Soldati-class Destroyer

Italian warship design answered a geography. The Mediterranean is small, distances are short, and the Regia Marina expected to fight within reach of its own coasts — so its ships were built for speed and gun power rather than endurance, and their designers accepted light construction to get both.

The Soldati class, ordered from 1937 and named after types of soldier — Artigliere, Granatiere, Bersagliere, Alpino — was the mature expression of that approach and the standard modern Italian destroyer of the war. Nineteen were ordered and seventeen completed, in two batches before and during the war.

They carried four or five 120 mm guns and six torpedo tubes on about 1,850 tons, and made close to 38 knots — genuinely fast, and faster than most of what they would meet. On trials Italian destroyers regularly turned in figures that impressed foreign observers.

The trials were also misleading, as Italian trial speeds generally were: they were run light, without full armament or stores, and in service the margin shrank. More importantly, speed answered a question the Mediterranean war rarely asked. The class’s actual work was tied to the pace of the merchant ships it was protecting, which made about eight knots.

From June 1940 the Regia Marina had one strategic task above all others: get fuel, ammunition, vehicles and men across to Libya, and later to Tunisia. Everything the Axis armies in North Africa did depended on those cargoes arriving, and the British spent three years trying to stop them with submarines, aircraft and surface forces operating from Malta.

That is the war the Soldati fought. Not fleet actions — those were rare — but escort, night after night, on a route where the enemy knew the destination and often, through Ultra decrypts, the sailing time and the cargo. Italian destroyers were sent out repeatedly to protect ships that the other side had already been told about.

The tonnage figures are the argument. Across the whole campaign the Axis got the great majority of what it loaded across to North Africa — but “the great majority” is not the same as enough, the losses fell hardest on fuel, and by late 1942 the shortfall was measured in tanks that could not move rather than tanks that had not arrived.

The name ship of the class showed early how the odds ran. On the night of 11–12 October 1940, off Cape Passero, an Italian force including Artigliere ran into the British cruiser HMS Ajax in the dark. In the confused close-range action that followed, Artigliere was hit in the machinery and left dead in the water.

She was still afloat at daylight, under tow. The heavy cruiser HMS York found her that morning and sank her with gunfire. The engagement is a compact statement of the Italian problem: an aggressive night attack pressed home, a hit taken, and then no way to get a crippled ship home in daylight in a sea where the enemy could put an aircraft or a cruiser over her before her own navy could reach her.

They were consumed doing it. Ten of the seventeen Soldati were lost during the war — a casualty rate comparable to the British Tribals, achieved in a smaller sea over a shorter period and almost entirely in the escort role rather than in battle.

The class also suffered from the same handicaps as the rest of the Regia Marina: no radar until very late and in tiny numbers, no flashless propellant, and no doctrine for night action. Against a Royal Navy that had all three, an Italian destroyer escorting a convoy at night was working at a disadvantage that had nothing to do with the quality of the ship or its crew.

The armistice of September 1943 split the survivors as it split everything else in Italy. Several sailed to Malta and surrendered with the fleet, then served the co-belligerent navy on Allied convoy and escort duties for the rest of the war. Others were seized in port by the Germans and pressed into service under the Kriegsmarine.

A handful survived all of it and served the post-war Marina Militare into the 1950s and beyond. Which flag a ship finished the war under was settled by where she lay on 8 September 1943: those able to steam made for Malta, those under repair or in ports the Germans reached first were seized where they sat.

The Soldati were good ships used in a losing position. They were fast, adequately armed, and handled by crews whose competence and courage the Royal Navy consistently acknowledged; they lost because the campaign they were fighting was decided by fuel, by aircraft, by radar and by an enemy reading the mail — none of which a destroyer can affect.

Their record is the Regia Marina’s in miniature. Not the fleet action their navy had been built and trained for, but three years of escorting tankers through a sea where the other side knew when they were coming, at a cost of ten ships out of seventeen.

• Roger Chesneau (ed.), Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships 1922–1946 (Conway Maritime Press).
• Aldo Fraccaroli, Italian Warships of World War II (Ian Allan).
• Vincent P. O’Hara, Struggle for the Middle Sea (Naval Institute Press).