Battle of Cape Matapan

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Cape Matapan began with a cryptic message intercepted at Bletchley Park: "Today's the day minus three." A cryptanalyst named Mavis Batey had just done something that had never been done before. She had read the Italian naval Enigma. Three days later, a second decrypted message confirmed that an Italian battle fleet, including one battleship, six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and destroyers, was headed out to strike at British supply convoys in the Mediterranean. The date was late March 1941.

  What followed over the nights of the 27th through the 29th of March was a battle fought on two levels at once. On the surface, warships exchanged fire and torpedoes off the southern tip of Greece. Beneath the surface, an elaborate game of deception kept the Italians from learning that their own signals had betrayed them. And in the dark hours before dawn on the 29th, British battleships closed to point-blank range against an enemy who did not even know they were there.

  How a codebreaker's breakthrough turned into Italy's greatest defeat at sea, and what it cost both sides to keep that secret, is the story this documentary will tell.

• 2. The Bletchley Breakthrough

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  Mavis Batey was working at the Government Code and Cypher School when she broke open Italian naval Enigma for the first time. Her first decoded message was spare and strange: "Today's the day minus three." It told her something was coming. The follow-up message, three days later, spelled out the details of the Italian sortie.

  The intelligence produced by Bletchley Park was codenamed Ultra, and it came with a strict rule. The enemy must never suspect that their signals had been read. Every time Ultra provided a lead, the Allies had to stage a plausible reason for how they had found the fleet. At Cape Matapan, that cover was a reconnaissance aircraft carefully directed toward the Italian ships.

  Admiral Andrew Cunningham added his own layer of theater. On the afternoon of the 27th of March, he arrived at a golf club in Alexandria carrying a suitcase, as though settling in for an overnight stay. He made sure to be seen by the Japanese consul on the course. That evening, a party aboard his flagship was advertised but never held. Under cover of darkness, Cunningham slipped away and boarded his battleship.

  The Italian side had its own intelligence failure, though one that worked against them. German sources had told the Italian command that the British Mediterranean Fleet had only one operational battleship and no aircraft carriers. The Royal Navy actually had three battleships and a carrier, HMS Formidable. That miscalculation would matter enormously when the shooting started.

• 3. Action off Gavdos

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  On the morning of the 28th of March, an Italian floatplane launched from the battleship Vittorio Veneto spotted the British cruiser squadron at 06:35. Thirty minutes later, the Italian Trento group made contact south of the Greek island of Gavdos with Vice-Admiral Pridham-Wippell's cruisers. The British ships were heading south-east, and the Italians, reading flight as retreat, gave chase.

  Fire opened at 08:12 from 24,000 yards. Over the next forty-odd minutes, the heavy cruisers Trieste, Trento, and Bolzano expended a combined total of more than 500 shells: Trieste fired 132 armour-piercing rounds, Trento fired 204 armour-piercing and 10 explosive shells, and Bolzano added 189 armour-piercing rounds. Trouble with Italian rangefinding equipment meant none of those shells scored a significant hit. HMS Gloucester fired three salvos in return; they fell short, but the splashes prompted the Italians to change course.

  By around 09:00, the Italian cruisers had not closed the gap meaningfully and broke off, turning north-west to rejoin Vittorio Veneto. The British followed at extreme range. Admiral Iachino allowed this, hoping to pull Pridham-Wippell's ships within range of his battleship's guns.

  An officer on Orion's bridge turned to a companion and remarked, "What's that battleship over there? I thought ours were miles away." Orion's signal reporting an unknown unit was intercepted by the Italians. At 10:55, Vittorio Veneto joined the cruisers and opened fire, firing 94 rounds in 29 salvos from 25,000 yards. The British cruisers, unaware until that moment that a battleship was present, withdrew with slight damage from 381 mm shell fragments. A series of photographs capturing Italian salvos falling among Allied warships was published in Life magazine on the 16th of June 1941.

• 4. Air and Torpedo Attacks

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  Cunningham's force had been trying to close with Pridham-Wippell's cruisers. At 09:38, Fairey Albacore torpedo bombers launched from HMS Formidable and struck at Vittorio Veneto. The first attack landed no hits, but the manoeuvring it forced made it harder for the Italian ships to keep up their pursuit. Italian anti-aircraft batteries using 152, 100, and 90 mm guns, and 37, 20, and 13.2 mm weapons at close range, beat back the attack. One of the two Junkers Ju 88s escorting the Italian fleet was shot down by a Fairey Fulmar. Iachino broke off the pursuit at 12:20 and turned toward his air cover at Taranto.

  A second attack at 15:09 caught the Italians off guard. Lieutenant-Commander John Dalyell-Stead, who held the Distinguished Service Order, flew his Albacore to within 1,000 metres of Vittorio Veneto before releasing his torpedo. It struck her outer port propeller and caused 4,000 long tons of flooding. Dalyell-Stead and his crew were killed when anti-aircraft fire from the battleship shot down their aircraft. Vittorio Veneto stopped for repairs, then got under way again at 16:42, making 19 knots. Cunningham, hearing of the damage, began a pursuit.

  The third and decisive attack came between 19:36 and 19:50. Six Albacores and two Fairey Swordfish from 826 and 828 Naval Air Squadrons aboard Formidable, joined by two Swordfish of 815 Squadron flying from Crete, pressed the attack. Iachino used three-column formation, smoke, searchlights, and heavy barrage fire to protect Vittorio Veneto. The tactics worked for the flagship, but one torpedo found the heavy cruiser Pola. She had slowed to avoid colliding with Fiume and could take no evasive action. The blow knocked out five boilers and the main steam line. Pola lost electric power and drifted to a stop. The torpedo was apparently dropped by Lieutenant Grainger Williams, who was subsequently awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his role in bringing about what happened next.

• 5. The Night Action

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  Unaware that Cunningham's fleet was in pursuit, Italian headquarters ordered a squadron back to help Pola. That squadron included Pola's sister ships, Zara and Fiume. The order went out, but the squadron did not actually begin turning back for about an hour, officially because of communication problems.

  At 20:15, radar aboard Orion picked up a ship six miles to port, apparently dead in the water. It was Pola. The main Allied force detected the returning Italian squadron on radar shortly after 22:00. The Italian ships had no radar of their own, and Italian tactical doctrine had not planned for night engagements. Their main gun batteries were not prepared for action.

  At 22:20 the Italian ships spotted the British squadron, but assumed they were looking at friendly vessels. The battleships Barham, Valiant, and Warspite closed to 3,800 yards, point-blank range for battleship guns, and opened fire. Allied searchlights lit the scene, including those operated under the command of Midshipman Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark aboard Valiant. HMS Formidable joined the line briefly, firing one salvo from her 4.5-inch guns before withdrawing to safety. British gunners saw main turrets flying dozens of metres into the air from the Italian cruisers. Fiume and Zara were destroyed in minutes. Fiume sank at 23:30. The destroyer HMS Jervis finished Zara off with a torpedo at 02:40 on the 29th of March.

  Two Italian destroyers, Vittorio Alfieri, the flagship of Captain Salvatore Toscano, and Giosuè Carducci, were sunk within the first five minutes. Two others, Gioberti and Oriani, escaped in a smoke screen, Gioberti sustaining heavy damage after being chased by the British destroyers Griffin and Greyhound. British boarding parties took a number of Breda anti-aircraft machine guns from Pola before her crew was removed and she was sunk by torpedoes from Jervis and Nubian shortly after 04:00.

• 6. Aftermath and Secrecy

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  Italian losses totalled up to 2,303 sailors, most of them from Zara and Fiume. The Allies rescued 1,015 survivors; the Italian hospital ship Gradisca recovered another 160 after Cunningham broadcast the survivors' location on the Merchant Marine emergency band and granted safe passage to Italian rescue vessels. Allied casualties were three men killed, the crew of Dalyell-Stead's Albacore, shot down by Vittorio Veneto's 90 mm batteries.

  Naval historian Vincent O'Hara called the battle "Italy's greatest defeat at sea, subtracting from its order of battle a cruiser division, but the battle was hardly decisive." Admiral Iachino, writing after the war, was more precise about what the defeat exposed. The operation had revealed, in his words, the Italian fleet's "inferiority in effective aero-naval cooperation and the backwardness of our night battle technology." He did not mention the Enigma intercepts, which were not yet known to him.

  Cunningham himself was not entirely satisfied. Vittorio Veneto had escaped. He called that outcome, in his own words, "much to be regretted."

  The codebreakers at Bletchley Park were rarely told of the operational results of their work. Cape Matapan was an exception. A few weeks after the battle, Cunningham visited Bletchley Park personally to thank Dilly Knox and his team. Mavis Batey later recalled: "Our sense of elation knew no bounds when Cunningham himself came down in person to thank and congratulate us." The Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, sent a message to Knox that read: "Tell Dilly that we have won a great victory in the Mediterranean and it is entirely due to his girls."

  The role of Bletchley Park and the Ultra decryptions remained classified for decades. In 1966, author H. Montgomery Hyde published a story claiming an American spy named Betty Thorpe had seduced the Italian naval attaché in Washington, Admiral Alberto Lais, and stolen a codebook used to defeat the Italians. Hyde was found guilty of libelling the dead. A 1980 BBC series called Spy! revisited similar claims about an agent named "Cynthia" and a stolen codebook. In 1974, Frederick Winterbotham's book The Ultra Secret falsely credited Luftwaffe Enigma decryption rather than Italian naval Enigma. The real record was not corrected in Italian official history until Mavis Batey herself demonstrated Dilly Knox's rodding method to the Italian admiral in charge of naval history. The underlying documents were not declassified until 1978.