It’s the night of the 26th of March, 1941.
The Battle for Greece is on,
but in Souda Bay the Royal Navy sailors are sleeping peacefully.
The main Allied anchorage in the Mediterranean Island of Crete
is incredibly well protected against attackers.
It has three lines of nets and searchlights that regularly sweep the harbour.
And if anyone was foolhardy enough to try the raid,
several coastal artillery batteries would finish the job.
No Axis naval unit would be foolish enough to brave these defences.
Except for a team of six very determined men.
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At 5 minutes to midnight, with no moon and calm seas,
two destroyers of the Italian Navy drop six motorboats,
some 10 miles North-East of Souda.
And from there, the small vessels in single file,
silently and stealthily make their way towards the Allied harbour.
At 2:30am on the 26th, the assault teams reached Souda
and sights their first obstacle:
a British destroyer patrolling the entry of the bay.
Unseen by her searchlights, the teams with their hearts racing slip by unnoticed.
At 2:45am the mission commander, Naval Lieutenant Faggioni, reaches the first barrier.
The men take turns to lower the buoys
as their motorboats sail through quietly.
After what seems a lifetime the six craft have negotiated all three barriers.
They are in the lion’s mouth,
they are surrounded by the enemy,
the point of no return.
Slipping into the darkness Faggioni decides
he should get as close to the targets as he can to get his intelligence.
His motorboat hums away at minimum speed
and the men are left to their thoughts.
Time is passing on and with dawn rapidly approaching the men are nervous.
Thankfully they hear the gentle noise of the engine
as Lieutenant Faggioni looms out of the darkness smiling.
“There are some big fish to be had tonight.”
Sub Lieutenant Cabrini and Chief Petty Officer Tedeschi will attack the heavy cruiser HMS York.
Chief Petty Officer Beccati will take care of a large oil tanker, the Pericles.
Faggioni and Master Gunner De Vito will wait in reserve,
and strike at the York should anything go wrong.
As the sun slowly rises over Souda,
Faggioni notices that HMS York is coming to life, and may be about to move.
“She is about to leave port, boys! Time to move!”, he calls out.
Cabrini and Tedeschi manoeuvre their small launches into position,
to about 300 yards from their target.
While not as large as a battleship,
the cruiser stands out like a Leviathan against the morning sky.
She is 575 feet long,
displaces 8,250 tons
and is armed with six 203 mm guns,
eight 100 mm anti-aircraft guns
and 22 heavy machine guns as well as six torpedo launchers.
How can two men on motorboats take on such a beast?
The truth is: these are not ordinary motorboats.
Cabrini and Tedeschi are piloting MTMs – Modified Tourism Motorboats,
designed by two cousins of the Italian King!
These launches are powered by an Alfa Romeo engine,
capable of reaching a speed of 39 miles an hour.
But most importantly, each is equipped with a warhead of 660 pounds of TNT.
At 5:30 am, the two raiders start the engines
and soon head full throttle towards the side of the York,
leaving behind two perfectly parallel wakes.
The Alfa Romeo engines are now roaring against the silence of the dawn.
The men think they’ve been spotted by the British
and Cabrini can see the crew aboard the York frantically manning the deck guns.
But the British are preparing and firing their anti-aircraft guns,
believing they are under air attack!
It’s just 100 yards from the York now.
Flat out full speed is reached!
At this distance, it can either end in death or capture,
but defeat is out of the question.
Cabrini and Tedeschi have trained for months for this manoeuvre.
They lock the rudders, then yank the levers to their right.
Their seats are violently ejected into the water,
becoming improvised rafts.
The two sailors scramble away from their target, knowing what comes next:
the MTMs, almost simultaneously, ram the side of the cruiser.
Now it’s time for the warheads to do their job.
First, only two small explosions go off from the bow of the boats.
The burst immediately sends the small vessels sinking,
right next to the cruiser’s hull.
For what seems like an eternity nothing happens,
but the men know what’s going on.
The two small blasts are by design:
they are needed to send the MTMs’ bows underwater.
When the small boats reach a pre‑set depth, hydrostatic pressure triggers the main charges.
1,320 pounds of TNT go off in two massive explosions,
tearing gaping wounds into the side of the York.
Water pours through the gash in the hull, flooding the engine rooms.
The cruiser begins to list, slowly sinking into the shallow bay.
Cabrini and Tedeschi are still floating on their rafts,
when more explosions resonate around the Souda Bay.
Their comrade, Chief Petty Officer Beccati, has scored a hit against the Pericles,
the tanker displacing more than 8,000 tons.
Faggioni and the remaining two raiders have launched their MTMs against the cruiser HMS Coventry,
but its mission is a failure with the boats either exploding against floating debris or running aground.
By 7:00am, Faggioni and his men have all been captured by the British.
The Pericles will be towed away to Alexandria for repairs
but splits in half and is sunk en route.
HMS York is beached and used as anti-aircraft batteries for the rest of the war.
With the daring raid on Souda Bay, the Royal Navy suffered two total losses,
amounting to more than 16,000 tons of shipping, but no human casualties.
In this incredibly daring raid the brave men of the 10th Flotilla MAS lost 6 MTMs and 6 men captured.
A very small price compared to the toll exacted on the Royal Navy.
Faggioni and his men would eventually receive the Medaglia d’Oro,
the Italian equivalent of the Medal of Honor.
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