On the evening of 17 December 1941 two convoy operations collided in the central Mediterranean, in the Gulf of Sirte. A British force under Rear Admiral Philip Vian was taking the supply ship Breconshire to Malta, and an Italian fleet under Admiral Angelo Iachino, with battleships, was covering a convoy to Libya. The fight lasted barely an hour and settled nothing on the spot. Both convoys got through, but within two days a British cruiser force from Malta ran into a minefield off Tripoli and lost a cruiser and a destroyer.
Two convoys at sea
In December 1941 both sides needed to move supplies across the Mediterranean. The British were sending stores to Malta, whose cruisers and destroyers were raiding the Axis route to North Africa, and the Italians were supplying the Axis army in Libya, which had just been driven back by a British offensive.1
The British operation centered on Breconshire, a fast supply ship sailing from Alexandria to Malta. Rickard describes her escort as three cruisers and fourteen destroyers under Vian. Don Kindell's day-by-day record of naval events lists the light cruisers Naiad and Euryalus, the anti-aircraft cruiser Carlisle and a group of destroyers leaving Alexandria, joined at sea on the 17th by cruisers and destroyers from Malta.2
The Italian convoy sailed for Tripoli with a close escort that included the battleship Duilio and three light cruisers. A second group gave distant cover: the battleships Littorio, Andrea Doria and Giulio Cesare, the heavy cruisers Trento and Gorizia, and a screen of destroyers. On the 17th German air reconnaissance reported Vian's force at sea. According to Cristiano D'Adamo's history of the Regia Marina, one of the ships with the British was misreported as a battleship, which made the British look stronger than they were.3
An hour at dusk
The two fleets met late in the day. Rickard gives the time of contact as 5.45pm, and D'Adamo says the Italian battleships sighted the British only near dusk. Iachino had by far the heavier ships. D'Adamo writes that Littorio opened fire at a range of about 32,000 meters, beyond the reach of the British guns.4
The two accounts describe the British response differently. Rickard says Vian went straight for the Italians, so aggressively that Iachino assumed a British battleship must be nearby and turned away to the north. D'Adamo says Vian, who had orders from Admiral Andrew Cunningham to avoid a fleet action, fell back behind a smoke screen and slipped away in the dark. Both agree that the fighting was short: Rickard puts it at about an hour. Breconshire herself, with two destroyers, had been detached to keep her clear of the Italian ships.5
Damage was light. Kindell records that the destroyer Kipling was damaged by a near miss from German bombing that day, with one rating killed, and that a man in the destroyer Jervis was wounded by machine-gun fire.6
Both convoys get through
Neither side achieved its aim of stopping the other. Breconshire reached Malta on the afternoon of 18 December with the ships from Malta. Of the Italian convoy, one steamer turned off for Benghazi and the other three reached Tripoli safely, and D'Adamo stresses that all the Italian convoys of the operation reached port. He counts it as the first successful Italian convoy operation in several months.7
The minefield off Tripoli
The worst British loss came after the battle. On 18 December a force of three cruisers, Neptune, Aurora and Penelope, with four destroyers, left Malta to attack the Italian convoy heading for Tripoli. Early on 19 December the cruisers ran into a minefield. Aurora and Penelope got clear, but Neptune struck several mines and sank, and the destroyer Kandahar was mined while trying to help her and later had to be sunk. Rickard writes that only one man of Neptune's crew of more than 700 survived, and Kindell names him as Able Seaman J. N. Walton, picked up by an Italian torpedo boat on 24 December.8
On the same night Italian frogmen damaged the battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant in Alexandria harbor. Rickard counts the losses of the previous weeks, including the carrier Ark Royal and the battleship Barham, and concludes that for the moment the Royal Navy had lost control of the eastern Mediterranean. Three months later Vian and Iachino met again in the same waters, in the Second Battle of Sirte.9
