The human torpedo attack on Alexandria

At about six in the morning on 19 December 1941, in the naval harbour of Alexandria, three charges planted during the night by six Italian sailors of the Decima Flottiglia MAS (10th MAS Flotilla) went off one after another. First came the charge under the tanker Sagona, which also badly damaged the destroyer Jervis lying alongside her. A quarter of an hour or so later an explosion tore open the bottom of the battleship Valiant, and a few minutes after that the bottom of the Mediterranean Fleet’s flagship, the battleship Queen Elizabeth, with Admiral Andrew Cunningham on board. Both battleships settled on the bottom of the shallow harbour basin. Eight British sailors were killed, and the Royal Navy lost for many months the last two battleships it had in the eastern Mediterranean.

The attack at Alexandria closed the worst week in the history of the Mediterranean Fleet. A few days earlier a German submarine had sunk the cruiser Galatea off Alexandria, and on the same night that the Italians were entering the harbour, Force K from Malta ran into a minefield off Tripoli.

The sinking of the Galatea

The Arethusa-class light cruiser Galatea had taken part in the hunt for the Bismarck in May 1941, and in the summer she passed through the Red Sea into the Mediterranean and joined the cruiser squadron at Alexandria, commanded from the autumn by Rear Admiral Philip Vian. On 13–14 December Vian’s squadron put to sea to intercept an Italian convoy bound for Libya; the Italians turned back, and their battleship Vittorio Veneto was torpedoed on the way home by the British submarine Urge. The cruisers returned to Alexandria without a fight.

Many chronologies give 14 December as the date of the Galatea’s sinking. The attack took place around midnight on 14–15 December, which is why some sources, among them the German lists of U-boat successes, date it to 15 December. About 30 nautical miles west of Alexandria, Oberleutnant zur See Ottokar Paulssen’s U-557 fired torpedoes at the cruisers sailing in line. Three hit the Galatea, which capsized and sank within minutes. According to British figures 470 men were killed, among them her commanding officer, Captain Edward Sim; the destroyers Griffin and Hotspur rescued more than a hundred survivors. U-557 herself survived her success by less than two days: on 16 December, west of Crete, she was rammed by mistake by the Italian torpedo boat Orione, which took her for a British vessel. None of her crew survived.

The often repeated claim that the loss of the Galatea “began a series of defeats” for the Allies at sea needs correcting. The series had already been going on for a month: on 13 November U-81 torpedoed the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, and on 25 November U-331 sank the battleship Barham. The Galatea was the third major Royal Navy warship sunk in the Mediterranean by German submarines in five weeks.

The men and weapons of the Decima MAS

The Italian navy, the Regia Marina, had long dreamed of an attack on Alexandria. Its special unit, known from March 1941 as the Decima Flottiglia MAS, already had a success behind it in Suda Bay on Crete, where explosive motor boats had disabled the cruiser York, but also a disaster at Malta, where in July an attack on the Grand Harbour had been smashed by British artillery. The first attempts to send human torpedoes against Alexandria in 1940 had ended with the sinking of the submarines carrying them, the Iride and the Gondar. Only in September 1941 did Italian frogmen sink one ship and damage two others in the roadstead at Gibraltar.

The weapon was the Maiale – the “pig”, as the slow-running torpedo, the SLC (siluro a lenta corsa), was jokingly called. It was in fact a small, electrically driven underwater vehicle some seven metres long, steered by two frogmen in oxygen breathing sets who sat astride it. Its nose was a detachable warhead containing about 300 kg of explosive, with a time fuse. The crew were to reach the target unseen, pass under the anti-torpedo nets, attach the warhead beneath the ship’s hull and swim away.

The mother ship was the submarine Scirè under Lieutenant Commander Junio Valerio Borghese, adapted to carry three human torpedoes in watertight containers on her deck. She left La Spezia on 3 December and at Leros in the Dodecanese took on board six men who had flown there from Italy. The crews were: Lieutenant Luigi Durand de la Penne and Petty Officer Emilio Bianchi (SLC No. 221, target: Valiant); Engineer Captain Antonio Marceglia and Seaman Spartaco Schergat (No. 223, target: Queen Elizabeth); and Captain Vincenzo Martellotta of the naval weapons branch and Petty Officer Mario Marino (No. 222), who were to attack an aircraft carrier or, if none was in harbour, a tanker. The attack was planned for the night of 17–18 December, but a storm delayed it by a day. In Italian documents the operation was designated G.A. 3.

Night in the harbour

The British were expecting something. According to British accounts, Italian signals read by intelligence pointed to an interest in Alexandria, and on 18 December Cunningham’s staff warned the ships that in calm seas an attack by aircraft, explosive boats or human torpedoes was to be expected. The battleships were surrounded by nets, and patrol boats dropped small depth charges in the harbour.

On the evening of 18 December the Scirè surfaced not far from the harbour entrance and released the human torpedoes. The Italians were lucky: as they approached the boom, the British opened it to let in destroyers returning from sea, and the three crews slipped inside along with them.

De la Penne’s crew had the most trouble. Bianchi lost consciousness when his breathing apparatus failed and came up to the surface, where he clung to the battleship’s mooring buoy. De la Penne, alone, dragged his pig along the bottom under the Valiant’s hull, but could not attach it and left the charge, with its fuse set, on the seabed a few metres beneath the ship. He surfaced exhausted, was spotted and was taken prisoner together with Bianchi. Both were put in a compartment deep inside the battleship, near where the charge might be lying, in the hope that fear would make them talk. According to Italian and British accounts, shortly before the explosion – sources speak of a quarter of an hour or half an hour – de la Penne asked to see the ship’s captain, Captain Charles Morgan, and warned him that the ship would soon blow up, without saying where the charge was. He was taken back below; the explosion wounded him slightly, but both Italians survived.

Marceglia and Schergat carried out their attack by the book: they attached the warhead beneath the Queen Elizabeth’s keel, in the area of the boiler rooms, and swam ashore. Martellotta, who was also suffering from breathing oxygen, had to travel on the surface; finding no aircraft carrier, he laid his charge under the tanker Sagona. The four men who reached land were to escape to Rosetta and rendezvous with the submarine Zaffiro. The escape plan, prepared by Italian military intelligence, proved useless – among other things the Italians had been given banknotes that had already been withdrawn from circulation in Egypt – and all of them were caught within two days.

At about 5.47 a.m. the explosion under the Sagona damaged the tanker and the destroyer Jervis; at about 6.05 the charge under the Valiant went off, and a few minutes later the one under the Queen Elizabeth. The charge under the Valiant blew a hole about 18 by 9 metres in her bottom near A turret and flooded her magazines. The Queen Elizabeth was far more seriously damaged: water flooded her boiler rooms and compartments up to the main deck. Both ships settled on the bottom, but on an even keel.

Force K in the minefield

That same night, several hundred miles to the west, a second tragedy unfolded. On 17 December Vian, escorting the supply ship Breconshire from Alexandria to Malta, ran into the Italian fleet of Admiral Angelo Iachino, which was covering a large convoy to Libya; the brief clash at dusk went down in history as the First Battle of Sirte. On the evening of 18 December the cruisers Neptune, Aurora and Penelope with four destroyers left Malta to intercept Italian ships bound for Tripoli.

At about one in the morning on 19 December, a dozen or so miles off Tripoli, the force ran into a minefield laid by Italian cruisers in June 1941. The Neptune, leading the line, struck two mines and, while going astern, a third, which blew off her propellers. The Aurora was badly damaged and the Penelope less so. The destroyer Kandahar, which went to the Neptune’s aid, herself struck a mine and lost her stern. The crippled cruiser warned the other ships to keep clear; towards morning she struck a fourth mine and capsized. Of her crew of about 765 men, among them some 150 New Zealanders, one man survived: Norman Walton, a seaman whose raft was found five days later by an Italian torpedo boat. According to various tallies, 764–766 men were killed. The Kandahar drifted for a day; on the morning of 20 December the destroyer Jaguar took off the survivors and sank her with a torpedo.

Force K never recovered from that night: of the cruisers at Malta only the Penelope remained, and in the following months she was bombed in harbour.

A fleet without battleships

The consequences of the attack at Alexandria were enormous. After the loss of the Barham, the Queen Elizabeth and the Valiant had been Cunningham’s only battleships; now his fleet consisted of a few light cruisers and destroyers. At that time, according to some studies, the Italians had four battleships in service. The Valiant entered the floating dock at Alexandria on 21 December and in the spring of 1942 sailed for repairs to Durban, which lasted until July. The Queen Elizabeth, after makeshift repairs, sailed in the summer of 1942 to the dockyard at Norfolk in the United States and returned to service only in mid-1943, after almost a year and a half.

The British decided to conceal the effects of the attack, as they had earlier concealed the loss of the Barham. Because the battleships had settled on an even keel, from the air they looked intact. Cunningham remained on board the Queen Elizabeth, and the ships held daily colours ceremonies and guard mountings with a band. For a long time the Italians did not know how much they had achieved. Cunningham reported the disaster to the First Sea Lord, Admiral Dudley Pound, and admitted in his memoirs that a simple means of defence – keeping the propellers turning slowly, which drove frogmen away – could have been used much earlier. In April 1942, at a secret session of the House of Commons, Winston Churchill admitted that six Italians with equipment of a peculiar appearance had put two British battleships out of action.

All six were taken prisoner. After Italy’s surrender in September 1943 most of them returned home and fought on the Allied side in the special units of the navy of the Kingdom of Italy. In March 1945 at Taranto Luigi Durand de la Penne was awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valour for the attack on Alexandria; according to Italian accounts, the medal was pinned on him by Charles Morgan, the former captain of the Valiant.

Place in the war

December 1941 was the Royal Navy’s worst month of the war. In the Far East Japanese aircraft sank the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse, while in the Mediterranean, in less than five weeks, the British lost an aircraft carrier, a battleship and two cruisers, and two more battleships were put out of action. Historians compare the result of the attack on Alexandria with the British attack on Taranto in November 1940: six men on three craft achieved what the Italian fleet had failed to achieve in a year and a half of fighting.

Italy exploited this moment of advantage only in part. Its fleet, short of fuel and cautiously commanded, did not come out for a decisive battle, but from then on it covered the convoys to Libya more freely, and in January 1942 large shipments reached Tripoli. Together with the Luftwaffe’s return to Sicily and the raids on Malta, this changed the balance of forces on the routes to Africa: Rommel, who in December had been falling back from Gazala, was able to go over to the counter-offensive in January 1942. The Royal Navy regained its strength in the Mediterranean only in the second half of 1942, and the attack on Alexandria remained the greatest success of the Decima MAS and one of the most effective sabotage attacks in the history of naval warfare.