World War: At Thirteen Islands

The sun shines bright on the Mediterranean, and in the year 280 B.C. a certain Chares of Lindus completed a tremendous image of a being he conceived to be the god of that sea’s warm sun. The Colossus towered 105 feet above Rhodes for 56 years, then toppled in an earthquake.Great fragments lay about for almost nine centuries, until Saracens sold them to a scrap-metal dealer, who carried them away on the backs of 900 camels.

Last week the sun was still warm at Rhodes. Metal fragments fell by the city and the earth seemed to quake, but the only thing colossal was the imagination of official Italy, which called this quaking of big guns and falling of shell and bomb “Italy’s biggest naval and air victory of the war.”

By last week the Eastern Division of Britain’s Mediterranean Fleet had been powerfully reinforced. Three new battleships (King George V, Prince of Wales, Jellicoe) had recently gone into the western Mediterranean, and the Repulse into the eastern. It appeared last week that some of the ships based on Gibraltar had joined the eastern squadron. All went out with lookouts alert—hunting for the will-o’-the-wisp Italian Fleet.

The Dodecanese (Twelve Islands) are really 13 islands off the southwest of Turkey which Italy grabbed in 1912 during the scrap with Turkey for Tripoli. Rhodes is the biggest of them. Being unable to raise so much as a smoke screen from the Latin enemy, the Eastern Mediterranean Command decided to bite at the Dodecanese and hope for an answer.

Closing in on the islands, the Fleet Air Arm, operating from the carrier Furious, bombed airfields at Marizza and Calato on Rhodes. The cruisers Sydney and Orion rained shells on the island of Scarpanto, blasting an airfield at Makri Yalo and pounding Pegadia.

The victory the Italians mentioned consisted of the first action during the war of M. A. S.—motoscafi, anti-sommergibile, “motor boats against submarines.” An Italian specialty, these darting little craft armed with two torpedo tubes, manned by ten men, will make 47 knots. The poet Gabriele d’Annunzio used to say that their initials stood for “memento audare semper”—”remember always to be brave.” Five of them buzzed out from Pegadia to the attack. The destroyer Ilex spurted forward, intercepted them, sank two, damaged a third, and sent the other pair hightailing. As the vessels moved off, Italian planes attacked, but were repulsed with the loss of two. Bored, the British squadron steamed away.

Though inconclusive, the attack on the Dodecanese was an important feeler against Italy’s main base in the eastern Mediterranean. The U.S. destroyer deal had opened the way for a new and bolder British strategy in the Mediterranean: to harass, with the help of reinforcements, Italian bases and communications to such an extent that Mussolini would be forced to bring his main fleet into play to protect the vital line to Libya. Then, at last, His Majesty’s Navy might be able to work up something more exciting than a game of drop the handkerchief.