Did orders issued in December 1941 by the Royal Navy's Mediterranean Fleet commander, Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham, adhere to the 1929 Geneva Convention? This British historian says no.
Italian frogmen launched a human torpedo attack on the British Mediterranean Fleet at anchor in the Egyptian harbor of Alexandria on the night of 18-19 December 1941. It could not have come at a worse time for the Royal Navy. And Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham's response to the threat was understandable, even though his actions were in complete contradiction to international law.
The strategic scenario that formed the backdrop to the assault would have tested the most resolute of men, and Cunningham already had demonstrated to the world that he was no quitter. Japan had just entered the war, and in the wake of Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo's surprise attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, the Emperor's victorious soldiers already were surging through Southeast Asia. Britain's Far Eastern naval deterrent, the capital ships Prince of Wales and Repulse, had been sunk by Japanese torpedo bombers only a week earlier, and during the previous month, one of Cunningham's three remaining battleships, HMS Barham, had been sent to the bottom in spectacular style by Hans-Dietrich Freiherr von Tiesenhausen's U-331.
With the Royal Navy's strength depleted and Britain's global resources overstretched, some form of attack at Alexandria seemed inevitable, if Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini's admirals were to gain control over the eastern Mediterranean basin. To a realist such as Cunningham, it was not a matter of if, but when. Yet no one knew an attack was taking place until two bedraggled Italian frogmen were found clinging to a mooring buoy under the bow of HMS Valiant at 0330 on 19 December 1941. Even more important, no one knew the precise nature of the assault, although most senior officers assumed correctly that it involved some form of underwater sabotage exploited by the Italians in operations against Gibraltar on three earlier occasions.
Having been transported to Alexandria on board the submarine Scire, six frogmen, led by lieutenant Luigi de la Penne and riding in pairs astride three maiale human torpedoes, had set off from their mother ship at 1840 the previous evening. They made landfall in the vicinity of the Ras el Tin lighthouse after negotiating a hazardous line of explosive obstacles, which constituted the Royal Navy's first seaward barricade across the approach channel into the Mediterranean fleet's base. The frogmen reached the more organized boom and net defenses guarding the harbor entrance at midnight, when, with the good fortune that often favors the brave, the boom gate opened to admit three destroyers returning from patrol. Seizing the unexpected opportunity, the three maiale tucked in astern of the British ships and slipped into the anchorage unobserved in the destroyers' wake.
De la Penne and his diver, Emilio Bianchi, headed for their prearranged target, the 32,700-ton battleship Valiant. They passed safely through the vessel's antitorpedo net, and at 0219 precisely, the nose of their human torpedo bumped gently against the Valiant's hull. The next stage of the operation was to attach a heavy explosive charge to the keel. But when de la Penne flooded the buoyancy tank to submerge, a valve jammed, and the maiale sank like a stone to the harbor bottom, some ten fathoms down. Equally alarming was de la Penne's discovery that the pillion seat was empty, and Bianchi had vanished.
By the time he had corrected the valve malfunction and returned to the surface, the demands of the operational timetable meant that de la Penne had to abandon a search for his missing companion within a few minutes. Resubmerging, he spent the next 40 minutes dragging the explosive charge along the harbor bottom, single-handed and hampered by a leaking wetsuit, until he had positioned it some ten feet beneath the vessel's vast unarmored and vulnerable underbelly. Then, having set the detonator timing device to 0630, de la Penne kicked himself toward the surface with his flippered feet.
As his head emerged, he could see a large mooring buoy to starboard and, pulling off his breathing mask, began to swim toward it. But an alert sentry on the battleship's deck spotted him in the darkness, and his shouted challenge was followed quickly by the unnerving chatter of a machine gun. Bullets spattered the sea close to de la Penne's head, and as the silver beam of a searchlight pinpointed his position, he raised his arm in a gesture of submission and swam toward the buoy. Dragging himself onto the rusty steel cylinder, he was surprised to find Bianchi, sheltered in the shadows on its lee side, safely hidden from the watchful eves of the enemy sentries.
A motorboat appeared out of the darkness, and the two frogmen were hauled off the buoy unceremoniously and taken to the Valiant—at that stage a perfectly proper and natural thing to do. Within a few minutes, however, ship's officers decided that interrogations by experienced intelligence officers ashore would obtain better results. So the captured frogmen were bundled back into the motorboat and ferried across the harbor to a group of huts close to the Ras el Tin lighthouse. There they were separated and taken to different buildings for questioning. The British already suspected some form of underwater attack was in progress—a surmise supported by the diving equipment the Italians were wearing—but no one could be absolutely sure, and only interrogation was likely to yield an answer.
Article 7 of the 1929 Geneva Convention requires suitable measures to ensure the safety and well-being of prisoners. Therefore, despite the intention of the British, they fortunately if unwittingly followed the provisions by moving the Italians from a place of danger (the probable attack target) to the relative safety of dry land. But any British hopes of obtaining information were thwarted by the enemy frogmen's strict adherence to Article 5 of the Convention, which required them to provide no more than their names, ranks, and numbers. If international law had been observed, the matter would have ended. Any form of coercion to obtain further information was strictly forbidden under the terms of the Convention.
News of the frogmen's capture reached the British commander-in-chief, Admiral Cunningham, sleeping on board the Queen Elizabeth, at 0400. Suspecting both the Valiant and his flagship were at risk of an imminent attack, Cunningham was, not unnaturally, perturbed by the threat. He was unaware that the Queen Elizabeth already had an Italian limpet mine attached to her keel, thanks to the efforts of another maiale team. With only two battleships available to oppose the might of Mussolini's formidable fleet, Cunningham knew he must do everything within his power to save them.
In 1899, the firebrand British Admiral Sir John Fisher told shocked delegates at the Hague Peace Conference: "hit your enemy in the belly, and kick him when he is down. Boil his prisoners in oil—if you take any—and torture his women and children. Then people will keep clear of you." To rub further salt in the wounds of his horrified listeners, he concluded: "The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility."
Cunningham's reaction to the news of the captured frogmen was prompt. And it was a chilling echo of Fisher's dictum. In his autobiography, A Sailor's Odyssey (London, Hutchinson, 1951), Cunningham admitted that on learning of the two prisoners: "I at once ordered them to be brought back to the Valiant and confined in one of the forward compartments well below the waterline." Such an order, however understandable in the stress of the moment, was totally illegal, and had Britain lost the war, Cunningham could have found himself arraigned before a panel of Axis judges charged as a war criminal. His decision to bring the frogmen back to the Valiant, which was clearly a place of danger, was in direct contravention of Article 7.
Even worse, the order for them to be imprisoned in a compartment below the waterline can be seen only as a deliberate act of coercion designed to apply pressure on the hapless prisoners. If some form of infernal machine had been planted on or near the battleship, it was reasonable to suppose that the two Italians would quickly reveal details of the operation to preserve their own lives. But as an eminent jurist, the late Professor L. Oppenheim, observed: "no physical or mental torture or any other form of coercion may be inflicted on prisoners to compel them to give information."
The culpability of Cunnigham's order is crystal clear from the verdict in Killinger et. al. (War Crime Reports 3 [1948], page 67), a trial held before a British military court in Wuppertal, West Germany. In this instance the accused men were tried, found guilty, and sentenced for an offense contrary to the terms of the Convention; they had placed prisoners in excessively heated cells in an attempt to extract information. It can hardly escape notice that the action on which the Germans stood accused was likely to result only in discomfort to the prisoners-or, at the very worst, physical pain. It would be difficult to argue that they had put their lives at risk. Yet, the order issued by the British admiral at Alexandria on 19 December 1941 most certainly did place the lives of prisoners at risk. Moreover, it was intended to do so.
On their return to the Valiant, de la Penne and Bianchi were placed in a compartment between the two forward gun turrets and magazines. They were situated uncomfortably close, had their captors but known it, to the explosive charge ticking away ominously beneath the keel. It was not, however, below the waterline as Cunningham had intended. In the Report of Proceedings de la Penne submitted following his release in 1944, he mentions that, following the detonation of the explosive charge, "I opened one of the portholes very near sea level, hoping to be able to get through it and escape."
Bearing in mind the fleet commander's callous disregard for the survival of the prisoners, it is reassuring to record that the British sailors standing guard over the frogmen gave them rum and cigarettes and, as de la Penne himself wrote, "behaved very nicely to us," even though, as he added wryly, they looked "rather white about the gills." Officers questioned the Italians again, but the two men refused to cooperate, and Bianchi actually managed to snatch some sleep.
When only ten minutes remained before the delayed-action device was due to detonate, de la Penne asked to speak to the commanding officer. Under armed guard, he was taken to see Captain Charles Morgan. The Italian lieutenant warned the Valiant's skipper that the ship would be blown up within minutes, although he again refused to indicate where the charge had been placed or the weight of explosives involved. Following Cunningham's instructions to the letter, Morgan returned the prisoner to the bowels of the battleship.
In view of de la Penne's warning, this was hardly a "place of safety" as envisaged in the Geneva Convention. But Morgan saw his duty as unquestioning obedience to his flag officer's previously expressed intentions. That Morgan himself was acutely aware of the danger is apparent from the fact that, even as the Italian was taken below by the guards, preparatory orders were being issued for the crew to abandon ship. Few would wish to experience the turmoil raging in Morgan's brain at that moment.
Minutes later, the 300-kilogram explosive charge detonated. The Valiant heeled violently, and as the lights went out, de la Penne's temporary dungeon began to fill with smoke. Fortunately, he managed to escape from his steelwalled prison and made his way through the confusion to the quarterdeck, where Morgan was busy organizing damage-repair parties in a last frantic effort to save the ship. A short time later, the sky lit up, as her sister ship, the Queen Elizabeth, shuddered from a massive explosion below the waterline, a legacy bequeathed to the flagship by the second of the three maiale teams.
Both vessels settled on the bottom; mercifully, the shallow depth of the anchorage saved them from capsizing. Had the attack been carried out in deeper water, both ships most probably would have been lost with heavy casualties. Nevertheless, Cunningham's worst fears had been realized, for he was denied the use of these two vital fighting ships for several months at a crucial stage of the war. Only an inspired combination of elaborate bluff and sheer determination would enable the remnants of the Mediterranean fleet to hold the ring against the overwhelmingly more powerful Italian Navy until replacement vessels could be found. It is impossible not to sympathize with the British admiral's cruel dilemma on the night of the attack.
The downfall of Mussolini led to Italy's surrender on 3 September 1943, and before many months had passed, the Italians were fighting alongside the Allies against the common enemy of nazism. Following his release from prison camp, de la Penne resumed his specialist duties with the Italian Navy and in june 1944 took part in a joint operation with a British striking force against former Italian warships that were by then in German hands. In March 1945, he was awarded the Medaglio d'Oro (the Italian equivalent of the British Victoria Cross or the U.S. Medal of Honor) for his part in the raid on Alexandria three years earlier. The Prince of Piedmont attended the award ceremony at Taranto, but at the last minute, as the gallant frogman stepped forward and saluted, he asked a British admiral standing at his side to help pin the gold cross onto the breast of de la Penne's dark blue uniform, a request accepted willingly.
The admiral's name was Sir Charles Morgan. On the night of 18 December 1941 he had been plain Captain Morgan, commanding officer of the Valiant. As the two officers exchanged salutes, de la Penne probably was unaware that Morgan's decision to keep him under guard in a compartment above the waterline of the battleship had almost certainly saved his life.
It is easy, in hindsight and from the comfort of an armchair, to pontificate over the rights and wrongs of Admiral Cunningham's decision to return the prisoners to a place of danger in defiance of the Geneva Convention. Currently serving senior officers—and the junior ranks who will one day succeed them in responsibility—should consider what their response would be, should they face the same nightmare. It would take the wisdom of Solomon to arrive at a justifiable solution under such circumstances.
Mr. Gray is the author of four Naval Insitute Press books, including the milestone Nineteenth Century Torpedoes and Their Inventors (2004).