The Italian submarine base at Bordeaux

At the beginning of August 1940 the Italian navy, the Regia Marina, was preparing for war on the open ocean. In German-occupied Bordeaux a base for Italian submarines was taking shape under the code name BETASOM: from the letter “B” for Bordeaux, read in Greek as “beta”, and the abbreviation “SOM” for sommergibili, submarines. Chronologies give 1 August as the date of its establishment, but it was a process rather than a single day. The Ministry of the Navy in Rome approved the creation of an Atlantic command on 25 July, the port was chosen in August, and the Italian naval staff decided that the command would begin operating on 1 September. Its commander arrived in Bordeaux at the end of August, and Italian sources give 30 August as the day of the base’s formal opening. The first boat due to be stationed there was by then already in the Atlantic: she had left La Spezia on 29 July.

The road to the Atlantic

The navies of the two countries had discussed Italian submarines taking part in an Atlantic war as early as June 1939 at Friedrichshafen, a few weeks after the signing of the Pact of Steel. It was agreed then that in the event of war the Italians would send boats into the ocean and be given a base in territory controlled by Germany. When Italy declared war on France and Britain, it had more than a hundred submarines, one of the largest submarine fleets in the world, but only about forty were suitable for long ocean patrols.

The first attempts to break out into the Atlantic were made immediately after the outbreak of war. On 13 June 1940 Giuseppe Finzi became the first Italian submarine to pass the Strait of Gibraltar; she patrolled the waters off the Canary Islands and Madeira without result and returned to the Mediterranean in July. Comandante Cappellini, attacked near the strait by British warships, took refuge in Spanish Ceuta and slipped out of port only thanks to the goodwill of the Spanish authorities. Voyages from Italy to the ocean and back were long, and the passage of the strait, watched by the British, was dangerous. The boats needed a base on the Atlantic itself.

The defeat of France provided one. Under the Armistice of Compiègne the whole Atlantic coast fell within the German occupied zone. The bases in Brittany, above all Lorient and Brest, were taken over by the Kriegsmarine. Rear Admiral Angelo Parona, appointed on 25 July to command the Italian submarine forces in the Atlantic, toured the French ports in August with the German Admiral Eberhard Weichold, the Kriegsmarine’s liaison officer in Italy, and chose Bordeaux. The city lay on the Garonne, about a hundred kilometres from the sea up the Gironde estuary. This put it further from British airfields than the Breton ports, and in the Bacalan district it had two harbour basins connected by a lock, as well as dry docks in which boats could be repaired.

A base on the Garonne

The Germans placed at the Italians’ disposal the French passenger ship De Grasse, which served as a depot ship with a radio station and a sickbay, and in October also the German ship Usaramo. The maritime station building was turned into quarters, and warehouses into barracks and offices. Internal security was provided by a company of about 225 men from the San Marco marine infantry regiment, while the Germans handled external security, air defence and the escort of boats in the Gironde and the Bay of Biscay. Italian sources state that initially some 800 service personnel and civilians served at the base. Later, as more boats and crews arrived, the number grew to about 1,600.

The question of command was delicate. It was agreed that the Italian boats would operate under the operational control of the commander of German submarines, Rear Admiral Karl Dönitz. Dönitz assigned them patrol areas and passed on convoy reports, but in matters of tactics, discipline and supply the crews answered to the Italian command in Bordeaux. According to Italian literature, Hitler did not want a joint command under German direction because he feared the Italians would demand in return that the German air force in North Africa be placed under them.

The first patrols

The first boat earmarked for Bordeaux was the Marconi-class Alessandro Malaspina, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Mario Leoni. On the night of 3–4 August she passed the Strait of Gibraltar and headed west of Portugal. On 12 August, north-west of the Azores, she attacked the British tanker British Fame (8,406 GRT), which had become separated from convoy OB 193. The ship went down only after being hit by several torpedoes and shelled with the deck gun. Three seamen were killed, 44 survivors reached the Azores in lifeboats, and the Italians took the master prisoner. It was the first ship sunk by an Italian submarine in the Atlantic.

Other boats followed Malaspina. Barbarigo passed the strait on 14 August and a few days later shelled a British steamer near Madeira, but did not sink it. Dandolo passed through on 16 August, damaged the Dutch ship Hermes on 21 August and on 26 August sank the British steamer Ilvington Court, carrying iron ore. After their patrols the boats made for the new base: Malaspina entered Bordeaux on 4 September, Barbarigo on 8 September and Dandolo on 10 September. At the end of September Dönitz visited the base, and by November 26 Italian boats had gathered at Bordeaux. All of them had passed the Strait of Gibraltar without loss. In all, 32 Italian submarines served in the Atlantic between 1940 and 1943, including several that in 1941 sailed round Africa from the Red Sea as Italian East Africa collapsed.

A difficult partnership

In the autumn of 1940 Dönitz sent the Italians into the North Atlantic, west of the British Isles, where they were to search for convoys for the U-boats. The results were poor. The Italian boats, designed with the Mediterranean in mind, had large, tall conning towers visible from afar and were slow to dive, and their commanders and lookouts were unfamiliar with the stormy waters of the North Atlantic. Italian doctrine favoured submerged attacks rather than the night surface attacks on which “wolf pack” tactics depended. The boats often lost contact with convoys they had found and failed to send reports in time. Dönitz, who had at first counted on their help with reconnaissance, eventually concluded that it would be better for them to operate independently in the central and southern Atlantic. In his memoirs he credited the Italian crews with courage and dash in combat, but faulted them for lacking the tenacity and endurance that war on the ocean demanded.

Parona, whom the Germans rated very highly, was strict with his own commanders, and some Italian admirals considered him too deferential to the Germans. At the end of 1940 changes on the German model began: older commanders were replaced by younger ones, a school was set up in occupied Gdynia (Gotenhafen) where Italian crews learned German tactics, conning towers were cut down and diving times shortened. Results improved, especially in distant waters off West Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean. In 1941, however, about half the boats were recalled to the Mediterranean, and in September of that year Parona was replaced by Captain Romolo Polacchini.

Place in the war

According to Italian tallies, the boats from Bordeaux sank 109 ships totalling some 594,000 GRT between 1940 and 1943 (other calculations give slightly more than 600,000), for the loss of 16 boats. The most successful was Leonardo da Vinci, which sank 17 ships of more than 120,000 GRT, the highest total of any submarine outside the German navy. Her commander, Gianfranco Gazzana-Priaroggia, and Carlo Fecia di Cossato of Tazzoli were awarded the German Knight’s Cross. Salvatore Todaro of Cappellini became famous for rescuing the survivors of ships he had sunk. Enzo Grossi, commander of Barbarigo and later of the base, left a different mark: in 1942 he reported sinking two American battleships, for which Fascist propaganda made him a hero, although he had not hit a single battleship.

In 1943 several boats were converted into transports intended to carry rubber, tin and other raw materials from Japan. After the Italian armistice was announced in September 1943, the Germans took over the base and the remaining boats, and some of the Italian personnel went over to the Italian Social Republic. The huge concrete submarine pen that the Organisation Todt had been building in Bordeaux since 1941 survived the war and today houses a cultural centre.

BETASOM’s significance for the course of the Battle of the Atlantic was limited: the Italians had at most about thirty boats there at any one time, whereas over the whole war Germany sent more than a thousand U-boats into the Atlantic battle. The base was nevertheless the first instance of permanent Axis military co-operation outside the Mediterranean. In the summer and autumn of 1940, when Britain was fighting in the air over its own territory and its fleet was stretched from the English Channel to Alexandria, every additional submarine on the Atlantic routes increased the pressure on the shipping on which its survival depended.