Italian plan to block the Suez Canal in early 1940

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Andy H
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Italian plan to block the Suez Canal in early 1940

#1

Post by Andy H » 06 Feb 2007, 03:37

On May 20th 1940 the British Naval Liason Officer in Marleau sent a telegram to the Admiralty, stating that the Italian Aircraft Carrier (better description would be Seaplane or Airplane tender) Miraglia was due to arrive in the Suez Canal on or around May 23rd/24th, and that its intention was to scuttle itself in the canal.

The British advised the Italians that they would not agree to the Miraglia's passage through the canal, thus any possibility of scuttling was denied.

Does anyone have any further information that could backup the BNLO's telegram?

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Re: Italian plan to block the Suez Canal in early 1940

#2

Post by Bronsky » 26 Feb 2007, 17:38

On May 20th 1940 the British Naval Liason Officer in Marleau sent a telegram to the Admiralty, stating that the Italian Aircraft Carrier (better description would be Seaplane or Airplane tender) Miraglia was due to arrive in the Suez Canal on or around May 23rd/24th, and that its intention was to scuttle itself in the canal
It was an "Aircraft Carrier", i.e. it had been designed as a CV and was later turned into an airplane transport (so still strictly speaking carrying aircraft, and therefore an aircraft carrier, right? :) ), though it could obviously be used as a Seaplane Tender. There's a description in English here though there is a typo for the tonnage figure: it should read 14,880 GRT instead of 4,880. This source gives more details.

Source for the picture (I tried to provide a link but it didn't work): http://www.hazegray.org/navhist/carrier ... raglia.jpg

Another picture here:
http://www.regiamarina.it/porta.htm

This is just for the sake of adding something to the debate, as I didn't know anything about that action, other than it sounds rather uncharacteristical of the Italians to have planned for such an operation. Remember that the general outlook was that the war was all but over, that kind of action might needlessly antagonize Britain and lose Italy a warship, neither of which would strengthen Italy's position at the negociating table.
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#3

Post by Bronsky » 26 Feb 2007, 17:43

The Miraglia had been involved in ferrying planes to Abyssinia during the conquest of Ethiopia, and there's a chance that it had been dispatched on a similar mission.

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#4

Post by Andy H » 27 Feb 2007, 20:27

Bronsky wrote:The Miraglia had been involved in ferrying planes to Abyssinia during the conquest of Ethiopia, and there's a chance that it had been dispatched on a similar mission.
Hi Bronsky

It seems that the BNLO memo was based upon a anonymous letter recieved by the French Consul in Trieste, and that the excuse of carrying aircraft to East Africa was to be used as the cover for this plan.
Remember that the general outlook was that the war was all but over, that kind of action might needlessly antagonize Britain and lose Italy a warship, neither of which would strengthen Italy's position at the negociating table.
A bit confused by this, given that war between the two nations was only weeks away!

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Re: Italian plan to block the Suez Canal in early 1940

#5

Post by Graham Clayton » 12 Apr 2011, 08:04

The First Sea Lord sent the following telegram to the C-in-C Mediterranean, on the 21st of May 1940:
A report, low graded, received that when Italian seaplane carrier Miraglia passes through the Canal on or about 25/5 en route for Massawa she may endeavour to scuttle ship and block Canal. Difficult with present state of tension to delay a warship. Can you suggest any reason for temporarily delaying her passage, or if this is not possible, any means preventing her blocking Canal should she endeavour to do so?
"The Royal Navy and the Mediterranean, Volume 2", G. A. Titterton, Great Britain, Admiralty, Historical Section, (Routledge, 2002) page 123
"Air superiority is a condition for all operations, at sea, in land, and in the air." - Air Marshal Arthur Tedder.

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Re: Italian plan to block the Suez Canal in early 1940

#6

Post by Andy H » 12 Apr 2011, 11:37

Graham Clayton wrote:The First Sea Lord sent the following telegram to the C-in-C Mediterranean, on the 21st of May 1940:
A report, low graded, received that when Italian seaplane carrier Miraglia passes through the Canal on or about 25/5 en route for Massawa she may endeavour to scuttle ship and block Canal. Difficult with present state of tension to delay a warship. Can you suggest any reason for temporarily delaying her passage, or if this is not possible, any means preventing her blocking Canal should she endeavour to do so?
"The Royal Navy and the Mediterranean, Volume 2", G. A. Titterton, Great Britain, Admiralty, Historical Section, (Routledge, 2002) page 123
Hi Graham

Thanks for the information provided. I have Vol I which covers the period that this alleged activity would have taken place and it mentions nothing, yet it turns up in Vol II which I imagine covers the period outise of Vol I (Sept'39-Oct'40) :?

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Andy H

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Re: Italian plan to block the Suez Canal in early 1940

#7

Post by phylo_roadking » 12 Apr 2011, 20:41

Remember that the general outlook was that the war was all but over, that kind of action might needlessly antagonize Britain and lose Italy a warship, neither of which would strengthen Italy's position at the negociating table.
A bit confused by this, given that war between the two nations was only weeks away!
IIRC the British expected...and in fact were within a VERY few days of receiving!....an offer by roundabout means from the Italians offering to facilitate negotiations with Hitler - the offer that Churchill and the War Cabinet ended up discussing during DYNAMO. Italy was expected by Churchill however to levy a very considerable fee for this service E.G. Malta :lol:
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Re: Italian plan to block the Suez Canal in early 1940

#8

Post by Andy H » 13 Apr 2011, 15:03

Hi Phylo

Do you anything do back up the Malta prize as being the price for doing business, so to speak?

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Re: Italian plan to block the Suez Canal in early 1940

#9

Post by Jon G. » 12 Jun 2011, 16:47

Something about Axis interest in closing of the Suez Canal.
Italo-German-Japanese motives for closing Suez

In February 1935 the Thai Ministry of Defence alerted British intelligence to
the fact that they were in ‘possession of a Japanese plan for attacking the
naval base at Singapore in the event of war’. By extension, Japanese naval
planners would have been extremely interested in how quickly a relieving fleet
could reach Singapore. The destruction of the mass of Japanese diplomatic
and military records renders it nigh impossible to reconstruct with precision
their interest in Britain’s strategic jugular vein. At the same time, it was
palpably obvious that the Suez route was the fastest means for a British fleet
to reach Singapore and tantalising clues have been left which suggest that
Tokyo took more than a passing interest in the Canal. Indeed, it seems likely
that a Japanese fixation with Suez predated the official designation of Britain
as a prospective enemy (1937). Evidence for such an interpretation emerges
from the fragmentary Malcolm papers.

For security reasons, the majority of Canal pilots were of British and
French extraction. In October 1924 the Director of British Naval Intelligence
complained at the Suez Canal Company’s appointment of a Japanese ship
pilot following pressure from the Japanese Consul General in Egypt. The
decision was taken without consulting the Suez Canal Company’s management
committee, on which Malcolm, as the senior British director, was a
leading member. Subsequently he elicited the company’s assurance that no
further Japanese pilots would be countenanced. At the instigation of the
Committee of Imperial Defence, the Foreign Office approached the Suez
Canal Company to ensure that the proportion of British pilots more truly
reflected the preponderance of British Canal traffic, a request that was
acceded to.

There remained the problem of the solitary Japanese pilot. Malcolm
persuaded the Suez Canal Company that under no circumstances would he
be permitted to accompany a British warship through the Canal; otherwise
he might report on the vessel’s armaments and speed of passage. At the same
time Lord Inchape, primed by the Admiralty, made representations to the
Suez Canal Company on behalf of British shipowners requesting that the
repugnant pilot’s duties be confined to non-British vessels. Even this was not
sufficient for the Admiralty, with Inchape conveying its fear that the ‘resident
spy’ would allow his government ‘to get to know the ropes’ with operational
details remitted home and ‘put into the archives and . . . made use of should
and when [the] occasion arise’. Fortuitously the much-maligned pilot failed
his exams and was removed. He would have no successors.

The year before the Japanese pilot took up his short-lived position the
British Naval Staff suggested there was a need for intelligence officers to
report from Japan on the loading of merchantmen destined to transit Suez.
As a result there was liaison between the Naval Staff and the Mercantile
Marine Department of the Board of Trade. The movements officer of the
Naval Intelligence Department also kept in touch with Lloyds to help monitor
the voyages of foreign ships. By 1934 arrangements were in hand ‘for
watching Japanese merchant shipping with a view to detecting any extraordinary
movements which might be made in anticipation of early
hostilities’.

In January 1939 Captain Godfrey went to Paris to coordinate the
exchange of information with French intelligence centres abroad ‘chiefly
about the movements of German, Italian and Japanese men of war and
merchant ships’. Just how they might deduce that their cargoes were intended
to block Suez is unclear. By January 1941 extensive surveillance was in place
but the Japanese were aware of this. More successful was the government
Code and Cipher School, which was reading Japanese naval traffic signals by
the early 1930s. In 1935 the Far East Combined Bureau was established in
Hong Kong to intercept and decipher Japanese naval signals. By the end of
1939 an even more important advance was achieved when Bletchley Park
(‘Station X’) broke the higher grade JN–25 code book involving messages
passed between naval headquarters in Tokyo and all their ships and shore
stations. Where appropriate, information procured was relayed to the more
important empire ports, including Suez.

Further evidence that the Japanese had indeed singled out Suez for close
scrutiny is provided by the unpublished memoirs of Brigadier R. J. Maunsell,
appointed head of Security Intelligence Middle East in September 1939. It
derived much amusement from the activities of its ‘favourite spy’, Ohno, the
Japanese Vice Consul at Port Said. He first came to prominence when he
approached two British inspectors with Irish surnames in the Egyptian police
in the mistaken belief that they would be willing to act as secret agents. In
1938 Ohno was arrested by an Egyptian police officer while in the process of
photographing the Canal. Before Security Intelligence Middle East could
intervene, Lampson had bullied the Egyptians into agreeing to transfer
Ohno to Alexandria, thereby placing him in prime position to report on the
movements of the Mediterranean Fleet!

The Italians, by contrast, transparently lacked a motive to block Suez
provided it remained open to their vessels trawling to and from east Africa.
Mussolini had threatened war during the Italo-Abyssinian Crisis if the Canal
were denied to Italian vessels. And in the negotiations leading to the Easter
Pact the Italians insisted that London reaffirm its adherence to the 1888
convention. As Mussolini emphasised to the Fascist Grand Council in
February 1939, he wanted to wrest control of Suez from the perfidious British
precisely because it could be blocked so easily. The dictator’s fear was not
without justification for, from at least 1939, the British Admiralty laid plans
to sabotage the waterway good and proper in the event of Italy (and
subsequently Nazi Germany) overwhelming Egypt. ‘Should it appear at any
time’, Pound advised Cunningham on 16 June 1940, ‘that the Army was
likely to lose control of Suez Canal we should be prepared to block it’. By
June 1942, with Rommel seemingly near total victory, the Americans
estimated that Britain’s planned sabotage would incapacitate Suez for at least
six months. The British then, ironically, were always in the best position to
inflict the paralysing blockage they so feared.

Italian war planners did contemplate, in November 1938, landing a force
from east Africa at Port Suez but no detailed scheme was drawn up. On
20 May 1940 the British Naval Liaison Officer at Marceau alerted the
Admiralty to an anonymous letter received by the French Consul at Trieste. It
warned that Rome planned to block the Canal with old warships before
declaring war. More specifically, the seaplane carrier Miraglia, due to enter
Suez around 25 May and ostensibly bound for Italian East Africa, intended
to scuttle itself to block the waterway. The First Sea Lord alerted Admiral
Cunningham but in the event nothing transpired. Upon entering the conflict,
Mussolini remarked that the seizure of the Canal would be ‘more deadly to
the British Empire than the capture of London’. But while this might have
formed a major Italian war aim, the means and resolve were lacking to
achieve the coveted prize. At his most optimistic, Mussolini envisioned
Cunningham’s fleet being compelled by saturation air attacks to vacate the
Mediterranean via Gibraltar. At the same time, Mussolini recognised that
there would be stiff British resistance based upon the realisation that to lose
Egypt ‘would possibly result in the collapse of the entire [British] empire’.

For the Germans there were divided voices over the significance of Suez.
As early as July 1940 Hitler offered aircraft to his Italian allies to attack the
Canal but found them unreceptive. Unwilling to impinge upon Mussolini’s
designated sphere of influence and already planning to invade the Soviet
Union, Hitler was content to leave matters alone. The German Navy took a
different view. Its chief, Admiral Raeder, considered the Mediterranean
theatre crucial in defeating Britain and instigated a plan to deprive it of the
two choke points, Gibraltar and Suez. This would free the Italian navy for
operations in the Atlantic and expose Britain’s vulnerability in the Indian
Ocean. At two meetings in September 1940 Raeder tried in vain to convince
Hitler to adopt his scheme and abandon his inclination to march east.

General Jodl, the Chief of the Operations Staff of the Armed Forces, offered
Rome two armoured divisions to assist in the drive on Suez but Italian pride
passed up the best opportunity of success when the British were at their
weakest. While the Italians hesitated in the Western Desert, the German
Naval Staff recognised that the British were taking full advantage of the lull
in the fighting to bring in reinforcements via Port Suez. ‘In this decisive phase
of the war’, they cautioned, ‘the Axis powers must not act too late’.

Regarding German-Japanese collaboration, the Wennecker diaries make it
apparent that the Japanese intelligence network in Egypt was providing
Berlin with important military data. The entry for 19 October 1939 records
that two British battleships had been spotted moving south from Suez,
apparently as part of a group hunting the Admiral Scheer. Just after the
conclusion of the Tripartite Pact in September 1940, the Japanese let it be
known they wished to establish another consulate at Port Suez which would
have further improved intelligence gathering. Alive to this, Security Intelligence
Middle East headed off the move by persuading the Egyptians to turn
down the proposal as ‘inopportune’.

On British grand strategy Japan was better informed, especially through its
closer contacts with the Axis. The Japanese gained a detailed insight into
Allied intentions when they penetrated the Anglo-French regional strategical
conference at Singapore in June 1940, from which they learned that
Britain did not intend to hold Hong Kong if war came to the Far East. On 11
November the German raider Atlantis sank the Blue Funnel liner Automeden
just west of Singapore after it was initially tracked by Italian signals intelligence based in East Africa. Among the documentation recovered was a
Chiefs of Staff memorandum, dated 5 August, which was passed onto Tokyo
on Hitler’s orders. Couched in deeply pessimistic terms the document promoted
Vice-Admiral Kondu, the Vice-Chief of the Japanese Naval Staff, to
remark that ‘such a significant weakening of the British Empire could not
have been identified [from outside appearances]’. Singapore and Malaya’s
defence shortcomings were alluded to and the fact that they could not be
remedied because of the prior calls of Europe and the Middle East. Spurred
on by this startling revelation, at the end of 1940 Admiral Yamamoto drew
up his infamous plan to launch simultaneous strikes against Hawaii and
Singapore.

The document did however contain one disturbing sentence from the
Japanese viewpoint: the hope that successful operations in the Mediterranean
would yet make it practical to dispatch a fleet to Singapore. On the very day
that Automeden was captured, the Fleet Air Arm struck at Taranto. Moreover,
the same month British forces finally overcame Italian air and naval forces
operating in the Red Sea. It thus remained within the realms of possibility
that a fleet could go out to the Far East. This was certainly Churchill’s view:

The naval and military successes in the Mediterranean and our growing
advantage there by land, sea and air will not be lost upon Japan. It is
quite impossible for our fleet to leave the Mediterranean at the present
juncture . . . [but] with every weakening of the Italian naval power, the
mobility of our Mediterranean Fleet becomes potentially greater, and
should the Italian fleet be knocked out as a factor, and Italy herself
broken as a combatant as she may well be, we could send strong naval
forces to Singapore without suffering any serious disadvantages

As this was being written, Graziani’s Tenth Army was receiving a stunning
blow from the Western Desert Force. The turn of events was not lost on the
Japanese and it appears that at some time late in 1940 Tokyo urged Berlin to
mount air raids against Suez in an effort to deny it to the Royal Navy. Several
British Foreign Office files, unfortunately destroyed but obviously based upon
intelligence gathering, made reference to such collusion. Also in December
1940 the Japanese Navy sought closer ties with German air and naval forces,
leading, the following July, to the deployment of Luftwaffe torpedo bombers
against the Canal. As 1941 unfolded, it would become foolhardy for the
British to risk sending more than the odd warship through Suez. The irony
was that the Suez Canal Defence Plan was operational but its purpose
now was to keep the Canal open to receive reinforcements for the defence of
Egypt rather than to secure a fleet’s passage en route to Singapore. Remote as
the latter prospect was by the close of 1940, one year later events in the
Mediterranean and Middle East conspired to rule it out altogether. As A. J. P.
Taylor wryly remarked, the much-vaunted Main Fleet had become ‘the fleet
that never was’.
From Steven Morewood: The British Defense of Egypt 1935-1940. Conflict and crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean pp200-204 and posted under fair use.

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Re: Italian plan to block the Suez Canal in early 1940

#10

Post by phylo_roadking » 12 Jun 2011, 16:52

Hi Phylo

Do you anything do back up the Malta prize as being the price for doing business, so to speak?

Regards

Andy H
I missed this! Andy, IIRC it's in Montefiore's Dunkirk.
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Re: Italian plan to block the Suez Canal in early 1940

#11

Post by Andy H » 13 Jun 2011, 00:52

phylo_roadking wrote:
Hi Phylo

Do you anything do back up the Malta prize as being the price for doing business, so to speak?

Regards

Andy H
I missed this! Andy, IIRC it's in Montefiore's Dunkirk.
Thanks Phylo, I have that book so I'll look into it.

Thanks JonG for that excellent extract, most interesting

Regards

Andy H

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Re: Italian plan to block the Suez Canal in early 1940

#12

Post by phylo_roadking » 13 Jun 2011, 00:58

I assume it's also discussed in John Colville ;) Colville might have been Montefiore's source for this, you'd need to check the notes - my copy is lent out :(
Twenty years ago we had Johnny Cash, Bob Hope and Steve Jobs. Now we have no Cash, no Hope and no Jobs....
Lord, please keep Kevin Bacon alive...

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