1912: The First Italian WarThe first engagement of the war followed immediately on its declaration and showed the Regia Marina was disdainful of its Imperial opponent and unimpressed by victories over the weak Armada Espana. On March 6, 1912, the armored cruiser
Olympos sailed from Rhodes to investigate reports of Italian cruisers in the waters north of Crete. They were indeed there, two armored cruisers of the
Giuseppe Garibaldi class, armed with a pair of 10” guns in single turrets but limited to 20 knots by their very low freeboard. As
Olympos steamed southwest and unlimbered her 12-8” guns, the Italian ships separated to the west and east.
Olympos turned east to pursue the closer enemy and pounded it with 8” shells, at 9:20am landing 5 hits out of an 8-gun salvo on
Amalfi. Then the tables turned as a semi-dreadnought battleship of the
Giulio Cesare class appeared out of the eastern sun-haze. Reversing course,
Olympos ran directly at the westernmost Italian cruiser, which had now circled back hoping to be in at the kill. She was, but it was death for herself and not the enemy; dodging shells from the
Giulio Cesare,
Olympos poured rounds into the Pisa as she raced past. At about a quarter-past 11:00am an 8” round penetrated the Italian’s aft turret and Pisa vanished in a flash of light and a roaring column of smoke. It was a tribute to the stoutness of Imperial construction that
Olympos could receive 1 heavy and 12 medium hits, heavily damage an enemy cruiser, destroy a second and still speed away from a battleship, but it is an indictment of Italian gunnery and tactics that three ships could not seriously damage a single enemy warship in an action spanning three hours.
The Index of Naval Strength from the 1908 Director’s Guide to Fighting Ships, dreadnought construction in Italy and in the Empire is not shown Early wartime priorities for the Navy were to add additional minesweeper/escort ships, to lay down more of the D-8 destroyers with their heavy torpedo armament, and to move the armored cruiser
Chandax and four destroyers to the Indian Ocean to blockade Massaua in Eritrea. Deprived of passage through the Suez Canal, the Italians would have to sail around Africa to reach their Eritrean colony. Wartime appropriations also allowed the dreadnought
Valentinian to be laid down; she was in essence a modestly-improved
Belisarius. Her quarterdeck was cut down to trim hull weight, allowing the B turret to be raised to super-firing position.
Valentinian would be the sole exception to Navy practice of building at least two dreadnoughts of each class; even wartime funds would stretch only so far. By the time she could be completed, significantly better designs were available and hers was not repeated.
Dreadnought
Nike (
Belisarius class) was still working up in April of 1912 when the battlefleets collided for the first time. On a sweep in the Ionian Sea, armored cruiser
Olympos was on-point as a scout when, with twilight coming, the Italian battle-line loomed up out of the darkness at a range of less than a mile. After her mad scramble to safety her captain remarked that the Navy must change its uniforms: “Red tunics to hide the blood, we may need, but brown pants, too!”
Despite the advantages of primitive ship-borne radio and advanced signal lamps, the Imperial battle-line then ran into the Italians at point-blank range. The Imperial Navy, with its cult-like devotion to gunnery and daytime close-action, had paid little attention to the problems of fighting at night since the Battle of the Malta Channel in 1904 and found itself hard-pressed now to cope with low visibility and confused signals. The saving stroke was that the destroyer arm retained its aggressive temperament: when in doubt, attack! The wild rush of destroyers that had proven so costly and ineffective in the Spanish War was here turned by instinct into a slashing and effective riposte. Imperial destroyers had always favored heavy gun and torpedo armament over speed, and by sheer number of launching tubes (and by the fine quality of their torpedoes) exacted a heavy toll from Italian impulsiveness.
Conte di Cavour, the sole Italian dreadnought, was struck four times in quick succession and began a slow roll to her death. Battleship
Vittorio Emanuele found herself at the focus of attention of every battleship gun in the Imperial Navy and reeled under multiple shell-hits, but here her antiquated submerged torpedo tubes proved their worth: semi-dreadnoughts
Thalassion and
Bosphorus were torpedoed, then flagship
Belisarius was struck – an almost even score for
Cavour in number of hits though none would be as fatal as
Cavour’s. Then semi-dreadnought
Giulio Cesare was torpedoed and went quickly down, followed by the shattered hulk of
Vittorio Emanuele. Leaving the burning wreckage of the Italian battle-line in their wake, the Imperial fleet turned its course north and its attention to damage control. All of the Byzantine ships survived,
Bosphorus in spite of a persistent slow leak and because of the nearness of friendly ports, but all three of the most powerful Imperial battleships would be in dockyard hands for months – a heavy but acceptable trade for three Italian capital ships gone forever.
Adding insult to injury, Imperial submarine UT-8 torpedoed the undamaged battleship
Andrea Doria as she made her way homeward to Taranto. She did not sink, but with her in drydock the Italian battle-line was reduced to impotence.
The post-battle analysis from the Navarchy stressed the necessity of having a large number of ships in scouting and screening formations, and emphasized maintaining good formation discipline, and the issuance of clear signals. But an unbiased observer is invited to ask: which of these had the Imperial commanders not already done? The Night Action in the Ionian Sea offered the same challenges as the 1904 Battle of the Malta Channel and the Navy seemed to have made no real progress in the management of this sort of battle in the decade between the two. Proposals for training in night-fighting were developed but not employed; the Navy could point to the successes of its destroyer arm and its powerful gunnery and declined to compromise that training in any respect.
Subsequent months saw the remnant of the Italian fleet remain in port, declining battle and awaiting the delivery of new warships to replace its losses. What few operations they did mount were in the nature of cruiser raids and destroyer actions. Generally these were unsuccessful as the more numerous Byzantine light forces could commit larger forces to block their thrusts. Italy, having sacrificed construction of cruisers and destroyers to build up its numbers of capital ships, now found itself without effective means to fight a skirmishing war. Her ports were blockaded, her commerce on the seas interrupted, and the long construction times necessary for warships meant there would be no speedy relief.
In October of 1912, war funding permitted the first of a new 1100-ton destroyer to be laid down in the yards of the Golden Horn, the namesake of the D-16 class. These splendid ships carried 5x4” guns, two triple torpedo-tube mounts and could easily reach their design speed of 31 knots, at last providing all the features the Navy needed in one package. With the Italian threat fading, old destroyers of the 600-ton class could be scrapped to free up crews to man the new ships. A new light cruiser – long a favored class of warship for the Imperials – was laid down under the name
Minotaur. Though still coal-fired, she was fast (28 knots), heavily armed (6-6” guns all in centerline mounts and 8x4” in secondary mounts), and at 5200 tons displacement, cheap enough to be ordered in quantity. This basic design would form the backbone of Imperial light forces for more than two decades, lasting in service until replaced by the legendary ‘
Phantom’ class.
With the pressure of wartime and abundant funds in hand, the Navy hastened the development of its director gunnery control station and in January of 1913 began fitting it to ships of armored cruiser size and larger. There was thought to be little risk in taking advantage of the winter ‘quiet time’ as the Italian fleet remained under repair or in port, and this proved correct. Imperial light cruiser and destroyer units were continuously busy with operations off the Italian coasts, keeping to the sea even in the roughest of weather and raiding as far afield as Genoa. This steady presence swept away enemy shipping from two-thirds of the Italian coast; contesting it cost the Regia Marina a steady attrition of their already-slender destroyer arm. Also, two Italian armed merchant cruisers attempted to use the dark winter nights to break out of Naples but were lost at the cost of damage to light cruiser
Sphinx, which was mined but not sunk. If the war had not begun well for Italy then the dark winter months of 1913 showed their fortunes had become as bleak as the weather.
One may well ask what the armies of the two belligerent nations were doing at this time and the short answer is, ‘very little’. With the overland routes blocked by petty Balkan states desperate to remain neutral and the Austrian alliance long-since lapsed, the only way to reach enemy territory for either nation was by sea. The large size of the national armies, the presence of good railroad networks, and limited experience with amphibious operations all meant a landing was all-too-apt to be cut off and rapidly overwhelmed. The one place the Imperial General Staff thought might be open to invasion was Sicily, which after all had been a province of the empire a mere fifteen centuries prior. The Navy’s refusal to tackle the minefields in the Straits of Messina ended that speculation for now; if the Strait could not be closed then the Italian Army could still move men across and the Army deemed the operation too hazardous to attempt. The Imperial Army and Navy would continue to discuss a Sicilian operation as it seemed the best place to capitalize on Imperial control of the seas but no firm date could be set.
One action from February of 1913 will serve as a cautionary tale of how speedily the tables may be turned in modern naval warfare, where steel hulls fly along at better than twenty knots and guns can range nearly to the horizon. Imperial Naval operations staff had planned a routine bombardment mission for a railroad yard outside Brindisi, on the outside of the heel of the Italian boot. Rear-Admiral Petrus Ourikos would fly his pennant on the old but still-powerful armored cruiser
Boukellarion, escorted by the modern light cruiser
Manticore and three destroyers. The run-in to the target was uneventful but before
Boukellarion could open up on the target with her 10” guns an Italian armored cruiser of the
Carlo Alberti class and 3 destroyers sortied from the port. Shortly thereafter two
Reina Margerita class battleships hove into view over the northern horizon and threatened to cut the Imperials off from their base. Ourikos was brave but not rash; the
Reina Margeritas were far better ships than the Spanish battleships
Boukellarion had faced off once before. The Imperial cruiser turned east to disengage, firing at
Carlo Alberti in order to discourage a pursuit. Being a good three knots faster than the Italian cruiser,
Boukellarion was making good her escape when her old triple-expansion engines began to fail. Having then no alternative, Ourikos swung his cruiser south across his enemy’s bow and ran up the flags for a ‘flotilla attack’. With the Night Action in the Ionian Sea still fresh in their minds, the Italians abandoned the pursuit and steamed away to the north, leaving a relieved – and reprieved – Ourikos to limp away for home.
The central problem was that the Imperial Navy needed ever more ships to meet its obligations, but new construction absorbed funds and yard space needed to refit the older ships. Advances in design and construction techniques also meant money was better spent on new hulls than on refurbishing the old. The
Hellas class armored cruisers had been the most advanced and powerful in the world when built, but that was nearly a decade and a half ago, and no longer true. Their main weapon was a 10” gun – still powerful – but they carried only four. This was too few for modern gunnery theorists, who claimed 8 guns as a minimum necessary for ladder firing, and the battery of the old ships could not be increased.
Boukellarion’s fire control would eventually be upgraded to the most modern standard but rebuilding her propulsion would require cutting open her armored deck in order to replace the boilers and engines, a lengthy and very expensive procedure that might, given her older hull form, still fail to raise her top speed. The most that could economically be done was to give her engineering plant a thorough cleaning and replace the damaged and corroded components. The two
Hellas class armored cruisers would soldier on for years to come with their original propulsion plant, outdated but without sufficient new construction to replace them.
By May of 1913 the first warships refitted with the new director control stations were coming out of the dockyards and the battle damage from the night-time melee in the Ionian Sea had been made good. The fleet spent its time on patrol and in training, testing its new fire control with live-fire exercises. Quartered in the fine new brick adjunct at the Navarchy, the new Operations Staff worked out a sweep of the Gulf of Taranto to be led by the armored cruiser
Olympos and followed up by the entire Imperial battle-line. It was hoped that the armored cruiser ‘trailing her coat’ before the Taranto naval base would temp the Italian fleet to come out, the same maneuver the Italians had now tried twice.
To a point, the plan worked perfectly. On May 16th of 1913,
Olympos drew the attention of a
Carlo Alberti class armored cruiser, and as it tried to close the range used her superior gunnery control to land 8” shells on the enemy at a range from which they could make no effective reply. But even as
Olympos turned her attention to the second member of the Italian scouting force (a
Marco Polo class armored cruiser) the Italian battle-line was spotted on the northern horizon, and from the amount of smoke looked to be coming south at top speed.
On spotting the Byzantine battleline led by flagship
Belisarius, the Italians turned north to withdraw. Held back by the 19-knot top speed of his old battleships and being unwilling to let his ships become separated in the pursuit, Admiral Pavlos Grigorios turned northeast to direct his fire on the tail of the enemy line. At this point the sad tale of the Battle of the Maltese Channel from the Spanish Wars was repeated; the Italians threw their destroyers against the Imperial line and the battle squadrons turned away, leaving flagship
Belisarius charging the enemy alone. Grigorios had held his own destroyers back in support; they were too far to the rear and side to effectively intervene.
Seeking to exploit the confusion as the Imperial formation dissolved, Italian Admiral Victor Persetti swung his ships east to cross the Byzantine T. But Grigorios had learned a lesson from his opponent and did not hesitate to apply it against them. Once the Italians turned to engage, his own destroyer flotillas plunged forward to the attack. At this point the battle-lines became completely disorganized and both flagships were hit,
Belisarius by a succession of heavy shells and new dreadnought
Leonardo da Vinci by two torpedoes in rapid succession – a nasty reprise of the fate of her classmate
Conte di Cavour from a year before, and as fatal.
With command shifted temporarily to Rear-Admiral Ourikos on the old pre-dreadnought
Constantinople, the Imperial battle line reformed by circling clockwise to the south-east, south and south-west. Gamely, the Italians also formed up on a south-westerly course; unfortunately for them, this attempt to renew the action took them directly into the teeth of Imperial destroyers who were charging back for a second run. Massive torpedo salvos at point-blank range followed, ship after Italian ship was hit and brought dead in the water to lie under Byzantine guns. After swinging south again to avoid Italian destroyers, the Imperial line formed on a north-easterly course to pursue the remnant of the Italian fleet. Admiral Grigorios was then able to resume command from the battered
Belisarius and, with twilight not far away, thought it prudent to withdraw his battleships to the southeast.
This Battle of Taranto Gulf has attracted endless discussion and speculation over the years in large part because the sides were fairly evenly-matched and because the action took place under favorable conditions of weather and visibility. There are certainly many points on which the battle might have turned to a different outcome: had the Imperial battleships followed
Belisarius instead of turning away, or had Persetti better handled his first, shocking destroyer attack, to name two. But after the battle there were voices raised in the popular press against both commanders for withdrawing rather than continuing the action, and that criticism reflects a misunderstanding of the actual condition of the two sides. The cardinal sins of a gambler are to continue to play when losing badly and to risk more than he can afford to lose. Damage had mounted, ammunition and coal were running low and darkness was falling; the fleets were disorganized and their crews exhausted. To continue the engagement would have been to wager the naval destiny of two nations on the turn of a single card – in other words, not mere imprudence but actual folly.
Despite the failures of signals, of the breakdowns in simple discipline and formation handling, the Imperial fleet had shown that it had mastered two crucial techniques – accurate and rapid gunnery, and slashing torpedo attacks pressed home to brutal effect. The early crippling of the Italian flagship was perhaps offset by the damage
Belisarius had received from the fire of the entire Italian battle-line. Ourikos’ turn-away from the first Italian torpedo attack may have left
Belisarius exposed but there can be no doubt that his long turn to the southwest drew the unsuspecting Italians into the exact position the Imperial destroyers needed for their counter-stroke. The emphasis on heavy torpedo armament and on the development of effective and powerful torpedoes paid dividends: at the close of the Battle of Taranto Gulf the Italians had lost their sole remaining dreadnought, five battleships and two armored cruisers along with five destroyers out of the twenty they had possessed. Only one battleship escaped; their entire naval strength was reduced to one battleship, three armored cruisers and fifteen destroyers.
Unlike Admiral Varnatzin, Admiral Ourikos would not be court-martialed but retained in command and eventually promoted. Disobedience to orders, it seemed, could be tolerated if a triumphant victory was the outcome. The final result of the Battle of Taranto Gulf was the destruction of the Regia Marina as a major navy, a catastrophe from which they could not and would not recover for many years.
Imperial battleships shoulder through a storm in the Ionian Sea Despite the crushing victory at Taranto Gulf, an Imperial offer to negotiate a peace came to nothing. Despite her lack of warships, Italy would refuse to yield, preferring to send out armed merchant cruisers to prey on Imperial shipping and to play for time in hopes of somehow improving her bargaining position.
This opportunity soon arrived, and it points up the fact that the Navy’s aggressive, offensive-minded spirit could sometimes have negative consequences. On a rainy night in July, armored cruiser
Olympos, accompanied by two screening destroyers, was steaming up the Otranto Strait when suddenly an unidentified ship loomed out of the darkness at point-blank range. The Imperials hesitated to open fire without positive identification, assuming that any large warship out on the seas must be neutral or friendly. Alas, it was not: the unknown ship was the
Italia, sole survivor of the
Reina Margerita class of Italian pre-dreadnoughts, and the Italians were under no illusion that any ship they saw could possibly be friendly. Imperial sailors sprang to their guns, but too late: the opening salvos were delivered with brutal effect as
Italia rushed by and
Olympos shuddered under a flail of steel. With three of her six 8” turrets destroyed, her bridge and superstructure shattered and her hull penetrated in multiple places,
Olympos staggered to a halt while the enemy, not knowing what else might be abroad on the sea, wheeled and fled.
Olympos was eventually able to get underway under her own power but the damage was severe – and ultimately fatal. Despite the best efforts of her damage control crews the flooding could not be stopped, and even the nearby Imperial base at Corfu was simply unreachable in the hours left to her. Not far off the island of Ereikoussa the progressive flooding drowned the fires in her boilers and a few minutes later she dove for the bottom.
Despite the painful loss of its most modern armored cruiser (
Athina being still under construction), the Navy’s control of Italian waters was essentially now secure. And in the face of Italy’s refusal to consider peace negotiations, the Imperial General Staff decided that the time had now come to devote the majority of the nation’s resources to the Army. The Navy still said that it could not close the Strait of Messina between the boot’s toe and Sicily, but did express confidence that it could sharply limit shipping across the channel. For the Army, this was good enough; with information in hand about enemy deployments it was decided to effect landings at the south-east corner of the island between the little towns of Lido de Noto and Avola. Once safely ashore the Army would march on Syracuse and then Messina, seizing a port for reinforcements and supply, and sealing Sicily off from the mainland.
While the operation did not go as smoothly as planned, for an army with no experience in amphibious operations it was reasonably successful. The landings went in over the open beaches against token resistance as Italian troops withdrew into the defenses of Syracuse and Messina rather than accept battle. The Imperial Army took the ports under siege, assisted by bombardment from Imperial warships, and with Messina effectively corked the rest of the island was soon taken.
Summer faded into autumn, and autumn into winter, with no end to the war in sight. But December of 1913 brought another naval action, one the Imperial Navy found instructive – and redemptive.
It was another overcast night in the Strait of Otranto, and another Imperial cruiser force was conducting a routine sweep, composed this time of the old armored cruisers
Hellas and
Boukellarion (as
Athina had not yet commissioned and
Chandax was in the Indian Ocean, these were the only Imperial armored cruisers) with light cruiser
Manticore and two destroyers for scouting and screening. But as the old Byzantine saying goes, “The goats will get over into the neighbor’s yard,” meaning that even recent experience and good planning cannot protect against every eventuality. Once again the sole remaining Italian battleship,
Italia, loomed up out of the night, opened fire and turned to withdraw. But this night was overcast, not black and raining, and the spotting range was longer… and
Italia missed her first shot. The old armored cruisers were not capable of more than 23 knots even when new, but
Italia had never managed more than 19, so the Imperials cut across the battleship’s wake and opened fire. One imagines the shade of Admiral Tsoukas grinning from the darkness as
Hellas and
Boukellarion again drove an enemy battleship before them, two terriers stampeding a bull into flight. Even in the gloom, the director-controlled Imperial gunnery was accurate, 10” shells leaving bright blooms of yellow, orange and red as they exploded in the battleship’s stern. Her aft turret was knocked out by
Boukellarion, guns left pointing impotently at the sky. Then one shot smashed the steering gear and
Italia heeled into a wild and uncontrolled turn to port.
Boukellarion drew a bead and landed an all-call of four-out-of-four 10” shells on-target at point-blank range.
Italia stopped dead in the water, whether from an engineering casualty or by her crew’s attempt to regain steering control will forever be unknown. Aflame from stem to stern, the battleship offered a perfect target for Imperial torpedoes; hit twice, she dipped her rail to the water and hung there for half an hour before sliding stern-first to the depths.
This was the final blow; Italy’s trident was utterly broken. Left without a single capital ship she no-longer had even a pretense of being able to restore her fortunes. Peace negotiations were hosted in Vienna but for a time remained deadlocked over the terms. The Empire held out strong hopes for Sicily, on which Italy would not yield, and had no interest in Sardinia, which might have been had. On the advice of Admiral Theodoros, Eritrea was the price – the gateway to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal and a vital way-station on the sea-lanes to the Imperial Far Eastern possessions. Humiliated and embittered, Italy at last agreed and by the loss of her navy also lost her only colony.
With hindsight we can see that the lessons of the Italian War were many and varied. In light of the almost total destruction of the Italian Navy in the Battle of Taranto Gulf it is difficult to remain objective about Imperial deficiencies. No less an authority than British Admiral Sir Stanhope Pearce declared it, “a Trafalgar in steam and steel”. It is beyond dispute that the Navy had in general performed well: its gunnery practice was good and its new fire control systems outstanding, its destroyers fearless and lethal in their torpedo attacks, and it showed good organizational skill in managing the Sicilian landings. Above all, it had forced its enemy to fight the kind of war it had built and trained for, and had defeated and destroyed its foe.
But it is fair to say that the Navy was sometimes incautiously led into unwise situations from which it could not extricate itself without loss. Despite its devotion to light forces, its scouting was often insufficient, particularly at night. Signals and control of formations were unsatisfactory when ships charged about at more than twenty knots and reaction-times in conditions of low visibility were measured in seconds. Certainly the Navy was shocked to find itself repeatedly brought to battle in conditions of low visibility where it was virtually blind. The lost
Olympos, with her mournful roll-call of the dead, pointed out that the Navy’s ships were not particularly well-designed against underwater attack, and that construction standards were not rigorous enough to ensure that what should be watertight actually was.
There is a monument today in Navy Square with a great bronze plaque set upon it to name the ships lost in battle and more around the perimeter to roll-call the dead. The lists are, it must be said, depressingly long. But there is a separate, less formal and more personal Navy memorial: a pair of toasts, drunk back-to-back on every 7th of July in every Navy ship and station around the world. The most junior officer leads with, “Confusion to the enemy!” and the shouted chorus is, “
Hellas and
Boukellarion!” The most senior then gives, “
Olympos and
Boukellarion!” and the others answer, “Never again!”