Cruiser (27 page)

In
Perth
and the other three cruisers, they began to relax a little and even to enjoy the chase in the sparkling morning. Bowyer-Smyth, immaculate and imperturbable as ever, chatted with his officers on the compass platform. The ship's regular routine went on: the Navigator at his charts, the lookouts
scanning their arcs, the Yeoman of Signals and his team alert for a new order from the flag, Ray Parkin on the wheel as Action Quartermaster. The gun crews were closed up but relaxed. It was funny the things you saw in war. Brian Sheedy noticed a tiny sparrow flying parallel with the ship, seeking a resting spot, he thought.

The next thing that happened was extraordinary – a music-hall comic turn in the fog of war. It was just before 11 am.
Orion
was leading the chase. Her crew were also enjoying the sunshine, munching on bully-beef sandwiches sent up from the galley. There was a slight sea haze on the horizon. On her bridge,
Orion
's officers were also snatching a bite, as the Admiral's Operations Officer recounted:

Force B, the 7th Cruiser Squadron, had blundered into the Italian trap. Admiral Iachino had them in his sights. Flashes of flame were rippling from the muzzles of
Vittorio Veneto
's great guns like winking lights on a Christmas tree. And Cunningham was still more than a hundred kilometres and almost three hours away to the south. Time to get out of there. Pridham-Wippell rattled off orders by flag and wireless.

‘Make smoke by all available means.'

‘Turn together to 180 degrees.'

‘Proceed at your utmost speed.'

In
Perth
's engine room, the brass telegraphs clanged for full ahead. The throttles were thrown open for maximum revolutions. The Engineer Commander, Dolly Gray, ordered the settings that would send a filthy black smoke billowing from her two funnels. That would take a couple of knots off her
speed but it would help conceal her from the pursuing Italians, who, without radar, would be firing blind. There were also chemical smoke floats on
Perth
's upper deck, which emitted a thick, foggy white cloud that rolled out across the sea and would help blanket them from their pursuers. The four cruisers put their helms hard over and wheeled around to starboard, the Italian battleship's salvoes screaming around them through the lowering smoke and throwing up tall fountains of dirty brown water. Bowyer-Smyth watched the shells explode with detached professional calm. ‘I had no idea fifteen-inch splashes were so big,' he said to the knot of officers beside him.
⁴

At his station on the flag deck, Brian Sheedy strained to follow the action:

Bowyer-Smyth demanded to know why his lookouts had not spotted the battleship. It was another comic moment. The masthead lookout, summoned to the bridge for a dressing-down, explained that he had tried to report a sighting but his false teeth had fallen into the voice pipe. A shipwright was summoned, the pipe was opened and the teeth were ceremonially handed back to their owner, to laughter all round.

But they were now in great peril. With luck, the Allied cruisers might manage their withdrawal under cover of the smoke, but if one were hit and crippled, or even slowed, the game would be lost. To the south, in
Warspite
, Cunningham knew immediately from Pridham-Wippell's first signals that his cruisers had encountered the main force of the enemy. He ordered
Valiant
, his fastest battleship, to go on ahead to support them. And now came the moment upon which the battle would turn.

Just as Admiral Iachino appeared to have a significant victory within his grasp, with the happy prospect of annihilating no fewer than four British cruisers on a sunny afternoon in Mare Nostrum, fate and history moved against him. Cunningham seized command of the air. The British Admiral did it reluctantly, because it would inevitably give away the presence of his aircraft carrier,
Formidable
. That in turn would tell his opposite number that British battleships were also present, losing any remaining element of surprise. But, with the cruisers in such danger, he had no choice. He ordered a torpedo strike by
Formidable
's aircraft. Six Albacores of the Fleet Air Arm's 826 Squadron lumbered off the carrier's flight deck, a torpedo slung beneath each fuselage. They headed north and pressed home an attack on the Italian battleship through a hail of anti-aircraft fire. All six torpedoes missed, passing either for'ard or astern. But for Iachino it was enough. He had no air
power of his own, no carrier that could return the strike, and no immediate, if any, prospect of air support from ashore. At 11.30 am, he turned tail and ran for it.

This was a mixed blessing for the British. The cruisers had been saved from destruction, and an hour later they came under the battle fleet's umbrella, shaken but unharmed. But the Italian ships were faster than Cunningham's. They were now heading for home at full speed with every chance of escaping, unless
Formidable
's aircraft could somehow make a hit and slow them down.

Cunningham ordered up another air strike. In the early afternoon, three Albacores and two Swordfish took off and headed north-west, escorted by three Fulmar fighters through the clear blue skies, to find the Italians. At about the same time,
Vittorio Veneto
and several of the Italian cruisers were attacked from high altitude by RAF Blenheim bombers flown from Crete, but little damage was done.

At 3.19 pm, the Albacores swooped out of the sun. Two of the Fulmars strafed
Vittorio Veneto
's bridge and upperworks with their wing-mounted machine guns to distract the Italian gunnery. In the lead Albacore, Lieutenant-Commander John Dalyell-Stead of the Fleet Air Arm flew through a storm of anti-aircraft fire to drop his torpedo just 1000 metres from
Vittorio Veneto
's unprotected stern. Then he was shot down and killed, crashing into the sea before he could see the results of his handiwork. But he had done his job. His was the only torpedo that hit. The great battleship staggered under the shock. Thousands of tons of water rushed into the hole punched in her side, both her port shafts were put out of action – one permanently – and the rudder jammed. She was down by the stern and listing to port, partly crippled.

After an hour of furious work by her engine room and damage control parties, she managed to get her speed back up to about 19 knots, still heading for home, the cruisers and destroyers grouped about her. Iachino urgently radioed for fighter cover from Italy, but none ever arrived. And he was now
slower than his British pursuers. But with the distance that still separated the two fleets, Cunningham feared that he might not overhaul the Italians before nightfall, so he ordered yet another air strike. In the long rays of a glorious twilight, more Albacores and Swordfish dived upon the enemy, jinking through a curtain of fire that could be seen by both Brian Sheedy and Roy Norris far away in
Perth
. ‘A parabola of brilliantly coloured anti-aircraft fire – red, white, blue, orange and green tracer fire – filled a tiny part of the wide horizon all curving in arcs,' Sheedy wrote. ‘It went on for half an hour.'
⁶

Despite some optimistic claims by the pilots to the contrary, the aircraft did not hit
Vittorio Veneto
. But one Swordfish, piloted by Lieutenant Michael Torrens-Spence RN, planted a torpedo into the engine room of the heavy cruiser
Pola
, which lurched to a halt, never to move again. In the last light of the setting sun, this sealed the encounter.

In the days before efficient radar, a night action at sea was fraught with added danger. Friend and foe were hard to distinguish. A dim and speedy silhouette, ill lit by moonlight, could easily appear like a small destroyer but turn out to be a heavy cruiser, and there was always the danger of collision in the turmoil. It took a confident admiral and a well-trained fleet to pursue a battle at night. Andrew Browne Cunningham was a confident admiral. Angelo Iachino was not. The Regia Marina had never been schooled in night fighting.

On the admiral's bridge in
Warspite
, Cunningham asked his staff for their opinions. On top of the hazards of battle at night, he faced additional risks. A concerted torpedo attack by the Italian destroyers could do him immense damage. And if he could not catch the Italians during the hours of darkness, he might be left naked in the morning daylight, well within the range of enemy dive-bombers based in Sicily. It was, the British thought, an inexplicable miracle that the Luftwaffe or the Regia Aeronautica had not been on to them by now. They could not know that Iachino had been calling desperately for air support but had failed to receive it.

Cunningham's staff dutifully put their views to him. But, as one officer wrote later:

From this point,
Perth
played only a spectator role at Matapan. She had won her battle honours in the chase by daylight. Hec Waller in
Stuart
, leading the 10th Destroyer Flotilla, would now carry the Australian standard.

At first, Waller felt he was being sidelined. Cunningham ordered a pack of destroyers to chase after the Italians, and they shot off into the starry night, but he kept
Stuart
and the 10th Flotilla with him as a screen for the battleships. Disappointed, Waller moved
Stuart
out to the starboard wing. As it turned out, it was the other destroyers and Pridham-Wippell's cruisers who would miss the climax of the battle. A confusion in their orders and a mistaken positioning led them to pass by the Italian main force in the night.

At 10.30 pm,
Valiant
's radar detected a large ship stopped eight kilometres ahead, off to port. This was the heavy cruiser
Pola
, torpedoed at dusk and now dead in the water. Only minutes later, a young bridge lookout in
Stuart
sighted six
darkened masses on a starboard bearing and on a course that would lead them across the British fleet.

‘Ships bearing green four-oh!'

Cruisers and destroyers. They could only be Italian. Waller rapidly informed his Commander-in-Chief. But, in
Warspite
, Cunningham and his officers had seen them at the same time through their binoculars. Startled, they identified two 8-inch heavy cruisers of the Zara class, with some escorting destroyers. But what on earth were they doing there? The answer, discovered only much later, was extraordinary. Admiral Iachino had sent
Fiume
and
Zara
back to the aid of
Pola
, their stricken sister ship. Incredibly, the Italian Commander had no idea of his enemy's position and that he was despatching two of his biggest ships into the midst of the British battle fleet. And, without radar,
Zara
and
Fiume
were unaware of their peril; their lookouts had seen nothing. They steamed on: perfect targets at a point-blank range of less than 4000 metres.