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Not only was it a battle, but it was such an unpredictable, such an unorthodox battle that it could occur but once, in the entire history of the World War II, when heavy bombers locked horns with warships of the enemy in broad daylight, nose to nose and emerged the victors. And not hit-and-run raids, not high altitude carpet bombing, but a mass air attack on a naval force, by lumbering four-engine B-17 Flying Fortresses. And everyone that sawe it marvelled.
This occurred in 1943. The location: Mediterranean Sea. Allies were on the verge of landing on Sicily which was a crucial move to remove Axis out of Sicily. Yet must the Sea ways be cleared of force before they could reach the shore--and one cemetery lay in the way, the Italian battle-ship Roma, flag-ship of the Regia Marina, and one of the newest and most powerful engines of war afloat. Her 15-inch guns, her large armor and her bloodthirsty reputation turned her into the pride of the Mussolini navy and a very serious possibility of any Allied landing force.
Then there was this bizarre turn of events when Italy had surrendered to the Allies on the month of September the same year. According to terms of the surrender the Italian fleet, with Roma included, was to leave La Spezia and go to the Allies in Malta. The only thing that no one expected was the violent manner of the reaction of Germany to the thing it perceived as betrayal.
sailing south with the Italian fleet on September 9, 1943, it was caught--not by submarines or dive bombers, but out of the air, by a handful of Luftwaffe Dornier Do 217 bombers, with a new and terrible weapon: the Fritz X. It was no ordinary bomb, but the first precision-guided missile in the world, a radio-controlled glide bomb, and able to penetrate the thickest armour ever to be placed on a ship.
The Germans struck with cold dispassion. The bombers dropped their Fritz X armaments at an enormous altitude over the water and with a joystick they controlled the armaments to the unsuspecting Italian vessels. This type of strike had no precedence. The sort the Italian sailors had never seen before. All they could do was to watch the bombs as they went about in the air--went, indeed, in dinky precision, to their own marks.
A single Fritz X crashed into Roma tearing clean through her decks and then exploding deep inside the vessel. A few seconds afterwards there was a second bomb which exploded the forward magazine. The blast was huge. Roma fractured and sank within 30 minutes carrying with her more than 1,300 of her crew-including Admiral Carlo Bergamini. In an instant one of the mightiest battleships of the war was wrecked, not by a fleet, not by a naval battle, but by a few bombers and a weapon never before seen.
It was a breakthrough, - a breakthrough that would never be the same in naval warfare.
The effectiveness of the Fritz X assault was felt right up to the Allied and Axis command. During centuries, the naval force relied upon heavy armor and large guns. A small aircraft, now, carrying a guided bomb, might do what whole enemy navies had been unable to do--sink a capital ship in one, accurate blow.
This incident was the sole occurrence throughout the entire course of World War II that a guided air weapon sank a battleship in action. It was the inaugural of the real thing, modern precision bombing-and a horrifying rehearsal of what was yet in store in the missile era.
Henceforth no battleship in the world was safe in a sense it never had been before.
And it was but one time.