The French Navy against Italy

Before dawn on 14 June 1940 – the same day the Germans entered Paris – French heavy cruisers opened fire on the Ligurian coast. A squadron from Toulon shelled the oil tanks at Vado Ligure, the works at Savona and the western suburbs of Genoa. This was Operation Vado, the first attack from the sea on an Italian city in this war, carried out a mere four days after Italy declared war on France and Britain. In the days that followed the French Navy sank an Italian submarine off Oran, and on 21 June a French battleship, together with British warships, bombarded the Libyan port of Bardia. These few actions were the whole of France’s naval contribution to the war with Italy before the armistice ended the fighting.

A fleet without a war

The French Navy, the Marine nationale, was in 1940 the strongest fleet in Europe after the British. Its commander, Admiral of the Fleet François Darlan, had for years been preparing it for precisely this war with Italy. He believed that control of the western Mediterranean was a condition of France’s survival, since it was across this sea that troops came from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. Pre-war plans assumed that once Italy entered the war the French fleet would attack targets on the coasts of the Gulf of Genoa, the Tyrrhenian Sea and southern Italy, while the British would send their Mediterranean Fleet towards Malta to draw the Italian Navy into battle. On paper the Allied superiority was overwhelming, especially in capital ships.

Yet when Benito Mussolini declared war on 10 June, the French Army had already been shattered in the north and the government was preparing to leave Paris. No great naval offensive was undertaken. Four French cruisers with destroyers patrolled the Aegean, submarines put to sea, and the British at Alexandria confined themselves to sweeps along the African coast. On 12 June the Italian submarine Dandolo fired torpedoes without result at French light cruisers that had sailed in response to a false report of German warships in the Mediterranean. On the night of 11–12 June British bombers flew over Turin and Genoa, and the next night the Italian air force attacked Toulon, Bizerte and airfields on Corsica. The French decided to reply from the sea.

Operation Vado

On the evening of 13 June Vice-Admiral Émile Duplat’s 3rd Squadron sailed from Toulon: four heavy cruisers and eleven large destroyers (contre-torpilleurs). The first group, with the flagship Algérie and Foch, was to shell Vado and Savona. The second, with Colbert and Dupleix – ships of the Suffren class – and the large destroyers Albatros and Vautour, headed for the stretch of coast between Arenzano and Sestri Ponente near Genoa. Three large destroyers and submarines screened the whole force from seaward. That same night French bombers attacked Italian airfields and the tanks at Vado, and British Swordfish torpedo bombers from the airfield at Hyères attacked Genoa.

At about 4.30 a.m. on 14 June Algérie opened fire at a range of some 15 kilometres. The oil tanks at Vado went up in flames, and the smoke obscured the target so much that further firing proved difficult. Foch shelled the steelworks at Savona, while Colbert and Dupleix fired on the gasworks and factories at Sestri Ponente. Italian coastal batteries replied, as did two armed pontoons in Genoa harbour and an armoured train near Albisola. The only effective shot came from the Mameli battery at Pegli: a 152 mm shell pierced the boiler room of the large destroyer Albatros, killing twelve sailors. The large destroyer Aigle silenced the battery on Capo Vado.

The Italian Navy had no major warships in the area, having moved its fleet to the ports of southern Italy at the start of the war. So the French were attacked by whatever vessels happened to be on the spot. The old torpedo boat Calatafimi under Lieutenant Giuseppe Brignole, escorting a minelayer, approached the cruiser group in the morning mist and fired torpedoes at Colbert and Dupleix, but missed. Four motor torpedo boats (PL) of the 13th MAS Flotilla attacked Algérie and Foch near Bergeggi; MAS 539 closed to about 1,800 metres, but all the torpedoes missed and two of the boats were damaged by splinters. The crew of Calatafimi were convinced that the flash of the hit on Albatros was the explosion of their own torpedo, and Italian propaganda presented the French withdrawal as the result of a counter-attack. In reality the French squadron was finishing its bombardment as planned and returned to Toulon before noon. Brignole was awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valour.

The material damage was slight. The French fired about 1,500 shells and the Italians about 300, and the French themselves later admitted that the results of the shore bombardment had been “practically nil”. According to Italian figures, six people were killed in Savona and 22 wounded. The lesson mattered more: a French squadron had approached the Italian coast and withdrawn unnoticed by the air force, and Italian aircraft took off only several hours after the attack. A bombardment on the very day Paris fell humiliated the dictator, who demanded swift “small offensive operations” from the army on the Alpine frontier, which hastened preparations for the Italian attack on France.

La Curieuse and Provana

Italy entered the war with a large submarine fleet, and from 10 June some of its boats lay in wait on the routes between France and North Africa. On the afternoon of 16 June, about 80 nautical miles from Oran, the Marcello-class submarine Andrea Provana attacked a convoy of five ships bound for Marseilles, escorted by the sloops Commandant Bory and La Curieuse. Two torpedoes missed, one of them passing less than 200 metres from La Curieuse. The sloop followed the torpedo tracks and plastered the spot from which they had been fired with depth charges. The damaged submarine surfaced only a few hundred metres from the French. The commander of La Curieuse judged that it was too close for gunfire and rammed it just as the crew were beginning to come up on deck. Provana broke in two and sank with all hands – 62 men according to Italian sources. The badly damaged sloop returned to Oran. Some lists give the name as Provano; the boat was called Andrea Provana, and some studies, including English-language ones, date its sinking to 17 June. Detailed French and Italian accounts point to the afternoon of 16 June. It was the only Italian submarine sunk by the French Navy.

Bardia and the last air raids

In the eastern Mediterranean, a French squadron under Vice-Admiral René-Émile Godfroy, with the battleship Lorraine, had been based at Alexandria since May, operating together with Admiral Andrew Cunningham’s Mediterranean Fleet. On the night of 20–21 June Lorraine, the British light cruisers Orion and Neptune, the Australian cruiser Sydney and several destroyers approached Bardia in Italian Libya, not far from the Egyptian border. On the morning of 21 June the ships shelled the port and a military camp for about twenty minutes. The damage was slight, and Sydney’s seaplane, spotting for the guns, was mistakenly fired on by British fighters. It was the last joint operation of the British and French fleets before France capitulated.

Raids by French naval aviation on Taranto and Livorno are sometimes mentioned as well. No reliable source confirms a raid on Taranto in those days. Livorno was indeed a target: on the night of 15–16 June the naval aviation’s four-engined Farman Jules Verne – the same aircraft that a week earlier had become the first Allied aeroplane to bomb Berlin – appeared over the city, but its bombs caused only small fires outside the town. On the night of 16–17 June another naval Farman from Oran bombed the Solvay works at Rosignano. On 22 June, two days before the armistice with Italy, French bombers again attacked Livorno, hitting the harbour station, a hotel and a bathing establishment; according to some studies these were naval aircraft, according to the Italian aviation historian Giorgio Bonacina, LeO 451 bombers of the Armée de l’Air from Istres. In the same days French aircraft from North Africa bombed Cagliari, Trapani and Palermo.

The fleet at the armistice

These actions took place in the shadow of defeat on land. On the evening of 16 June Paul Reynaud’s government resigned, and the new Prime Minister, Marshal Philippe Pétain, asked the Germans for armistice terms. Darlan, who at the beginning of June had still been threatening that in the event of capitulation he would lead the fleet into battle under the British flag, joined Pétain’s government as Minister of Marine and supported the request for an armistice, on condition that the fleet did not fall into German hands. He gave the British his word – to Winston Churchill at Briare on 12 June and to the First Sea Lord, Dudley Pound, at Bordeaux on 18 June – that no French warship would be handed over to the Germans. As the Germans approached the Atlantic ports, he ordered the ships there to sail for Africa; smaller vessels from Brittany and the Channel took refuge in British ports, and the unfinished battleships Richelieu and Jean Bart escaped to Dakar and Casablanca.

The French fleet ended the campaign virtually untouched, dispersed between Toulon, Mers-el-Kébir, Alexandria, Dakar, Casablanca and British ports. The armistice with Germany of 22 June provided for its disarmament under German and Italian supervision, and in it the Germans declared that they had no intention of using it for their own purposes. London did not believe these assurances. On 3 July 1940 the Royal Navy demanded that the French squadron at Mers-el-Kébir join the British, sail away or scuttle itself, and when it refused, opened fire; nearly 1,300 French sailors were killed. At Alexandria Cunningham and Godfroy reached a peaceful agreement and the French ships were immobilised there. From that day the fleet that in June had bombarded the Italian coast became a suspect neutral for Britain, and for Darlan and the Vichy government a bargaining chip in their dealings with both sides. The main forces of the Marine nationale scuttled themselves at Toulon on 27 November 1942, when the Germans tried to seize them.

Significance

Operation Vado and the clashes of the second half of June had no effect on the outcome of the campaign, which was decided in northern France. They did, however, show how poorly prepared Italy was for war on its own coast: the lack of reconnaissance, the delayed reaction of the air force and the absence of co-operation between navy and air force would recur in the years that followed, when it was the Royal Navy that was shelling and bombing Italian ports. At the same time the French fleet, withdrawn from the war at full strength after the armistice, became one of the most important problems of the war in the Mediterranean, and the balance of power in that sea in the second half of 1940 depended to a large extent on its fate – at a time when Malta was already being bombed by the Italian air force.