A convoy clash off Crete

On the evening of 28 June 1940, on the open sea between Greece and Libya, five cruisers of the British Mediterranean Fleet caught three Italian destroyers sailing from Taranto to Tobruk. A chase lasting more than two hours followed in the failing daylight. The destroyer Espero dropped back to shield the other two ships with smoke and with her own guns, and went to the bottom, while Zeffiro and Ostro escaped and delivered their cargo to Libya. It was the first surface action of the war between the Royal Navy and the Italian Regia Marina, and historians call it the Battle of the Espero Convoy.

War chronologies list it as a clash between Axis and Allied convoys south-west of Crete. This description needs two qualifications. The Italian “convoy” consisted solely of three destroyers, which themselves carried the cargo, and on the British side it was not merchant ships that fought but the cruisers covering convoys then bound for Egypt; the convoys themselves took no part in the action. Moreover, the scene of the action lay about a hundred nautical miles north of Tobruk and several hundred kilometres west of Crete. The destroyer sank at 35°18′N, 20°E, roughly south-west of the Peloponnese.

Supplies for Tobruk

When Italy entered the war on 10 June 1940, its navy made no provision for regular escort of shipping to Libya. The chief of naval staff, Admiral Domenico Cavagnari, believed that with the British fleet at Alexandria and the French fleet at Bizerte and Toulon, convoying ships across the Mediterranean would be almost impossible, and Mussolini gave assurances that the war would last three months while Libya had stocks for six. Reality soon put this to the test. In the very first days of the war requests for “essential” supplies began to arrive from Libya, and British armoured patrols on the Egyptian border raised fears in Rome of an offensive against Cyrenaica. The forward port of Tobruk, however, lay dangerously close to Alexandria, so it was decided to send urgent equipment there in warships: fast destroyers and submarines.

Three Turbine-class destroyers of the 2nd Squadron were assigned to one such run: Espero, flagship of the squadron commander, Captain (capitano di vascello) Enrico Baroni, together with Zeffiro and Ostro. They were ships from the late 1920s, with a designed speed of 36 knots. According to the Italian official history, they carried two coastal artillery batteries of the Fascist Militia with ten guns, about 120 tons of ammunition and 162 soldiers. English-language studies describe these units as Blackshirt anti-tank units. The cargo filled the decks, which made it impossible to use the torpedo tubes. The destroyers left Taranto on the evening of 27 June, without air cover or reconnaissance support.

The British operation

As chance would have it, a large part of Admiral Andrew Cunningham’s fleet was at sea in those same days. Since the start of the siege of Malta, ships had been waiting at the island to be brought out to Egypt, among them a liner carrying evacuated civilians. They were formed into two convoys, a fast one and a slow one, and at the same time a third convoy, gathering ships from Turkish and Greek ports, was to set out from the Dardanelles for Egypt. According to the plan, all three were to reach a single point south of Cape Matapan, halfway between Malta and Alexandria, on 30 June. Heading west of Crete was the 7th Cruiser Squadron under Vice-Admiral John Tovey, Cunningham’s second-in-command: the Leander-class cruisers Orion (flagship), Neptune and the Australian HMAS Sydney, and the larger Liverpool and Gloucester, each with twelve 6-inch (152 mm) guns. More distant cover was to be provided by the old battleships Royal Sovereign and Ramillies with the aircraft carrier Eagle. Ahead of the convoys sailed destroyers hunting for submarines. On the evening of 27 June, south-east of Crete, they forced the Italian submarine Console Generale Liuzzi to the surface with depth charges and she went to the bottom (according to Italian sources she was scuttled by her own crew), and on the morning of 29 June they dealt with Uebi Scebeli in the same way.

The chase

At about noon on 28 June the Italian destroyers were spotted by a British Short Sunderland flying boat from Malta, some fifty nautical miles west of the island of Zakynthos. The crew did not report their course, and at first it was thought that the Italians were heading for Greece. After a further report, at about 4.40 p.m., Tovey realised that they were steaming south and turned his squadron to intercept. The cruisers split into two groups to catch the enemy in a pincer. At 6.30 p.m. the destroyers were sighted from Liverpool, and a few minutes later the cruiser opened fire at a range of about 16 kilometres. According to Italian sources the first salvo was fired somewhat later, shortly before 7 p.m.

On paper the destroyers were faster than the cruisers. In reality, weighed down with cargo, no longer young and steaming through a rough sea, they could not break away. They could, however, defend themselves with smokescreens, sharp turns and the gathering dusk. Captain Baroni quickly judged that all three ships could not escape, and decided to sacrifice his own. Espero fell back, laying smokescreens, changing course and firing, while Zeffiro and Ostro made off south-westwards at full speed. The British fired for a long time and inaccurately. According to British accounts Espero was not hit until around the fifteenth salvo; according to Italian accounts the first hit came at 7.30 p.m. The destroyer herself hit Liverpool with a 120 mm shell about a metre above the waterline, doing little damage. She also fired torpedoes, which forced the cruisers to turn away.

At about 8 p.m. Espero, hit many times, came to a stop. Darkness was falling, the British ships had used up most of their ammunition, and the other two destroyers were far away. Tovey broke off the chase and ordered Sydney to finish off the crippled ship. The Italians kept firing to the end. The burning Espero sank at 8.40 p.m. Captain Baroni went down with his ship. Prisoners taken aboard Sydney said he had been killed by an explosion on the bridge; survivors later questioned by an Italian commission claimed that he had survived the explosion and chosen to remain aboard. He was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valour.

The survivors

Sydney lowered boats and rescued survivors for as long as the burning wreck lit up the sea, until fear of Italian submarines made her leave. She picked up 47 men, three of whom died before reaching Alexandria. She left behind one of her boats, with oars, a sail, water and food, lit by a searchlight, so that the others could swim to it. Drifting rafts and boats wandered the sea for many days. After two weeks the Italian submarine Topazio found six men alive on a raft. There had been some 225 sailors and soldiers aboard Espero, and by these figures only a little over fifty survived.

Zeffiro and Ostro reached Benghazi on 29 June and then Tobruk. Two smaller escort vessels, which had left Taranto a few hours after the destroyers with more troops and supplies, were diverted to Tripoli. From the Italian point of view the operation thus ended in partial success: two-thirds of the cargo reached its destination.

Ammunition

For the British the victory proved costly in quite another way. According to British figures, the five cruisers fired about 5,000 6-inch shells to sink a single destroyer. Only about 800 such shells were left in the magazines at Alexandria. Part of the squadron had to return to base, and Cunningham postponed the sailing of the Malta convoys by two weeks until stocks had been replenished. The convoy from the Aegean, attacked from 29 June to 1 July by Italian aircraft from the Dodecanese, reached Alexandria and Port Said without loss on 2 and 3 July.

Both sides drew lessons. The British discovered how ineffective long-range daylight gunfire was against fast, manoeuvrable targets. Italian historians stress that the destroyers would have got away unscathed if their own air force had spotted the cruisers before they came within range. The lack of cooperation between the navy and the air force – which in Italy was an independent service, the navy having no air arm of its own – was to cost the Regia Marina dearly throughout the war.

Place in the war

The Battle of the Espero Convoy was a minor action, but it foreshadowed what the war in the Mediterranean would become: a struggle over the supply lines of the armies in North Africa. According to Italian tallies, Espero was the first of 58 Italian destroyers lost in the war and the first of 174 Axis warships and merchant vessels sunk on the routes to Libya between June 1940 and January 1943. Zeffiro outlived her by only a week: on 5 July she was sunk in Tobruk harbour by Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers.

The postponed Malta convoys sailed in July, and on 9 July Cunningham’s fleet covering them fought the Battle of Calabria (Punta Stilo) against the main Italian fleet, the first battleship action in that sea in this war. Less than a month later, on 19 July, Sydney, together with destroyers, sank the Italian cruiser Bartolomeo Colleoni off Cape Spada on Crete, and in November 1941 she herself was lost with all hands in action with the German armed merchant cruiser Kormoran off the coast of Australia. In December 1940 Tovey took command of the Home Fleet, and in May 1941 he directed the pursuit that ended in the sinking of the battleship Bismarck. The supply of Libya, which in June 1940 travelled aboard three destroyers, remained for the next two and a half years one of the Axis’s weakest points and, for the British operating from Alexandria and Malta, one of their main targets.