The raid on Suda Bay

At dawn on 26 March 1941, a few minutes after five o’clock, in Suda Bay on the north-west coast of Crete, two small Italian motorboats with explosive charges in their bows struck the side of the British heavy cruiser HMS York as she lay at anchor. The explosion flooded her boiler rooms and forward engine room; the ship lost propulsion and power, and to stop her sinking she was towed onto a shoal. A third motorboat hit the Norwegian tanker Pericles, chartered by the Royal Navy. It was the first successful operation by the Italian navy’s assault units, which for a few days had been operating under the name of the Decima Flottiglia MAS (10th MAS Flotilla). All six pilots survived and were taken prisoner by the British.

Italian accounts usually date the operation to 25 March, because that evening the ships put the motorboats into the sea and the whole operation ran through the night of 25–26 March. The attack itself, however, took place on the morning of 26 March. Nor are the Italian reports, repeated in many chronologies, that a cruiser, two tankers and a merchant ship were sunk in the bay borne out. The York did not go down in deep water: she was beached and never put to sea again. The Pericles settled on the bottom, but she sank only three weeks later, on her way to Alexandria. The remaining motorboats hit no ship at all.

A forward base on Crete

The British had occupied Suda Bay with the Greek government’s consent at the beginning of November 1940, immediately after the Italian invasion of Greece, when a battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment arrived on Crete, followed by boom nets, anti-aircraft guns and stores. The deep, sheltered bay, several miles long, was to serve as a forward fuelling base for Admiral Andrew Cunningham’s Mediterranean Fleet, several hundred miles closer to the Italian shipping routes and to the coasts of Greece than Alexandria. Ships covering the convoys carrying aid to Greece, or the aircraft carrier whose planes struck Taranto, could refuel on Crete instead of returning to Egypt.

In March 1941 the base became more important still. From the beginning of the month convoys from Egypt had been carrying to Greece the British, Australian and New Zealand expeditionary force, while Cunningham’s cruisers screened them on the Aegean side. Lying at Suda at that time were, among others, the light cruiser Gloucester, the anti-aircraft cruiser Coventry, the destroyer Hasty and several tankers, including the Norwegian Pericles (8,324 GRT), which had been refuelling British warships in the bay since 15 March. The York – the same ship that in October 1940 had finished off the Italian destroyer Artigliere – returned to Suda on the afternoon of 25 March after escorting a convoy to Malta. She was commanded by Captain Reginald Portal, brother of the Chief of the Air Staff, Charles Portal.

The bay was closed by three lines of boom nets, but beyond that its seaward defences were modest.

The Decima Flottiglia MAS and its boats

The Italian navy, the Regia Marina, had a tradition in this field dating back to the First World War, when its MAS torpedo boats and swimmers had sunk Austro-Hungarian battleships. In 1935–1936, during the crisis in relations with Britain caused by the war in Ethiopia, the officers Teseo Tesei and Elios Toschi built the first human torpedo at La Spezia, while small explosive boats were being developed in parallel. The first attempts to use them in 1940, against Alexandria and Gibraltar, failed.

In January 1941 command of the unit, which until then had operated as part of the 1st MAS Flotilla, was taken over by Commander Vittorio Moccagatta, who on 15 March reorganised it as the Decima Flottiglia MAS. It had a surface division, with the explosive boats, and an underwater division, with the human torpedoes and frogmen, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Junio Valerio Borghese.

The weapons used at Crete were MTM explosive motorboats (PL), which the Italians called barchini, “little boats”. Each was about six metres long, had a wooden hull, made around 30 knots and carried some 300 kg of explosive in the bow. The propeller could be raised so that the boat could slide over a boom net. The pilot steered the boat towards its target, opened up to full speed, locked the rudder and, some 80–90 metres from the target, jumped into the water, releasing the seat back, which served him as a raft. On impact the bow section with the charge broke away, sank and exploded below the target’s waterline.

The motorboats were carried close to their targets by surface ships. Two old Sella-class destroyers, Francesco Crispi and Quintino Sella, had been converted for the task and fitted with electric cranes and cradles for the boats. They were based on the island of Astypalaia (Stampalia in Italian) in the Italian Dodecanese, some six and a half hours’ steaming from Crete. Two earlier expeditions against Suda, in January and February 1941, had been called off after the ships had already put to sea.

The night of 25–26 March

After aerial photographs taken on 24 March showed a cruiser, destroyers and a dozen or so merchant ships in the bay, the Crispi and the Sella sailed from Astypalaia on the evening of 25 March, each carrying three motorboats. At about 11.30 p.m. they reached a position some ten nautical miles from the entrance to the bay, near the Akrotiri peninsula, lowered the boats into the water and turned back. The six motorboats were led by Lieutenant Luigi Faggioni. The others were piloted by Sub-Lieutenant Angelo Cabrini, the petty officer mechanics Alessio De Vito, Tullio Tedeschi and Lino Beccati, and the gunner sergeant Emilio Barberi.

The boats got past the first two boom nets during the night, and at about 4.30 a.m. they slipped past the third, through a narrow gap between the last buoy and the shore, covering part of the distance under oars so as not to give themselves away with the noise of their engines. Searchlights swept the water in the bay, and the pilots at first took the movement of the anti-aircraft cruiser Coventry, which had been refuelling from the Pericles during the night, as a sign that they had been detected. Faggioni waited until daylight would allow him to identify the ships at the anchorage. He sent two boats against the York, two against the merchant ships, and kept two, including his own, in reserve.

At about 5.10 a.m. Cabrini and Tedeschi made for the cruiser and jumped from their boats a few dozen metres short of the target. The officer of the watch on the York heard the roar of an engine, took it for an aircraft and had no time to raise the alarm. Both motorboats exploded against the starboard side amidships. The blast tore a hole some 7.5 metres long in the plating and flooded both boiler rooms and the forward engine room. The ship listed to starboard and settled by the stern. Two sailors were killed and several wounded. The destroyer Hasty towed the cruiser onto a shoal, where she settled in about eight metres of water.

A few minutes later Barberi’s boat hit the Pericles, which had just finished refuelling the Coventry. The explosion ripped open her cargo tanks; the ship took a heavy list to starboard and settled on the bottom of the bay. Her crew survived. Faggioni, seeing the Coventry gathering speed, tried to attack her, but his boat, incapable of hitting a moving target, smashed against the quay. The remaining motorboats – because of mechanical faults or the exhaustion of their pilots, who had spent many hours freezing in their open boats – hit nothing. One of them ran ashore undamaged.

Prisoners, a wreck and a dispute over credit

The six Italians were taken prisoner, and the intact motorboat was examined by British specialists. On their return from captivity all the pilots were awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valour, Italy’s highest military decoration.

From then on the beached York served as an anti-aircraft battery. Repairs were impossible: there was no dock at Suda, and German Junkers Ju 88 bombers were attacking the bay ever more often. On 18 May further bombs wrecked the ship for good, and on 22 May, the third day of the Battle of Crete, her crew blew up her main armament with demolition charges and abandoned the wreck. The Luftwaffe also claimed the credit for destroying the York, but the ship’s papers, which the Italians found on the wreck after the capture of Crete, and the British records show that the cruiser had already been lost after the attack of 26 March. In 1952 the wreck was raised by an Italian salvage firm and towed to Bari.

Most of the fuel was pumped out of the Pericles into another tanker. On 11 April she sailed under escort for Egypt, but on 14 April, in a storm some 35 nautical miles from Alexandria, she broke in two. Her crew was rescued, and both halves were sunk by gunfire.

Its place in the war

The raid on Suda Bay was a rare success for the Italians at a time when they were suffering almost nothing but defeats at sea, from Taranto to the sinking of the cruiser Armando Diaz off the coast of Tunisia. Six men and some cheap boats had put out of the war a heavy cruiser – at the time the only ship of the Mediterranean Fleet armed with 8-inch (203 mm) guns. The Royal Navy’s official historian, Stephen Roskill, judged the loss of the York to be the inevitable consequence of using a base that could not be properly defended. Because Suda’s defences were weak, the bay remained no more than a forward fuelling station, and Cunningham’s fleet still had to rely on Alexandria, several hundred miles away.

The very next evening Cunningham sailed from Alexandria to meet the Italian fleet, which had set out against the convoy routes to Greece, and on 28 March he fought the Battle of Cape Matapan without the York. The March success also proved to be the greatest achievement of the Italian explosive motorboats. The attack on the harbour of Valletta in Malta on 26 July 1941 ended in disaster, in which Moccagatta and Tesei were killed. The flotilla scored its greatest success on the night of 18–19 December 1941, when human-torpedo crews badly damaged the battleships HMS Valiant and HMS Queen Elizabeth in Alexandria harbour, depriving Cunningham of the core of his fleet for many months. The attack in Suda Bay was the first proof that such strikes were possible, and from then on the Royal Navy had to protect its harbours not only against aircraft and submarines but also against small boats and frogmen.