Three Kings

The one brush the Italians had with the Royal Navy had occurred at the Battle of Calabria, called the Battle of PuntaStilo, fought 30 miles east of that point on the toe of Italy’s boot. The Italians had a large army to supply and support in Libya, and they had dispatched a heavily escorted convoy to Benghazi just as the British were organizing a similar operation to send supplies to Malta. Each side had a strong mixed force of cruisers and destroyers, backed up by battleships in what would become one of the largest fleet engagements in the Mediterranean conflict. In the end it came down to the three British battleships, Warspite, Malaya and Royal Sovereign, five light cruisers, the carrier Eagle, and sixteen destroyers, against an equal Italian fleet composed of two battleships, Cavour and Cesare, six heavy cruisers, eight light cruisers, and also sixteen destroyers. The British had an edge in battleships and with the planes aboard HMS Eagle, but the Italians had many more cruisers.

The man who might have led the British cruisers, Admiral John Tovey, was not there in this go round, having taken his early appointment to command Home Fleet. The action was scattered and inconclusive on both sides, with Warspite scoring the only hit of note, a long shot fired from a range of nearly 26,000 yards in a duel with the two Italian battleships. The round struck the Cesare aft, setting off a ready store a 37mm AA gun ammunition, and the resulting fire spread below decks to compromise half the ships boilers. It was a hit to match the feat of the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst when it encountered HMS Glorious, the shot that still troubled the sleep of Captain Christopher Wells on that ship.

After this the Italian destroyers rushed in to lay down a smoke screen, which the British took to be a cover allowing the Italian battleships to break off. They would claim a moral victory in the action, though the Italians would later say those destroyers were setting up a torpedo attack in the thickening smoke. The cruisers continued to exchange fire, and both sides made unsuccessful destroyer rushes, but the action was largely inconclusive. The Italian air force showed up to attack ships on both sides in a fiasco that saw them trying to bomb their own cruisers. Little damage was done, and both sides turned for the safety of friendly ports. Yet the Italian convoy to Benghazi got through, and they would use that fact to claim a pyrrhic victory. The real effect of the battle, however, was to increase the timidity of the Italian Navy when the threat of a confrontation with the Royal Navy was factored into any plan.

The British were confident they could hold their own and eventually dominate the Italian Navy, and they were hatching a plan to make that a certainty as HMS Hermes slipped quietly through the Suez Canal to join the fleet on the 12th of January. She would join the Eagle for a daring raid against the main Italian base at Taranto, and the Old Stringbags would attempt to torpedo the enemy battleships as they wallowed in port.

Part VI

Sonnenblume

"We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general."

Winston Churchill

Chapter 16

The plan had been called “Hercules” in the history Fedorov knew, but it had emerged in the minds of the German war planners much earlier in this world, and blossomed here in the same energy that was giving life to Rommel’s movement to North Africa. Now it was seen to bloom like the sunflower Rommel’s operation was named for, and so Keitel’s entire plan was folded into Sonnenblume, and would become an essential component of its success. The loss of Gibraltar had indeed put a keen focus on the Mediterranean as the next theater of war. Hitler’s naval liaison officer to the Italians in Rome, Vice AdmiralWeichold echoed the sentiment of many others when he wrote his final report on the matter and delivered it directly to the Fuhrer.

“Malta is the stumbling block of Italy’s conduct of the war at sea. If the Italian navy is to fulfill its main function, which is to keep open sea communications with Libya, then-from the purely military standpoint-it must take action immediately and forestall the British by eliminating Malta and capturing Crete. Both of these operations, if carefully prepared and launched without warning, have excellent prospect of success, though the latter would certainly entail a greater degree of risk. I strongly recommend that Malta be given the highest priority, and if not taken by the Italians in December, it should become a primary focus of German military action with the new year.”