2.40–2.50 a.m. Sabaudia’s cargo of ammunition was hit and blew up: a column of flame and smoke rose several hundred metres into the air, and debris rained down on Jervis, almost a kilometre and a half away.

Luca Tarigo, at the head of the convoy, turned back and made for the British ships, but came under fire from Nubian, Jervis and Mohawk. Shells wrecked her bridge and started a fire, and de Cristofaro lost a leg to a splinter. According to Italian accounts he continued to command until he bled to death. Lampo also fired on Nubian and attacked her with torpedoes, but missed, and, hit by many shells herself, ran aground. Nubian also caught the fleeing Adana and set her on fire.

Then came the Italians’ only success. Mohawk, swerving to avoid a ship that was trying to ram her, was hit by a torpedo aft – the explosion tore off her stern together with the after turret, and the ship came to a stop. A few minutes later a second torpedo struck her on the port side between the boiler rooms. They had been fired from a hand-trained tube by the crew of the burning and sinking Tarigo, directed, according to Italian sources, by Sub-Lieutenant Ettore Bisagno; the ship’s electrical circuits had already been destroyed. Mohawk rolled over to port and settled on the shallow bottom. Forty-one of her crew were killed, 43 according to some accounts; some 160 survivors, including her captain, Commander John Eaton, were picked up by Nubian and Jervis. Janus finished off the wreck, whose keel was sticking out of the water, with gunfire, and then also completed the work on Tarigo, which sank after an explosion amidships.

Shortly after four the three British destroyers made off towards Malta. The low cloud that had grounded the Italian air force the day before now shielded them from air attack, and at 10 a.m. on 16 April they entered harbour with only minor splinter damage.

The tally

According to the British official history, the convoy lost 14,398 GRT of shipping: Sabaudia blew up, Iserlohn and Aegina sank, Adana went down a few hours after the action, and the grounded Arta was destroyed on 26 April by a party from the British submarine HMS Upholder, which boarded the wreck and blew it up. Of the three escorting destroyers, Tarigo and Baleno sank. The Italians refloated Lampo after a salvage operation lasting several months and repaired her; she returned to service in 1942 and was sunk by bombs on 30 April 1943.

The number of Axis dead remains uncertain. The British official history gave 350 German dead, 300 vehicles and 3,500 tons of supplies, but counted only German losses. According to the German historians Jürgen Rohwer and Gerhard Hümmelchen, there were some 3,000 men aboard the ships and destroyers, of whom Italian destroyers, torpedo boats, a hospital ship and rescue seaplanes picked up 1,271 (1,248 according to another tally) over the following days. On this basis some historians, among them Vincent O’Hara, put Axis losses at around 1,700, and some tallies at around 1,800 killed and missing – Germans and Italians, soldiers and sailors. Other studies give much lower figures, from a few hundred upwards. The British lost one destroyer and 41 men.

Pietro de Cristofaro was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valour (Medaglia d’oro al valor militare), Italy’s highest military decoration. Mack, who had fought at Cape Matapan a few weeks earlier, was awarded a bar to his Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for that night. Over the following months the wreck of Mohawk, lying in shallow water, was visited by Italian divers, reportedly disguised as local fishermen, who recovered documents from it. Some Italian authors claim that this material later helped in preparing the attack by Italian human torpedoes on the harbour at Alexandria in December 1941.

Echoes in London and Rome

The victory came at a moment of exceptional tension between the Admiralty and Cunningham. On 14 April Winston Churchill issued a directive in which he declared that cutting the sea route between Italy and Africa was the first duty of the Mediterranean Fleet, for which heavy losses in battleships, cruisers and destroyers must if necessary be accepted. “Every convoy which gets through must be considered a serious naval failure,” he wrote. The Admiralty instructed Cunningham to sacrifice the battleship Barham as a blockship, which was to bombard Tripoli at close range and then scuttle herself in the harbour entrance. Cunningham, convinced that he would be condemning hundreds of sailors to death or captivity with no chance of success, protested and proposed a bombardment by the whole fleet instead. News of the convoy’s destruction arrived in the very middle of this exchange of signals. The First Sea Lord, Admiral Dudley Pound, sent Cunningham a friendly personal message, Churchill a telegram of congratulations, and according to the British official history the note of irritation disappeared from the correspondence. The blockship scheme was shelved, and on the night of 21 April British battleships bombarded Tripoli, to little effect.

The Italian high command put the disaster down to bad luck – the detection of the convoy by British aircraft. The German admiral attached to the Italian navy, Vice Admiral Eberhard Weichold, blamed the Italians for not giving the convoy cruiser cover, although they knew of the British destroyers at Malta. Since February the Germans had also been pressing for the approaches to Tripoli to be mined, which the Italians had put off until 1 May. Supermarina did not, however, suspend the traffic: just four days after the battle two more convoys reached Tripoli without loss.

Its place in the war

The Battle of the Tarigo convoy was the heaviest blow yet dealt by British surface ships to Axis convoys bound for Libya, and it ended the period in which Rommel’s supplies had flowed almost unhindered. It showed what Malta could mean for the war in Africa if only warships, reconnaissance aircraft and fighters to protect them could be maintained there. According to the British official history, in April 1941 the Axis lost ten ships totalling more than 23,000 GRT on the way to Libya, seven of them – almost 18,000 GRT – to surface ships, and in May a record eleven. The loss of the men, vehicles and ammunition of a single convoy did not stop Rommel, but it reminded him that his army hung by the thin thread of seaborne supply.

The success could not be repeated straight away. At the end of April Mack’s flotilla was relieved at Malta by Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten’s 5th Destroyer Flotilla, reinforced by the cruiser Gloucester, but German air raids and mines in the Grand Harbour, followed by the evacuation of the troops from Greece and the Battle of Crete, took every ship the fleet had. From 21 May Malta once again had no surface force. The idea returned in the autumn of 1941: Force K, made up of two cruisers and two destroyers, destroyed the Duisburg convoy in November, and the fuel lost at sea weighed heavily on the Axis forces during the British Crusader offensive. The pattern for these night attacks, guided by air reconnaissance, ever better intelligence and radar, had been set precisely by that night off the Kerkennah Islands.