Battle of Cape Matapan HMS AJAX and the Battle of Cape Matapan
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Battle of Cape Matapan HMS AJAX and the Battle of Cape Matapan: 28th – 29th March 1941 By Clive Sharplin (Associate Member) The sea fight of the Second World War known as the “Battle of Matapan” was actually the second of that name to occur in naval history. The first occurred on 19th July 1717 when a mixed force of fifty-seven ships and galleys, Spanish, Portuguese, Venetian and Papal were attacked off Cape Matapan by a Turkish squadron of about the same size. After a fierce fight with losses on both sides the Turks withdrew. The ship HMS Ajax was a Leander Class light cruiser, the seventh ship to bear the name, relatively young having been launched in 1934, first commissioned in 1935. Displacing 9,563tons fully laden, her main armament consisted of 8 x 6”guns mounted in pairs over four turrets with 8 x 21 “ torpedo tubes in two quadruple mountings, steam turbine driven, with a wartime crew of 680. After participating in the first major sea battle of the second World War, the Battle of the River Plate in December 1939 and defeating the German battleship Admiral Graf Spee she returned to Chatham Dockyard for a 7 month long repair and refit during which my Father, Bob, joined her on 10th February 1940 as a Petty Officer Mechanician, he was to be a crew member for more` than a year until September 1941 when he was drafted to the battleship Valiant, thus enduring one of the Royal Navy’s most hostile periods. Ajax emerged back into the fleet on September 30th 1940 being deployed to the 7th Cruiser Squadron in the Mediterranean. The major refit items included the most visually obvious, her single pole masts converted to tripods with the fitting of Type 279 radar, the 46ft aircraft catapult and seafox aircraft was replaced by a 56ft one with a walrus* aircraft and zarebas to the secondary armaments 4” Guns. Since 31st January 1941 Ajax had been mainly involved with Operation LUSTRE, escorting convoys or actively transporting the troops from Suda Bay to Greece. (*Editor’s Note - can any of our members from that time shed any light on what planes Ajax flew as there is some debate on this point?) So 224 years later in March 1941 the Mediterranean had been named Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) by Italy’s fascist leader Benito Mussolini in his bizarre claim that it was Italy’s Mare Nostrum but it was far from being Italy’s or for that matter the Royal Navy’s, being most bitterly contested by both. That three year-long contest is now viewed, with the benefit of hindsight, by some naval historians and strategists as being prolonged and as critical as was the battle of the Atlantic and just as fundamental to the Allies winning World War 2 and Ajax was usually in the thick of it. In March 1941 the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean fleet was in a situation of having added to its normal duties the final onerous stages of transporting 60,000 British, Australian and New Zealand troops and their material from Alexandria to Greece to bolster the Greek army’s resistance to an expected German invasion to rescue the Italian’s embarrassingly failed invasion of Greece whose invading army had been pushed back into Albania by the Greek army. The eventual German entry to this theatre of war with their formidable air superiority greatly increased the bitterness and ferocity of the entire conflict as well as completely changing its strategic directions and management. The Italians were still licking their wounds from the Royal Navy’s previous brushes with their own Regia Marina (their navy) over the previous nine months. Then starting in July 1940 intelligence gained by each side lead them to issue fleet orders that was to bring their respective navies into conflict on July 19 at what became known as the Battle of Cape Spado, this transpired to be the matinée to the Battle of Matapan which was itself decisive in setting the future course of the war. The Italian Supermarina (Italian Naval Headquarters) dispatched Admiral Ferdinando Casardi, with the 2nd Division to sail from its base at Tripoli on July 7th to enter the Aegean Sea via the Antikithera Strait northwest of Crete to search for and destroy a suspected British convoy of small Tankers leaving Romania transiting into Greek waters, his ships were spotted the next day by British aircraft. The British meanwhile had their own warships sweeping along the same route for enemy submarines in the path of a different convoy under their escort en-route from Port Said to Greece. The Australian light cruiser Sydney with the British 2nd destroyer flotilla comprising Ilex (Flag), Hasty, Hero, and Hyperion were found cruising independently forty miles to the nor-noreast in the gulf of Athens. Following both sides initially making different manoeuvres and course changes a gunfight started before they settled into a stern chase at 32 knots with the British in pursuit of the Italians who fired spasmodically at the British ships but their poor gunnery failed to inflict any hits upon their pursuers whereas the Sydney scored a critical shell hit on the Bartolomeo Colleoni taking out two of her boilers and the main steam line bringing the Italian to a dead stop whereupon she was quickly sunk by three torpedoes from the British destroyers Ilex and Hyperion. Sydney also got two hits on the Bande Nere, one on the bow the other destroying her seaplanes’ hanger. Sydney had to then withdraw due to a lack of ammunition having expended 1300 shells in the space of two hours with only ten left for her forward turrets. The Bande Nere eventually made it back to port in Benghazi minus 545 of her crew including her wounded captain who were picked up by Ilex, Hyperion and Hasty, of whom 121 later died. There had also been the much earlier brilliant audacious air attack in November 1940 on the Italian Taranto naval base when aircraft from the carrier Illustrious halved the Regia Marina’s strength in one blow by sinking the battleships Italia, Conti di Cavour with the Caio Dulio being severely disabled in the bow, the cruiser Trento damaged and two destroyers damaged by near misses. As a result the Italians had promptly withdrawn the rest of their fleet north to Naples. The price paid by the Royal Navy at Taranto was astonishing, just one aircraft lost with its crew of three who were captured by the Italians. (It has since been widely claimed that the Japanese used this action as their stimulus, model and template in attacking the U.S Navy’s base at Pearl Harbour on 7th December 1941 in declaring war on the USA). This added insult to the injury the Italians had been given from a thrashing by the Greeks following what Mussolini thought would be a walk in the park and he needed the Germans to help rescue his Greek campaign from being a total disaster. The Taranto attack had a profound effect on the naval strategical situation in the Mediterranean as well as providing heartily welcomed news back in a hard pressed Britain. It placed a lust for revenge by the Regia Marina, as together with increasing pressure from the German High Command who for months were becoming more insistent that their Italian partners implement a more aggressive strategy to restore the situation in the Mediterranean forcing the Super marina to take action, they developed Operation Gaudo. The Supermarina, usually reluctant to risk its capital ships but anxious to demonstrate to the arrogant Germans what its Regina Marina was made of, assigned to Operation Gaudo the new 45,000 ton 9 x 15-inch gun battleship Vittorio Veneto, six of its seven 8-inch 10,000 ton heavy cruisers, Trieste, Trento, Bolzano, Zara, Fiume and Pola, two light 6-inch cruisers Duca degli Abruzzi and Garibaldi plus 17 Destroyers. Gaudo tasked the Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Angelo Iachino to take the bulk of his remaining surface forces to sea to engage the British, the plan being to patrol the waters around Crete to seek out and destroy allied convoys, their escorts and any other ships they might discover. Iachino was concerned that the operation depended upon German and/or Italian air support which he could only request through Supermarina. Experience told him that this was invariably futile as co-operation between the different arms of the Italian armed forces was non-existent. He was however heartened by intelligence received from the Germans which indicated that the British Mediterranean fleet possessed only one operational battleship and no aircraft carriers. The intelligence however was completely wrong, three British battleships, Warspite, Barham, Valiant and an aircraft carrier, Formidable were in fact safely in Alexandria harbour at full battle readiness. The aircraft carrier Illustrious had been bombed and badly damaged on 16th January in Malta’s Valletta Harbour but replaced by the Formidable, a scenario at that time not then discovered by the Germans. On 23rd March Cunningham received an Ultra signal from the Admiralty. Ultra was a name to disguise signals that had originated from Britain’s most secret code breaking establishment at Bletchley Park where the Italian Enigma naval code had only just been broken, alerting him to an Italian naval operation commencing in three days’ time. On the 25th a further Ultra signal advised the interception of another Italian signal giving one days’ notice to their fleet commanders. Ajax had already made her name known to the Italians in a previous action in October 1940 when together with the Cruiser Malaya, the veteran battleship Ramillies, the aircraft carrier Eagle and a screen of eight destroyers had completed escorting convoy MF4 to Alexandria with supplies from Libya, when in a position some 110 miles east of Malta at 0200 on the 12th of October three Italian destroyers were sighted, identified as Ariel, Artigliere and Arione.