ANOTHER BITTER PILL

Dominion, Volume 34, Issue 259, 29 July 1941, Page 6

ANOTHER BITTER PILL

Presumably the enemy motor torpedo-boats which attacked Malta’s fortified harbour of Valetta on Saturday were Italian craft. They are referred to in accounts of the action as “E-boats,” but this name (borrowed from the Germans) is being used to denote nearly all vessels of that waspish, speedy type, irrespective of nationality. All the attackers are believed to have been destroyed, their number having been variously reported as eight, 12 and up to nearly 20. The official report, however, issued as a joint communique from the Admiralty, War Office and Air Ministry, simply states that the attack “was repulsed with heavy loss.” This is another bitter pill for Italy to swallow. Since the Great AVar, when an Italian motor torpedo-boat sank an Austrian warship, Italy had set great store on these craft and had concentrated on their development. Writing in Brassey’s Naval Annual for 1939, Rear-Admiral Sansonetti, of the Italian Navy, made special (though discreet) ■ reference to “those high-speed motor-boats which during the last war played such a brilliant part in many naval episodes in the Adriatic, to which the Italian Navy has remained faithful and which are copied today by many other navies.”

It is customary (Sansonetti wrote) to build every year a certain number of these motor-boats, whose design is continuously improved upon while the specialized dockyards are always ready to reproduce them in great number. Most navies used motor torpedo-boats in the Great War, and development has been competitive ever since. The large orders for British-made boats, placed by the Netherlands Government in 1939, were a convincing tribute to British design and performance in the class in which Italy has pretended to be pre-eminent. But apart from the quality of the Italian craft as compared with those of other nations, the fact remains that Italy hoped to do well with them. After long months of hesitation she has used them in force in the manner planned —in a hit-and-run attack on ships in a harbour within comparatively easy reach of Italian bases. What damage they inflicted we do not yet know, but it is clear that British aircraft and the harbour defences coped with the attack in devastating fashion, and that Italy’s “E-boat” fleet—like her capital ships and cruiser force on other occasions—has taken a severe drubbing.