On the afternoon of May 11, 1943, the gray hulks of Type II Hunt-class British Royal Navy destroyers sliced through the glistening Mediterranean waters in the narrow Strait of Sicily, their officers scanning the nearby Tunisian coastline.
Lieutenant Commander Richard Rycroft, the 31-year-old captain of HMS Tetcott, trained his binoculars on Kelibia, an idyllic Tunisian fishing town on the Cap Bon peninsula founded by the Carthaginians in the 5th century BC as the fortified town of Aspis. Millennia after a Roman fleet besieged Aspis in 255 BC amid the First Punic War, warships had returned to Kelibia’s coastline. Rycroft spotted his prey and directed Tetcott toward a small boat filled with fleeing Germans. The few enemy soldiers posed little threat, but the British destroyer, its bow surging through the azure water, showed no signs of slowing. As it sped past the enemy vessel, the ship’s log noted, Tetcott “lobbed a depth charge close to it, blowing it to bits.”
Rycroft’s cold efficiency at the helm of Tetcott was not unique. A day earlier Lt. Cmdr. John Valentine Wilkinson, commanding HMS Zetland, had received orders to investigate enemy boats sighted in the Gulf of Tunis and found three rafts carrying 30 Axis soldiers. The destroyer charged the small craft, and “the boats were rammed or capsized and rendered unserviceable.” Wilkinson’s report, like Rycroft’s, made no mention of survivors plucked from the sea.
Yet such actions were not random bloodlust on the part of the British captains. This was their retribution.
was the purposefully named Allied air and naval blockade intended to thwart the evacuation of enemy troops from Tunisia to Sicily. The war in North Africa was grinding to a close. Anglo-American forces that had come ashore during Operation Torch—the November 1942 landings in Vichy French–ruled Morocco and Algeria—were closing in from the west, while British Gen. Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army, the victors of El Alamein, approached from the south. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the famed “Desert Fox,” and his vaunted German-Italian panzer army were trapped in an ever narrowing vise. Their only means of reinforcement or escape was the tantalizingly narrow
