The sinking of the cruiser Elli

At 8.25 a.m. on 15 August 1940, in the roadstead of the harbour on the island of Tinos in the Cyclades, a torpedo struck the old Greek cruiser Elli. The ship lay at anchor, dressed overall with flags, for she had come for the island’s greatest feast: the Dormition of the Mother of God, celebrated in the Orthodox Church on the same day as the Catholic Assumption. On the quayside and around the shrine of Panagia Evangelistria, which houses a miraculous icon of the Virgin venerated throughout Greece, crowds of pilgrims had gathered (Greek accounts speak of about ten thousand people) to await the procession. The explosion tore open the hull in the area of the boiler room and the fuel tanks, and fire broke out on board. Two more torpedoes, aimed at the passenger ships Elsi and Esperos lying in the harbour, missed and exploded against the mole, causing panic ashore. At about 9.45 a.m. Elli sank. According to the Greek navy, nine petty officers and seamen were killed and 24 members of the crew wounded; some Italian studies give fewer dead and several missing.

Greece was a neutral country. The torpedoes had been fired by the Italian submarine Delfino. Yet nobody said so officially.

The ship and the feast

Elli was a ship with a past. She had been built in 1910–1913 by the New York Shipbuilding yard in America for China as the training cruiser Fei Hong, but after the revolution in China the order was cancelled, and in 1914 Greece bought the ship. She was named in memory of the victory off Cape Elli over the Turkish fleet in December 1912. She served in the First World War and in the war with Turkey, and in the 1920s underwent a thorough reconstruction in France, after which she could carry more than a hundred mines. She displaced about 2,100 tons and had a crew of 232. By 1940 she was obsolete, but she still served as a ceremonial ship: every year the navy sent her to Tinos to grace the celebrations of 15 August.

Delfino was a medium-sized submarine of the Squalo class, built at Monfalcone in 1931. Since Italy’s entry into the war she had been based on the island of Leros in the Dodecanese, an archipelago that had belonged to Italy since 1912, and patrolled the Aegean. She was commanded by Giuseppe Aicardi.

A summer of tension

From Italy’s declaration of war on 10 June 1940 Greece lived in the shadow of its Italian neighbour. A year earlier the Italians had occupied Albania and reached the border of Greek Epirus, and Britain and France had given Greece a guarantee. General Ioannis Metaxas, who ruled the country as a dictator, tried to maintain strict neutrality, although his state was economically and politically tied to London: under a trade agreement of January 1940 a large part of the Greek merchant fleet sailed for the British. The Governor of the Dodecanese, Cesare Maria De Vecchi, one of the former quadrumvirs of the March on Rome, had been sending reports to Rome since June about British warships in Greek ports and an alleged base on the island of Milos. They were exaggerated, though not entirely invented.

That summer brought a series of incidents. On 12 July Italian aircraft from the Dodecanese, attacking a British tanker off Crete, also bombed the Greek auxiliary Orion and the destroyer Hydra. At the end of July bombs fell near the destroyers Vasilefs Georgios and Vasilissa Olga and two submarines off Nafpaktos in the Gulf of Corinth, and at the beginning of August near a coastguard boat off Aegina. Athens protested, Rome brushed the protests aside, and both sides pretended that these were mistakes.

In August the tension turned into an open campaign. On 10 August the Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, told Benito Mussolini about the death of Daut Hoxha, the leader of an armed band from Chameria, a border region of Epirus partly inhabited by Albanians. Hoxha had been killed in June – according to historians, in a settling of scores between Albanian bands – but Ciano presented him as an Albanian patriot murdered by Greek agents. The Duce flew into a rage. Ciano noted in his diary that Mussolini was thinking of an “act of force”, because he had had accounts to settle with the Greeks since 1923, and they were mistaken if they thought he had forgotten. This was a reference to the Corfu incident, from which Mussolini had then been forced to withdraw under pressure from the Great Powers. From 11 August the Italian and Albanian press, directed by Ciano and by the viceroy in Tirana, Francesco Jacomoni, accused Greece of murdering Albanians and demanded the “liberation” of Chameria.

The order

Who exactly ordered the attack long remained unclear, and the answer still depends on the source. According to the findings of the Italian journalist and historian Mario Cervi, published in 1972, Mussolini, impressed by De Vecchi’s reports, instructed the head of the navy, Admiral Domenico Cavagnari, to designate a reliable submarine commander from the Dodecanese to attack ships in the Aegean suspected of carrying contraband for the British. The order was passed on 14 August to the naval command in the Dodecanese and submitted to the governor. De Vecchi, in memoirs published in 1960, wrote that sealed instructions had arrived as early as 11 August and spoke of attacking merchant ships in Greek waters without warning, concealing the attacker’s nationality. Either way, it was De Vecchi who personally sent Aicardi out from Leros and pointed him to the waters between Tinos and Syros. According to some accounts he told him to sink everything he came across.

The order made no mention of warships. Aicardi later explained that he had intended to attack two merchant ships showing no neutrality markings, and that Elli had moved towards him, so he had had to torpedo her. This version is not credible: the cruiser was lying at anchor among decorated boats and could not move. According to Cervi, the commander simply chose the most impressive target, hoping for promotion.

On Tinos

After the hit, Elli’s crew tried to bring the fire under control, while the passenger ships attempted to tow the cruiser into shallow water. They ran out of time. As the cruiser began to sink, the sailors jumped into the sea. The wounded were picked up by the fishing boats of Michalis Petichakis, who came alongside the burning ship despite the danger of her ammunition exploding; King George II and the government later honoured him for this action. Delfino slipped away unseen. Metaxas ordered that the celebrations should go ahead, and the procession with the icon passed through the streets of the little town with the whole population taking part. The destroyers Vasilefs Georgios and Vasilissa Olga were sent to Tinos and escorted the ships carrying the pilgrims home. According to some studies, on the same day Italian aircraft also attacked a Greek steamer off Crete.

An “unknown” culprit

Officers of the Greek navy examined the fragments of the torpedoes that had exploded on the mole. By the very next day they had no doubt that they were Italian. Metaxas’s government, however, kept the expert findings secret and forbade the press to make any suggestion as to the submarine’s nationality. The official communiqué spoke of a submarine of “unknown nationality”. Metaxas wanted at all costs to avoid giving a pretext for a war for which Greece was not ready.

In Rome few people knew who the culprit was. A spokesman for the Italian Foreign Ministry suggested that the attack was a provocation by the British, who wanted to sow confusion in the Balkans, and according to Italian propaganda they might have used torpedoes bought before the war. To the German naval attaché the Regia Marina command replied that no Italian vessel had reported an attack, and its war diary recorded an “unknown submarine”. Ciano noted on 15 August that the Greek cruiser had been sunk by a submarine of “unknown” nationality, and added that in his view De Vecchi’s impetuousness lay behind it. The most difficult position was that of the Italian minister in Athens, Emanuele Grazzi, a sincere advocate of friendship with Greece, whom Rome kept in the dark about its intentions. A few months later Aicardi was quietly removed from command of Delfino.

The communiqué about an “unknown” submarine deceived no one in Greece. Years later Grazzi wrote in his memoirs that the attack had united a nation “deeply divided by insurmountable political differences and old hatreds” and given it the will to resist. The Greeks regarded the sinking of a warship on the feast of the Mother of God, before the eyes of a crowd of pilgrims, as sacrilege.

Delay

For the time being there was no war. In mid-August Berlin gave Rome to understand that it wanted no complications in the Balkans, from which the Reich drew raw materials, and that Italy should concentrate on fighting Britain. On 22 August Mussolini postponed the attack on Greece until the end of September and that on Yugoslavia until 20 October. In September the Italians launched their offensive in Egypt.

Place in the war

The delay was short. When German troops entered Romania on 7 October 1940 without informing Rome, Mussolini decided to respond with a fait accompli of his own. At 3 a.m. on 28 October Grazzi handed Metaxas an ultimatum, which he rejected, and a few hours later Italian troops crossed the Greek–Albanian border. The Greco-Italian War had begun. On 30 October the Greek government finally published the results of its investigation into the Elli affair, with photographs of the fragments of the Italian torpedoes. The Greeks, united just as Grazzi had foreseen, threw back the Italians and carried the fighting into Albanian territory. Mussolini’s defeat brought the Germans into the Balkans, and in April 1941 they attacked Greece and Yugoslavia.

After the war Greece demanded reparation. Under the peace treaty of 1947 Italy handed over the modern light cruiser Eugenio di Savoia, which entered service in the Greek fleet in the early 1950s under the name Elli. The wreck of the old cruiser was raised in sections in 1955–1956 and sold for scrap. In 1985 divers found fragments of an Italian torpedo on the seabed off Tinos, and they went to the Naval Museum in Piraeus. Every year since 1945 wreaths have been laid over the spot where the ship went down on 15 August, and 15 August on Tinos is a day of remembrance that is national as well as religious.