RN Vittorio Veneto

The Littorio class was Italy’s answer to the French Dunkerque and Strasbourg, and to the realisation that rebuilt dreadnoughts would not be enough. Laid down in 1934, launched on 22 July 1937 and commissioned on 28 April 1940 — six weeks before Italy entered the war — the Vittorio Veneto took her name from the battle that ended the First World War on the Italian front.

She was a treaty ship in name only. The Washington limit was 35,000 tons standard; she displaced closer to 41,000, on a hull 237.8 m long and 32.9 m in the beam, and every signatory that mattered was quietly doing the same arithmetic. Three of the class were completed — Littorio, Vittorio Veneto and Roma — while a fourth, Impero, was never finished. What Italy got for the money was a genuinely modern battleship: nine 15-inch guns, 30 knots, and protection designed around the assumption that she would fight in the confined, aircraft-dominated waters of the Mediterranean.

The main battery was nine 381 mm /50 guns in three triple turrets — an Ansaldo design that fired an 885 kg shell at roughly 870 m/s, one of the highest muzzle velocities of any battleship gun of the war. On paper it gave her a reach beyond 40 km, further than almost anything afloat.

The price was accuracy. Very high velocity wore the barrels quickly and, combined with triple turrets whose guns were closely spaced, produced notoriously wide shell dispersion at long range — the Italian battle fleet repeatedly straddled its targets without hitting them. The secondary battery of twelve 152 mm guns and an anti-aircraft outfit built around twelve 90 mm mounts completed an armament that looked, and largely was, first class.

She was fast: about 30 knots on roughly 130,000 shp, enough to choose her range against anything slower and to run from anything heavier. Her belt reached 350 mm, and underwater she was built around the Pugliese system — a large hollow cylinder inside the hull intended to absorb a torpedo explosion and leave the inner bulkhead intact.

The system worked better in theory than in the water. It depended on the cylinder being properly supported along its length, and where it was hit near the ends of the ship it transmitted the shock rather than absorbing it — as the Regia Marina discovered at Taranto with the Littorio, and as the Vittorio Veneto would discover for herself off Cape Matapan. She was hard to sink; she was not hard to hurt.

Her war began conventionally. At Cape Spartivento on 27 November 1940, covering an operation against British convoy traffic to Malta, she engaged Force H — including the battlecruiser Renown — at long range, firing on targets barely visible from the top of her rangefinders in exactly the kind of gunnery duel both navies had spent twenty years preparing for. Neither side scored a decisive hit and both broke off, each convinced the other had declined the battle.

Two weeks earlier, the Swordfish attack on Taranto had disabled three of the fleet’s older battleships in a single night. The consequence for the Vittorio Veneto was immediate: with half the battle line on the harbour bottom, the Regia Marina’s striking power now rested on her and her sisters. She was the fleet flagship of a fleet that could no longer afford to lose her.

The operation that became the Battle of Cape Matapan sent her east against British convoy traffic to Greece, flying the flag of Admiral Angelo Iachino. It went wrong from the moment British carrier aircraft found her. On 28 March torpedo bombers from HMS Formidable hit her aft, and she took on roughly 4,000 tons of water. She was underway again after about ten minutes and made Taranto on 29 March — a tribute to her damage control and her size.

The disaster came that night, and it came to the ships covering her withdrawal. British battleships equipped with radar found the heavy cruisers Zara, Fiume and Pola in complete darkness and destroyed all three, along with two destroyers, at ranges under 4,000 m. The Italian ships had no radar and no night-fighting doctrine to compensate; most never opened fire. The Vittorio Veneto escaped, but Matapan settled the argument about who owned the Mediterranean night.

On 14 December 1941 the British submarine HMS Urge torpedoed her off the Strait of Messina, and she spent months under repair — the second time in nine months that a single torpedo had taken the fleet flagship out of the war. When she returned she was committed to the campaign that actually decided the Mediterranean: covering the convoys carrying fuel and armour to North Africa, and trying to intercept the ones supplying Malta.

What finally immobilised her was the fuel itself. Italy had no oil of its own and depended on German allocations that were never adequate; from mid-1942 the shortage was so severe that the surface fleet largely stopped sailing. The ships were intact, manned and combat-worthy, and there was nothing to move them with — a battleship burns fuel by the thousand tons on a single sortie. The most powerful battleship Italy ever sent into action spent the last year of the Italian war swinging at her moorings.

On the armistice she sortied from La Spezia for Malta and reached it, evading the German air attack that sank the Roma on the same voyage. She was interned at Malta until 14 September 1943, then moved to Alexandria and, by late October, to the Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal, where she sat out the rest of the war. She steamed to Augusta on 6 June 1946, was allocated to Britain under the peace treaty, returned to La Spezia that October, paid off on 3 January 1948 and was broken up.

The verdict is not about the ship. She was fast, powerfully armed, well protected and difficult to sink — a competitive modern battleship by any measure that mattered in 1940. What defeated her was everything around her: no radar, so she could not fight at night; no carrier air cover, so she could be found and hit from the air at will; and no oil, so in the end she could not move at all. Italy built a first-class battleship and could not supply it with a first-class war.

• 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).
• Erminio Bagnasco & Augusto de Toro, The Littorio Class: Italy’s Last and Largest Battleships (Seaforth).