Andrew Cunningham(1883–1963)

Andrew Browne Cunningham was born at 1 Glencairn Crescent in Edinburgh's West End on 7 January 1883, the third of five children of Daniel John Cunningham, then professor of anatomy at the University of Edinburgh and later at Trinity College Dublin, and Elizabeth Browne. The Cunninghams of his father's line were Galloway smallholders who had walked into the medical profession in two generations. The family moved to Dublin in 1885 when Daniel took the Dublin chair, and Cunningham was raised there until ten, when he was sent across to the Edinburgh Academy as a boarder. He entered the Royal Navy through HMS Britannia at the age of fourteen in 1897, was commissioned as a sub-lieutenant in 1903, and spent the next decade in the small-ship navy of the late Edwardian era: gunboats on the China station, sloops in the Persian Gulf, destroyers in the Mediterranean.

He took command of his first destroyer, HMS Scorpion, in 1911 at twenty-eight and held her for seven years through the destroyer war of 1914 to 1918. Scorpion served at the Dardanelles through the long summer of 1915 as one of the inshore destroyers covering the Gallipoli landings, the Suvla Bay reinforcement and the December evacuation; Cunningham came out of the Dardanelles with the Distinguished Service Order. He commanded the destroyer HMS Termagant for the rest of the war in the North Sea and the Dover Patrol, and ended the war a commander at thirty-five with two Bars to the DSO and the reputation of a destroyer man of unusual aggression and ship-handling skill. The Navy promoted him captain in 1920, gave him the new aircraft-carrier HMS Eagle in 1929, and rear-admiral in 1932.

He took command of the Mediterranean Fleet in 1939 as a vice-admiral; it was the most important sea command outside the Home Fleet, and the one most likely, when Italy entered the war in June 1940, to do the deciding fighting of the Mediterranean theatre. On the night of 11 to 12 November 1940 his carrier strike on the Italian battle fleet in Taranto harbour was the first carrier-launched air attack on a defended battle fleet in naval history. Twenty-one Swordfish biplanes from HMS Illustrious, flying in two waves at dusk and at midnight, sank or crippled three Italian battleships at anchor at the cost of two aircraft. The Japanese naval staff studied the Taranto plan that winter and used it as the template for Pearl Harbor thirteen months later.

On the night of 28 to 29 March 1941 Cunningham brought the Mediterranean Fleet to action against the Italian Regia Marina off Cape Matapan at the southern tip of the Peloponnese, a night action fought entirely by radar gunnery against a fleet that had no radar. The Italian heavy cruisers Zara, Pola and Fiume and the destroyers Vittorio Alfieri and Giosuè Carducci were sunk; over two thousand five hundred Italian sailors died. Matapan was the largest Allied naval victory of the European war and effectively ended the Italian battle-fleet challenge in the Mediterranean. Two months later, with the German invasion of Crete underway and the Royal Air Force air cover gone from the island, Cunningham took the decision to keep his ships at sea under air attack to evacuate the British Army from the Cretan beaches. The fleet lost three cruisers and six destroyers in nine days and saved sixteen thousand men. His signal to his captains, when the loss rate was at its worst, was the line that became his: 'It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It would take three hundred years to build a tradition. The evacuation will continue.'

He commanded the Allied naval forces for the Sicily and Italian landings in 1943, then succeeded Sir Dudley Pound as First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff in October 1943, the post he held to the end of the war. He attended the Cairo, Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences as Churchill's principal naval adviser. He was created Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope in 1946 (Hyndhope being his Borders estate at Selkirk) and received the Order of Merit the same year. He retired to Bishop's Waltham in Hampshire and worked through the 1950s on the official Royal Navy history of the Second World War. He died at his London house on 12 June 1963 of a heart attack, aged eighty. He was buried at sea off Portsmouth on 15 June 1963, by his own request. The Cunningham name today carries his memory as the surname of the fleet admiral whose tactical and moral leadership of the Mediterranean Fleet across the catastrophic eighteen months of 1940 and 1941 kept the British Empire's middle sea in British hands when every objective measure said it should not have been.