The First Battle of Sirte was fought between the British Royal Navy and the Regia Marina (Italian Royal Navy) during the Mediterranean campaign of the Second World War. The engagement took place on 17 December 1941, south-east of Malta, in the Gulf of Sirte. In the following days, two Royal Navy forces based at Malta ran into an Italian minefield off Tripoli and two British battleships were disabled by Italian manned torpedoes at Alexandria. By the end of December, the balance of naval power in the Mediterranean had shifted in favour of the Italian Fleet. Background The British Eighth Army and the Axis armies in North Africa were engaged in battles resulting from Operation Crusader, which had been fought between 18 November and 4 December. Its aim was to defeat the Afrika Korps and relieve the siege of Tobruk. This had been achieved and Axis forces were conducting a fighting retreat; by 13 December, they were holding a defensive line at Gazala, east of Benghazi. The Axis were desperate to supply their forces, intending to transport stores to Tripoli, their main port in Libya and Benghazi, the port closest to the front line. The island garrison of Malta was under siege and the British wanted to supply their forces on the island. Prelude Axis convoys M41 and M42 The Italians were preparing to send M41, a convoy of eight ships, to Africa on 13 December 1941. That morning, their previous supply attempt, two fast cruisers carrying fuel to Tripoli, had failed when both ships were sunk at the Battle of Cape Bon by a force of destroyers en route to Alexandria. Convoy M41 consisted of eight merchant ships in three groups, with a close escort of five destroyers and a distant cover force of the battleships and , four destroyers and two torpedo boats. Soon after sailing on 13 December, a group of M41 was attacked by the British submarine and two ships were sunk; later that day two ships collided and had to return to base, while the distant cover force was sighted by the submarine and Vittorio Veneto was torpedoed and forced to return to port. Supermarina the Italian navy high command, rattled by these losses and a report that a British force of two battleships was at sea, ordered the ships to return to await reinforcement but the "force of two battleships" was a decoy operation by