The Daring Dozen (30 page)

Immediately after leaving the
Scire
, the three ‘pigs’ had a stroke of good fortune when three British destroyers hove into view. The harbour’s net gates opened and the guide lights went on, allowing the raiders to slip unseen into Alexandria ahead of the enemy vessels. Though the three torpedoes had lost one another in the black water, each knew their own orders: de la Penne and Bianchi were to attack the
Valiant
, Marceglia and Schergat the
Queen Elizabeth
and Martellotta and Marino a loaded oil tanker.

De la Penne and Bianchi soon saw ahead of them the huge hull of the 32,000-ton battleship. Encountering its protective anti-torpedo netting, Bianchi cut their way through it, and they approached their target. But the exertion of dealing with the netting had exhausted Bianchi to such an extent that he fainted, slipping from the ‘pig’ and floating to the surface. Regaining consciousness, he clung to a floating buoy out of sight of the British sentries patrolling the deck of the
Valiant
.

Under the surface, de la Penne had noticed the disappearance of Bianchi but his more pressing concern was for the ‘pig’, which for some reason had dropped like a stone to the sea bed. Diving down to investigate, de la Penne discovered that a steel wire had snagged the propeller, and despite his best efforts he was unable to restart the motor. De la Penne was faced with a stark choice: either abort the mission or try to drag the ‘pig’ a few yards so that it was directly beneath the hull of the
Valiant
. He decided on the latter, as Borghese recounted in his memoirs:

With all his strength, panting and sweating, he dragged at the craft; his goggles became obscured and the mud he was stirring up prevented his reading the compass. His breath began to come in great gasps and it became difficult to breathe at all through the mask, but he stuck to it and made progress. He could hear close above him the noises made aboard the ship, especially the sound of an alternating pump, which he used to find his direction. After 40 minutes of superhuman effort, making a few inches at every pull, he at last bumped his head against the hull. He made a cursory survey of the position: he seemed to be at about the middle of the ship, an excellent spot for causing maximum damage.
¹⁶

In fact the torpedo was underneath the
Valiant
’s port bulge, abreast A turret, and close to the turret’s shell room and magazine. It was a little after 0300hrs and de la Penne set the fuse on the warhead to explode at 0500hrs. Once he had surfaced de la Penne found Bianchi clinging to the mooring buoy at the bow of the
Valiant.
They were soon spotted by British sentries above and as the pair waited to be picked up they listened to the guards ‘talking contemptuously about Italians. I called Bianchi’s attention to the probability that in a few hours they would have changed their minds’.
¹⁷

At 0330hrs a British patrol boat appeared and the two Italians were hauled on board. The officer in command asked them a few rudimentary questions and on the way to shore ‘expressed ironical sympathy with their lack of success’. De la Penne and Bianchi said nothing, and after a brief interrogation conducted in Italian the pair were returned to the
Valiant
where the ship’s captain, Charles Morgan, was more appreciative of their mission. He wanted to know where they had placed the charge. De la Penne and Bianchi refused to cooperate, so an armed escort placed them in a hold not far from A turret. They were well treated, given a tot of rum and a cigarette, and encouraged to disclose the whereabouts of the charge. Bianchi curled up and went to sleep while de la Penne kept one eye on his watch. At 0450hrs he told his guards he wished to speak to Captain Morgan. In his operational report on the incident de la Penne described subsequent events:

I was taken aft into his presence. I told him that in a few minutes his ship would blow up, that there was nothing he could do about it and that, if he wished, he could still get his crew into a place of safety. He again asked me where I had placed the charge and as I did not reply he had me escorted back into the hold. As we went along I heard the loudspeakers giving orders to abandon ship, as the vessel had been attacked by Italians, and saw people running aft … a few minutes passed (they were infernal ones for me: would the explosion take place?) and then it came. The vessel reared with extreme violence. All the lights went out and the hold became filled with smoke.
¹⁸

The charge had exploded under the port bulge, holing an area some 60ft by 30ft and causing extensive flooding in several compartments and some electrical damage. De la Penne and Bianchi were taken up on deck, from where they saw the ship begin to list to port some four or five degrees. The two Italians turned their gaze towards the
Queen Elizabeth
just a few hundred yards away. They could see startled sailors standing in her bows watching the drama on the
Valiant.
Suddenly a great explosion rent the air and the
Queen Elizabeth
‘rose a few inches out of the water and fragments of iron and other objects flew out of her funnel, mixed with oil, which even reached the deck of the
Valiant
, splashing everyone of us standing on her stern.’

The
Queen Elizabeth
had been blown up by Marceglia and Schergat in a flawless act of sabotage. Having cut through the anti-submarine net, the pair attached a loop-line from one bilge keel to the other, and fixed their warhead on the line so that it was suspended 5ft beneath the hull of the battleship. It exploded under the ‘B’ boiler room, devastating the ship’s double-bottom structure and inflicting damage to a section of the ship measuring 190ft by 60ft. Compartment by compartment the vessel began flooding up to the main deck level, until eventually the
Queen Elizabeth
sank to the bottom of Alexandria Harbour.

As a frantic manhunt ensued for the two saboteurs, Marceglia and Schergat swam ashore, slipped off their diving suits and posed as French sailors. The evasion plan required all six operators to rendezvous with an Italian submarine that was lying ten miles offshore from Rosetta, the men having to first steal a boat to make the pick-up point.

Marceglia and Schergat made their way to the railway station where they took a train to Rosetta, 40 miles east of Alexandria. They spent the night in a cheap hotel and the next evening made their way towards the harbour with the intention of stealing a boat. Here their luck ran out and they were stopped by an Egyptian patrol. Identified as Italians, the two saboteurs were handed over to the British.

The last two saboteurs, Martellotta and Marino, successfully destroyed a 16,000-ton oil tanker called the
Sagona
to complete a night of devastating triumph for the Tenth Light Flotilla, although Borghese himself, sailing back towards Italy, would have to wait more than a week to hear the news. For 39 hours the
Scire
remained submerged before surfacing and making for Leros, and from there Borghese piloted the vessel to La Spezia. After covering 3,500 miles in 22 days at sea, he arrived home on 29 December. Waiting to welcome them ashore was Admiral Bacci with a telegram from Admiral Riccardi, Under-Secretary of State for the Navy, commending Borghese and his crew for their part in a highly successful mission.

The sinking of the
Queen Elizabeth,
which took 18 months to raise and repair, and the damage to the
Valiant
was a grave setback for the British fleet in the East Mediterranean, even if the Royal Navy pretended otherwise. It denied Italian claims of the
Valiant
having suffered a similar fate to that of the
Queen Elizabeth
and to prove it, released photos to the press of the ship at anchor at Alexandria. What the photographs carried by the British papers didn’t show, however, was the extensive damage that de la Penne and Bianchi’s torpedo had caused to the
Valiant
below the waterline. It was another year before the battleship was able to resume operations. ‘For the first (and last) time in the course of the war,’ wrote Borghese, ‘the Italian Navy achieved crushing superiority and dominated the Mediterranean; it could therefore resume, with practical immunity, supplies to the armies overseas and carry out transport of the German Afrika Korps to Libya, thus causing the defeat, a few months later, of the British Army which was driven out of Cyrenaica.’
¹⁹

Despite his satisfaction with the attack on Alexandria, Borghese was astounded to discover that his superiors were not going to exploit the success to its maximum advantage; with the British fleet all but out of action, a large-scale assault on the island of Malta – for so long a thorn in the side of the Axis – would almost certainly have succeeded. Borghese later divided the blame at this missed opportunity between the hesitancy of the Italian general staff and the refusal of the German High Command to supply the fuel for aircraft and warships.

Bianchi, who along with his five fellow saboteurs was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, agreed with the sentiments of his commander concerning Malta. ‘The island was exhausted, we could have taken it with little risk, but we never got there,’ he reflected years later. The six saboteurs were all conferred with the Gold Medal upon their return from captivity and in an act of high irony, de la Penne received his decoration from the new chief of the Allied naval mission to Italy – none other than Captain Charles Morgan, erstwhile commander of the
Valiant
.

Borghese received the Military Order of Savoy for his role in the attacks on Alexandria Harbour, the citation praising his ‘great technical competence and shrewdness … and cool determination’. What delighted Borghese even more, however, though he didn’t hear of it for a long time after, was the speech given by Winston Churchill to a secret session of the House of Commons on 23 April 1942. It was the British Prime Minister’s grave duty to inform the House about the details of the attack:

Extreme precautions have been taken for some time past against the varieties of human torpedo or one-man submarine entering our harbours. Not only are nets and other obstructions used but underwater charges are exploded at irregular intervals in the fairway. None the less these men had penetrated the harbour. Four hours later explosions occurred in the bottoms of the
Valiant
and the
Queen Elizabeth,
produced by limpet bombs [
sic
] fixed with extraordinary courage and ingenuity, the effect of which was to blow large holes in the bottoms of both ships and to flood several compartments, thus putting them both out of action for many months.
²⁰

Thrilled at the success of the attacks on Alexandria, the Italian admiralty instructed Borghese to relinquish command of the submarine
Scire
and focus all his efforts on leading the Underwater Division of the Tenth Light Flotilla.
^*
Borghese formulated a brazen plan to return to Alexandria and finish what they’d started in December, by destroying the
Valiant
and
Queen Elizabeth
as the two vessels lay in the large repair dock. The date of the attack was set for May 1942, and as in the previous mission a submarine, the
Ambra
, sailed from La Spezia to Leros where it took on board the six operators.

Although the saboteurs were deposited close to the target the attack failed; the British defences had been strengthened considerably in the wake of the previous assault with ‘searchlights, star-shells, aircraft and cruising patrol vessels’ sweeping the harbour continuously. In addition the operators lacked the experience of their predecessors, who had been, as Borghese described them, the ‘pick of the bunch’. Finally, the captain of the submarine
Ambra
was an inferior pilot to Borghese and was at least a mile west of the pre-arranged drop-off point. All in all it was a dispiriting mission with none of the saboteurs getting close to their target. Borghese knew he must look for fresh ideas with which to disrupt British shipping.

Borghese’s skills and
savoir faire
were now much in demand and he was invited to Berlin in the summer of 1942 to discuss widening his scope of operations from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and beyond. An attack on New York was mooted, as was a raid against British targets in Freetown, Sierra Leone. From Berlin Borghese travelled to Paris, where he met Admiral Dönitz, Commander-in-Chief of the German submarine fleet at his headquarters in the Bois de Boulogne, and he then headed south to the German submarine base at the Atlantic port of Bordeaux. Despite being well received by the German submariners, Borghese struggled to impress upon them the potential of human torpedoes. This, he wrote, was because they were not ‘suited to the German military mind, since they demanded, in addition to skill in the water and seamanlike qualities, conspicuous gifts of personal initiative and individual enterprise’.

Borghese had another reason for visiting Bordeaux, other than to meet and greet his German allies, and that was to test a new craft in which he harboured high hopes of success. It was a pocket two-man submarine, weighing 12 tons and carrying two torpedoes, that would be launched against targets in North America. His original intention had been for a German U-boat to carry the mini-submarine across the Atlantic in a specially adapted ‘pouch’, but in Bordeaux Borghese carried out several tests that convinced him the most practical method of transportation was for the U-boat to carry the mini-submarine in a bed on its deck. ‘An important step forward had been taken on the road to the realization of our plans for the future, which was certainly on the audacious side,’ wrote Borghese of his time at Bordeaux.

Back in Italy, Borghese turned his thoughts once more to Gibraltar. The port was now busier than ever, with a huge flow of shipping coming in and out of the harbour, so much so that many merchant supply ships were anchored outside the harbour defences in the bay of Algeciras. Using a false name, Borghese rented a cottage on the north coast of the bay, a little over two miles from Gibraltar, but on Spanish territory. A Spanish woman moved in and soon she was joined by her husband, an Italian naval officer, as well as a team of 12 assault swimmers from the Tenth Light Flotilla. From the front room of the cottage the men observed the Allied steamers at anchor in the bay and formulated their plan of attack. On the night of 13 July 1942 the dozen frogmen crept from the cottage to the sea and swam out to the supply ships, where charges were laid against four vessels. Though none were sunk in the resultant explosions, all required a considerable period in the repair yards. Two months later another attack was carried out by three frogmen and this time the 1,787-ton steamer
Raven’s Point
was sunk.