The Second Battle of Sirte

On the afternoon of 22 March 1942, in stormy weather in the central Mediterranean north of the Gulf of Sidra, four British light cruisers and a dozen or more destroyers under Rear Admiral Philip Vian barred the way for nearly five hours to a much stronger Italian force that included the modern battleship Littorio. Sheltering behind smoke screens and threatening torpedo attacks, they kept the Italians away from the four merchant ships of convoy MW 10, bound from Alexandria to Malta. The action went down in history as the Second Battle of Sirte and is regarded as one of the Royal Navy’s most skilful defensive manoeuvres of the war. It did not, however, save the convoy: over the following days German and Italian aircraft sank all four ships, at sea or already in harbour, and only a small part of their cargo reached the island.

Popular chronologies record under 22 March that “the battered convoy reaches Malta after heavy losses inflicted by the Luftwaffe and Italian naval forces”, while the island continues to be heavily bombed against weak RAF resistance. The sequence of events was somewhat different. On 22 March a battle was fought in which no ship of the convoy was hit; the Italian fleet sank none of them. The ships reached the approaches to Malta only on the morning of 23 March, and their losses were inflicted by aircraft, not only German ones, over the following five days.

Malta needs supplies

In the autumn of 1941 Malta had been a dangerous offensive base: in November its ships destroyed the Duisburg convoy, and its aircraft and submarines were sinking a large share of the shipping bound for Libya. That was precisely why the Germans returned to the skies over the island. By the spring of 1942 Malta was approaching the limit of its endurance. Since December 1941 its airfields, harbour and towns had been bombed from Sicily by II Air Corps of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2, and since the January raids the defences had been weakening week by week. The last successful convoy had reached the island in January. The February convoy, MW 9, was broken up by air attack and none of its three ships reached Malta, while the loss of the airfields of western Cyrenaica after Rommel’s counter-offensive made it hard to provide air cover on the route from Alexandria. Fuel, anti-aircraft ammunition and food were running short.

Admiral Andrew Cunningham’s Mediterranean Fleet no longer had any battleships: Barham had been sunk in November, and Queen Elizabeth and Valiant lay damaged at Alexandria after the attack by Italian human torpedoes in December 1941. Convoys could therefore be escorted only by light cruisers and destroyers. The 15th Cruiser Squadron was commanded by Vian, the same officer who in December, at the First Battle of Sirte, had brought the supply ship Breconshire through to Malta past the Italian fleet. On 11 March, returning from an unsuccessful sortie, he lost his flagship, the cruiser Naiad, torpedoed by the German submarine U-565; he transferred his flag to Cleopatra.

Convoy MW 10

On the morning of 20 March four ships left Alexandria: the fast fleet supply ship Breconshire carrying fuel, the British freighters Clan Campbell and Pampas, and the Norwegian Talabot. According to British figures they carried about 26,000 tons of cargo (other tables give nearly 30,000 tons). They were escorted by the Dido-class cruisers Cleopatra, Dido and Euryalus, the old anti-aircraft cruiser Carlisle and destroyers; Hunt-class escort destroyers joined from Tobruk. One of them, Heythrop, was sunk as early as 20 March, torpedoed by U-652. On the morning of 22 March the cruiser Penelope and the destroyer Legion joined from Malta.

Vian had prepared a plan in case he met the Italian fleet. He divided his ships into several groups. On a signal they were to move out towards the enemy, lay smoke screens between him and the convoy and attack with torpedoes from behind them, while Carlisle and the escort destroyers stayed with the merchant ships to beat off air attacks.

The Italians knew about the convoy. On the night of 21–22 March the fleet commander, Admiral Angelo Iachino, sailed from Taranto in the battleship Littorio with destroyers, and Admiral Angelo Parona’s 3rd Division left Messina: the heavy cruisers Gorizia and Trento, the light cruiser Giovanni delle Bande Nere and destroyers. In firepower the Italian superiority was overwhelming: the battleship’s 381 mm guns and the heavy cruisers’ 203 mm guns against the 133 mm and 152 mm guns of the British light cruisers. On the morning of 22 March Italian torpedo bombers and bombers began attacking the convoy.

Battle in the smoke

At 2.27 p.m. Euryalus sighted ships’ smoke to the north. The convoy turned away to the south-west, and Vian’s groups moved out towards the enemy and laid a smoke screen. Parona’s cruisers appeared first. After a brief exchange of fire they withdrew northwards to draw the British under the battleship’s guns, but Vian would not be lured away from the convoy.

The wind was rising to a gale. It blew from the south-east, from the British towards the Italians, and carried the smoke onto the enemy. For Vian it was an ally: the screens lasted a long time and hid the convoy, and the Italian gunners could see a target only when British ships emerged from the smoke. The heavy seas, however, hampered the gunnery of the smaller British ships more than that of the heavy Italian ones.

At about 4.40 p.m. the Italian cruisers returned, this time with Littorio. For two and a half hours the fighting went on, with the British cruisers and destroyers dashing out of the smoke, firing a few salvoes and ducking back in when the shells fell too close. Iachino tried to work round the screen to the west, between the convoy and Malta, but each time he ran into smoke and the threat of torpedoes. At 4.44 p.m. a shell hit Cleopatra’s bridge, killing sixteen men; according to the British it was a 152 mm shell from Bande Nere, according to Iachino one from Littorio’s secondary armament. The destroyer Havock, damaged by a near miss from a heavy shell, lost eight men and was sent back to the convoy.

After 6.30 p.m., when the Italian ships came closest to the convoy, Vian threw his destroyers into the attack. They fired torpedoes from about 5,000 yards (4.5 km). None hit, but the Italians turned away. The destroyer Kingston was hit by a shell from the battleship that killed fifteen men and temporarily disabled her; Lively was damaged by splinters. Littorio took a hit from a 120 mm shell that did no damage; a fire in her seaplane, set alight by the blast of her own guns, was taken by the British for a torpedo hit. At about 7 p.m., at dusk, Iachino broke off the action and turned north. He had no radar, and the memory of the night defeat at Matapan in March 1941 made the Italian command avoid fighting in the dark.

Air attacks on the convoy continued throughout. The ships manoeuvred so skilfully and the anti-aircraft fire was so dense that none was hit, although the escort used up a large part of its ammunition in the process. According to the figures of both sides, the Italians fired about 1,500 shells in the battle and the British about 2,800, as well as 38 torpedoes. According to most sources, only the British suffered casualties from enemy fire in the battle.

The destruction of the convoy

The battle, however, had a price that could not be recovered. The convoy, which had turned south to avoid the Italians, lost several hours. Instead of entering harbour at night, it reached Malta only in daylight, within range of the bombers from Sicily. The main part of Vian’s escort, low on fuel and ammunition, returned to Alexandria. The merchant ships were dispersed to make for the island by different routes, with Carlisle, Penelope, Legion and the damaged destroyers.

On 23 March Clan Campbell was sunk by bombs about 20 nautical miles from Malta. Breconshire, disabled by a hit a few miles from the harbour entrance, dropped anchor; the gale kept parting the tow lines, and the destroyer Southwold, which was trying to tow her, struck a mine and sank. On 25 March tugs brought the supply ship into Marsaxlokk bay. Talabot and Pampas, which had been struck by two bombs that failed to explode, entered the Grand Harbour on 23 March.

Unloading went very slowly: there were too few men and too little equipment, and the work was not organised to continue round the clock, for which the island’s authorities were later criticised. On 24 and 25 March the raids missed the ships, but on 26 March German dive bombers hit all three. Talabot and Pampas burned and settled in the harbour; Talabot, which was carrying ammunition, was reportedly scuttled to prevent her from blowing up. Breconshire capsized on 27 March in Marsaxlokk bay; some of her fuel was later pumped out through a hole in her hull. The destroyer Legion was also sunk in the harbour. According to British figures, of about 26,000 tons of cargo fewer than 5,000 were unloaded.

The Italians also suffered losses, though not from enemy fire. On the way back to base on 23 March the gale sank the destroyers Scirocco and Lanciere, with a large part of their crews.

On Malta itself the raids grew even heavier. From 20 March Kesselring struck above all at the airfields, while the defence had only a dozen or so Hurricanes and a handful of Spitfires sent at the beginning of March. The fighters could not protect the ships in harbour, and those that took off were lost in combat with the more numerous Messerschmitts.

Assessment

In Britain the battle was received as a victory. Cunningham is said to have called it one of the most brilliant actions of the war at sea, Winston Churchill sent Vian his congratulations, and the King knighted him. British historians stress that a weaker force, without aircraft or battleships, beat off a battleship and two heavy cruisers without losing a single ship in the battle. Italian historians and some Western ones speak of a partial Italian success: Iachino inflicted losses on the enemy without losing anything to his fire, and by forcing the convoy to delay he delivered it into the hands of the air force. He is criticised, however, as at the First Battle of Sirte and at Matapan, for excessive caution: with superior firepower he could have risked pushing through the smoke towards the merchant ships.

Strategically the operation was a British defeat. Malta, which needed tens of thousands of tons of supplies a month, received a few thousand. The battle is sometimes credited with causing the Axis powers to abandon a landing on Malta, but this is inaccurate: the decision to postpone Operation Herkules was taken only in the summer of 1942, after Rommel’s victories.

Place in the war

The destruction of convoy MW 10 opened the hardest period of the siege of Malta. In April the Luftwaffe dropped more bombs on the island than ever before; the ships damaged in the Grand Harbour, among them Penelope, Kingston and Havock, continued to be bombed, and Havock ran aground and was wrecked off the Tunisian coast in April on her way to Gibraltar. The submarines left the island, and supplies for Rommel’s army, halted at Gazala, reached Libya almost without loss.

The next attempt to supply the island came only in June. The convoy from Alexandria under Vian’s cover (Operation Vigorous) turned back in the face of Iachino’s fleet, and of the convoy from Gibraltar (Harpoon) two ships reached Malta. Only Operation Pedestal in August, bought at the cost of heavy losses, and then the recapture of the airfields in Libya after El Alamein broke the blockade. The Second Battle of Sirte remained proof that the Royal Navy could outwit a stronger Italian fleet, and at the same time a warning that in the central Mediterranean in 1942 the fate of convoys was decided above all by command of the air.