Enrico Cernushi, Italian Battle Fleet 1940-43 (Osprey, 2024)
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s imperialist ambition around the Mediterranean Sea in the 1930s is sometimes overlooked in the rapid build-up of Nazi Germany’s military. But on paper, Italy was a potent threat in the region. What it needed, however, was a powerful fleet to achieve Mussolini’s aims. By 1940, he thought he had one in La Squadra, the pride of Italy’s Regia Marina (RM). Noted naval historian Enrico Cernushi’s describes that fleet and its actions in an increasingly desperate struggle with the Allies.
Cernushi traces the development of Italian seapower in the Mediterranean after World War I when France was deemed Italy’s main maritime enemy. Progress was slow, and the Italians were still not ready when tensions ratcheted up with Britian during the Abyssinian Crisis of 1935-36. That led to new Littorio class battleships being laid down to form the heart of a new battle fleet. Cernushi surveys the Italian warships as they came online through the interwar period but notes the struggles the RM had with the new Italian air force for independent control of naval air capabilities. That created a deficiency in air reconnaissance, which would cause significant problems during the war. Turning to how the fleet operated, Cernushi considers command and communication, finding them more efficient than many have assumed. This was also true for Italian intelligence work breaking Allied codes while protecting their own. The RM was well supported for supplies and maintenance, adds Cernushi, though a lack of oil would all but paralyse the fleet for most of 1942 through May 1943.
With all the support set out, Cernushi examines the fleet in combat. On the eve of war, the British underestimated the Italian navy, judging them weak. Their first major test of that thesis came off Calabria on 9 July 1940, when the British were unpleasantly surprised by the RM’s gunnery and manoeuvrability. Cernushi moves on to the 1940 battles to defeat the convoys criss-crossing the Mediterranean, the attack on Taranto, and the action at Cape Spartivento. The action continues through 1941 and 1942 with Cernushi describing many engagements of differing sizes and importance. Moving into 1943, Cernushi finds the Italians struggling with fuel shortages and Allied bombing of ports; the tide had definitely turned against them. That left the Allied landings in Sicily in 1943 virtually unopposed. The end of Italy’s war was not long in coming.
In his analysis of the RM, Cernushi argues that the Italian battleships served their country with distinction while dispelling the myth of their excessive gunnery dispersion. Other aspects of maintaining a fleet in combat worked well too, continues Cernushi, but the lack of carriers affected the fleet’s balance. Overall, Cernushi contends that the RM stood up well to the RN despite the political and economic problems sinking its homeland.
The story of Italy’s naval struggle in the Mediterranean has not often been told from an Italian perspective. Cernushi’s contribution is, therefore, a welcome one; he adds a necessary corrective to post-war British efforts to diminish the Italian navy, and we can see how the Italians struggled valiantly against increasingly difficult odds. Cernushi packs a useful amount of technical and operational detail into slim volume, and his battle narratives are well executed. He is supported handsomely in that regard by Osprey’s usual excellent graphics and a variety of photographs of warships. If you have overlooked the Mediterranean theatre in your WWII naval studies, this is a more than suitable place to start.
