Italian Navy ITALIAN EAST AFRICA A short-lived union of Italy’s east African possessions: Eritrea, Italian Somaliland, and the newly but only briefly conquered Abyssinia, from 1936 to 1942 See East African campaign ITALIAN NAVY “Regia Marina.” The Italian Navy was the great rival of the French Navy in the Mediterranean, and a lesser rival of the Royal Navy It was considered one of the world’s top five navies in the interwar period and was therefore subject to restrictions of the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 As naval arms control broke down from 1935, the Italian Navy struggled to keep pace with shipbuilding programs of its rivals Work on aircraft carriers was set aside because Benito Mussolini believed that land-based bombers would suffice At the start of the war the Regia Marina had no aircraft carriers and poor to no radar, but it did have modern battleships and rebuilt dreadnoughts; 19 cruisers (including treaty cruisers); auxiliary cruisers; 113 submarines; and about 100 destroyers, motor torpedo boats, and small coastal craft However, its tactics and doctrine were outmoded and extremely cautious Over objections of the Kriegsmarine, and in particular Admiral Karl Dönitz, Benito Mussolini insisted on sending a significant number of Italian submarines into the Battle of the Atlantic (1939–1945) The Regio Marina also maintained a “Red Sea Flotilla” of destroyers, submarines, and motor torpedo boats at Massawa and Assab in Eritrea, to protect that colony and its conquest of Abyssinia These bases and most of the Flotilla were isolated and wiped out during the East African campaign (1940–1941) In 1941 an Italian small craft flotilla was shipped overland to operate in the Black Sea under Kriegsmarine command From 1940 to 1943 about 30 Italian submarines operated out of a base at Bordeaux shared with Dönitz’s U-boats Dönitz thought they hampered rather than helped Atlantic operations At the end of 1941 he confined the Italian boats to a marginal southern zone and no longer even tried to include them in Kriegsmarine hunts They still sank 350,000 tons of shipping The Italian Navy had some success in its more familiar Mediterranean waters, especially in the use of small attack boats and manned torpedoes Its “10th Light Flotilla” made surprise attacks on British warships at anchor in Alexandria, Malta, and other Mediterranean ports However, the Italians suffered a catastrophic defeat at Taranto in November 1940, which exposed a critical lack of aircraft carriers and naval air defenses Its merchant marine and transports were savaged repeatedly in convoy duty to North Africa, and its warships were under constant air threat when seeking to intercept British convoys to Malta About half the prewar tonnage of the Italian Navy was lost by mid-1943, though most of its capital warships were preserved by the expedient of keeping them in harbor most of the time—a pattern of nonuse reminiscent of the Imperial German Navy’s behavior before and after Jutland in 1916, but also dictated in the Italian case by a severe lack of fuel oil Under the final armistice agreement, all Italian ships steamed all-out to surrender to the Allies at Malta One battleship was sunk by the Germans en route Joseph Stalin was subsequently denied any Soviet claim to a share of the Italian fleet He was given a number of older Western Allied vessels and captured German ships in compensation See also airborne; BARCLAY; explosive motor boats; Schnorkel 587