Whose Mediterranean?

Out of Italy, fortnight ago, roared a triumphant tale of victory over the British Mediterranean Fleet. Gleefully Rome told of sinking a British cruiser in the Malta Channel, damaging an aircraft carrier and another cruiser, putting the Royal Navy to rout. Last week tits British Admiralty issued a different version, backed it up with firsthand accounts of the battle.

About 70 miles southeast of Sicily (both sides agreed) the action began. This had always been a likely spot for an Italian hit-&-run attack, within easy range of the torpedo boats based at Syracuse. Heavy darkness and calm sea made it perfect. Fanning out ahead of the main British forces, H.M.S. Ajax flirted with the shrouded Sicilian coast to draw the Italians out. This was the light cruiser which had run the Admiral Graf Spee to cover in Montevideo last winter. Tall, square-jawed Captain E. B. D. McCarthy was itching for a chance to test the motto of his new command: Nec quisquam nisi Ajax (colloquially: You can't do nothing till Ajax comes).

At 2 :30 a.m. it came. Through the ship's corridors ran the call "Action Stations." Fire gongs clanged. Out of the darkness darted a flotilla of speedy, 679-ton torpedo boats, charging in close to loose a shoal of their tin fish. Heeling over hard, the Ajax spurted forward out of their path, opened up with her 6-inch guns. Into the hull of one Italian smashed the first salvo, scarcely dispersed at the point-blank range. But the other attackers maneuvered their small guns into play, began pumping 3.9-inch shells back at the Ajax. With an orange-colored flash, an Italian shell plowed through an unarmored compartment forward on the Ajax. Next minute, a series of blasts roared from a second torpedo boat as the Ajax's shells reached her vitals. The vessel disintegrated.

Pounding forward in chase of a third, the Ajax began to ship water through her forward plates, was forced to reduce speed. In the murk before dawn she suddenly came on an Italian squadron of one heavy cruiser and four destroyers. Opening up again at long range, she staggered one destroyer with a shot through the hull. As the crippled destroyer lost way, another slipped her a towline, started spewing out a smoke screen. By now the Ajax (which the Italians claimed to have sunk) had begun calling up support. But before the heavy cruiser York could arrive, the faster Italians vanished over the swells.

At daybreak, British planes from an aircraft carrier spotted the Italians again, identified the cripple as the crack, 1,620-ton destroyer Artigliere. Believing British ships near, the other Italians abandoned the Artigliere and cut for home, as the York and Ajax arrived for the kill. The Italians began to abandon ship. "A few seconds later," said a British witness, "came the order for the York to finish her off. The crew were told to abandon ship, and floats were thrown overboard for them."

Said A. P.'s Larry Allen, aboard the battleship Warspite: "The York waited until all had complied, then fired heavy shells into the Artigliere. . . . The flaming ship merged into a funnel-shaped mass resembling a Kansas tornado. . . . Shortly after 9 a.m. I saw a sheet of flame spout skyward. A torpedo from the York had touched the Italian vessel's magazines. Then she went down in a death plunge, a rainbow band of pink, light green and purple framing her in a semi-halo. As she disappeared, her red-hot plates sizzled and sent up geysers of steam." With as much impudence as humanity, the Warspite then radioed the Artigliere's position on an Italian commercial wave length. Later in the morning, a Sunderland flying boat sighted the drifting sailors, guided an Italian hospital ship to the scene. Meanwhile Italian bombers swarmed out over the main British force in a four-hour attack. Italy claimed a torpedo hit on the cruiser Liverpool (admitted in London), a bomb hit on an aircraft carrier.

Later in the week, Rome trumpeted a new series of victories over the British at sea and the whole cycle began again. Italy, as before, was vague, skimpy with details. Her torpedo-carrying planes, she said, had picked up the British squadron again in the Eastern Mediterranean, had scored two hits on a British cruiser. Farther on they attacked a British convoy and struck one transport. Meanwhile the submarine Enrico Toti sighted the British oceangoing submarine Perseus, torpedoed it after "a violent fight at short range." At week's end the Italians claimed hits on a 10,000-ton cruiser in convoy. The 31,100-ton battleship Barham (which the French said they hit last month at Dakar) was reported laid up at Gibraltar with "serious damage" suffered in the battle of Sicily. As before, the Admiralty kept mum.

But the British had another story which was more than a match for Italy's. Popping brashly to the surface off the Italian Riviera, a British submarine had blasted away at a railhead and oil tanks at Savona, then slipped back into Vado Roads near by and sunk a 3,000-ton armed merchant ship. In Genoa, she bagged another of 5,000 tons. Off Naples and in the Libyan port of Bengasi other British submarines picked off two supply ships.

Said BBC at week's end: "The British Navy has covered a distance of 20 times the circumference of the earth in vain search for the Italian Battle Fleet in the Mediterranean." That of course was very bad news for the British. If the Italian Fleet could ever be forced to meet the heavier British Mediterranean squadron, British troubles in that sea would doubtless soon be over.

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