The surrender of the Italian fleet

On 10 September 1943 the ships the Royal Navy had been fighting in the Mediterranean for three years began to enter Malta’s Grand Harbour and the roadstead outside: battleships, cruisers and destroyers of the Regia Marina, flying black pennants from their masts and with black circles painted on their decks as a sign that they were complying with the terms of the armistice. The squadron from Taranto arrived first; a day later came the main body of the fleet from La Spezia and Genoa, which had lost its flagship on the way – the battleship Roma – together with the fleet commander and more than a thousand sailors. On 11 September Admiral Andrew Cunningham reported to the Admiralty that the Italian fleet lay at anchor under the guns of the fortress of Malta.

This day is often summed up as the fleet “surrendering at Malta and in other Mediterranean ports”. The phrase captures the sense of events but needs two qualifications. Formally it was not a surrender of the fleet but compliance with the terms of the armistice: the Italians placed their ships under Allied control without striking their colours, and their fate was to be settled only by a later agreement. Nor did the main body sail for Malta at first; it headed for Sardinia and then for Bône (today Annaba) in Algeria, and was directed to Malta only after meeting the British. Some ships, moreover, ended up in neutral Spain, where they were interned.

A fleet without a war

In 1943 the Italian fleet was still powerful, but it had long been almost idle. After the losses in the attack on Taranto in 1940 and the defeat at Matapan, its heavy ships rarely put to sea, and from 1942 they were immobilised above all by a shortage of fuel. The three modern Littorio-class battleships – Littorio (renamed Italia on 30 July 1943, after the fall of Mussolini), Vittorio Veneto and the newest, Roma, commissioned in June 1942 – lay at La Spezia, where American air raids damaged them in the spring of 1943. The older battleships Andrea Doria and Caio Duilio were based at Taranto, and Giulio Cesare was serving as a training ship at Pola.

The battle fleet was commanded by Admiral Carlo Bergamini. On 7 September he was summoned to Rome by the Minister of the Navy and Chief of Staff, Admiral Raffaele de Courten. According to accounts cited by Italian naval historians, he was not told then that the Armistice of Cassibile had been signed four days earlier; on the contrary, he was ordered to prepare the fleet to attack the expected Allied landing in the Salerno area, and at the same time to consider the possible scuttling of the ships. The armistice, meanwhile, required the Italians to bring the fleet to ports designated by the Allies: ships on the west coast were to sail to North Africa, and those at Taranto to Malta.

Night at La Spezia

On the evening of 8 September the announcement of Italy’s surrender – first by General Dwight Eisenhower on Radio Algiers, then by Marshal Pietro Badoglio on Italian radio – took the fleet as much by surprise as the rest of the country. Instructions for Italian ships were broadcast in English from Malta: leave port, hoist black pennants and sail for Allied ports. In telephone conversations with Rome, Bergamini is said to have declared that he would not hand over a fleet that had not lost a battle; according to de Courten’s memoirs, the ship commanders gathered aboard Roma leaned rather towards scuttling. The minister argued that the armistice terms did not provide for the surrender of the ships and that their honour would be preserved. In the end Bergamini agreed to take the fleet to sea – with orders to sail to the base at La Maddalena at the northern tip of Sardinia, where he was to receive further instructions. The German liaison officers were removed from the ships.

In the early hours of 9 September, at around three o’clock (Italian sources give times from 2.30 to 3.40 a.m.), three battleships, three light cruisers and eight destroyers left La Spezia; at sea they were joined by three cruisers from Genoa. A few hours later German troops carrying out Operation Achse entered the port and seized the ships unable to sail; the crews managed to scuttle some of them. Bergamini, according to Italian authors, ordered his commanders to resist any attempt to seize the ships, whether it was made by the Germans or by the Allies.

During the day the situation in Sardinia turned against the Italians: the Germans, evacuating their troops from the island to Corsica, seized La Maddalena. The naval command in Rome (Supermarina) therefore diverted the fleet to Bône, and with that the plan to bring King Victor Emmanuel III and the government – who had fled Rome for the east coast – to Sardinia was abandoned.

The sinking of Roma

The Germans had been tracking the movements of the Italian fleet from the first hours. When it became clear that the ships were not heading for Salerno but steaming along the west coast of Corsica towards Sardinia and then towards Africa, the Luftwaffe was ordered to attack. Dornier Do 217 bombers of III Gruppe of Kampfgeschwader 100 (KG 100) took off from Istres airfield in Provence, armed with a new weapon: the Fritz X radio-guided armour-piercing bomb. The bomber released it from high altitude, and the bomb aimer steered it onto the target with a control stick, watching its tracer flare.

The aircraft appeared over the fleet in the afternoon, in the area of the Strait of Bonifacio and the island of Asinara. For a long time the ships’ crews held their fire – the aircraft were circling high, and Bergamini reportedly believed them to be the air cover promised by the Allies. The attack began at about 3.40 p.m. Some fifteen minutes later one bomb hit Italia and another Roma: it passed through the hull and exploded beneath the keel, flooding the engine room and two boiler rooms. The battleship slowed and fell out of line. At about 4 p.m. a second Fritz X struck near the forward main-armament turret and set off the magazines. The turret was hurled overboard, a column of fire and smoke rose above the ship, and Roma capsized, broke in two and sank – at about 4.12 p.m. according to most accounts – roughly 30 kilometres off the north coast of Sardinia.

Admiral Bergamini, the ship’s captain, Captain Adone Del Cima, and most of the crew were killed. The figures vary from source to source. The official Italian inquiry after the sinking established that there were 1,849 men aboard, of whom 596 survived and 1,253 died. The Italian naval historian Francesco Mattesini, drawing on research by the admiral’s son, Pier Paolo Bergamini, argues that the inquiry omitted some two hundred men of the fleet staff; by these calculations there were more than 2,000 men aboard and around 1,390 died. Roma was the first battleship sunk by a guided weapon. A couple of weeks earlier, on 27 August, the Germans had sunk the British sloop Egret with a similar weapon, the Hs 293 glide bomb – so the age of precision weapons had begun a few weeks before this day, but it was Roma that became its symbol. The damaged Italia, which had shipped several hundred tonnes of water, sailed on.

The survivors were picked up by destroyers and the cruiser Attilio Regolo. Some of these ships, unwilling either to return to Italy or – without orders – to sail to the Allies, made for the Balearic Islands; at the port of Mahón on Minorca the Spanish interned them together with the survivors, while two escorting torpedo boats, Pegaso and Impetuoso, were scuttled by their commanders off Majorca rather than let them fall into foreign hands. That same day two destroyers that had been sent to Civitavecchia to collect the king and then ordered back north were lost in the Strait of Bonifacio: Antonio Da Noli struck a mine, and Ugolino Vivaldi, badly damaged by German shore batteries and aircraft, sank the following day.

Under the guns of Malta

Command of the rest of the fleet passed to Admiral Romeo Oliva in the cruiser Eugenio di Savoia. The ships hoisted black pennants and continued south. On the morning of 10 September, off the Algerian coast, they were met by the British battleships Warspite and Valiant with a destroyer escort; under their guard the Italians turned east and on 11 September dropped anchor off Malta. Three years earlier, off Calabria, that same Warspite had shelled Italian battleships at a range of more than twenty kilometres.

The squadron from Taranto had reached Malta earlier. Admiral Alberto Da Zara, after consulting his commanders, took Andrea Doria, Caio Duilio, two cruisers and a destroyer out of port on the evening of 9 September – just as British ships carrying a landing force were approaching Taranto. The squadron passed them without a shot being fired and on 10 September arrived off Malta. The next day Da Zara, in an atmosphere he himself described as very tense, met Cunningham and was shown the text of the armistice and the clauses concerning the navy. The old battleship Giulio Cesare sailed from Pola; some of the crew wanted to scuttle her, but the officers managed to bring her to Taranto and, on 12 September, to Malta. Ships lying in Adriatic and southern Italian ports made for Brindisi and Taranto; the king and Badoglio arrived in Brindisi on 10 September.

On 11 September Cunningham sent his famous signal to the Admiralty: “Be pleased to inform Their Lordships that the Italian battle fleet now lies at anchor under the guns of the fortress of Malta.” For the commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, who had been fighting the Regia Marina for mastery of that sea since 1940 and who during the years of the siege of Malta had watched the island come close to starvation, it was a moment of personal triumph. The British received the Italians coolly but correctly: the ships kept their Italian crews and colours.

The ships that were not saved

Not every vessel managed to escape. In ports in the north and in Greece, in the Adriatic and the Aegean, ships under repair or without fuel were seized by the Germans. At Trieste the battleship Conte di Cavour, under repair, fell into their hands; at Genoa the unfinished aircraft carrier Aquila; and in many ports torpedo boats, corvettes, submarines and merchant ships. Some crews scuttled their ships, as French sailors had done at Toulon in November 1942; other vessels the Germans took into the Kriegsmarine and used until the end of the war. In many ports sailors resisted and died fighting the Germans, and thousands were taken prisoner.

Place in the war

The fleet’s move to the Allied side ended the war in the Mediterranean in the form it had taken since June 1940. The Royal Navy no longer had to keep heavy ships there to counterbalance the Italian battleships; in the autumn of 1943 some of them were already sent back to Britain and to the Indian Ocean, from where in 1944 and 1945 they went into action against Japan. The Allies also gained freedom of navigation and ports, while the Germans, having lost their ally at sea, could oppose them in those waters only with submarines, aircraft and captured vessels.

Because of doubts about the loyalty of the crews and the lack of tasks for heavy ships, the Allies did not let the Italian battleships fight. Italia and Vittorio Veneto were taken to Alexandria as early as 14 September and in October to the Great Bitter Lake in Egypt, where they remained until the end of the war. The smaller ships were treated differently. On 23 September at Taranto, Cunningham and de Courten concluded an agreement under which cruisers, destroyers, torpedo boats and submarines under the Italian flag would operate alongside the Allies – escorting convoys, carrying troops and supplies, and landing special forces. Thus the Co-Belligerent Navy of the Kingdom of Italy came into being, and on 29 September, at Malta, Badoglio signed the so-called Long Armistice. In the north Mussolini’s Social Republic organised a small navy of its own; former comrades from one fleet thus found themselves on both sides.

After the war the peace treaty of 1947 obliged Italy to hand over some of its ships to the victors. Giulio Cesare went to the USSR as Novorossiysk and in 1955 sank at Sevastopol after an explosion, most probably of a German mine from the war. The modern battleships allotted to Britain and the United States were scrapped. The wreck of Roma was found in 2012 at a depth of about a thousand metres off the north coast of Sardinia. Bergamini was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valour, and the memory of him and his sailors – who died carrying out the order to end the war, at the hands of a recent ally – became one of the symbols of the Italian 8 September.