Part IV - The Mediterranean

Summary

It can be argued that the ‘great days’ of naval warfare, encounters between battle fleets, in the Mediterranean were over for good when our story opens in October 1943; it saw the close of two centuries of major warship engagements, culminating in Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham's command of the Mediterranean Fleet between June 1939 and March 1942, with its high peaks of Taranto (November 1940) and Matapan (March 1941). His leadership of a battle fleet from Alexandria against the size-able and balanced Italian fleet was paralleled by the command of Force H from Gibraltar by his friend and contemporary Admiral Sir James Somer-ville (June 1940 to February 1942). In our period the only capital ships in the middle sea were superannuated dreadnoughts of British, American and French navies (used solely for bombardment of shore targets), for the Italian fleet was, in the words of Cunningham's famous signal, ‘under the guns of the fortress of Malta’; it was defeated, much of it was disarmed and reduced to a care-and-maintenance basis, and a handful of its light forces supplemented those of the Allies in the continuing fight against the Germans. It was, though, a diplomatic football, as President Franklin Roosevelt, eager to establish good relations with the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, ahead of post-war diplomatic arrangements, had promised rashly to hand over one-third of the Italian fleet to the Soviet navy. He appears to have done this without adequate consultation with Prime Minister Churchill or the Combined Chiefs of Staff; much time and effort was spent trying to row back from this over-hasty commitment [187, 190–91, 194, 201]. In the event, the Soviets were fobbed off with obsolete British and American vessels, pending the end of hostilities worldwide; the Russians received Italian vessels after 1945. Roosevelt's cavalier offer did not take into account Italian pique at the proposed transfer without their consent, the current co-operation of the Italian Navy, the use of its light forces and its dockyards and its mercantile marine, nor the unsuitability of vessels designed for the Mediterranean for service in the Soviet Arctic.

The modern battleships and aircraft carriers may have departed many months before this story opens and there may have been no actions between surface ships in the last eighteen months of the Mediterranean war but it is not to say that the naval contribution to the fighting was not considerable.