AT SEA: Sydney v. Colleoni

• Share

North of Crete—the island where the Minotaur in his labyrinth used to devour sacrificial Greek virgins—6-inch naval gunfire bellowed over the blue Mediterranean one morning last week. The 6,830-ton Australian cruiser Sydney had engaged two Italian cruisers of the 5,06g-ton Condottieri class—the Bartolomeo Colleoni and the Giovanni delle Bande Nere.* These ships can make 38 knots to the Sydney'?, 32.5. They have the same fire power (eight 6-inch guns each) but the Italians are lightly armored, designed especially to catch and destroy destroyers. Two British destroyers spotted them first and flashed word to the Sydney, which was coming down from the north, inconspicuous in her light grey-blue battle paint, among the small islands sprinkled between Crete and the Greek mainland.

The Bande Nere promptly fled, but not before being hit. The Colleoni paused long enough to trade salvos with the Sydney. This was fatal. A shell struck into her boiler room, and crippled her so that British destroyers could close in and polish her off with two torpedoes. The destroyers then rescued 545 officers & men who had stripped and jumped overboard. Italian dead & wounded totaled about 300.

During the rescue work, Italian aircraft heavily bombed the British, claimed to have sunk one of their ships. But the British, when they steamed triumphantly into Alexandria with their prisoners, admitted no losses in this first clear-cut victory over the Italian Navy. For this action, King George promptly made Captain John Collins of the Sydney a Companion of the Order of the Bath. Commander Hugh Nicholson, senior officer of the destroyer force, got a bar added to his D. S. O.

Italy laughed off the Colleoni''?, loss by claiming to have sunk a British submarine in the eastern Mediterranean last week, a 15,000-ton British supply ship bound for Malta, and to have bombed out the Malta torpedo factory. Italy boasted: "Great Britain's naval domination of the Mediterranean has been replaced by Italian air supremacy in this sphere." Meantime, British communiques clarified what happened last fortnight south of Crete where Italian airmen claimed they sank a British cruiser on July 8. The cruiser was the Gloucester (9,300 tons) and her commander, Captain Frederick Rodney Garside, was killed, but she was able to join next day in the Ionian Sea "boat race."

> Italy insisted last week that the British battle cruiser Hood and aircraft carrier Ark Royal were tied up in Gibraltar undergoing repairs after Italian bomb-hits last fortnight. Two small groups of big Italian bombers, each carrying two tons of explosive, appeared over the Rock one night after flying all the way from Italy (1,000 miles). A blaze of searchlights and a fierce storm of anti-aircraft fire burst from the Rock but the Italians got away after inflicting what they described as "serious damage" on the dockyard and supply dumps.

> The British started digging a 13-foot ditch from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Algeciras through the flat, sandy neck (1,300 yd. wide), joining the Rock and the Spanish mainland. Evidently they had reason to expect an attack on Gibraltar, either by loud-talking Spain or by German "tourists" with whom Spain is now crawling (see p. 26).