HMS Valiant, in her glory days.

The Battle of Cape Matapan was a naval engagement fought between ships of the British and Australian navies and the Royal Italian Navy from 27 to 29 March 1941 in the Mediterranean Sea. It was a clear victory for the allies, as they sank five Italian ships without losing any of their own, but it didn’t have great strategic importance, mainly serving to limit Italy’s operations in the Eastern Mediterranean for a while. For military historians, however, it is distinguished as “the first big naval battle of World War II” and “the only large fleet action in the war which took place outside the Pacific theater.”

Such, anyway, is the judgment of William Koenig in his chapter on the battle included in a coffee-table book called Two Centuries of Warfare. That book was published in 1978 and it was hanging around the house when I was a kid. At some point, I believe around 1980, in fell into the hands of a family acquaintance who had actually been involved in the battle as a member of the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve, serving I believe as a radar operator on the battleship Valiant (the use of radar played an important role in the British victory). He wrote up a note on his own observations in response, and it was kept stuck in the pages of the book. I recently rediscovered it when the book was getting ready to be tossed out in a house-cleaning exercise. I thought I’d post a transcript of it here just because it’s worth holding on to these eyewitness/participant accounts of history before they’re lost entirely. Unfortunately I no longer remember the name of the fellow who wrote the note and I can’t make it out from his signature. But for anyone interested in the battle, here’s what he had to say (I’ve given a literal transcript, with no editing for spelling or grammar).

This is not quite as it happened. The Italian ships Pola, Zara and Fiume were first picked up by Valiant’s radar at about 15 mile range which permitted the British ships Warspite, Valiant and Barham to close the Italian ships. At about 3000 yards range the ships were [?] to starboard in line a head and passed the Italian ships at about 2900 yd. range. Using radar range bearings the search lights were turned on and the battle ships opened fire with the results as indicated in the book. Of interest is the fact that Prince Philip now Duke of Edinburgh a midshipman at the time manned one of the search lights. I was passing range and bearings to him over the ships intercom system.