Operation Harpoon

1942 CE.

Shown on the map at 36.200°, 11.633°.

Operation Harpoon (Battle of Pantelleria (Battaglia di Mezzo Giugno [Battle of mid-June]) was part of Operation Julius, two simultaneous Allied convoys sent to supply Malta in the Axis-dominated central Mediterranean Sea in mid-June 1942, during the Second World War. Operation Vigorous was a west-bound convoy from Alexandria and Operation Harpoon was an east-bound convoy from Gibraltar. Vigorous was driven back by the battle fleet of the Regia Marina after massed attacks by Axis aircraft. Two of the six ships in the Harpoon convoy completed the journey, at the cost of several Allied warships. News of the two operations had been unwittingly revealed to the Axis by the US Military Attaché in Egypt, Colonel Bonner Fellers, who had been submitting detailed military reports on British activities to Washington. The American code was later revealed by Ultra intercepts to have been broken by Italian military intelligence (the Servizio Informazioni Militare).

Text from the Wikipedia article Operation Harpoon (1942), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

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