The Year of Strategic Crisis
Part 11: Operations in the Med and Black, April 7 – June 15, 1941
Though Mussolini’s eyes were frequently cast eastward every day to oversee and ponder the situation in the east, where indeed the greater part of his army was in action of one sort of another, this did not preclude the conduct of operations elsewhere. Indeed, it was during this two month period that the Italian Marine Corps began operating, albeit still with only one of its prescribed three divisions. The Regia Marina, too, was not inactive and would contribute in some part to the opening stages of the war with the Soviet Union. Thus we shall now turn to operations in the Mediterranean and Black Seas.
The Italian Marine Corps was originally envisaged to go east, as a stopgap force against the Soviet armor rampaging through Dacia. Its mission was simply to hold the corridor linking Dacia to Graziani’s forces, which were pushing past Odessa by this stage. A mix up of orders, however, sent them to Valencia, in Iberia. By the time this mistake had been noticed, Bastico was already going eastward and the marines’ mission was scrubbed. It did not take long for the Italian general staff to find other tasks for it to do. Taking into account its mission—to assault beaches held by the enemy and generally to be the mainstay, once it reached its proper size, of Italy’s expeditionary power projection strategy on land—it was determined that it would gain some experience with these tasks. As such, on the 27th of April, the Marine Corps, which was under the command of Lieutenant General F. Lisi, with its one division, commanded by Major General Re, assaulted the island of Eivissa, off the west Iberian coast. Of the Balearic Islands, the Italians held only Majorca: Eivissa and Menorca were both held by Spanish forces fighting under the British flag. The battle of Eivissa easily went the marines’ way, for the soldiers there had been denied supplies for the entirety of the Second Iberian War. Two brigades of Spanish troops were destroyed.
The marines’ assault on Eivissa.
The capture of Eivissa forced those last Spanish ships out of port there—the light cruiser ARE Baleares and one flotilla of destroyers. Campioni handily dispatched these ships. On the 3rd of May, the marines then assaulted Menorca. The opposition here was much stiffer, as somehow the Spaniards had kept a source of supply open to them. Nearly three hundred marines died on Menorco, some twenty-seven times more than on Eivissa, but in the end they triumphed and destroyed another two brigades of Spanish troops. There were now only three Allied positions left on or in the Mediterranean: the British enclave at Tel Aviv, which Mussolini had decided to avoid provoking for a while, Spanish Morocco, which Italy did not have the available strength to take as there were at least two or three Spanish divisions there, and Malta. The marines assaulted Malta on the 19th of May. Without four days Malta was conquered, and the British garrison there was destroyed. All the islands of the Mediterranean were now in Italian hands.
The marines’ assault on Malta.
As the marines fought on Malta, da Zara sallied into the center of the Black Sea. The Soviets first subjugated his fleet to attacks by Soviet air force units. Soviet interceptors tangled with carrier-based fighters, but the Soviets were outnumbered and forced to desist with some casualties. The day Malta fell da Zara had his first encounter with the Soviet Black Sea fleet and sent it scurrying toward Batum with the loss of some destroyers. By the 3rd of June he had hit upon a plan. He was going to strike the port at Batum. The port was guarded by some anti-aircraft guns, in addition to the guns of the Black Sea fleet. However, the latter were hardly considerable: reports from Lieutenant General Ricci, the commander of da Zara’s carrier wings, stated that the Soviets actually had very few surface ships: a single light cruiser and a handful of transports and destroyers. Of the thirty-nine naval units Batum, the vast majority were submarines.
Da Zara striking at Batum.
Ricci’s aviators had a field day. Over and over again. For a week, da Zara’s carriers launched their warplanes and they struck at Batum’s port. By the 6th, if not before, all of the permanent air defenses had been knocked out, and port facilities crippled. By the 10th, of the entire Soviet fleet in Batum, only a squadron of transports, three flotillas of submarines, a brace of destroyers and the single light cruiser remained; all were much damaged. With one final effort, Ricci’s aviators destroyed these ships, and thus annihilated the entire Soviet Black Sea fleet. Italian losses during this prolonged encounter amounted to, in aggregate, only a handful of planes, though the aviators were in poor shape, having flown and bombed, with great precision, with very little rest for a straight week.
Batum devastated, just before the final push to wipe out the Soviet Black Sea fleet.
As Italian armies faced even larger Soviet armies, or the promise of larger Soviet armies, and hoped only to keep them stalemated, Mussolini followed his original strategy elsewhere with success. The Mediterranean was finally nearly cleared of a hostile presence, the enormous British fleet which remained at Tel Aviv notwithstanding due to an idleness which was more than simply enforced by the Italians. The Marine Corps had proved its worth and was soon to find itself on the frontline against greater Allied forces. In the Black Sea, da Zara established Italian ascendency over Soviet naval forces in the most destructive way possible. Italy could still attend to limited operations, despite the call of operations in the east.
