Cruiser (28 page)
Authors: Mike Carlton
Cunningham wrote in his memoirs that never in his life had he experienced a more thrilling moment. More like a young midshipman than a Commander-in-Chief, he bounded from his admiral's bridge to the compass platform above, where the ship was conned and where he could get a better view. There was a breathless silence â it seemed unending â as
Warspite
's turrets trained towards the enemy. It was broken by the calm report from the Gunnery Director Tower above: âDirector layer sees the target.'
It must have been the Fleet Gunnery Officer, Commander Geoffrey Barnard, who gave the final order to open fire. One heard the âting-ting-ting' of the firing gongs. Then came the great orange flash and the violent shudder as the six big guns bearing were fired simultaneously. At the very same instant the destroyer
Greyhound
, on the screen, switched her searchlight on to one of the enemy cruisers, showing her momentarily up as a silvery-blue shape in the darkness. Our searchlights shone out with the full salvo, and provided the illumination for what was
a ghastly sight. Full in the beam I saw our six great projectiles flying through the air. Five out of the six hit a few feet below the level of the cruiser's upper deck and burst with splashes of brilliant flame. The Italians were quite unprepared. Their guns were trained fore and aft. They were helplessly shattered before they could put up any resistance. In the midst of all this there was one milder diversion of note. Captain Douglas Fisher, the captain of the
Warspite
, was a gunnery officer of note. When he saw the first salvo hit he was heard to say in a voice of wondering surprise: âGood Lord! We've hit her!'
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Barham
and
Valiant
opened up as well on the two cruisers. The carnage was tremendous. Watchers on the British ships saw gun turrets and huge chunks of debris fly into the air and masts come crashing down. Almost instantly, the Italians erupted in orange flame, burning from stem to stern, sending heavy pillars of oily black smoke billowing into the night sky.
Fiume
would sink within three-quarters of an hour.
Zara
, on fire and out of control, drifted away.
To their credit, the Italian destroyers accompanying the cruisers attempted a bold counter-attack, causing Cunningham to âcomb the tracks', as it was called â turning away so that any torpedoes fired would, with luck, pass harmlessly down his ships' sides. Just before 11 o'clock, he unleashed the destroyers of his own screen, the 10th Flotilla. It was the moment Waller and
Stuart
had been waiting for. The old Scrap Iron Flotilla leader leaped forward like a thoroughbred racehorse, the scene lit by the hellish flames from the cruisers, the eerie glow of star shells and the stabbing silver fingers of searchlights.
âAlarm starboard!'
âShift target to cruiser bearing green six five!'
âDirector: target!'
âFire!'
It was the burning
Zara
.
Stuart
's 4.7-inch guns pumped a salvo into her, tongues of flame and black and yellow smoke belching from the muzzles. Multicoloured tracer shells streaked
through the night like some hellish fireworks display. Then Waller ordered a torpedo attack.
âTurning to fire torpedoes!'
âThirty degrees to go, sir.'
In
Stuart
's waist, the Commissioned Gunner (T), Frank âShorty' Ley, aimed his tubes, six of them, each armed with a 21-inch torpedo.
âTwenty degrees to go, sir.'
âVery good.'
âTen degrees to go, sir.'
âFire one. Fire two. Fire three.'
The watchers on the bridge saw an explosion in the
Zara
. At least one torpedo hit, they thought. From there, the action became confused. It was like a dockyard brawl, a knife-fight in a darkened bar, ships weaving and circling and grappling in the fog of war. Shapes would come and go in the gloom. Suddenly, an Italian destroyer appeared out of the murk, heading straight for them. Waller flung
Stuart
into an emergency turn to port, and the enemy â probably the
Giosue Carducci
â raced by to starboard less than 150 metres away.
Stuart
pumped some shells into her from the 4.7s, but there was no reply.
Minutes later, they fired another salvo into the
Zara.
Then
Stuart
heeled over again as yet another Italian destroyer shot past, illuminated by a convenient explosion in one of the damaged cruisers.
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This was the
Vittorio Alfieri
, a fast fleet destroyer named, curiously, after a playwright considered the founder of Italian dramatic tragedy. Another Italian tragedy was unfolding. Signalman Les Clifford was on
Stuart
's bridge that night:
âHard a'port!' shouted Captain Waller as the destroyer
Vittorio Alfieri
flashed by.
At the same moment the Gunnery Officer
10
shouted: âEngage destroyer bearing green seven oh!'
The guns swung round to the new bearing, their crews sweating as they rammed home the shells.
The order to fire was given simultaneously with the first salvo crashing into the Italian's bridge and forward gun platform. A second salvo tore gaping holes in her superstructure fore and aft, and a third, fired by the after guns, caused big explosions in the stern of the destroyer.
The Italian had apparently suffered damage to her steering gear, for she began to go round in circles.
Havock
, who was following in the wake of
Stuart
, was directed to finish off the
Alfieri
, and this was promptly executed with the aid of torpedoes.
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Eventually, at 11.18 pm, Cunningham sent out a general signal: âAll forces not engaged in sinking the enemy retire to the north-east.'
This, as he later admitted himself, was a mistake. The order had been intended only for the destroyers, but it caused Pridham-Wippell and his cruisers to end their attempt to get in touch with the
Vittorio Veneto
. Admiral Iachino and the body of his fleet thus managed to break away to the north-west, back home to Taranto.
Stuart
, her crew still fired with the lust of battle, reluctantly disengaged along with the rest. The last great act came long after midnight.
Zara
, a flaming wreck, sank herself with scuttling charges. Shortly after 3 am, another group of destroyers finally encountered the cruiser
Pola
, still wallowing lifeless and now irretrievably alone. The destroyer
Jervis
circled her warily, guns and torpedo tubes training as she went, but she need not have bothered with the precaution. With their engines dead and their electrical circuits burned out, the fight had gone out of the Italians. The destroyers' searchlights revealed a tableau of horror. Someone had hung out a white flag of surrender â a bed sheet or a tablecloth â and the open door to an after gun turret swung listlessly in the slight swell. There was a fire burning on
Pola
's quarterdeck, which was strewn with rubbish and personal belongings, and it was appallingly plain that half her crew were drunk, lurching about on deck in a litter
of empty bottles. Others, panic-stricken, some naked, were leaping over the side. The destroyers rescued as many as they could in the glare of the searchlights.
A German officer fished out of the water by HMS
Mohawk
unwisely greeted his rescuers with a crisp âHeil Hitler!'. A beefy Australian on exchange with the RN, Ordinary Seaman Frank McAuliffe, from Randwick in Sydney, picked him up by the scruff of his neck and the seat of his pants and tossed him back overboard. âSalute properly when you come over the side of a British ship,' McAuliffe shouted after him. The German grasped a rope and struggled back again, slinking off to the quarterdeck but taking care to stand apart from his bedraggled Axis shipmates.
At precisely 4.10 am,
Jervis
sank the
Pola
with torpedoes. She rolled over in the inky waters and went to the bottom. So ended the Battle of Matapan.
From the field of Waterloo, after his victory over Napoleon in 1815, the Duke of Wellington famously wrote in a despatch to London, âBelieve me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.'
Perhaps Andrew Cunningham had much the same thoughts as the sun rose on the next morning, Saturday 29 March. Amazingly, he had lost only three men: the crew of the Albacore shot down after torpedoing
Vittorio Veneto
. But a panorama of desolation lay before him. The night had been cold. Corpses floated on a sea of stinking fuel oil, bobbing obscenely among the wreckage. Survivors on rafts, or clutching anything that would float, cried piteously for help. To the British and the Australians, these men had been the enemy, but they were also sailors like themselves. In
Perth
, Brian Sheedy made a sombre note:
At 1000 five boatloads of survivors came into sight in the
direct line of approach of the fleet. Fleet steamed through them detaching two destroyers to pick them up. Much waving of arms by Italians, standing on rafts. Poor devils, they must have been through hell last night. From what ship we do not know. For almost twenty miles the Fleet came across Italian sailors adrift in hazardous craft. Some were on rafts in groups of about eight or ten; groups were floating in the water held up by lifejackets; then there were single sailors surrounded by wide stretches of water. And then there were the dead not in the water but floating on it, bloated by body gases, the white duck of their uniforms stretched to breaking point. They floated like grotesque balloons, white shapes on a blue sea.
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Like everyone else, the Australians were tired and drained. They had been at action stations all night. Warwick Bracegirdle noted that:
For us, in the cruisers, it was the beginning of our second day of tension. Everybody wore that grey look of tiredness, strain and stubble. Our Captain had, as always, made time to shave and alone looked immaculate. The smell of cooking from the galley was becoming quite unbearable to all hands.
Suddenly, on our port bow, we sighted a line of grey life rafts, wallowing low in the water. Packed tight with weary waving survivors. It's never a nice sight at sea. You may be one of them yourself one day. It means the end of one fight, against a decent honourable foe, and the beginning of a new fight to keep alive. A fight against the elements â against the sea. That's perhaps why sailors the world over get along so well together. They have an endless fight against the sea be they fishermen, or deep sea sailor men. A destroyer was detached from the small screening force to pick up survivors. The Fleet was manoeuvred clear at high speed. Enemy submarines were a certainty so frequent zig-zags of course were made.
The one destroyer stopped and commenced rescuing survivors by aid of scrambling nets let down her sleek grey sides. Suddenly
a penetrating series of short, sharp blasts on a steam siren â the emergency signal for âenemy aircraft in sight'. This was followed by the air raid warning imminent signal (a red flag) from the carrier with radar. The cruisers packed in tighter to cover the carrier. The destroyers also eased in to tighten the ring. The lone destroyer with survivors shot ahead at speed leaving survivors in the water. She could not be caught stationary in an air attack.
Then the signal to fire a protective barrage, an umbrella of shell over the air carrier. The sky close above her became black with angry puffs of anti-aircraft shell forming a disturbing blanket of steel fragments. Then hose piping right ahead, every available gun of the carrier's eight barrel pom-poms (nicknamed Chicago Pianos) pumped out vicious red tracer at diving aircraft. The swift attacks pressed home by German Junkers 88 dive bombers
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continued. The cracking tempo of the gunfire becoming more marked as fresh attacks developed. Off the carrier's port bow, a huge detonation of a 1000 pound bomb followed by a black burst and a rising, towering 100 foot water column. The carrier had been near missed.
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With infinite irony, the rescue effort had been interrupted by the Luftwaffe. The air support so desperately requested by Admiral Iachino arrived 24 hours too late. A flight of JU88 bombers jumped the fleet in the afternoon at the start of the first dog watch. They flew low and level through a massive outpouring of high-angle fire to attack
Formidable
, but they scored not a hit and lost two of their own before disappearing over the horizon again. By this time, the British had rescued some 900 Italians, but, understandably, Cunningham had no wish to keep up the humanitarian effort at the risk of another German attack. In clear English, he broadcast his exact position to the Supermarina and invited them to send out a hospital ship, which, he said, would be granted safe passage. The Italians politely thanked him for this chivalrous gesture and did as he suggested.