ABSTRACT
Whatever one may have thought of the multi-faceted nature of the naval war up to this point, it was destined to get far more onerous and complicated as 1941 proceeded. What had been essentially a limited Western hemisphere-based war in 1940, in which the British Commonwealth (along with their Free French allies) had been pitched against the Axis combination of Germany and Italy, widened dramatically and became a truly global affair by the end of 1941 as the Soviet Union, the Japanese and the United States were all sucked into the military vortex. Although the British had survived the very real challenges of the old year,
1941 had hardly begun before further problems were encountered. On 10 January the carrier Illustrious, a vital component of the Mediterranean Fleet, was found on escort duty west of Malta by a host of German Ju-87 dive-bombers and in a ten-minute ordeal was hit six times and suffered three near-misses. While she and the battleship Warspite, which was also hit but not seriously, lived to fight another day, the damage the carrier had sustained in this and further attacks made on her in Valletta harbour over the course of the next few days was such as to keep her out of action for the rest of the year.1 At least she could be repaired. This was not the case with the light cruiser Southampton, another victim of a well-coordinated dive-bombing attack that swept down out of the sun and achieved total surprise on the following day. Southampton was a total loss. Cunningham judiciously described the outcome as a ‘setback’.2 It was, not least because it underlined just what damage aircraft could do to warships if they caught them unprepared. Moreover, the damage to Illustrious would keep the Mediterranean Fleet critically short of airpower for two months until the carrier Formidable was able to join up with Cunningham’s force in March.3
