"Shore Based Interference In The Regia Marina?" Topic

Erich Raeder was forever meddling with his commanders at sea, trying to micromanage how they would fight their ships and react to a situation, and quick to fire those he deemed had not carried out his orders to the letter. I'm just curious to know if the Italian Supermarina would have interfered in a similar manner with the operations of the Regia Marina?

I have tried to find something on this online, but with no success, and my books on the RM are few and far between. Mind you, I can see Santa bringing me a copy of Mussolini's Navy… :o)

I would say not, because the commanders were cautioned sufficently to know losses were unacceptable before they sailed.

Fleet in being was the mantra of Supermaria. They were actually pretty successful at it.

Fleet in being = fleet in port.

Because a critical fuel shortage hamstrung the Italian war effort, heavy units of the Italian fleet rarely were able to sortie, but had to spend most of their war at anchor. What little fuel was available was allocated mostly to the cargo ships and their escorts that attempted to run supplies and reinforcements across the Sicilian Narrows to the Axis armies in North Africa.

On the rare occasions when the Italian battle fleet put to sea, Commando Supremo did not directly interfere with operations. However, at the battle of Cape Spartivento, general orders required Admiral Iachino only to engage if he had a numeric advantage. Having no clear advantage, he withdrew.

Actually Supermarina intefered quite often, as it was formally the commanding authority even superior to the commander at sea.

The rationale behind this was that Supermarina centralized all the info coming from other sources (Aeronautica, local command in autonomous zones such as EGEOMIL, the Germans, etc.) and therefore had a bigger and better picture of the situation tha the commander at sea.

Therefore the commander at sea was constantly exchanging messages with Supermarina, receiving orders more or less open to intepretation. This created much problems as commanders at sea were often incapable of taking autonomous decisions, having to wait for Supermarina's directives, and tended to err on the safe side when the situation was not clear as they we conscious that Supermarina would have been ready to scapegoat them in case of failure.