Mussolini's War in the Red Sea: Headache for the British Empire

Here's What You Need to Know: Italy disputed Allied use of the critical sea route between India and the Middle East, straining the British Empire’s resources.

On May 9, 1936, four days after Italian troops entered Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, Mussolini appeared on a balcony of Rome’s Palazzo Venezia to proclaim Victor Emmanuel emperor of the newly created Italian East Africa. Never again were fascism and Mussolini so popular.

Italian East Africa symbolized Italy’s aspiration to great-power status. It lay beyond the Mediterranean prison that Mussolini felt confined his nation and enjoyed a potentially strategic position with its long coastline extending down the southern third of the Red Sea, interdicting the crucial British sealane between India and Suez.

A Feet of Survival

Following the Munich conference in 1938, Great Britain began to study ways to resolve the Italian problem in the Middle East. The foreign office believed the swift conquest of Italy’s new empire might decisively undermine Mussolini’s power base at home. However, Mussolini himself did not seem to attach much importance to holding the colony. In October 1936, he sacked his deputy minister of war for warning that if war came East Africa would fall as quickly as it had been taken unless Il Duce immediately invested money in its defense infrastructure.

The Italian Navy, for its part, toyed with the tantalizing idea of creating an oceanic strike force consisting of diesel battleships, aircraft carriers, supply ships, and tropicalized men-of-war to sail from a network of newly built bases along the Somali coast. However, this plan’s price tag made its fulfillment little more than a fantasy.

By June 1940, when the anticipated war with the British Empire finally began, Massawa was the only base along the lengthy coastline of Somalia and Eritrea with a naval presence. At this Red Sea port, Italy deployed eight modern submarines, seven destroyers, two old torpedo boats, five World War I-era motor torpedo boats, and the large colonial sloop, Eritrea. This was hardly the oceanic strike force Italy’s maritime strategists envisioned, but Great Britain nonetheless regarded these ships as a knife pressed against the throat of Suez.

In the eyes of Rome, however, the Red Sea Squadron’s inadequate stocks of fuel and ammunition limited its role to one of survival and sea denial for the duration of what the government hoped would be a short war.

A War of Intelligence

On June 10, 1940, Rear Admiral A.J.L. Murray commanded the British Red Sea Force based at Aden. Murray mustered the New Zealand light cruiser Leander and the Australian Hobart. In the weeks leading up to war, especially after Great Britain read Italy’s orders for the “immediate and secret mobilization of the army and air force in east Africa,” the British Admiralty dispatched the old cruiser Carlisle; three sloops, Auckland, Flamingo, and Grimsby; and the modern ships of the 28th Destroyer Division, Kandahar, Kingston, Kimberley, and Khartoum, to supplement Murray’s command. The Red Sea Force had multiple missions: to prevent Italian reinforcements, to engage the Massawa squadron, to blockade the coast of Italian Somaliland, to protect the vital shipping lane up to Suez, and to defend Aden from surface attack.

Rear Admiral Carlo Balsamo commanded Italy’s squadron. His missions were less ambitious: to dispute passage of the Red Sea and preserve his force. The submarines were his principal offensive weapon. On June 10 they occupied or were en route to their patrol stations, but their forewarned enemy had halted all mercantile shipping to the Red Sea since May 24, and the submarines enjoyed scant success. Galilei sank the Norwegian tanker James Stove (8,215 tons) 12 miles off Aden on June 16. The hulk of that freighter burned for three days with grim effect on the city’s native population. As a matter of fact, the Royal Navy took the threat of the Italian submarines so seriously that it attributed even the loss of the Indian sloop Pathan (661 tons), sunk off Bombay on June 23 presumably by a floating mine, to the submarine Galvani.

In exchange Italy lost four submarines. Crew poisoning caused by a leak of methyl chloride (used as a cheap substitute for freon in the air conditioning system) caused Macallé to be stranded and wrecked on June 15. Four days later misguided doctrine betrayed Galilei off Aden. Up until 1942 Italian submarine commanders trusted their guns and surface speed and did not hesitate to fight enemy ships on the surface if conditions appeared to warrant it. On that day the sloop Shoreham and the 650-ton armed trawler Moonstone found the Italian boat on the surface. She dived, but after undergoing a depth charge attack, Galilei battle-surfaced and manned her guns.

Ten minutes into the ensuing action Moonstone landed two 4-inch shells on the submarine’s conning tower from very close range, killing the captain, gun crew, and all the other officers except a lone midshipman. Moonstone swiftly launched a boat, and before the young officer understood what was happening, British sailors had boarded. He dropped the codes overboard, but the British discovered general operational orders that allowed the sloop Falmouth to track down the submarine Galvani at the entrance of the Persian Gulf.

In this night action of June 24, Falmouth caught the Italian boat on the surface, damaged her, and then, with Kimberley; standing by, forced her to surrender and scuttle herself. Italian sources, however, deny Galilei carried such valuable information on an operational mission and suggest her capture provided a convenient cover to protect other intelligence sources.

After the end of the campaign in eastern Africa, the Italians discovered, with dismay, that the very professional civilian barman at the officer’s mess in Massawa was not Sicilian, as supposed, but a Maltese infiltrated there in 1938. The same intelligence (whatever the source) led to the interception of Torricelli, the fourth Red Sea submarine lost in the war’s first fortnight.

Sinking of Torricelli

On June 14 Torricelli, under Corvette Captain Salvatore Pelosi, relieved Ferraris after she also suffered a case of methyl chloride poisoning off Djibouti. On June 21, Shoreham, Kingston, and Khartoum encountered and slightly damaged Torricelli. Pelosi aborted his mission and began the long trip back to Massawa. The most dangerous point in this passage was Bab el Mandeb—the Gate of Tears—the heavily patrolled 15-mile-wide choke point between the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.

Shoreham spotted Torricelli off Perim Island early on the morning of June 23. The Italian submarine submerged briefly but found no security in the clear, shallow water. Pelosi surfaced, preferring to outrun the British sloop rather than submit to a depth-charge attack. He did not know Shoreham formed just one end of a search line that included the destroyers Kandahar, Kingston, Khartoum, and the Indian sloop Indus.

At 5:30 am, Torricelli initiated the action with her 3.9-inch conning tower gun from a range of 5,500 yards, and her second salvo scored a lucky blow, damaging Shoreham’s bow and causing her to turn away. Indus appeared, but she was no faster than the submarine, and it momentarily seemed to Pelosi his boat might pull away. But when the column of three destroyers hove into view, his hope swiftly vanished. Kingston, in the lead, opened fire with her forward guns at 5:36.

Torricelli launched four torpedoes back at the British destroyer, which Kingston dodged. As she closed, Kingston opened fire with her machine guns and 40mm “pom-poms,” trying to clear the submarine’s bridge so boarders could capture her like Galilei. However, one of Kingston’s 40mm shells accidentally struck an aerial lead and wounded eight of her crew.

For a half hour the chase dragged on. The other destroyers engaged as they came in range, and the submarine fiercely replied. In growing frustration, the three British warships switched from trying to capture to sinking their enemy. They expended nearly 700 rounds before, at 6:05, a shell destroyed Torricelli’s steering gear and rendered further resistance impossible. Five minutes latter the crew abandoned ship, and Torricelli sank at 6:24.

The British Take Casualties

After rescuing 60 members of the submarine’s crew, the British force split up. According to the British account, Khartoum, with prisoners, set off for her Perim patrol zone. However, at 11:50 a torpedo in her after quintuple mount suddenly exploded for no apparent reason, igniting a huge fire in the after lobby. The crew could not control the conflagration, and Khartoum ran for Perim harbor seven miles distant.

There, her men abandoned ship, swimming for their lives. At 12:45, No. 3 magazine blew up, destroying the ship. This incident is one of the most controversial events of the campaign. Italian and some British writers relate that, in fact, Pelosi’s boat sank the much larger warship. “During the engagement Khartoum sustained one hit from a 10-cm shell which burst near the after bank of 21-in torpedo tubes. A splinter caused the air vessel of a torpedo to explode.”

The last submarine-versus-surface ship engagement occurred after Perla, victim of another poison gas leak, was stranded off Ras Cosar on the evening of June 26 following a depth-charge attack by Kingston. About noon the next day, Leander, Kandahar, and Kingston returned to document the sinking Kingston had incorrectly claimed. Perla fired just one shell at the British warships before her gun jammed. The cruiser’s Supermarine Walrus seaplane took off and dropped several bombs. Then Leander opened fire, observing four straddles and claiming several hits. Despite their optimistic claims, however, splinters from near misses caused the only damage inflicted by the British onslaught.