Outstanding British sailor of WWII owed huge debt to brave Ulster pilot

Cape Matapan is the southernmost point of mainland Greece, separating the Messenian Gulf in the west from the Laconian Gulf in the east. Here at the end of March 1941 the Royal Navy and the Royal Australian Navy inflicted a crushing defeat on the Regia Marina, the Italian Navy.

In September 1940 Bletchley Park had cracked the Italian Navy’s C38M machine cipher. As a result of this Admiral Andrew Cunningham knew that the Italian fleet was planning to attack British convoys transporting troops and material from Egypt to reinforce the Greeks.

Yet Cunningham confessed in his biography to being sceptical: “I myself was inclined to think that the Italians would not try anything. I bet Commander Power, the Staff Officer, Operations, the sum of ten shillings that we would see nothing of the enemy.”

Cunningham’s name and that of Captain (then Lieutenant) Michael Torrens-Spence are most readily associated with two actions: Taranto in November 1940 and Cape Matapan.

In November 1940 the Fleet Air Arm had mounted a stunningly successful attack on the Italian battle fleet at anchor in Taranto harbour during the course of which Ulsterman Michael Torrens-Spence was responsible for sinking the Littorio, one of Italy’s newest and largest battleships, for which he was awarded the DSC.

Torrens-Spence was to play an equally distinguished role in the Battle of Cape Matapan.

At Maleme, Crete, he was given the position, course and speed of a large Italian naval force and ordered to attack. Torrens-Spence and Sub-Lieutenant Peter Winter, his observer, found the enemy sailing in close formation and generating a huge smokescreen. After observing an attack by aircraft from the carrier HMS Formidable without result because they were dropping their torpedoes outside the smokescreen, he climbed 2,000 feet and found a hole in the enemy smokescreen. He then descended into this space and aimed his torpedo at very short range at a cruiser of the Pola class which actually was the Pola.

The Pola immediately slowed to six knots and the Italian admiral decided to divide his force, leaving a large detachment to escort Pola, and sail for home.

That night, the Royal Navy was able to overtake the detached Italian force off Cape Matapan and engage them. With the aid of radar, the Royal Navy was able to sink three Italian heavy cruisers and two destroyers by gunfire. Some 2,400 Italian sailors perished, at the cost of four light cruisers damaged and three sailors killed. Admiral Cunningham was slightly disappointed with the failure of his destroyers to make contact with the battleship Vittorio Veneto. Nevertheless Cunningham had won a great strategic victory at Cape Matapan (and obviously lost his bet with Commander Power).

Pola’s captain was rescued by the destroyer HMS Jervis and was heard to remark, ‘Either that pilot [a reference to Torrens-Spence] was mad or he is the bravest man in the world’. 

Admiral Cunningham in his post-battle dispatch noted: “An example of the spirit of these young officers is the case of Lieutenant F.M.A. Torrens-Spence who rather than be left out, flew with the only available aircraft from Eleusis to Maleme ... arranged his own reconnaissance and finally took off with a second aircraft in company and took part in the dawn attack.”

Admiral Cunningham was the outstanding British sailor of the Second World but this modest and self-effacing man had virtually no public profile.

A Lowland Scot born in Rathmines in Dublin, his father was a professor of anatomy at Trinity College Dublin.  His parents were inheritors of a ‘strong intellectual and clerical tradition’. Both his grandfathers were clergymen. At the age of 10 he inexplicably received a telegram from his father asking ‘Would you like to go into the Navy?’ At the time, the family had no naval connections at all, and Cunningham only had a vague interest in the sea. Nevertheless, he replied ‘Yes, I should like to be an admiral’.

General Eisenhower described Cunningham as ‘a Nelsonian type of admiral’ because ‘he believed that ships went to sea to find and destroy the enemy’.

In his diary Eisenhower also admiringly noted Cunningham ‘remains in my opinion at the top of my subordinates in absolute selflessness, energy, devotion to duty, knowledge of his task, and in understanding of the requirements of allied operations’.

It says a lot about the character of the man that a few weeks after the battle Cunningham made a point of visiting Bletchley Park to congratulate ‘Dilly [Knox] and his girls’ on their work that had made victory possible.

Knox was a classics don at King’s College, Cambridge, and a formidable codebreaker. During the First World War he helped decrypt the Zimmermann telegram which brought the United States into the war.

Mavis Batey was Dilly’s personal assistant and was responsible for cracking the Italian naval codes. She recalled: ‘Our sense of elation knew no bounds when Cunningham came down in person to congratulate us.’ The codebreakers of Bletchley Park were seldom told of the operational impact of their work but this was a conspicuous exception.

Admiral Cunningham may be seen at his very best in May 1941 when he argued vehemently against the surrender of the Commonwealth forces under the command of Major-General Freyberg VC on Crete. Although he knew the cost would be high (and it was), he made the case for their evacuation: “It has always been the duty of the Navy to take the Army overseas to battle and, if the Army fail, to bring them back again. If we now break with that tradition, ever afterwards when our soldiers go overseas they will tend to look over their shoulders instead of relying on the Navy. You have said, General [Wavell], that it will take three years to build a new fleet. I will tell you that it will take three hundred years to build a new tradition. If, gentlemen, you now order the Army in Crete to surrender, the Fleet will still go there to bring off the Marines.”

Of the 22,000 Commonwealth personnel on Crete, 16,500 were rescued.