The Luftwaffe scored seven direct hits on Illustrious in just 61⁄2 minutes. Fragmentation bombs wiped out its after pom-poms and their gunners, as intended. One bomb pierced its 4-inch-thick armored flight deck, generating a second explosion in the hangar, which stored about 50,000 gallons of aviation fuel. A damaged Stuka crashed onto the flight deck like a kamikaze.

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“After the first attack, few of the ship’s decks were recognizable,” said Lamb, “and below the flight deck there was just a gaping shell with dead bodies plastered against the bulkheads wherever one looked. Worse things were happening in the hangar, some of them indescribable. Men lying with their brains spilling onto the deck were commonplace. From my cockpit, ahead of the ship, I thought that I could imagine what it must have been like; but nobody could visualize that horror unless they had listened to firsthand descriptions as I had to do, weeks afterwards, to let the poor devils get it off their chests.”

“In a few minutes the whole situation had changed,” wrote Cunningham. “At one blow the fleet had been deprived of its fighter aircraft, and its command of the Mediterranean was threatened by a weapon far more efficient and dangerous than any against which we had fought before. The efforts of the Regia Aeronautica were almost as nothing compared with those of these deadly Stukas of the Luftwaffe.”

The near-destruction of HMS Illustrious, which threatened to tip the balance of power in the Mediterranean in favor of the Axis powers, was the low point in the career of Cunningham, widely regarded as Britain’s greatest naval commander since Lord Horatio Nelson. His victories at sea during World War II, as commander in chief of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean, have become legendary: the Battles of Calabria, Taranto and Cape Matapan, the invasion of Sicily. He even earned respect for the evacuation of Crete, a no-win operation forced upon him by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in which the navy lost three cruisers and six destroyers, but saved 16,500 men. Justifying that mission — the navy must not let the army down — the admiral famously said, “It takes three years to build a ship; it takes three centuries to build a tradition.”

Cunningham also served as Allied naval commander during Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa in November 1942, the campaign that brought the United States into the war across the Atlantic. He and General Dwight Eisenhower, the Allied supreme commander, worked together famously, sharing a regard for combat efficiency. Wrote Eisenhower in his diary: “Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham. He remains in my opinion at the top of my subordinates in absolute selflessness, energy, devotion to duty, knowledge of his task and in understanding of the requirements of allied operations. My opinions as to his superior qualifications have never wavered for a second.”

Cunningham was all but destined to become an admiral. In 1892 young Andrew, a Scot born in Ireland, was living with two aunts in Scotland so he could attend Edinburgh Academy. One day he received a telegram from his father, an anatomy professor at Trinity College in Dublin.

Would you like to go into the Navy?

Nine-year-old Andrew replied:

Yes, I should like to be an admiral.

Nicknamed “Cutts” or “ABC” by his men, Cunningham was generally irascible and sometimes short-tempered. He demanded performance without error or hesitation and was thus regarded with a mix of fear and respect. The admiral drove a car as if he were a Grand Prix driver like the legendary Tazio Nuvolari, renowned at the time for racing at the ragged edge and crashing as often as he won. And Cutts was not above flicking butterballs across a banquet table with his spoon.

As a child, Cunningham was encouraged to learn German, becaise his father considered it the language of science. Only German governesses served at the Cunningham house, so the boy and his four siblings learned the language from the time they entered the nursery.

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