The Italians were unique in never pressing an action no matter what their advantage. Half of British tactics during WWI were making sure that their battleships didn't get torpedoed.

It also seems to me like the Italian destroyers were outclassed, which would have made forcing the fight all the more difficult for the Italians if the British were intent on running out the clock.īut everyone was reluctant to press action against destroyer fleets. The British in turn seemed to be aware of this and just made it their goal to stall until sunset. Sinking a few destroyers only to have a battleship lamed and then picked apart in the darkness was certainly a trade they weren't interested in making. I assume this extended to not wanting to have any of their battleships wounded such that they couldn't withdraw, which is the type of damage torpedoes seem to excel at. They had been shown earlier their complete inability to fight the British at night due to lack of radar. JChuck looking over the wiki summaries, I can see where the Italians were reluctant to press the issue with the British destroyer fleets.I suspect the most frustrated man in the Med was the German liaison officer. It must have been extremely frustrating being an italian admiral in ww2.įuel was a reason there weren't more actions, but I listed several here that could have been high profile if the Italian admirals had been concerned with actually closing with and destroying the British. It's hard to have high profile actions when there's never enough fuel to put to sea. The war in the Med is definitely an interesting one, and the only thing from WWII at sea with more importance and less exposure is the later half of the Solomons campaign. That's one of the oddities of my links, and I usually remember to fix them before the post goes live. Neat to read about some of the action in the Mediterranean it's not something I've really been exposed to through cultural osmosis.įixed. The wiki link for the Raid on Alexandria is broken it requires 1941 to be in parentheses.

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