Nooooooooooo
More on-topic: Reading about the European theater can give little gems that people don't cover all that often. One sees a lot from the big name American and Japanese ships. The Pacific War is covered a lot by the more historically inclined members of the fandom. The European side of things? Barely ever covered save for maybe Warspite, Hood and Bisko. A shame really, there's some stuff in here that is quite useful.
Like Italian Ninja Loli.
In other words,
Espero. Doesn't even have a wiki page of her own (just her class-
Turbine -and her sinking). Antique destroyer built in the late-20s. Has engine troubles reducing her to 25 knots, so she stays back to cover her two sisters against a force of British light cruisers. Whereupon she successfully dodged their fire for
an hour before being hit in the boilers.
Her return fire? Splinters from one shell hitting HMS
Liverpool hit the warheads of two torpedoes. They didn't detonate, but if they
had...
Espero continued to be shot at by HMAS
Sydney, before she finally sank. Sydney? Her gun-barrels were
stripped of paint in the morning. The direct quote being "Morning showed the muzzles of
Sydney's guns stripped of paint, which hung in long reddish-grey streamers almost to the deck."
It took the British
nearly five thousand rounds of six-inch ammo to sink one destroyer. No, that is not a typo. They shot so many shells to sink Espero (and try to sink her sisters) that there were only about
800 rounds of light-cruiser ammo left in the
entire Mediterranean theater. To sink one antique and crippled destroyer.
Poor showing, Britain, poor showing.
And Espero has to have one ludicrously high evasion stat
Joking aside, why do I bring this up? When Espero sank right around the start of the story, timeline wise? Simple, because it is an indication of why the Mediterranean is an interesting area to cover that doesn't get much interest. And why that is where we're going when I move back to Europe.
