The second battle of Sirte: one of the most extraordinary naval victories of all time
In all the hundreds of years of history of the British Royal Navy, there are few more extraordinary victories than the second battle of Sirte.
On 22 March 1942, a British convoy escorted by Royal Navy destroyers, four light cruisers and an anti-aircraft cruiser under Rear-Admiral Philip Vian, with no air cover, came up against met an Italian battle squadron in a rising gale in the Gulf of Sirte. The Italian force consisted of the modern battleships Littorio, two heavy and one light cruisers and ten destroyers. Littorio alone, which carried nine 15-inc guns throwing shells which weighted a ton and a half each, threw six times the weight of shells of Vian's entire cruiser force, in which the heaviest guns were HMS Penelope's six 6-inch guns. In fact Penelope's guns were the only ones in Vian's force which even matched the calibre of Littorio's secondary armament.
If a convoy escort was attacked by a force so overwhelmingly superior in a David Weber novel, unless the outnumbered side had an equally massive technological superiority (which Vian's ships didn't) you would expect to read that the defenders died heroically to the last man and woman.
Well, Vian hadn't ready any of those novels (unsurprisingly as they hadn't been written yet) or anything similar.
When the Italian ships withdrew some time later all the ships of the convoy and all the escorts were still afloat and all the merchant ships of the convoy were still steaming towards Malta.
Sadly the Italian air force was more successful than their navy, and managed to stop many of the supplies being landed in Malta where an overwhelming naval force had failed to do so.
This video tells the story of an extraordinary feat of arms, frustrating the attac my an overwhelmingly superior naval force - and what happened next.
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