Abstract
The First World War in the Mediterranean was a largely frustrating experience for the Allies. Their strategic and political differences hindered mutual cooperation. In this context, the Italian role has been badly overlooked by non-Italian historians. Italian historians, on their part, essentially focused on the Adriatic campaign, largely ignoring Italy’s war outside the Adriatic, as well as the Allied contribution to it. I aim to offer a fresh perspective of the war in the Mediterranean by looking at Italy’s role in the Allied naval strategy with a comparative approach, using new material made available by the Italian Navy Archive.
Shady Areas and Stereotypes
Paul Halpern, probably the leading naval expert of the First World War, wrote that the naval war in the Mediterranean was, for the Allies, ‘a frustrating experience’. This ‘frustration’ is exemplified in Italy’s relations with its new Entente allies. During the war, both British and French admirals repeatedly – often bitterly – criticized their younger ally. In particular, they blamed the self-reliant Italian naval strategy and ‘lack of offensive spirit’. Many of them would have probably agreed with General Douglas Haig, who, in 1917, called the Italians ‘a wretched people, useless as fighting men but greedy for money’, and doubted whether they were ‘really in earnest about this war’. 1 Such ideas strengthened the less benevolent stereotypes which depicted the Italians in general as an opportunistic, faint-hearted, and essentially cowardly people. The Italians, on their part, reacted with a mix of pride and resentment. They claimed that their allies made no real effort to understand Italian difficulties, and the peculiarities of the Italian naval war – particularly regarding the Adriatic – and tended to see Allied criticism as a political attack aimed at depriving the Italian naval command of its authority and autonomy. 2 Later, these negative evaluations of Italian performance had a huge impact on the post-war settlement: they left the British and French ‘with fewer scruples about breaking the territorial promises included in the Treaty of London’, under which Italy had entered the war in May 1915, with tremendous consequences not only for Italian politics, but for Europe and beyond. 3
These contrasts were reflected in post-war literature, and left many undiscussed areas in the role played by Italy at sea in the First World War. In particular, Anglo-American and French historians tended to describe the war in the Mediterranean as an Anglo-French affair, paying little attention to the Adriatic and almost no attention to Italy’s role outside the Adriatic. In their eyes, Italy’s contribution to the final victory was minimal, if not counterproductive. Halpern, for example, described Italy as a ‘recalcitrant ally’, which played an essentially defensive role at sea – not least because of its persistent tactical deficiencies – absorbing, however, significant Anglo-French resources. 4 Even more severe, Lawrence Sondhaus claimed that Italy’s passive naval strategy hampered the overall Allied Mediterranean strategy, because ‘from the start the Italians … seemed willing to concede the Adriatic to the enemy’. Thus, the Central Powers maintained control of the ‘Italian sea’ to the end of the war, systematically challenging Allied supremacy in the Mediterranean. 5 Auguste Thomazi also agreed that the Italians were inefficient allies, whose timidity enabled the Austro-Hungarian fleet-in-being to tie down an ever-greater number of Allied warships, which could have been put to better use elsewhere. 6
Italian historians, on the other hand, have praised Italy’s performance and tended to overemphasize the significance of the Adriatic campaign. Because it was the base of the only Mediterranean ‘grand fleet’ of the Central Powers, the Austro-Hungarian k.u.k. Kriegsmarine, the Adriatic was, in their eyes, the decisive theatre of the Mediterranean war. Italian accounts thus provide little insight on Italy’s war outside the ‘Italian sea’, and badly neglect the Allied contribution and support to Italy elsewhere in the Mediterranean. 7 An Italian history of Italy’s role in the overall Allied Mediterranean strategy is, in fact, non-existent.
This article aims to address the limits of both strands of scholarship. It argues that the Italian naval approach was all but defensive, and that the apparent Austro-Hungarian ‘unchallenged control of the Adriatic’ is, in fact, a myth. It also reveals that Italian failings, which undoubtedly did occur throughout the war, had their origin in other causes and not in the lack of an offensive spirit, or the partial Italian commitment to the Entente cause, or Italian cowardice – instead, they were largely the result of material difficulties. Mutual inter-allied mistrust and competition, and incompatible views in both the strategic and tactical spheres, produced the strongly antithetical narratives of the Allied Mediterranean war that survive to this day in Italian and non-Italian scholarship. This article therefore aims not only to break the myth of Italian ineffectiveness and timidity by reassessing the impact of Italy’s naval operations, but also to decipher a century-long historiographical misunderstanding. Furthermore, it overcomes the tendency of Italian historians to narrow their analysis to the Adriatic operations, by showing how, by the end of the war, Italian naval strategy was much more oriented towards the Mediterranean than it was towards the Adriatic.
What follows makes no pretense to painting a comprehensive picture of Italy’s naval war in 1915–18. Instead, this essay re-evaluates the Anglo-French and Italian strategic approaches, and focuses on three case studies – the Adriatic, the Italian contribution to the anti-submarine strategy, and the Italian role in the convoy system – to examine how the Italian war was linked to that of the other allies. In so doing, I hope to provide the international community of military historians with a fresh take on the First World War in the Mediterranean.
Great Expectations and Strategic Approaches
Much of the Allied frustration towards Italy probably originated in the great expectations the Allies had of their new Italian ally when it entered the fray in May 1915. The Treaty of London, signed in secrecy on 26 April, confirmed Italy’s declaration of war, within a month, on Berlin and Vienna (Rome’s former allies), and Constantinople; military and naval conventions, to be signed by Italy, France, Britain, and Russia, to coordinate their efforts; and financial support to Italy. The British were particularly satisfied. Their aim was to complete the blockade of the Central Powers by securing the Mediterranean and closing it to their enemies. The Italian intervention seemed to turn the Mediterranean balance of power decisively in favor of the Allies; the Austro-Hungarian fleet, left alone, could be confined to the Adriatic, where it could be quickly beaten. The whole Mediterranean basin would then become an Allied sea. The price for such a rosy prospect was relatively cheap: a £50 million British loan to Italy. Alongside this, a list of territorial gains to be made to Italy was included with the Allied promises: Austro-Hungarian territories in Italy and Dalmatia, and minor colonial compensations for Italy in the case of an Anglo-French partition of the Ottoman and German empires. In other words, Italy’s intervention seemed to bring the Allies important – maybe decisive – and low-cost advantages, without jeopardizing French and British predominance in the Mediterranean.
However, things quickly took an unexpected turn. The financial loan to Italy soon proved inadequate to match Italian war needs. Italy delayed its declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire until August 1915, and resisted pressure to declare war on Germany until August 1916, thus badly affecting Allied cooperation throughout the Mediterranean and the effectiveness of the blockade. Although Italy’s ambiguous stance towards Germany was dictated primarily by its lack of preparedness for total war against the main continental power, it also reflected Rome’s political assumption that Vienna – not Berlin – was its main enemy (in Italy, the First World War was often referred to as the Fourth War of Independence). For the original Entente members, and particularly for Britain and France, the reverse was true. Furthermore, when Rome came to know of the secret Anglo–Russo–French agreement on the future partition of Asia Minor it made it clear that it expected to be equally compensated with Ottoman territories in the Eastern Mediterranean, thus affecting Anglo-French influence in that area. The Italian attitude revived historical anti-Italian prejudices in Allied countries; it seemed to confirm that Italy was not ready to fulfil its promises, and was indeed fighting for its sacro egoismo – an unfortunate expression used by Prime Minister Antonio Salandra when Italy was still a neutral country. 8 Last, but not least, Italy’s military effort proved to be far less decisive than expected, and this situation was further exacerbated by serious inter-allied strategic disagreements over the conduct of naval operations.
In 1914, the Allies had agreed on a general division of labor at sea: London would take on the German fleet in the North Sea, whilst Paris would focus on the Mediterranean, and Petrograd would deal with the Baltic and the Black Sea. This scheme was partly revised by British participation in the Dardanelles campaign in April 1915, which led to complex Anglo–French collaboration. In this context, neither the British nor the French had a clear strategy for the Adriatic until the end of 1915. Preoccupied that it should not jeopardize the Dardanelles operation, their hope was that the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine would be knocked out in a single blow, an idea reflecting their generally low opinion of the Austro-Hungarian navy. This was an unfair judgment of Vienna’s sea power. The Dual Monarchy had developed naval-industrial facilities that could build battleships faster than many other European naval powers, including Italy and Germany. 9 It possessed a high-quality naval officer corps, whose training was considered to be ‘outstanding’, even by German standards. 10 The Austrians were also quick to exploit the new submarine weapon, thus posing an unprecedented – and unexpected – threat to the French fleet when it tried to gain local supremacy in the lower Adriatic and forced the Otranto strait at the end of August of 1914. The submarine threat proved a strong-enough deterrent to push Admiral Augustin de Lapeyrère to cancel the operation; the French remained adamant that from then on none of their capital ships should be deployed above Otranto. 11
When Italy entered the war, its Entente allies were happy to hand strategic responsibility for the ‘Italian sea’ to Italian naval staff. The Allied Naval Convention, signed on 10 May 1915, established Italian command in the Adriatic, within the overall French command of the Mediterranean. This reflected Anglo-French hopes that the Italians would deal with the Austrians quickly with only minor Allied support in the lower Adriatic – 4 dreadnoughts, 5 cruisers, 6 submarines, all British, plus 10 destroyers, and 6 submarines, all French. 12 The deployment of Allied naval forces, as provided by the Naval Convention, however, should not have encouraged such an optimistic view. Half the Italian fleet was based at Venice, to guard the Austrian naval bases of Trieste, Pola, and Fiume. The remaining Italian forces, supported by French and British units (the so-called First Allied Fleet), were at Brindisi and Taranto, to guard Cattaro and the lower Adriatic. An additional French reserve was based at Corfu to protect Allied communications with the Dardanelles. This meant a substantial waste of resources, but it was hardly avoidable, given the limited capacity of the Italian ports. The Anglo-French command hoped that this unfavorable situation would not last long; instead, a quick victory over the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine did not materialize.
The British and French attributed this failure to the Italian strategic approach; the Italian ‘lack of offensive spirit’ became a mantra. For example, Admiral Louis Dartige du Fournet, Allied Mediterranean Commander until 12 December 1916, repeatedly expressed his disappointment in the ‘defensive’ nature of Italian plans, 13 and Admiral Cecil Thursby, commander of the British Adriatic Squadron, stated bluntly, ‘The Italians lack initiative, avoid responsibility, and are not accustomed to Fleet work.’ 14 Not surprisingly, Thursby’s opinion reinforced anti-Italian stereotypes that were widely shared in the Royal Navy. Such judgments have obviously influenced non-Italian historians, who usually describe Admiral Emilio Thaon di Revel, Italian naval chief of staff, as a ‘defensive-minded’ strategist, who imposed an ‘essentially defensive character’ on Italian operations in the Adriatic. 15 The deployment of the main Italian assets, the dreadnoughts and battleships, ‘farther from harm’ 16 at Taranto, and the fact that they were little used throughout the war, seemed to confirm such assumptions. In reality, the lack of a major Italian naval offensive was the consequence of a combination of political and military factors.
Two documents help us to understand Italian strategy. The first is the plan for an inter-allied naval operation in the Adriatic to neutralize the Austro-Hungarian fleet, which was drawn up by the Italian naval staff in early May 1915. This originated in the high opinion the Italians had of the k.u.k Kriegsmarine, which they had confronted unsuccessfully in 1866 and later respected as a powerful ally-competitor, and from the slight superiority the Italians enjoyed over it – as shown in Table 1.
Italian and Austro-Hungarian naval forces at the outbreak of war*.
In brackets, the units launched during the war.
Source: B.R. Mauriello, La Marina russa durante la Grande Guerra (Genoa, 2009), pp. 13–15; Halpern, The Naval War, pp. 6–8.
Revel, like many of his colleagues at the time, was inspired by Mahanian theories of gaining control of the sea through a Nelsonian naval engagement. 17 But, given the balance of power in the Adriatic, Revel believed the British and French should supply the margin of victory. The surprise attack he proposed was to be Italy’s first military action following the declaration of war, yet the other allies, after the French experience of 1914, rejected the proposal; they held that a massive naval offensive without proper intelligence regarding the enemy was too risky. 18
The second document is Revel’s general plan for operations in the Adriatic, which was issued to all Italian admirals at the beginning of hostilities. It followed Revel’s principle that ‘at sea defense is only ensured by offence’,
19
and it stressed the need to concentrate Italian naval forces for a decisive engagement as soon as possible: Our primary objective must be the destruction of enemy naval forces. In consequence, any unit of the fleet, when finding itself in conditions of at least tactical parity, must engage in full, with little concern for the inevitable losses, in order to destroy the enemy, or at least put it out of action.
20
These documents show quite clearly a readiness on the part of the Italian navy to fight an offensive war. The Italians, indeed, attributed the failure to catch the enemy by surprise to their allies’ lack of initiative. 21 Revel was so dissatisfied with his new naval allies that he issued a memorandum to Sidney Sonnino, Italian foreign minister, on 5 May 1915, stressing his apprehension about Italy being left to take the full burden of the fight at sea. Sonnino went so far as to hint that the inadequate support of Britain and France revealed a secret intention to avoid the annihilation of the Austro-Hungarian fleet, mirroring the Anglo-French preoccupation that the Habsburg Empire should not come out of the war badly weakened. 22 Allied mistrust of Italy was therefore reciprocated; where the British and French assumed that Rome did not join them in the war on Germany out of its sacro egoismo, the Italians doubted that their allies were wholehearted in their war on Austria-Hungary. Such mutual suspicions never disappeared and they stimulated the more cautious attitude of the Italian naval staff.
Strictly military problems added to these political considerations. Militarily, submarine warfare shocked the Italian command. It posed a serious problem of adaptation – exacerbated by the arrival in the summer of 1915 of German submarines in support of the Austro-Hungarians, expanding their potential – to which Italy was relatively slow to respond. When the Italians lost the armed cruiser Garibaldi and the large cruiser Amalfi in the early stages of the war to enemy torpedoes, Revel realized that he needed to fight a very different kind of war. Not surprisingly, he came to the same conclusions as the French in 1914; capital ships were of little value in the Adriatic. They must be preserved until a major naval engagement against enemy capital ships could be fought, whilst ordinary duties such as coastal defence, patrol of Italian waters, and anti-submarine activities were to be taken over by light craft. 23
The Italians lacked such forces. In 1916 they began to design the Motobarca Armata Silurante (MAS), a fast torpedo-armed boat, but the MAS program took time to complete. 24 So, in the autumn of 1915, Revel had little choice but to turn once more, and rather reluctantly, to his allies. He asked for reinforcements in the shape of at least 24 destroyers and as many minesweepers and torpedo craft for anti-submarine duties as possible, and insisted that the slight superiority he enjoyed over the enemy called for a joint operation. The British and French were irritated by Italy’s requests. The British were particularly annoyed, because they had more impelling priorities – namely the North Sea and the Dardanelles. 25 They saw Revel’s insistence on Italian needs as yet again a manifestation of Italian selfish egoism, 26 and concluded, in the words of Julian Corbett, the naval theorist, that Italy’s entry into the war ‘instead of relieving our burden in the Mediterranean, as might have been expected’, had had the effect of ‘increasing it materially’. 27 This was hard for the British and French to accept, particularly because reports from their naval attachés repeated that the Italian attitude had become increasingly cautious, and that Italian battleships were largely unused. 28 Why the other allies should provide forces to do the job the Italians were not ready to do themselves in their waters, was beyond Anglo-French comprehension.
Revel’s allies dismissed his requests. Instead, they decided to create a mammoth barrage in the Otranto channel in the autumn of 1915, aimed at trapping enemy submarines in the Adriatic. This essentially turned Allied strategy from an offensive-based approach into a strategy of containment. It is doubtful the British and French really understood how costly it would be. They probably saw it as a temporary measure, still believing the Italians would defeat the weakest of the Great Powers’ navies if they made a serious commitment to the task. Instead, the unexpected development of the war and the limited Allied collaboration strengthened Revel’s prejudices and spurred his conclusion that Italy, being the only Entente power to be in close contact with a modern enemy fleet in the Mediterranean, must prevent debilitating losses in its confrontation with Austria-Hungary: this served to defend Rome’s military and diplomatic place in the post-war settlement. So Revel would not launch any major Adriatic operation until adequately supported by his allies with the light craft he badly lacked. 29
The Italian chief of staff also drew different conclusions from the Otranto-barrage strategy than did his allies. In Revel’s eyes, the barrage would turn the Adriatic campaign into a large naval siege: he believed it could be carried out only with massive Allied support in materials and patrolling vessels. 30 So the Otranto operation served only to multiply Italian needs. It is important to stress, however, that whilst Revel believed the Anglo-French should think longer-term, and provide a significant amount of resources to sustain the Otranto barrage and support his submarine-clearance operations in the Adriatic, he had no intention of remaining passive in the meantime. The cautious attitude imposed on him by submarine warfare and insufficient Allied support had applied only to Italian capital ships; he was still anxious to fight an offensive war whenever possible. The whole doctrine of the Regia Marina was offensive-oriented; Revel was convinced that giving it up completely would have had a traumatic impact on his crews’ morale. His revised strategy from September/October 1915 aimed at using Italian ‒ and, when available, Anglo-French ‒ light craft to provoke the enemy into battle, to chase it when it emerged; but the Italian command would commit its capital ships only if the enemy was ready to stay and fight. 31 Such a strategy obviously implied constant and tiring naval activity on the part of Italy’s limited light units. It also meant high consumption in terms of raw materials, especially coal. That is why Revel continued to ask periodically for Allied support. It was the price for maintaining a strategic initiative.
The new Italian strategy was not inconsistent with the Otranto barrage, which would simply provide an artificial border for the Adriatic operational scenario. By implicitly accepting the prospect of a longer war, such a strategy was also, in retrospect, more forward-looking than that of the British and French commands. The latter, unfortunately, did not seem to understand these developments. In part, this misinterpretation was exacerbated by Revel’s cold and, at times, stormy character, which did not help establish mutual empathy. His inflexible attitude is mentioned as a major impediment to inter-allied collaboration by almost all of the Allied naval senior officers. Admiral William Sims, commander of US forces in European waters, described Revel as a stubborn naval commander who ‘delivered his opinions with an insistence which indicated that he entertained little doubt about their soundness’ and ‘was not particularly patient if they were called into question’. Admiral Howard Kelly, commander of the British cruisers in Brindisi, was more blunt. He found Revel ‘a real tough nut’ and a difficult ally to deal with. 32
Inefficient inter-allied communication was indeed one of the main faults in the Entente’s war. It hampered Allied solidarity and mutual understanding, no less than military coordination. 33 Attributing this problem in inter-allied naval relations to Revel’s personality, however, would be unfair. In the first place, there is little evidence that John Jellicoe or Dominique Gauchet 34 were much more malleable. Second, Italy’s naval relations with its allies did not improve when, in October 1915, Revel resigned, thanks to chronic disagreements with the Ministers of Marine 35 over the power and functions of the chief of the naval staff. 36 The Italian naval command passed to Luigi di Savoia, Duke of the Abruzzi, the commander of the fleet (Armata Navale). A glamorous cousin of the king of Italy, Abruzzi was younger and more aggressive than Revel. The Allied naval commanders, the British in particular, had remarkably good relations with him. Yet, despite such personal ties, the Anglo-French did not rectify their evaluation of the Italian strategy. Criticism over Italy and its slow progress in the naval war, as well as mutual mistrust, remained. 37
This would suggest that personal characteristics, though crucial factors to be taken into account when dealing with joint operations and the working of alliances, should not be overemphasized. The real strategic contrasts between Italy and its allies ran deeper, and sprang from political competition, different evaluations of the strength of the Austro-Hungarian navy and its potential, and conflicting views of the general scope of the Adriatic campaign.
The Adriatic Campaign: A Reassessment
The Adriatic campaign was characterized by peculiar geographic features which favored the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine. The Italian coastline is low and open, whereas the Dalmatian coast is rough and protected by a chain of islands, separated by narrow channels that could be mined and easily defended. Austrian forces were therefore, apparently, immune to direct attacks. Even the character of the water favored the Austrians. The Italian side is muddier and supported the concealment of submarines, while the opposite was the case along the Austrian littoral. The Italian coast was also more suitable for dawn attacks, as attackers emerged from out of the sun whilst defenders found the sun in their eyes – for the same reason, dawn attacks on the Austrian littoral were harder to carry out. 38
The k.u.k. Kriegsmarine made good use of these advantages, taking the initiative on the first day of the war by bombarding a few Italian coastal cities, and it kept launching such raids throughout the conflict. In Austrian, Anglo-American, and French accounts, the Austrian opening sortie ‘set the tone for what was to come’ – namely a repeated and largely unchallenged Austrian teasing of Italian cities and minor bases. In the words of Wilfred Tomkinson, commander of the British submarines in the Adriatic, the Italian crews ‘seemed to seek any excuse for not going out’. 39 Captain Herbert W. Richmond, British liaison officer with the Italian fleet, complained that the Italians had surrendered their sea to the Austrians ‘in spite of [Austrian] inferior naval force & without fighting an action!’ He concluded bluntly, ‘They [the Italians] had better sell their Fleet & take up their organs & monkeys again, for, by Heaven, that seems more their profession than sea-fighting.’ The French too were ‘disgusted with the Italian attitude’. 40 Halpern concluded that the Italians slept ‘into an increasingly defensive state of mind’, their major preoccupation being the preservation of materials for a long war: ‘There seemed to be a progression on the part of the Italian Naval High Command from a sensible refusal to do foolish things with large ships to the habit of saying “no” to almost any action which carried the least degree of risk.’ 41 Strategically, this determined Austro-Hungarian control of the waves, to the point that, in 1918, a US navy commander’s memorandum referred to the Adriatic as ‘practically an Austrian lake’. 42
This vulgate is unfounded. The Regia Marina totalled 96 raids, attacks, and minor naval operations in the Adriatic throughout the war – an average 2.28 per month in Italy’s 42 months of active combat – almost doubling the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine’s 51 sorties. Italian initiatives were more frequent in the upper Adriatic – which can partly explain why the other allies did not appreciate them – but exceeded by 35 to 25 the Austrian sorties in the south as well. The Regia Marina operated largely independently, the other allies contributing to only 4 sorties in the upper Adriatic and 15 in the south. More importantly, Italian operations increased throughout the war, whereas Austrian initiatives decreased steadily, and dropped to just two sorties in the upper Adriatic and one in the lower in the whole of 1918 – as shown in Table 2.
Italian and Austro-Hungarian naval raids in the Adriatic*.
In brackets, Italian actions with British (B), French (F), or Anglo-French (BF) participation.
Source: Cernuschi, Battaglie sconosciute, pp. 260ff.
This trend suggests that the idea of the Adriatic being an Austrian lake is at best hyperbole, unless one is prepared to take the Austrian progressive decrease of naval activity as a sign of Austria’s overall control of the operational theatre. Yet these statistics merely tell us that the Italians were much more active than traditionally appreciated. They do not reveal the effectiveness of their activity. To appreciate the strategic significance of Italian operations one needs to analyze more in depth the different types of actions undertaken by the Regia Marina.
The first – and larger – group of them included interception operations. The main strategic option for the Italian command was to intercept enemy vessels if and when they sortied. This was, however, affected by significant command and control problems. Because none of the three parts of the Allied armada – the Italian forces at Venice, the Allied forces at Brindisi and Taranto, and the French reserve at Corfu – was strong enough to anticipate success in the case of a massive Austrian sortie, the Allies would have to converge on the enemy from different directions before engaging in full-scale combat. The complexity of this manoeuvre, which posed unprecedented challenges to the Allied navies, is the main reason why the Austrians managed repeatedly to escape unharmed. When the Austrians launched minor sorties, on the other hand, Italian light units pursued them relentlessly, participating in about thirty engagements. Those were, however, fought at long range, for the Austrians never kept their ships still to fight. This was not a consequence of an Austrian low fighting spirit – quite simply, the Austrians needed to survive to fight another day. Moreover, claiming that they could always elude – and fool – the Italian navy was an important part of their war propaganda. Indeed, despite some notable exceptions – such as the battle off Durrës on 15 December 1915, when the Austrians lost the destroyers Triglav and Nika, and the Helgoland and Tatra were badly damaged – the Italians managed to inflict only minor damage. When the Austrians suffered heavier losses than usual, they tended to attribute them to the intervention of the British or French, even when the latter were nowhere close – the fight off Porto Corsini (Ravenna) in the night between 3 and 4 May 1916 was emblematic. 43 Italy’s allies were pleased by such claims, and rarely did they take the trouble to rectify them. As a result, such wrong assumptions are still recurrent in Austrian, Anglo-American, and French accounts. 44
Interception – inefficient as it was – was a reactive measure. Maintaining the strategic initiative required a more proactive stance. Thus Revel, and later Abruzzi, instructed Italian naval officers to perform various naval operations (missioni) aimed at provoking the enemy into battle under conditions favorable to the Allies. These included raids on enemy coastal facilities and even direct attacks on enemy ports, despite all geographical odds. Evaluating the scope and effect of such initiatives is not easy and can be done only in a comparative analysis with Austro-Hungarian raids.
According to Austrian accounts, the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine’s attacks were so intimidating that they had a powerful impact on the morale of the Italian population and paralyzed Italian naval forces. 45 Italy’s allies, once again, tended to confirm this view, dismissing Italian sorties as ‘small operations which have no real significance and are, above all, intended to give the illusion one is acting’. 46 Non-Italian historians seem to have relied too heavily on such sources, and have concluded that Austrian raids proved highly effective. Italian historians, on the other hand, claimed that such raids had no strategic significance because they did not damage Italian ships, but only Italian civilian facilities. 47 Both interpretations are incorrect.
The Italian command stressed repeatedly that the short distance between Dalmatia and Italy forced it to scatter its limited light craft along the Adriatic coast to ‘battle and repulse’ potential enemy raids that might materialize quickly and unexpectedly. Italy’s allies, Jellicoe in particular, protested that the Italian command should not be preoccupied with keeping a significant part of its forces in the Adriatic for that purpose, and should instead concentrate them in the south to strengthen the Otranto line, or to escort vessels in the Mediterranean.
48
Revel remained adamant: The British people have the fortune of being less excitable than the Italians. There are domestic political necessities that may not have any relevance in the case of England, but which in Italy cannot be ignored. As an Admiral, I may deplore their existence; as an Italian … I cannot deny my government the support that it thinks it needs to ask of its Navy.
49
This goes back to the Italian pre-war strategic culture of the Regia Marina, putting a high premium on defending the still fragile unity of the country; it also reflects the Italian obsession around keeping the consensus over the war and avoiding a social revolution. 50 By strengthening such preoccupations, the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine did in fact score a point in its favor, for it kept Italian forces dispersed in the Adriatic and away from the wider Mediterranean front. It did not, however, by any means paralyze the enemy. Austrian raids also failed to inflict significant naval losses. Since the beginning of hostilities, Admiral Anton Haus, Austro-Hungarian chief of naval staff, had wanted to exploit surprise attacks to smash the bulk of the Italian fleet. His naval officers, however, admitted that an attack on the main Italian naval bases, such as Venice and Brindisi, was out of question, for they were ‘too heavily protected’. 51
By contrast, Italian sorties aimed straight at the main Austrian bases, including Trieste, Pola, Fiume, and Cattaro, with the purpose of igniting a major naval battle, and not merely affecting the enemy’s morale. The Regia Marina launched about forty sorties of this kind. They hit Austrian naval facilities and even the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine headquarters (the Park Hotel) in Sistiana. 52 The Austro-Hungarian fleet never took the bait. One might therefore conclude that all Italian escamotages resulted, ultimately, in strategic failure, depriving the Italian command of its main strategic objective. However, such an objective shifted progressively from attracting the enemy into battle to destroying the bulk of its forces by alternative means if it did not emerge.
Where the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine essentially repeated the same type of action – raids including bombardment – the Regia Marina diversified its tactics and even developed a new doctrine. Called battaglia in porto or ‘in-port battle’, it emphasized the need to turn provocative attacks into deadly strikes. The Italians designed ingenious devices to overcome port defenses; the Grillo-class Barchini Saltatori (‘jumping boats’) were a sort of naval tank fitted with two lateral caterpillar chains for climbing over barrages that protected a harbor. From May 1916 onwards, the MAS were also used to attack enemy battleships in their bases. In addition, the Italians pioneered manned-torpedo tactics that were likewise to score spectacular feats in the Second World War. With such devices, bold Italian incursori were towed by bigger boats in the vicinity of enemy bases and went deep into enemy waters to attack patrolling vessels or to break through port obstructions to strike at anchored ships. Such daring attacks proved highly effective and led to the sinking of some of the strongest Austro-Hungarian battleships, including the pre-dreadnought Wien (on 10 December 1917 in Trieste) and the flagship Viribus Unitis (on 1 November 1918 in Pola). 53
In time, even interception sorties became more incisive. This was largely thanks to the MAS. Their greatest success came on 9 June 1918 when Lt Luigi Rizzo, with two MAS, intercepted the entire fleet of Austrian dreadnoughts – Viribus Unitis, Prinz Eugen, Szent Istvàn, and Tegetthoff – on possibly the only occasion when they were all sailing at once, heading south to break the Otranto barrage. Szent Istvàn and Tegetthoff were torpedoed; the former sank within three hours. The loss of Szent Istvàn proved a turning point in the campaign for it marked the end of Austrian sorties, which were now considered too risky. 54 In the final months of the war, the Italians kept up the momentum; in effect they forced the remaining ships of the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine into their ports and eventually destroyed the cream of the Austro-Hungarian fleet-in-being, sinking 14 ships and seriously damaging another 46 – even without a Nelsonian battle. 55
Not only was the Regia Marina more active and more elaborate in its tactics than its opponent, but it also proved more efficient. In Adriatic engagements it scored 37 direct hits, as opposed to 13 scored by the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine. 56 More importantly, amongst Italian battleships that were lost during the war, only the cruiser Garibaldi was sunk by Austrian crews – on 18 July 1915. The dreadnought Leonardo da Vinci, and possibly the pre-dreadnought Benedetto Brin, were lost to sabotage by agents of the Evidenzbureau on 27 September 1915 and 2 August 1916, respectively; the pre-dreadnought Regina Margherita was lost to mines on 11 December 1916; the cruiser Amalfi was sunk by the German UB14 camouflaged as an Austro-Hungarian U26 on 7 July 1915 (Italy had not yet declared war on Germany). By contrast, all k.u.k. Kriegsmarine losses in battleships were caused by the direct attacks of the Regia Marina.
Furthermore, contrary to the widespread assumption that the Italians mounted only ‘small operations’, they proved ready and capable of launching major naval operations. The most important was the rescue of the defeated Serbian army between December 1915 and early April 1916. Non-Italian accounts tended to minimize the Italian contribution, and in at least one case neglected it altogether, 57 while in fact the whole operation was managed by Abruzzi. The Italian commander concentrated 81 Italian steamers in a relatively narrow sea crossing between the Italian and Albanian coasts. Italy’s allies contributed with 25 French and 11 British steamers. All Allied forces in the lower Adriatic were dispatched in support: in part, they were used as escort vessels; in part, they served to clear the sea of enemy submarines. In about 140 days, the Regia Marina made 584 journeys back and forth, the Marine Nationale made 168, and the Royal Navy 77. Between 150,000 and 200,000 Serbs, mainly soldiers, were transported to Corfu; they were later reorganized as a fighting force and disembarked at Salonika for the remainder of the war. Despite Austro-Hungarian submarine and aerial attacks, only 6 Italian and 2 French steamers were lost during the Serbian evacuation. It was therefore a notable operational success for the Allies, and especially for the Italian navy, which shouldered the highest burden of the operation. In addition, the Regia Marina carried out 4,924 journeys to transport and resupply the Italian expeditionary corps to Albania and Macedonia (100,000 and 52,000 men, respectively, including military and civilian personnel, and 580,000 tons of goods). 58
Finally, the Italians launched a successful amphibious operation, which led to the occupation of the island of Pelagosa in June 1916. This was part of Abruzzi’s strategy to occupy all Dalmatian islands one by one, in order to provide forward bases for Italian submarines and MAS to oppose enemy navigation in the Dalmatian archipelago, as well as to gather intelligence for ‘further advance to Sabbioncello’. Unfortunately for the Italians, the other islands were never occupied. Pelagosa was evacuated in August, because the Italian chief of staff, Luigi Cadorna, obsessed with his Isonzo offensives, had no men or material to spare for Adriatic operations. 59 Nonetheless, on 3 November 1918 the Italians managed to conquer Trieste by sea – one of Italy’s long-sought-after goals – with a lightening amphibious operation.
The Regia Marina proved capable of performing a wide range of naval operations: interception sorties, coastal raids, in-port attacks, evacuation and transportation operations, patrolling and anti-submarine duties, and amphibious operations. It certainly did not lack an offensive spirit – quite the opposite. It progressively reduced the enemy’s freedom of action whilst maintaining its own. This is revealed not only by the number of operations undertaken, but also by the amount of material the Regia Marina and the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine were able to transport through the Adriatic. The Italians shipped 61,900 tons of supplies in 1915, largely to Italian coastal cities and to the Italian army engaged on the Isonzo. That figure was raised to 524,956 tons in 1916; 769,500 in 1917; and 1,381,900 in 1918, with a steady increase in war-related goods for both the Italian army (which had retreated to the Piave river in November 1917), and for Allied forces in the lower Adriatic. By contrast, statistics of the material transported by the Austrians are less detailed, but it appears that the latter shipped to their forces in the Balkans some mere 75,000 tons of food supply and 200,000 tons of war-related goods throughout the entire war, largely from Pola to Cattaro and Durrës. 60 Thus, the Italian navy effectively imperiled the enemy’s use of the sea in terms of its capacity to project power at a distance and to sustain land operations. In a war where decisive results remained a mirage almost everywhere until the very end, the campaign of the Regia Marina against the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine in the Adriatic was a most notable exception.
The Submarine War
The Italian naval war was not limited to the Adriatic. The two main areas where it overlapped with the wider war of the Entente were the submarine campaign and the Mediterranean convoy system, which were linked. In both areas inter-allied misunderstanding and mutual contrast were even greater than in the Adriatic. The submarine war, in particular, became the major issue for the Allies in the Mediterranean and can be divided into three phases. Up to early 1916 it was limited primarily to the Adriatic. From 1916 on, it escalated to include the entire Mediterranean, reaching its peak with the proclamation of unrestricted submarine warfare by Germany on 9 January 1917, which began the last phase of the campaign. The Allies largely failed to come to a shared strategy against submarines until the final months of the war. Once again, there was a tendency on the part of the British and French to attribute a huge responsibility for this failure to Italy. Because it did not declare war on Germany until August 1916, Italy was, in British and French eyes, for many months useless against U-Boats. Furthermore, the Italians were accused of being strategically uncooperative. Finally, they were described as ‘children at the game of the sea’ and consequently inefficient in their anti-submarine tactics. 61
The first allegation is partly correct. Italy’s delayed declaration of war on Germany undoubtedly created a difficult situation because the Italians could not attack U-Boats in Austrian bases. In contrast, U-Boats masqueraded as Austro-Hungarian submarines attacked all enemy and neutral vessels – including Italian – in the Adriatic and Mediterranean. Sailing camouflaged as Austrian boats, however, made them legitimate targets for the Italians, so on the high seas U-Boats were not at all immune to Italian attacks as the British and French seemed to believe. In other words, Italian political ambiguity did not facilitate the Allied anti-submarine war, but it was not a huge handicap.
Inefficient inter-allied coordination was a more serious problem. Was Italy uncooperative over strategy? ‘Cooperation’ is a relative concept. If being uncooperative means not giving up national interests to a common cause, that was far from a purely Italian attitude. Indeed, the root causes of the limited Allied coordination were perpetual inter-allied political rivalries and divergent strategic views. The first Allied attempt to mount a coordinated response to submarines was the already-mentioned Otranto barrage, created in October 1915. Blockading submarines by using lines of nets and mines worked fairly well in the English Channel, which is 33.1 km wide at the Strait of Dover. But it was much more difficult to replicate such a tactic in the Strait of Otranto, which is 73 km wide. The Italians and the French suggested a fixed barrage, made of continuous lines of nets 60 m in depth, and supported by a flotilla of British drifters. The British, however, calculated that for an uninterrupted barrage four drifters per km were needed, a total of 400, but they had only 100 available. So they opted for a mobile barrage supported by light craft and submarines. 62 Unfortunately, it proved penetrable and largely ineffective.
The Otranto operation could – and should – have favored a closer mutual synergy among the Allies. Instead, it seemed to provide further grounds for mutual recrimination. In the first place, it caused serious contrasts over the prickly question of command. Neither the Italians nor the French, who were especially suspicious of one another because of their traditional competition in the Mediterranean, were inclined to put their units at the mouth of the Adriatic under the command of the other. 63 Initially, Lapeyrère was not keen even to meet his Italian counterpart to exchange strategic views ‘unless an English Admiral was present’. 64 The obvious compromise to accommodate the grumpy ‘Latin sisters’ was to put Rear-Admiral Mark Kerr in command of the Otranto line. The British used their role of primi inter pares to try to keep the overall direction of the war at sea. They pushed the French to accept Italian command in the Adriatic, but agreed with Lapeyrère that any reinforcements to Italy, which exceeded Allied support as provided for under the Naval Convention, should be subordinate to their autonomy from the Italian command. 65 Revel, who was reinstated as naval chief of staff in February 1917, opposed it with all the means he had. In a letter to his Allied colleagues, he stressed that the Italian experience of the scenario suggested that the naval command in the lower Adriatic must remain in Italian hands, regardless of any potential Allied reinforcements being sent there, and refused ‘to participate any further’ in such debates. 66
In May 1918 the British tried to overcome the long-lasting differences by proposing a British Admirallissimo in the Mediterranean; this was also meant to counterbalance the role of Ferdinand Foch as Allied Generalissimo on the western front. Revel denied his support. The debate over the British Admirallissimo resulted in a stalemate and no decision was taken by the end of the war. Despite the fact that the French were equally unhappy 67 with the British proposal, Sir Eric Geddes, first lord of the Admiralty between 1917 and 1919, chiefly blamed the Italians for the outcome: ‘Admiral di Revel and he alone is responsible for the present state of affairs’. 68 The fact that the overall command in the Adriatic remained in Italian hands, furthermore, made British command at Otranto more nominal than real. Kerr was frustrated at having ‘no executive work or command to do’. He could ‘only ask for things that I know I won’t get and point out methods which I know won’t be carried out’. 69 The poor results of the barrage convinced him that some British forces would be better used elsewhere.
The issue was discussed at the London Conference, 23–4 January 1917. The debate that took place is emblematic of the difference between the Anglo-French and the Italian points of view. Admirals Jellicoe, John Kelly (Howard’s brother), and Ferdinand De Bon (French naval chief of staff) argued that ‘the presence of the English battleships had an object which no longer exists, for the hypothesis of a big general engagement is now most improbable’. The Italian Minister of Marine, Admiral Camillo Corsi, agreed in principle, but replied that, because the real threat was now posed by submarines, ‘we need new means for old to meet the new situation’. In other words, he asked for compensation in the shape of light craft. Kelly asked, ‘Do you not think that you have all the forces you need in the Mediterranean with two fleets?’ Corsi replied that Italian light craft were already stretched to the limit escorting troops to Salonika, and if the Anglo-French really wanted the Adriatic to be secured they needed to join the Italians in their submarine-clearance operations. 70
In the end, it was agreed to withdraw all but one British battleship, yet the Anglo-French command could only promise that reinforcements would be sent to the Adriatic if the contribution of other Allied naval forces, such as the Australian and the Japanese, resulted in relief of British destroyers ‘from the duties upon which they were at present engaged’. 71 The possibility never materialized. 72 In order to meet Italian objections, the French promised that a squadron of French battleships would be available at Corfu. 73 The combination of the British withdrawal and an increase of the French fleet in Corfu would result in the strengthening of French naval influence: an idea as unpopular with the British as with the Italians. To prevent such an outcome, the British and the Italians agreed to put another British officer, Commodore Algernon Heneage, in command of the Otranto barrage, under the supervision of the Italian command, with the right to call on Allied support when necessary. 74 The Allies established ad hoc bilateral convergences – an Anglo-French collaboration to reduce British vessels under Italian command at Otranto and use them in the Mediterranean, and an Anglo-Italian agreement to inhibit French control at the mouth of the Adriatic – which prevented each party from becoming pre-eminent in the Mediterranean. This, of course, impeded any coherent tripartite strategy.
Then, on 15 May 1917, disaster struck at Otranto. The three strongest Austro-Hungarian cruisers, Novara, Helgoland, and Saida, attacked the barrage by night and sank or severely damaged 18 drifters out of a total of 47 in the line, managing to escape Allied retaliation. The British realized that, until they could provide destroyers to protect the drifters, the line was likely to be raided again. As the destroyers were not available, the Admiralty ordered the drifters to be withdrawn, thereby making the barrage even less effective.
75
At the Paris naval conference of 24 July 1917, the Allies clashed over responsibility for this severe setback. In Revel’s view, the Austrian raid proved the soundness of the Italian thesis that the Adriatic should be the Allied priority. In consequence, he asked for further Allied support. He also emphasized the need to put pressure on the United States, which had declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917, to join the Allies in the war against Austria-Hungary, so that American reinforcements could be sent to the Adriatic, if none from the British were available. In Revel’s words, When we agreed that the British battleships should be withdrawn … we expected that such contribution to the naval forces in the Mediterranean would have been compensated as soon as possible. … Out of an available total of 42 [Italian destroyers], 16 are for war duties in the Adriatic; 11 for the escort service between Albania and Salonika; and 13 for the defense of coastal traffic, while two are [being] completed. … Sixteen boats are absolutely insufficient for the Adriatic, specially if we consider the great distance between the two bases at Venice and Brindisi, while the enemy can shift its forces in perfect security from Pola to Cattaro.
76
Finally, he suggested that the Otranto barrage could be more effective if it was transformed at least partially into a fixed barrage. 77 According to British reports, however, the problem at Otranto was not the lack of ships to protect the line, rather it was that the Italian (and also French) destroyers already there spent too little time at sea compared with British destroyers. De Bon, on his part, pointed out that he believed the Italian dockyards were underused, and repairs of Italian vessels must be done more quickly. Revel replied that keeping Italian vessels in port and the slowness in Italian repairs were both caused by a lack of coal and raw materials; he asked for an immediate dispatch of 50,000 tons of steel from the Allies to solve this in part. He was politely denied any such support. The discussion closed with the British once more rejecting Revel’s proposal for a fixed barrage at Otranto.
This highlighted a final Allied problem in the anti-submarine war, namely that the three allies had different methods of fighting submarines. This was inevitable, for submarines were such a new weapon, tested in battle for the first time, that no country had a specific doctrine, or even expertise, to deal with them. They experimented, and learned from experience. Until the beginning of 1916, Admiral Arthur Henry Limpus, superintendent at Malta, thought mainly in terms of patrolling routes and directing traffic away from areas where submarines were known to be operating. Kerr’s outlook was also fundamentally defensive. Priority, he believed, should be given to arming merchant ships. 78 The French would rather hunt the submarines with light craft. De Bon tended to see the ‘systematically organized destruction of submarines, instead of the escort of merchant vessels’ as the solution to the submarine war. 79
After the reshuffle at the Admiralty in the summer of 1917, the British Mediterranean command went to Vice-Admiral Sir Somerset Gough-Calthorpe, 80 who proposed a renewed anti-submarine offensive in the Adriatic; 81 he put a lot of emphasis on the use of decoy ships, working in concert with submarines. 82 At an inter-allied conference in Brindisi, Heneage, following Calthorpe’s instructions, put forward a new strategy for the Otranto barrage. He made a distinction between three anti-submarine tactics: offensive (all measures aiming at the destruction of U-Boats); defensive-offensive (a combination of nets and mines); and purely defensive (escort). Without jeopardizing the mobile barrage, he aimed at ‘turning the fight from an essentially defensive into an essentially offensive action’ by deploying ‘a great number of submarines in ambush.’ The French agreed on the principle of fighting submarines offensively, but if Allied submarines were to be the main means to do it, they ought to be kept away from the enemy coast to minimize losses; submarines should be deployed some 40 miles behind the Otranto line, where U-Boats would surface, and should chase them for up to 48 hours in that area. 83
Revel did not share either of these approaches. The Italian naval staff had calculated that the increase in the sinking of U-Boats in the third trimester of 1917 (34 as opposed to 13 in the same period of 1916) was to be attributed to a steady improvement in the use of torpedoes and aircraft (see Table 3). 84 Revel concluded that aircraft had proved to be the most successful weapon against submarines, so the Allies should deal with the threat through coordinated aerial attacks. Fighting U-Boats with Allied submarines would be a case ‘of two blind men fighting’. Nevertheless, if Allied submarines were to be used, they needed to be deployed close to the enemy coast, to intercept U-Boats as they left their bases, for he pointed out that it was almost impossible to anticipate where the U-Boats would surface. A system of communication between hydrophones and submarines was also badly needed. In short, he re-stressed the need for a substantial change in the tactics used at Otranto. 85
Allied means used in the AS campaign and their impact.
Revel’s strategy was the only one based on technical evidence. This does not mean that he was right in all of his assumptions. For example, he would not admit that navigation in daylight by Italian hospital ships could reveal to the U-Boats the routes that Allied convoys would later use by night. 86 Revel also claimed that U-Boats entered the central Mediterranean from the Atlantic as much as from the Adriatic, and urged the British to build up another barrage at Gibraltar. The Naval Intelligence division of the Admiralty, however, knew that the amount of U-Boat traffic through Gibraltar was extremely limited compared to traffic from Otranto, and it could not justify a second very expensive barrage. 87 So the Italian approach to the submarine war had its own faults, but it was not essentially wrong. Revel made some sound proposals, which were ignored until the autumn of 1917.
In the latter period, with Italy facing its darkest hour in the war – the Caporetto crisis – Calthorpe began to move towards Revel’s position. He wrote to the Admiralty that ‘without wishing to detract from good work done by our air squadron in the Aegean it appears to be vastly more important that the Adriatic should have every preference as regards disposal of personnel or material’, and urged the Admiralty to join Revel’s aerial offensives. 88 This shift towards the Italian position has never been noted by British and French historians, but it would suggest that the Italians, after all, were not as incompetent as their allies had so often repeated.
By the end of the year, Calthorpe’s proposal penetrated to the top echelons of the British naval authorities. In 1918 British air forces based at Taranto increased steadily, and they provided crucial support to the Italian air campaign in the lower Adriatic. ‘Continuous joint air strikes’ launched ‘with energy’ over the Austro-Hungarian submarine bases, Cattaro in particular, brought the enemy to its knees. 89 For both Italian and British naval commanders, assuming that the solution to their problem could lie in exploiting a different weapon than their own – especially an experimental arm such as the air force – was a not insignificant shift in mindset. Inter-allied synergies were therefore not entirely non-existent. They simply needed years to develop in successful ways.
In addition to air coordination, at an inter-allied conference in Rome in February 1918, the Italo-French proposal for a fixed barrage at Otranto was at last approved. It comprised an uninterrupted 66 km line of nets between Otranto and Fano Island, plus an additional 14 km line between Fano, Somatraki, and Corfu. It was made of 180 km of steel nets, 429 buoys, and 1,200 mines. Italy, France, and Britain shared the astronomical cost of 3,238,345 lire. The fixed barrage was completed on 11 September 1918. It proved effective in paralyzing the remaining enemy submarines in the final two months of the conflict, 90 but the U-Boats had already lost the war in the Mediterranean to a means that aimed very little at destroying submarines: the convoy system.
Escorting Allied Manna
Supplying Italy, which depended on imports by sea of vital goods such as grain, coal, and raw materials, became a crucial inter-allied problem, particularly in the last two years of the conflict. Total Italian imports declined steadily during the war. As a consequence of the escalation of submarine war throughout the Mediterranean in 1916, cotton imports fell from 2,913,102 tons to 2,536,660 by the end of the year. The food issue was equally traumatic. Italian needs in grain and wheat increased, as seen in Table 4. 91
Italian needs in imports in grain and wheat from the other allies throughout the war.
The closing of the Dardanelles prevented Italy from obtaining grain from Russia and Romania, and the diversion of British traffic from the Mediterranean route around the Cape of Good Hope caused a crisis in the shipping of coal. 92 Coal imports fell from 11 million tons in 1915 (90 per cent of which came from Britain) to 6 million tons in 1916, and to 5 million tons in 1918, despite an increase in domestic production of fossil fuels from 953,000 tons to 2,172,000 in the last year of the war. At the London conference in January 1917, a report of the Shipping Commission stressed that Italy must import monthly ‘an absolute minimum’ of 800,000 tons of coal. The tonnage currently employed was sufficient for the importation of 465,000 tons monthly, ‘thus leaving a permanent deficit of 340,000 tons per month’. In consequence, Italy had found it necessary ‘to consume about 600,000 tons of different stocks, including navy stocks’. 93 In May 1917, the Italian mission to Washington concluded that, without increases in coal deliveries from the Allies, ‘Italy would soon be out of the war.’ 94
Italian needs in commodities and raw materials were only one aspect of the problem. Italy also needed direct support in merchant vessels. This was partly due to the chronic weakness of the Italian merchant fleet. In 1917 the Italian vessels devoted to sea trade and shipping amounted to 440 ships of all types (1,500,000 tons), plus 71 ships captured from the enemy (400,000 tons) and 106 time-chartered steamers (600,000 tons): 617 ships in total (2,500,000 tons).
95
The Italian delegates to the Allied Shipping Commission stated that This fleet is absolutely insufficient for our needs in the matter of essential supplies, notwithstanding the restriction in the consumption of bread, meat, sugar, coal etc. already imposed on our population, and the fact that importation of luxuries in Italy has ceased.
96
The other crucial factor in the Italian supply crisis was the submarine war. Proportionally, Italy suffered the highest figure of losses in merchant vessels among the belligerents: 57.52 per cent as opposed to Britain’s 42.63 per cent and France’s 39.44 per cent. 97 The defense of the Allied Mediterranean supply-chain was arguably the most important aspect of Italy’s cooperation with its allies. It ran into the usual grid of misunderstandings, mutual suspicions, and recrimination. But it turned out to be not only the main preoccupation for the Regia Marina from 1917 onwards, but also the most successful area of inter-allied collaboration, though this was little appreciated by both the Italians and their allies.
The strategy to defend the Mediterranean trade routes had been discussed at an early inter-allied conference in Paris in December 1915, when 18 patrol zones were delineated, 98 later reduced to 11 at the Malta conference, 2–9 March 1916 (see Figure 1). The role of the Italians in these conferences was relatively limited. Rear-Admiral John De Robeck commented sarcastically that they were ‘only anxious [for the Allies] to realize that it was impossible for the Italians to do anything’. Rear-Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss added that both the Italians and the French were ‘quite incapable of safeguarding their areas properly’. Such statements have led to another myth, namely that there was ‘nearly no surveillance at all in Italian waters except for semaphore stations on shore’. 99 Allied criticism of Italy for its apparent limited commitment to the defense of cargo ships increased in January 1917 when Germany unleashed its unrestricted submarine campaign. In response to it, the British proposed a system of convoys for at least slow vessels, and that the French system of fixed patrol routes, frequently changed and used in the Aegean, be integrated with a new formula – ‘dispersion’ – for Allied shipping in the western Mediterranean basin. 100 In March 1917 it was clear that the experiment of dispersion had not worked any better than fixed routes, and their combination was even worse. 101 The Allies met again for a conference at Corfu on 28 April–1 May, where they established a central authority in Malta, made up of representatives of Allied navies to arrange for transport routes and escorts. Thanks to Calthorpe’s personal commitment, it strongly endorsed the convoy system, 102 despite the fact that, in the spring of 1917, none of the Allies had much faith in convoys. 103
Mediterranean showing patrol zones.
According to Jellicoe, 372 convoy and escort vessels were required for the protection of trade on the main routes, but there were only 212 available, and which did not take into account convoying the troop transports. Geddes approached the Italians for reinforcements of at least 11 destroyers; he believed that Italian forces, despite their Adriatic duties, could be spared for escorting convoys, many of which, after all, supplied Italy. 104 But Revel politely refused to provide additional assistance. Geddes began to say openly to his subordinates that he saw the Italians as villains and he tactfully threatened them with suspending supplies to Italy if they did not start to collaborate. Revel, in turn, reminded him that if shipments of coal ceased he would be forced to suspend naval operations. 105
Calthorpe suggested that the Italians could, alternatively, give more assistance to the convoy escorts by intensifying their control of the Otranto barrage. In other words, Revel could use more ships there in order to intercept more submarines, and allow more Allied warships to be diverted for escorts in the central Mediterranean. If anti-submarine measures worked, the British hoped that escorts could be increasingly reduced, and even abolished. 106 After the 15 May attack, however, Revel was less inclined than ever to risk his ships at Otranto, particularly as the barrage was being implemented in a way that he strongly disapproved. He issued a memorandum to his allies on 3 September, Defense of traffic and anti-submarine war in the Mediterranean from the Italian point of view, in which ‘with the highest spirit of mutual trust’ he explained that the system of supply, escort, and anti-submarine defense was a symbiotic and fragile mechanism: ‘You ask Italy to provide forces for the defense of traffic in the Mediterranean, and Italy replies: give me coal for my railways, so that I can do by railway what I do through vessels, and I can give you my light craft.’ Until then, he had nothing to spare. He provided his allies with a detailed list of Italian ships for anti-submarine duties which highlighted, once again, how stressed Italian resources were (see Table 5). 107 The British replied that Italy needed to strengthen its naval production, and that was certainly a good point. The Anglo-French also suspected that Italian supply difficulties were due to lack of loading and uploading facilities rather than to lack of ships. In any case, if Italy was to strengthen its naval facilities, it needed deliveries in raw materials. 108 It seemed a vicious circle.
Italian naval strength in light units in Autumn 1917.
The British request for the 11 Italian destroyers turned out to be a long-lasting issue affecting inter-allied naval relations. It was reiterated on 14 September at a special inter-allied conference, which addressed more specifically the issue of coal supplies to Italy. If provided with an Italian escort, the British promised to send 700,000 tons of coal to Italy per month onwards, using the Gibraltar–Genoa route. Revel still opposed providing the 11 destroyers, as he explained to Sonnino: We only have 40 destroyers, 21 of them antiquated and worn-out by long use, to fulfil the multiple obligations from the Tyrrhenian to the Adriatic, or the protection of communications to Libya and Albania. The 11 destroyers requested by the British represent more than a quarter of their already insufficient strength, and the request comes from the most powerful maritime nation in the world that has more than 375 destroyers, reinforced by American and Japanese craft. Moreover, we have to be prudent and conserve our light craft because of the difficulty of making rapid repairs caused by the lack of raw material.
109
Revel would emphasize this again on 18 December in a memorandum for the Italian marine minister, Alberto Del Bono, stressing that he saw in the reiterated request to put Italian vessels under British command an attempt to weaken the authority of the Italian command. He described the Adriatic as the naval front, where Italy was largely fighting alone, and insisted that the other allies needed to ‘at least guard our rear’. 110 The lack of collaboration on the part of Revel infuriated the British. They failed to appreciate that Italy’s problem of defending trade did not end when large ships reached Genoa, for it was even more difficult to defend traffic between the large and small Italian ports. Consequently, Revel found it impossible to diminish the means he had to defend this traffic in the Tyrrhenian. 111 Once again, Italian reluctance to meet Allied requests was not caused by egoism or lack of collaborative spirit, but by serious material difficulties.
That was not all. Revel was little disposed to put his ships under a non-Italian authority because of his obsession about the other allies being willing to take control of the Italian fleet. In that very period of the war, at the peak of the Caporetto crisis, he had been informed by the Servizio Informazioni of the navy that the British had secretly brought arms and munitions to their only battleship left in Taranto, the HMS Queen. Those weapons were to be used to arm the drifters’ crews, who would sabotage the Italian ports of Taranto and Brindisi in the case that Italy made a separate peace. The Queen would then be scuttled in the channel between the Mar Grande (big port) and the Mar Piccolo (small port) at Taranto, so as to trap the Italian dreadnoughts in the harbor. Revel transferred marine units to Taranto and Brindisi from Naples and Messina; the Queen was isolated and the fresh water supply was cut off – officially ‘due to technical difficulties’, in reality to force the British crew to give up the ship. The Italian marines took control of it and immobilized it. All British weapons on the ship, including the 305 mm guns, were transferred to Italian depots. The Queen was released a few months later, but its 305 mm guns remained in Taranto ‘for the protection of the port’. Revel insisted that these actions must not be made public so as to avoid serious diplomatic repercussions at a delicate moment in the war. But his deep-rooted mistrust of his allies was obviously strengthened by these developments, and he repeatedly opposed the British suggestion that Italian dreadnoughts be ‘temporarily’ transferred to Corfu. 112
The latter proposal was part of a wider British contingency plan to acquire the bulk of the Italian fleet in the case that Italy surrendered. It had been discussed by the Admiralty and Calthorpe since 13 November. The British priorities, the latter wrote, should be to occupy Valona and prevent Albania from falling to the Central Powers, to make every effort to reinforce and hold the Otranto barrage and to acquire at least those Italian ships in the Adriatic which were ‘of the utmost importance’, without giving ‘the enemy the chance of laying his hands on what is left’. The British were to keep ‘as many of these latter as we can hope to man, and all the rest should be sent to the west coast of Italy before Italian neutrality becomes an accomplished fact’. The method of acquisition would be ‘purchase or agreement, backed perhaps by a show of force majeure’. Finally, Calthorpe proposed that British shipping en route to Italy should be withdrawn or diverted to prearranged ports, for example ships bound from Gibraltar to Genoa be diverted to Marseilles, and those bound from Port Said to Italy to Malta. 113 The Admiralty replied briefly on 4 December, approving the draft of the plan and promising Calthorpe that he would receive further comments. 114 Calthorpe then forwarded his plans to Howard Kelly, stressing that it was ‘of the utmost importance that the Italians shall be unaware that the question is under consideration by us, and every precaution is to be taken by you to avoid the fact coming to their knowledge’. 115 The student of the Second World War will see a similarity with the situation in 1940, when British attempts to acquire or neutralize the French fleet led to the tragedy of Mers-el-Kébir.
There is no evidence that Revel was aware of such plans, but the British coup at Taranto, though unsuccessful, acted as a warning bell. Revel used spurious justifications to refuse to send his capital ships to Corfu – the main argument was that ‘the voyage between the two ports was too dangerous’. The British authorities saw it as yet further proof that Revel was ‘an altogether contemptible person’, and that his crews were afraid of leaving their ports for even the safest journey. 116 Revel’s real preoccupation, as he revealed to Admiral Carlo Bergamini some 20 years later, was that at Corfu his ships would be at the mercy of the French, and he was ‘as determined to prevent them being taken by the Allies as he was to avoid surrendering them to the Germans’. 117 Though none of this happened – the Italian military situation progressively improved – it is indicative of the state of inter-allied naval relations in the winter of 1917–18.
Nonetheless, Italy’s position after Caporetto was so precarious that Revel had to find a way to cooperate with his allies, despite everything. Italian coal stocks, which had been around 780,000 tons at the beginning of 1917, had now fallen to 360,000 tons. The navy used around 50,000 tons per month – to which the emergency needs of the army must be now added – and that meant that the stock would be completely exhausted within six months. At the same time, warned Silvio Crespi, Italian commissioner for supplies, the Central Powers concentrated their efforts on the Italian shipping-routes in order to ‘starve the country and provoke a revolution’. 118 Italian merchant losses increased from 104,000 tons in 1916 to 241,000 by the end of 1917. 119 The British exploited Italian difficulties by linking shipments of supplies to further Italian collaboration in the convoy system; this time the blackmail played out. 120
Revel reluctantly conceded to the British 28 Italian merchant vessels to be included in their convoys. Thus, he managed to obtain an immediate dispatch of 50,000 badly needed tons of coal. 121
Only on 18 February 1918 did the Allies find a solution to the supply crisis, when they signed an inter-allied agreement for coal supplies to Italy. Part of the solution was to divert supplies from sea to land transports, through France via the Modane–Ventimiglia railway line. Out of a total of 690,000 tons of coal per month, 240,000 tons of French coal would be delivered by rail, and 450,000 tons of British coal would be delivered in part by rail across France and in part by ship. Four million hundredweight of wheat were also promised to Italy. 122 To carry this program out, convoys followed new routes, and frequently changed them, in the way that had proved successful in the Atlantic: Gibraltar–Genoa; Egypt–Malta–Naples; Libya–Taranto; Bizerte–Naples; Malta–Taranto. The most important route was Gibraltar–Genoa. In the spring of 1918, a total of 1,088 vessels (69 convoys), which was about 70 per cent of traffic to Italy, reached Genoa from Gibraltar, and 1,044 vessels left Genoa for the Atlantic. 123 A further inter-allied solution was found for supplies at sea by increasing the tonnage per convoy. Instead of convoys made of 3 merchant ships, escorted by 2 armed vessels, convoys of 8 to 12 vessels, escorted by 6 warships, began to be formed. Where escort ships were not available, merchant vessels were armed with anti-submarine guns. 124
Despite all previous contrasts, these efforts, especially on the part of a hard-pressed Britain, were extraordinary. It is no exaggeration to say that they saved Italy; there would have been no Italian ‘miraculous resistance’ 125 on the Piave, nor the final victorious offensive of 24 October 1918, without a constant flow of Allied supplies to keep the country in the war. Unfortunately, such efforts were little appreciated by the Italians. Their needs were so desperate and so vast, and their relations with their allies by now so strained, that it was not unusual for the Italians to accuse them of ‘starving Italy’ with insufficient or delayed shipments. 126
Italian mistrust in their allies also stimulated the creation of a specialized anti-submarine organization, the Ispettorato per la Difesa del Traffico Nazionale (IDTN), autonomous from the British Mediterranean command for anti-submarine warfare and the Direction Générale des Routes established at Malta in the spring of 1917. The IDTN reflected the Italian tendency of relying on the ‘very Italian art of getting by’ whenever possible. It became a crucial component in the Italian struggle to survive the crisis in the winter of 1917–18. The head of the Inspectorate, Rear-Admiral Mortola, took orders directly from the chief of naval staff and was charged with: (1) the provision, distribution and utilization of offensive and defensive measures against submarines and the organization of harbors of refuge; (2) arming merchant vessels and the provision of a suitable reward to masters who sank submarines; (3) the conclusion of agreements with neutral countries regarding the treatment of armed merchant vessels in their territorial waters; and (4) the control of navigation to ensure its safety. IDTN commands were created at La Spezia, La Maddalena, Genoa, Livorno, Civitavecchia, Naples, and Palermo. IDTN offices to coordinate convoys leaving for Italy were based at Gibraltar, Port Said, Bizerte, Corfu, Piraeus, Patras, Salonika, and New York. 127 Each IDTN command had its own naval forces for the protection of traffic, and could use them independently, according to circumstances. By the end of the war Mortola had 392 ships of all types under his command, including 26 Italian cruisers out of a total of 42, 101 minesweepers and 167 MAS. Revel commented, ‘Defense of traffic has become … the main duty of our navy.’ 128
The Italian rules were based on the idea that ships should navigate by night, as much as possible at full speed, in order to reduce the distance they would have to cover in daylight. Semaphore stations on shore, aircraft patrol, and protection by heavy naval batteries and armed trains were provided. The artillery umbrella of protection implied that the principle of coastal navigation replaced that of patrolled routes. The other allies were initially very skeptical about this system. Revel provided them with detailed statistics of Italian, Allied, and neutral losses in Italian and non-Italian waters, which suggested that the Italian system of defending traffic was to be considered the best among the Allies (see Table 6). 129
Italian, Allied, and neutral vessels lost to submarines in the Mediterranean since May 1915.
Allied losses in Italian waters were 20 per cent of those in extra-Italian waters. Halpern suggested that these statistics might have been misleading since the Italian zones were smaller than the others. 130 Nevertheless, the other allies acknowledged the effectiveness of the Italian system when they eventually adopted Italian regulations along the Italian coast for all Allied vessels. 131 The myth that there was ‘no surveillance in Italian waters’ is therefore unfounded. Italy would not have recovered for the final act of the war without the Allied convoy system, but the Allies could never have supplied Italy successfully without an efficient and autonomous Italian system of escort, surveillance, and defense in Italian waters, which in 1918 helped reduce Italian merchant losses to 138,175 tons. 132 It was only through a combination of these measures that Italy survived the crisis, and the Allies won the submarine war in the Mediterranean.
Conclusions
Despite all the difficulties and mistakes that were inevitably made, the contribution of the Italian navy to the final Allied victory in the Mediterranean, far from being counterproductive, was indeed greater than is generally appreciated. In particular, the accusations of egoism and cowardice towards the Italians were undeserved. Allied complaints about the lack of a collaborative spirit on the part of the Italian naval staff, and Admiral Revel in particular, have also been much exaggerated. More serious strategic issues lay at the heart of Italy’s differences with its allies.
As far as the Adriatic is concerned, it might be said that the real problem was that Italy seemed to be the only Allied power to have a coherent strategy for the Adriatic war from late 1915 onwards. Paradoxically enough, Italy and its allies had remarkably similar views at the beginning of hostilities – they hoped for a quick and decisive naval victory – only to turn to a more cautious approach after experiencing the peculiarities of the Adriatic scenario, as well as the threat posed by the new weapon of submarines. Although both the Anglo-French and the Italians came to acknowledge these – in the autumn of 1914 and 1915, respectively – only the latter seemed to act accordingly. The former stuck to a fully justified prudent attitude in the opening phases of Italy’s war, when Revel preached a decisive joint attack on the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine, and then apparently expected the Italians to carry it out alone.
Instead, the Italian naval staff became increasingly convinced, from the summer of 1915 to the establishment of the Otranto barrage in the autumn, that the naval war in the Adriatic would be a long war of attrition, which in many ways mirrored the land operations, and that the Allies needed to invest massive human, financial, and material resources. Revel saw the Adriatic as the main front in the Mediterranean, because it was the base of both Austrian and German Mediterranean forces. The other allies, however, saw the rest of the Mediterranean as the real battlefield, and they believed that Adriatic distractions should not jeopardize their strategy elsewhere. These were fundamentally different standpoints.
As it turned out, the Italian navy found itself more committed outside the Adriatic than it was in the ‘Italian sea’, so much so that more than 60 per cent of its forces were devoted to extra-Adriatic duties. As the war progressed, it proved willing and capable of mounting major naval operations, including the rescue of the Serbian Army and various transportation operations. Despite these additional challenges, Italy’s confrontation with the k.u.k Kriegsmarine was conducted offensively by the Regia Marina and was concluded victoriously with the destruction of the bulk of the Austro-Hungarian fleet, including its largest battleships and dreadnoughts. There was no major ‘glorious’ naval engagement, which the Italian admirals had hoped for to avenge the defeat suffered against the Austrians in the battle of Lissa of 1866, but the final outcome was still a decisive victory. Italy’s allies failed to fully appreciate this, possibly because they tended to underestimate the Austro-Hungarian navy.
More generally, it can be concluded that much of the frustration and mutual recrimination that characterized inter-allied naval relations came from misunderstandings and diplomatic rivalries. The Mediterranean really did cry for unity, and that was never achieved. Inter-allied frictions were destined to flare up again in the post-war period; this is indicative of the fundamental problem of turning longer-lasting alliances into ad hoc fighting groupings. The Triple Entente in 1914 was already a much more complex alliance than the Central Powers, the latter being clearly Germany-centric. The Allies found a precarious balance in 1914; with the addition of Italy, a country that had belonged for 32 years to the opposite camp and which had a long tradition of Mediterranean ambitions, they became a multiplicity of actors whose interests and objectives tended to diverge sharply, and whose relationships, as a result, were likely to be fragile at best and at worst dangerously volatile. All parties were slow to recognize and accommodate that complexity, and in some areas, such as naval command, it was never done.
Different strategic approaches, mutual mistrust, material difficulties, and the limited tripartite coordination that the Mediterranean Allies achieved at sea – with the exception of convoy defense – meant that individual navy chiefs of staff carried a great deal of responsibility, and stimulated national solutions to various issues. In this regard, the Regia Marina proved capable of some positive initiatives, developing autonomous and original devices and tactics. It also managed to parry the submarine threat in Italian waters in ways that equalized and perhaps even surpassed British and French methods. The long-lasting effectiveness of MAS and manned-torpedo tactics actually demonstrated the excellence that the Regia Marina was capable of achieving.
This does not mean that Italy could not have done any better than it did. It certainly could have – as could have all other belligerents. For example, an early understanding of the nature of modern naval operations could have led Italian naval authorities to give preference to the expansion of their light craft, instead of their capital ships. The MAS program should have been launched earlier than May 1916. Strategically, the Italians might have carried out Abruzzi’s plan to take the Dalmatian islands, posing a greater threat to Austrian ports, though it would have required resources that Cadorna was not ready to divert from the main land front. The Italians could also have tried to explain better their anxieties to their allies, but the main inter-allied issues, such as the reasons why Revel was uneasy to concede his ships to the British and French, posed an embarrassing diplomatic problem, namely the risk of revealing how little Rome trusted its new partners. So the Italian chief of naval staff preferred to put forward vague or even specious justifications for many of his decisions, incidentally strengthening Allied prejudices about the Italians being timid, incompetent, and uncooperative.
In sum, despite such stereotypes, and unfair criticism by its own allies, the Regia Marina did the Allies a great service in taking on, largely alone, the only Mediterranean ‘grand fleet’ of the Central Powers. Allied support to Italy must also be stressed, for it was thanks to the convoy system that Rome managed to get to the end of the war. A more complete and balanced analysis of the Italian role in the Allied naval strategy is therefore badly needed, in particular regarding the blockade and joint operations in the lower Adriatic and the Eastern Mediterranean. With this article I have taken a step in that direction.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
1
G.H. Cassar, The Forgotten Front. The British Campaign in Italy 1917–1918 (London, 1998), p. 321.
2
John Gooch highlighted similar issues between Italy and its allies on land. See J. Gooch, The Italian Army and the First World War (Cambridge, 2014).
3
L. Sondhaus, The Great War at Sea. A Naval History of the First World War (Cambridge, 2014), p. 133.
4
P. Halpern, The Naval War in the Mediterranean 1914–1918 (Annapolis, 1987), p. 374.
5
Sondhaus, The Great War, pp. 132–8.
6
See A. Thomazi, Guerre navale dans l’Adriatique. La marine française dans la grande guerre 1914–1918 (Paris, 1925).
7
See E. Cernuschi, Battaglie sconosciute. Storia riveduta e corretta della Regia Marina durante la Grande Guerra (Vicenza, 2014); V. Grienti and L. Merlini, Navi al fronte. La Marina Militare italiana e la Grande Guerra (Parma, 2015); N. Morabito, La Marina Italiana in guerra 1915–1918 (Milan, 1933); Ufficio Storico della Marina (USM), La marina italiana nella Grande Guerra, 8 vols (Florence, 1935–42).
8
L. Riccardi, Alleati non amici. Le relazioni politiche fra l’Italia e l’Intesa durante la prima guerra mondiale (Brescia, 1992), pp. 305ff.
9
L. Sondhaus, The Naval Policy of Austria-Hungary: Navalism, Industrial Development, and the Politics of Dualism, 1867–1918 (West Lafayette, 1993), p. 173.
10
M. Niemöller, From U-Boat to Pulpit (Chicago, Willet, Clark, 1937), p. 84.
11
Halpern, The Naval War, p. 34; Sondhaus, The Great War, pp. 128–30.
12
Archivio dell’Ufficio dello Storico della Marina (AUSM), b. 498, f. 3. Contributo dalla Marina inglese all’Italia durante la guerra 1915–18.
13
Halpern, The Naval War, p. 270.
14
Naval Library, London, Jackson MSS, Thursby to Jackson, 12 May 1916.
15
Halpern, The Naval War, pp. 99, 272.
16
Sondhaus, The Great War, p. 132.
17
A.T. Mahan, Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 (New York, 1903), II, pp. 51–2; Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660–1783 (Boston, 1890), pp. 287–8.
18
Documenti Diplomatici Italiani (DDI), 5ª, III, doc. 637, Sonnino to Tittoni, 9 May 1915.
19
Grienti and Merlini, Navi al fronte, p. 59.
20
AUSM, b. 354/4, Viale, ‘Piano generale delle operazioni in Adriatico’, 18 April 1915, also quoted in full in Grienti and Merlini, Navi al fronte, p. 21.
21
M. Gabriele, ‘La Convenzione navale italo-franco-britannica del 10 maggio 1915’, in Nuova Antologia, fasc. 1972–3, April–May, 1965, p. 489.
22
DDI, 5ª, III, doc. 637, Sonnino to Tittoni, 9 May 1915.
23
USM, La marina italiana, III, pp. 215–20; Halpern, The Naval War, p. 274.
24
USM, La marina italiana, V, pp. 143–4.
25
Sondhaus, The Great War, p. 268.
26
Halpern, The Naval War, p. 338; P. Halpern, A Naval History of World War I (London, 1994), p. 141.
27
J.S. Corbett, History of the Great War Naval Operations, Based on Official Documents, 3 vols (London and New York, 1920–3), II, p. 395.
28
Lieutenant W.E. Parry, Diary, Parry MSS 71/19/1, 14 November 1916. Quoted by P. Halpern, ed., The Royal Navy in the Mediterranean, 1915–1918 (Aldershot, 1987), p. 186.
29
Cernuschi, Battaglie sconosciute, pp. 25ff.
30
ASUM, b. 519, Corsi to Abruzzi, 18 October 1916.
31
Morabito, Marina Italiana, pp. 26–7; E. Ferrante, Il pensiero strategico navale in Italia (Rome, 1988), pp. 37–54.
32
Halpern, The Naval War, pp. 84–5.
33
See L. Tosi, La propaganda italiana all’estero nella Prima Guerra Mondiale (Udine, 1977).
34
Commander of the Grand Fleet until 1916, later First Sea Lord, and Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean from 1916 onwards, respectively.
35
Italian Ministers of Marine were: Leone Vitale from the outbreak of war until 24 September 1915; Camillo Corsi from 30 September 1915 to 16 June 1917; Arturo Triangi from 16 June to 16 July 1917; and Alberto De Bono from 16 July 1917 to 30 October 1917.
36
Grigenti and Merlini, Navi al Fronte, p. 33.
37
Halpern, The Naval War, pp. 130–7, 334–6.
38
Halpern, A Naval History, p. 140.
39
Churchill College, Cambridge, Tomkinson MSS, 170/2, Tomkinson Diary, 18, 22, 25 October, 2, 4 November 1915 and 31 January, 13 March 1916.
40
Quoted by Halpern, A Naval History, pp. 150, 153.
41
Halpern, The Naval War, p. 164.
42
AUSM, b. 1191, Revel to Grassi, 30 April 1918; Sondhaus, The Great War, p. 316; Halpern, The Naval War, p. 439.
43
Morabito, Marina Italiana, pp. 76–89 and 113–45.
44
W. Aichelburg, Register der k. (u.) k. Kriegsschiffe. Von Abbondanza bis Zrinyi (Vienna, 2002), p. 343.
45
See Aichelburg, Register. See also H. Bayer von Bayersburg, Die Marinevaffen im Einsatz, 1914–1918 (Vienna, 1968); A.E. Sokol, The Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Navy (Annapolis, 1968).
46
Service Historique de la Marine (SHM), Vincennes, Carton Ed-91, Captain Marie-Isidore-René Daveluy, Daveluy to Lapeyrère, 30 August 1915; Halpern, The Naval War, p. 147.
47
Cernuschi, Battaglie sconosciute, p. 218.
48
AUSM, b. 497, f. 18, Definition and Allocation of the Japanese and United States Reserves and their Maximum Contribution in the Mediterranean.
49
Quoted in full in: USM, La marina italiana, V, pp. 312–3.
50
Ferrante, Il pensiero strategico, pp. 37–47.
51
Cernuschi, Battaglie sconosciute, pp. 51–3.
52
Ibid.
53
Morabito, Marina Italiana, pp. 191–284.
54
Ibid., pp. 250ff.
55
Italian total losses were: 8 ships sunk and 28 damaged. The British and French had 4 and 2 light units damaged in the Adriatic, respectively: Cernuschi, Battaglie sconosciute, p. 242.
56
The k.u.k. Kriegsmarine also inflicted 6 direct hits on French ships and 5 on British, whilst being hit 10 times by the former and 6 by the latter: Ibid.
57
Sondhaus, The Great War, p. 167.
58
Morabito, Marina Italiana, pp. 108–10.
59
Halpern, The Naval War, pp. 130–40.
60
Cernuschi, Battaglie sconosciute, p. 63; Morabito, Marina Italiana, p. 17; USM, La marina italiana, VI pp. 301–22. Further details and data regarding Italian and Austro-Hungarian operations and the amount of goods transported through the Adriatic between 1915 and 1918 are included in various documentaries released by RAI and the Italian Navy and available on their websites.
61
Halpern, The Naval War, p. 128.
62
Morabito, Marina Italiana, p. 150.
63
This was yet another factor forcing the Allies to keep their forces at Taranto and Corfu separated.
64
SHM, Carton Ed-83, Lapeyrère to Augagneur, 26 May 1915; Halpern, The Naval War, p. 125.
65
Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge (CAC), De Robeck MSS, DRBK, 4/39, Heneage to De Robeck, 3 April 1917; C. Manfroni, Storia della marina militare italiana durante la Guerra Mondiale, 1914-1918, 2nd edn (Bologna, 1936), p. 238.
66
AUSM, b. 497, f. 2, Cooperazione interalleata durante la guerra marittima mondiale in Mediterraneo, Memorandum di Revel, 8 August 1917.
67
Halpern, The Naval War, p. 525.
68
Ibid., p. 252.
69
P. Halpern, The Battle of the Otranto Straits. Controlling the Gateway to the Adriatic in WWI (Bloomington, 2004), p. 18.
70
AUSM, b. 827, f. 6, Conferenza di Londra. Allied Naval Conference Report, 23–4 January 1917.
71
AUSM, b. 827, f. 6, cit., Establishment of convoy system in the Mediterranean. Necessity for this system in order to ensure adequate supply of coal to Italy and to economize tonnage.
72
The National Archives (TNA), FO 371/2946, Memorandum from Imperiali, 26 June 1917.
73
TNA, ADM 137/1420, Report of Allied Naval Conference, London, 23–4 January 1917.
74
Halpern, The Royal Navy, pp. 209ff.
75
Halpern, A Naval History, p. 162; ADM 137/782, Kerr to Admiralty, 21 May 1917.
76
AUSM, b. 497, f. 18, cit., Definition and Allocation of the Japanese and United States Reserves and their Maximum Contribution in the Mediterranean.
77
Ibid.
78
Halpern, Battle of the Otranto Straits, p. 31.
79
AUSM, b. 827, f. 6, cit., Relazione della commissione delegata a prender parte alla conferenza di Londra per la protezione subacquea delle navi mercantili, 16 August 1917.
80
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, Fremantle MSS, FRE/301, Memorandum of Conference at the Admiralty, 14 August 1917.
81
TNA, ADM 137/1413, Calthorpe to Admiralty, 28 October 1917.
82
AUSM, b. 827, f. 6, cit., Offensive measures against enemy submarines in the North Sea, 12 September 1917.
83
AUSM, b. 827, f. 2, Conferenza italo–inglese–francese per lo studio dei mezzi di offesa e difesa contro sommergibili. Verbale del 7 settembre 1917.
84
AUSM, b. 827, f. 3, Addetto Navale italiano a Londra. Sommergibili nemici distrutti, 30 September 1917.
85
AUSM, b. 827, f. 2, cit. Verbale del 7 settembre 1917.
86
USM, La marina italiana, V, pp. 126-127; VI, pp. 111-164.
87
Halpern, The Naval War, p. 381.
88
TNA, ADM 137/1413, Calthorpe to Admiralty, 28 October 1917.
89
AUSM, b. 497, f. 2, Opera della Regia Marina in Eritrea e Somalia. Cooperazione interalleata durante la Guerra in Mediterraneo; USM, La marina italiana, VI, p. 308.
90
Morabito, Marina Italiana, pp. 157, 319.
91
USM, La marina italiana, VI, p. 563.
92
Halpern, The Naval War, p. 237.
93
Total stocks were 1,500,000 tons, naval stocks 800,000: AUSM, b. 827, f. 3, Allied Naval Conference Report, 23–4 January 1917.
94
A. Caracciolo, ‘La crescita e la trasformazione della grande industria durante la prima guerra mondiale’, in G. Fuà (ed.), Lo sviluppo economico in Italia (Milan, 1969), p. 203.
95
They would increase to 771 by the end of the war: USM, La marina italiana, VI, p. 564.
96
AUSM, b. 827, f. 6, cit., Allied Naval Conference Report, 23-4 January 1917
97
AUSM, b. 498, f. 3, La guerra degli Alleati, sf. 2107, Elenchi navi italiane perdute durante la guerra. Tonnellaggio mercantile affondato durante la guerra.
98
The Navy Records Society, The Keyes Papers, 3 vols (London, 1979), I; Halpern (ed.), doc. 135, Commodore Keyes to his wife, 30 December 1915, p. 299.
99
Both quotes from: Halpern, The Naval War, pp. 256, 329.
100
TNA, ADM. 137/1420, Agenda and Conclusions, Allied Naval Conference, London, 23–4 January 1917.
101
Halpern, The Naval History, p. 390.
102
TNA, ADM 137/1412, Ballard to Admiralty, 21 August 1917.
103
See: TNA, ADM 137/1230, Wemyss to Admiralty, 13 December, 1916; C. Manfroni, Storia della marina militare, p. 284; Morabito, Marina Italiana, pp. 383–92.
104
Halpern, The Naval War, p. 376.
105
Halpern, A Naval History, p. 143.
106
AUSM, b. 827, f. 2, cit., Verbale del 7 settembre 1917.
107
USM, La marina italiana, VI, p. 205.
108
AUSM, b. 827, f. 6, cit., Revel a Rey Di Villarey, Addetto navale all’ambasciata italiana in Londra, Memorandum per Lloyd George, 31 September 1917.
109
AUSM, b. 740, f. 1, Telegrammi, Revel to Sonnino, 24 September 1917.
110
USM, La marina italiana, VI, p. 523.
111
AUSM, b. 740, f. 1, cit., Revel to Sonnino, 24 September 1917.
112
Cernuschi, Battaglie sconosciute, pp. 203ff; Cernuschi, ‘Dagli amici mi guardi Iddio’, in Storica, January 1994.
113
TNA, ADM 137/2180, Calthorpe to Admiralty, 13 November 1917.
114
TNA, ADM 137/2180, Admiralty to Calthorpe, 4 December 1917.
115
TNA, ADM 137/2180, Calthorpe to Kelly, 14 November 1917.
116
TNA, ADM 116/1649, ff. 72–8, Hankey to Geddes, 1 June 1918.
117
Cernuschi, Battaglie sconosciute, pp. 203ff.
118
S. Crespi, Alla difesa d’Italia in guerra e a Versailles (Milan, 1937), p. 176.
119
Cernuschi, Battaglie sconosciute, p. 235.
120
Halpern, The Naval War, p. 376.
121
USM, La marina italiana, VI, p. 18.
122
Crespi, Alla difesa, p. 54.
123
Manfroni, Storia della marina militare, p. 288.
124
Halpern, The Naval War, p. 378.
125
Gooch, Italian Army, p. 282.
126
Bodleian Library, Oxford, Rodd papers [uncat.], Hardinge to Rodd, 18 January 1918.
127
Manfroni, Storia della marina militare, pp. 284ff.; Halpern, The Naval War, p. 337.
128
Italian minesweepers cleared 55 per cent of mines in Italian waters: Manfroni, Storia della marina militare, p. 301; Morabito, Marina Italiana, p. 383.
129
USM, La marina italiana, V, p. 469; VI, p. 191.
130
Halpern, The Naval War, p. 382.
131
Manfroni, Storia della marina militare, p. 287; USM, La marina italiana, VI, pp. 189–212
132
USM, La marina italiana, V, pp. 469ff.; VI, pp. 191ff.