Six Men on Pigs: How Italian Frogmen Humbled the Royal Navy at Alexandria

COLD OPEN

It is just before six in the morning on December nineteenth, nineteen forty-one. Alexandria Harbor, Egypt. The sun has not yet risen. The great warships of His Majesty's Mediterranean Fleet sit at their moorings, dark shapes against a darkening sky that is only beginning to lighten at its eastern edge.

Deep inside HMS Valiant — a thirty-two-thousand-ton battleship, one of the most powerful warships in the world — two men sit in a compartment near the waterline. They are soaking wet. Their clothes are strange: black rubber suits, unfamiliar gear. They are Italian. And they are under armed guard.

One of them is Lieutenant Commander Luigi Durand de la Penne. He has been sitting here for hours. He is calm. Too calm, his guards will later say.

At five fifty, de la Penne asks to see the captain. The request is unusual, but the officer of the watch sends word up the chain. Captain Charles Morgan comes down to see the prisoner.

De la Penne looks at Morgan. "Your ship," he says quietly, "is about to blow up."

Morgan stares at him. He orders the compartments below the waterline cleared. He orders the watertight doors sealed. He does not have time to do much else.

Fifteen minutes later, HMS Valiant erupts.

A column of water rises beside the hull. The deck jumps beneath the feet of every man aboard. The lights go out. And one of the most powerful warships in the Mediterranean begins to settle into the mud of Alexandria Harbor.

She is not alone. Minutes later, her sister — the battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth, flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet — suffers the same fate.

Six men did this. Six men riding weapons so ungainly, so absurd, that even their operators called them pigs.

This is WWII Untold.

ACT ONE

To understand how six Italian sailors humbled the Royal Navy in its most fortified harbor, you have to go back six years — to a workshop in La Spezia, Italy, where two naval engineers were tinkering with an idea that most of their superiors thought was insane.

In nineteen thirty-five, as Mussolini prepared for his invasion of Ethiopia, Captain Teseo Tesei and Captain Elios Toschi began testing a weapon that defied easy classification. Take a standard torpedo — twenty-one inches in diameter, roughly twenty-two feet long. Now hollow out a space on top for two men to sit, one behind the other, straddling it like a horse. Add a rudimentary set of controls. Strap a three-hundred-kilogram warhead — that is roughly six hundred and sixty pounds of explosive — to the nose. And slow the whole thing down to about three knots. Walking speed.

The idea was deceptively simple. A submarine would carry these devices to within a few miles of an enemy harbor. The crews would ride them in, underwater, breathing through closed-circuit rebreathers that left no telltale bubbles on the surface. They would navigate past the harbor defenses, attach the warhead beneath an enemy ship, set a timer, and swim away. If everything went right, the ship would explode hours later, long after the attackers had slipped out of the harbor or — more realistically — been captured ashore trying to blend in.

The Italians called the weapon the Siluro a Lenta Corsa — the slow-running torpedo. Its official designation was SLC. But the men who rode them, who wrestled with their unreliable motors and cursed their tendency to flood and fought against the crushing cold of hours spent underwater at night — those men called them maiali. Pigs.

The name stuck. And it was earned.

By nineteen thirty-eight, the Italian Navy — the Regia Marina — had seen enough promise in these tests to formalize the program. In September of that year, Supermarina, the Italian naval high command, ordered the First MAS Flotilla to establish a Special Weapons Section dedicated to human torpedoes and combat frogmen. MAS stood for Motoscafo Armato Silurante — armed torpedo motorboat — but the acronym had become shorthand for Italy's fast-attack naval units. The men who volunteered for the special weapons section were a different breed: engineers who could swim, sailors who could hold their breath, officers willing to ride a device that was as likely to drown them as deliver them to the target.

In January of nineteen forty-one, Commander Vittorio Moccagatta took command and reorganized the unit. By March, it had a new name: the Decima Flottiglia MAS. The Tenth Light Flotilla. It would become the most famous special operations unit in Italian military history.

Their first major success came on March twenty-fifth, nineteen forty-one, at Souda Bay on the island of Crete. Using a different weapon — explosive motorboats, essentially unmanned speedboats packed with charges — Decima MAS operators crippled the British heavy cruiser HMS York. She never sailed again. It was a proof of concept. Small teams, unconventional weapons, audacity over firepower. It worked.

Now here is the irony that hangs over this entire story, and it is an irony worth savoring.

Thirteen months before the attack on Alexandria, the British themselves had pioneered exactly this kind of raid. On the night of November eleventh, nineteen forty, twenty-one Swordfish torpedo bombers launched from the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious and attacked the Italian fleet at anchor in Taranto harbor. They sank or crippled three Italian battleships in a single night, reshaping the balance of power in the Mediterranean with a handful of obsolete biplanes. The Japanese studied Taranto carefully. So did the Italians.

Britain invented the playbook. And then forgot to defend against it.

By late nineteen forty-one, the Royal Navy's Mediterranean Fleet was bleeding. On November thirteenth, the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal was sunk by a U-boat torpedo. Twelve days later, the battleship HMS Barham went down the same way — torpedoed by U-five-thirty-one, capsizing and exploding with the loss of more than eight hundred men. Ships had been lost in the fighting around Crete. Others had been sunk on minefields. The cascading losses were relentless.

What remained of Britain's Mediterranean muscle was concentrated in Alexandria: two battleships, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Valiant, their escorts, and a collection of cruisers and destroyers. They were the cork in the bottle. As long as those battleships existed, the Italian fleet could not operate freely. As long as they floated, convoys could reach Malta. As long as their guns could fire, the balance held.

The men of Decima MAS knew exactly where those battleships were. And they had been planning this for months.

The man who would deliver them was Lieutenant Junio Valerio Borghese, commander of the submarine Scirè. Borghese — aristocratic, cold-eyed, brilliant — was known as the Black Prince. He had designed and perfected the method of carrying maiali in external cylinders welded to a submarine's hull, allowing the devices to be launched while the submarine remained submerged. He had commanded every Scirè mission. He believed in this weapon with the fervor of a convert.

He was also a man whose postwar life would cast a long shadow. In nineteen seventy, Borghese would attempt a neo-fascist coup d'état in Italy, a bizarre and failed putsch that ended his reputation as a war hero and reframed him as something far darker. But on December third, nineteen forty-one, when Scirè slipped out of La Spezia with three maiali clamped to her hull, Borghese was simply the best submarine commander in the Italian Navy, doing what he did better than anyone.

Six men would ride the pigs into Alexandria. Three crews of two.

Maiale number two-two-one: Lieutenant Commander Luigi Durand de la Penne, pilot, and Petty Officer Emilio Bianchi, diver. Their target was HMS Valiant.

Maiale number two-two-three: Captain Antonio Marceglia, pilot, and Petty Officer Spartaco Schergat, diver. Their target was HMS Queen Elizabeth.

Maiale number two-two-two: Captain Vincenzo Martellotta, pilot, and Petty Officer Mario Marino, diver. Their target was whatever large vessel they could find — ideally an aircraft carrier, if one was present.

They picked up the six frogmen at the island of Leros in the Aegean Sea, a secret stop in the middle of the voyage. Then Scirè turned south toward Egypt.

ACT TWO

December seventeenth, nineteen forty-one. At the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park — GC and CS, the center of Britain's codebreaking operation — analysts intercepted and decoded Italian naval signals showing unusual interest in Alexandria. The details were vague. No operational specifics. But the pattern was unmistakable: someone in the Italian Navy was paying very close attention to what was sitting in that harbor.

The warning reached Admiral Andrew Cunningham, Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet. Cunningham was the finest fighting admiral Britain had produced since Nelson — aggressive, shrewd, and relentless. He took the intelligence seriously.

The next day, December eighteenth, a second decrypt arrived. An urgent Italian reconnaissance flight had confirmed that the battleships were at their moorings and the sea was calm. Calm seas mattered. You could not ride a pig through heavy swells.

At ten twenty-five in the morning on December eighteenth, Cunningham issued an alert. His words were precise: "Attacks on Alexandria by air, boat or human torpedo may be expected when calm weather prevails. Look-outs and patrols should be warned accordingly."

He knew something was coming. The harbor defenses went on heightened alert. Patrol boats increased their sweeps. Nets were checked. Lookouts were doubled.

It was not enough. Knowing an attack is coming and stopping it are very different things.

That night — the night of December eighteenth — Scirè reached her launch position. She was roughly five nautical miles from the naval anchorage, lying at forty-nine feet beneath the surface of the Mediterranean. At approximately one point three miles from Alexandria's commercial harbor, Borghese gave the order. The external cylinders opened. The three maiali slid free.

Six men were now alone in the dark water off the Egyptian coast.

They started their motors. Three knots. Walking speed. The journey to the harbor would take more than an hour, much of it on the surface, their heads barely above the water, breathing the night air and watching the dark shapes of the harbor defenses take form ahead of them.

De la Penne led. Marceglia followed. Martellotta brought up the rear.

The first obstacle was the harbor boom — a massive anti-submarine net stretched across the entrance, designed to stop exactly this kind of incursion. The Italians had planned for it. They had studied the harbor. They knew the boom had a gate. And they knew it opened to let ships in and out.

What happened next was either extraordinary luck or the kind of providence that favors the bold. As the three maiali crews approached the boom, they saw the gate begin to swing open. Three British destroyers were entering the harbor, returning from patrol. The frogmen fell in behind them, riding in the wake of the enemy ships, passing through the open gate like uninvited guests walking through a door held open by the host.

They were inside.

But Alexandria Harbor was not undefended. Patrol boats crisscrossed the anchorage, and their crews were on edge. Cunningham's warning had reached them. Periodically, the patrol boats dropped depth charges — small explosive charges lobbed over the side to deter exactly the kind of attack that was now underway. The concussions thumped through the water, rattling the frogmen's bones, squeezing their chests, blurring their vision. But depth charges are area weapons. They kill by proximity. And the harbor was large. The charges missed.

The three crews separated, each heading for its assigned target.

De la Penne and Bianchi found Valiant. She was enormous — a dark wall of steel rising out of the harbor water, her bulk blocking out the stars. They submerged, taking their maiale down beneath the surface, breathing through their rebreathers, navigating by touch and instinct in the black water beneath the battleship's hull.

And then the pig failed.

The motor seized. The maiale stopped dead in the water beneath Valiant's keel. De la Penne tried to restart it. Nothing. He tried again. Nothing. The device was dead weight — more than a ton of steel and explosive, hanging in the water, going nowhere.

De la Penne made a decision. He would drag it.

For the next forty minutes, in near-total darkness, breathing recycled air through a rubber mouthpiece, Luigi Durand de la Penne physically hauled the dead maiale across the harbor floor beneath HMS Valiant. He pulled it through the mud. He wrestled it over obstructions. He fought the current and the cold and the growing certainty that his air supply was running low. At some point during this ordeal, he lost Bianchi — his diver had either passed out from oxygen deprivation or been swept away. De la Penne was alone.

He could not suspend the warhead from Valiant's bilge keels as planned. The pig was dead, and without power, he could not maneuver the five-hundred-pound warhead into position beneath the hull. So he did the only thing he could. He dropped the warhead onto the seabed, roughly fifteen feet beneath Valiant's hull. He set the timer. And he prayed the blast would carry.

Then he surfaced.

Marceglia and Schergat had better luck. They found Queen Elizabeth — the flagship, the biggest prize in the harbor — and they executed the attack exactly as they had trained. Textbook perfect. They maneuvered their maiale beneath the battleship's hull, detached the warhead, and suspended it directly from the bilge keels using the clamps they had practiced with hundreds of times in the waters off La Spezia. The charge was tight against the hull. When it blew, there would be nothing between six hundred and sixty pounds of explosive and the ship's bottom plating.

They set the timer. They withdrew. They surfaced.

Martellotta and Marino, finding no aircraft carrier in the harbor, selected the largest target they could identify: the tanker Sagona, a big fleet oiler sitting heavily in the water. They did not know — could not have known — that the destroyer HMS Jervis was moored alongside Sagona, taking on fuel. They placed their charge beneath the tanker's hull, set the timer, and slipped away.

By the early hours of December nineteenth, all three charges were in place. All six men were out of the water. And one by one, they were caught.

De la Penne surfaced near Valiant and was spotted by sentries. He was pulled from the water and taken aboard — the very ship he had just mined. Bianchi was found floating nearby, semiconscious. The other crews made it ashore but were picked up by patrols within hours. Their cover stories — poorly forged documents, implausible explanations for being soaking wet on an Egyptian dock at three in the morning — convinced no one.

At five forty-seven on the morning of December nineteenth, the first charge detonated.

The blast beneath Sagona tore the tanker open. The shock wave ripped through the water and slammed into HMS Jervis, moored alongside. Jervis's bow was torn away — an unintended bonus that amplified the raid's toll beyond anything the Italians had planned.

Aboard Valiant, de la Penne heard the explosion. He knew he had minutes. He asked to see the captain. Captain Charles Morgan came to see the prisoner. De la Penne told him the truth: your ship is about to explode.

Morgan ordered the lower compartments cleared. Men scrambled up ladders, away from the waterline. It was a decision that saved lives.

At six oh five, Valiant's charge blew.

The explosion ripped through the hull beneath A and B turrets, tearing a hole in the lower torpedo bulge measuring sixty by thirty feet. The ship shuddered, listed, and began to settle. The lights failed. Water poured in through the ruptured plating.

Four minutes later, at six oh nine, Queen Elizabeth's charge detonated.

This was the big one. Marceglia's textbook placement paid its dividend in full. The blast tore through the double bottom and anti-torpedo bulges near the boiler rooms, opening a wound one hundred and ninety feet long and sixty feet wide. The flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet flooded to the main deck and sank to the harbor floor.

In the space of twenty-two minutes, three explosions had crippled two battleships, wrecked a tanker, and torn the bow off a destroyer.

Six men. Three pigs. And the most fortified harbor in the Mediterranean had been cracked wide open.

ACT THREE

Admiral Cunningham was a hard man, forged by years of war at sea. But what he faced on the morning of December nineteenth tested even his iron composure. Both of his battleships were sitting on the bottom of Alexandria Harbor. The Mediterranean Fleet's striking power — the heavy guns that kept the Italian Navy at bay and protected the convoys to Malta — was gone.

And the timing could not have been worse. Pearl Harbor was just eleven days old. The American Pacific Fleet was shattered. The British had lost the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse to Japanese air attack off Malaya on December tenth. Now Alexandria. In a single month, the Allies had lost roughly thirty-eight percent of their operational battleship strength worldwide. The strategic implications were staggering.

Cunningham understood immediately that concealing the disaster was almost as important as repairing it. If the Italians — or worse, the Germans — learned that both battleships were out of action, they would move. The Italian fleet would sortie. Convoys to Malta would be annihilated. The entire balance of power in the Mediterranean would collapse.

So Cunningham ran a bluff.

He kept his admiral's flag flying aboard the crippled Queen Elizabeth. Bands played on schedule. Ceremonies continued. Officers came and went as though nothing had happened. The ships sat on the shallow harbor floor, but from the outside — from the air, from a reconnaissance photograph — they looked normal. Their masts were upright. Their turrets were trained. They appeared, to a distant camera, to be fully operational warships riding at their moorings.

The deception held for weeks. The Italians suspected the truth but could not confirm it. The Germans were distracted by the Eastern Front. And Cunningham bought the time he needed.

But time could not conjure steel. The damage was real, and it was severe.

HMS Valiant eventually sailed to Durban, South Africa, for permanent repairs on April third, nineteen forty-two. She was not fully operational again until July — roughly seven months out of action.

HMS Queen Elizabeth's wounds were worse. In mid-July nineteen forty-two, she limped to the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Virginia — across the Atlantic, to America — for a complete rebuild. Her repairs lasted until June of nineteen forty-three. Eighteen months. Eighteen months in which the most powerful warship in the Mediterranean Fleet contributed nothing to the war.

As for the six men who had done this — they spent the rest of the war as prisoners. De la Penne and Bianchi, Marceglia and Schergat, Martellotta and Marino. Captured, interrogated, and eventually sent to POW camps. They had accomplished one of the most successful special operations raids in military history, and their reward was a prison cell.

But they had done something that the entire Italian battle fleet — with its modern battleships, its cruisers, its destroyers, its thousands of sailors — had failed to do. They had neutralized British capital ship superiority in the Mediterranean. As the former Regia Marina admiral and naval historian Marcantonio Bragadin would later write: "Where the Italian fleet had failed, six sailors had succeeded."

Cunningham, too, reflected on what had happened. When a junior officer suggested, after the attack, that keeping propellers turning slowly in reverse might create currents strong enough to frustrate swimmers and human torpedo operators, Cunningham's response was characteristically blunt. "It is a pity," he said, "we did not think of it before."

A simple countermeasure. Obvious in hindsight. Conceived only after the damage was done. It is the kind of detail that reminds you that war is not chess. It is a contest between flawed human beings making decisions under pressure, and the side that suffers is often the side that simply did not imagine what the enemy might try.

There is one more scene in this story, and it is the one that matters most.

After the war, the world sorted itself out. The Axis powers were defeated. Italy became a republic. Former enemies became allies. And in the way that military professionals sometimes do, the men who had fought each other came to regard one another with a respect that transcended the conflict.

Captain Charles Morgan — the man who had commanded HMS Valiant on the night she was crippled, the man whom de la Penne had warned just minutes before the explosion — rose through the ranks. By the end of the war, he was an admiral.

When the Italian government decided to award Luigi Durand de la Penne the Medaglia d'Oro al Valor Militare — the Gold Medal of Military Valor, Italy's highest decoration for bravery — Admiral Morgan made a personal request. He asked for the privilege of pinning the medal on de la Penne's chest himself.

Think about that for a moment. The captain of the ship asked to honor the man who sank it. Not out of obligation. Not as a diplomatic gesture. Out of respect. Professional, personal, and deeply felt. Morgan had seen what de la Penne had done — dragging a dead torpedo across the harbor floor in the dark, alone, refusing to abandon the mission — and he recognized it for what it was. Extraordinary courage. The kind that does not care about nationality.

The ceremony took place. Morgan pinned the medal. The two men shook hands. And in that handshake was something rare and worth remembering: the acknowledgment that valor belongs to no single flag.

A word about Borghese, the Black Prince, who delivered the frogmen to Alexandria aboard Scirè. His wartime record was brilliant. His postwar record was not. In December of nineteen seventy, Borghese attempted to overthrow the Italian government in a neo-fascist coup. It failed, almost farcically. He fled to Spain and died in exile. His story is a reminder that courage in war does not guarantee wisdom in peace, and that the same qualities that make a man dangerous to his enemies can make him dangerous to his own country.

CLOSING

The attack on Alexandria Harbor is not well known outside of naval history circles. It does not have the name recognition of Pearl Harbor or Taranto or Midway. No major film has been made about it. No monument dominates a city square.

But consider what happened. Six men, wearing rubber suits and breathing through tubes, riding devices so temperamental they called them pigs, entered the most heavily defended harbor in the Mediterranean — a harbor whose commander had been warned, by the best intelligence service in the world, that an attack was coming — and they sank two battleships. They shifted the balance of naval power in an entire theater of war. They did it without firing a shot. And then they sat down and waited to be captured, because there was never a plan to get them out.

The British invented this kind of raid at Taranto, thirteen months earlier. The Italians perfected it at Alexandria. And the lesson — that a few determined individuals with the right weapon and enough audacity can achieve what fleets and armies cannot — has echoed through every special operations doctrine written since.

Six men, three torpedoes they called pigs, and the most fortified harbor in the Mediterranean. And by dawn, the balance of power had shifted.

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