Lorenzo Colombo

Sirena was a coastal submarine, leader of the class of the same name, belonging to the “600” series of the “Bernardis” type (named after the designer, General of the Naval Engineers Curio Bernardis). It had a single hull with double resistant central bottoms (in which all the tanks were hosted: ballast, emergence, rapid emergence and compensation) and an external counter-hulls (having both the function of increasing lateral stability, and to accommodate additional fuel tanks).

Sirena still on the slip
(From “Gli squali dell’Adriatico, Monfalcone e i suoi sommergibili nella storia navale italiana” by Alessandro Turrini)

Second of the five classes of small coastal submarines (Argonauta, Sirena, Perla, Adua, Acciaio) that made up the “600” series (so called because of the surface displacement of the boats that composed it), Sirena class was composed of simple, practical, and resistant submarines, characterized by excellent stability and maneuverability both on the surface and underwater, good robustness and also good habitability, despite its small size.

The launch of the Sirena in Monfalcone
(Istituto Luce)

Derived from the Argonauta class, which had opened the “600” series, Sirena were set up before the entry into service of their predecessors, which prevented the experiences that emerged from the utilization of the new class from being fully exploited in their design. Nevertheless, they were judged to be successful units, as were the Argonauts. Between Sirena and the Argonauta there were some slight differences relating to the hull (which on Sirena was slightly shorter and wider: 60.20 meters in length and 6.45 in width compared to 61.50 and 5.65 of the Argonauta) and to the superstructures, resulting from improvements made in the design phase. In particular, the stem, which on the Argonauta was shaped like those of the larger submarines of the Pisani class (from which they were partly derived), on Sirena it was slightly raised, assuming a shape called “shark”.

Sirena with the original fully enclosed conning tower
(Aldo Cavallini Collection)

The displacement was slightly greater than the previous class (679 vs. 666 tons on the surface, and 842 vs. 810 under water). Other differences were the deck gun, consisting of the new 100/47 mm model that replaced the older 102/35 of the Argonauta, and the engines, which were also more modern and powerful (1,350 hp vs. 1,250 hp) and it had a slightly greater range. In general, more modern apparatuses were adopted, to improve the already good qualities of the previous class. In fact, the performance of Sirena was better than the already satisfactory performance of the Argonauta class.

The decision to build Sirena class was taken by the Regia Marina following the London Naval Conference of 1930, in which it was established that there would be no limitation on the number of submarines of standard surface displacement not exceeding 600 tons that the signatory nations could build. Precisely for this reason, the “600” series became the standard model of all small coastal submarines built by the Italian Navy during the thirties.

Sirena displaced 678.95 tons on the surface and 842.20 tons submerged; The displacement varied slightly between the submarines of the class built in different shipyards, and is variously referred to as 681, 691 or 701 tons on the surface and 842, 850 or 860 tons submerged.

The propulsion system for surface navigation consisted of two FIAT diesel engines with a power of 1,350 or 1,444 hp (650 or 675 hp per engine) on two four-bladed propellers, which allowed a maximum speed of 14 knots, while for underwater navigation there were two CRDA electric motors with a power of 800 hp (400 hp per engine).  They were powered by a lead-acid battery consisting of 104 elements, which allowed a maximum speed of 7.7 knots. The surface range, with a supply of 80 tons of fuel, was 2,200 miles at 14 knots (for another source, 2,280 miles at 12 knots) and 5,000 (for another source 5,590) miles at eight knots (4,480 miles at 8.5 knots). Submerged, it could make seven to eight miles at 7.5 knots and 72 (84 knots for other sources) at four knots.

The submarines of the class built in Taranto and Rijeka, were instead powered by Franco Tosi diesel engines and Marelli electric motors, with slightly different range and speed performances.

Sirenas were armed with six 533 mm torpedo tubes, 4 at the bow and 2 at the stern, with a reserve of 6 torpedoes (for another source, 12 torpedoes), and with an OTO Mod. 1931 100/47 mm (with a reserve of 144 or 152 rounds) and two Breda Mod. 31 13.2/76 mm guns in single installations (with a reserve of 3,000 rounds; according to some sources the number of these machine guns was later increased to four). The test depth was 80 meters, with a safety coefficient (relative to the maximum stress referred to the elasticity limit of the material) of 3.

The twelve submarines of the class were christened half with the names of “sea deities” (Sirena, Naiade, Nereide, Anfitrite, Ondina, Galatea) and the other half with names of minerals (Ametista, Diamante, Rubino, Topazio, Smeraldo, Zaffiro). The six submarines of the mythology group were built by the CRDA of Monfalcone, while the remaining six were entrusted, in pairs, to three other shipyards: Ametista and Zaffiro to the OTO shipyards in La Spezia; Diamante and Smeraldo at the Franco Tosi shipyard in Taranto; Rubino and Topazio at the Kvarner Shipyards in Rijeka (the first and only submarines built by this shipyard for the Royal Italian Navy: it was an “experiment”, which was not replicated).

Only one, the Galatea, would survive the war: of the others, nine were lost in action and two scuttled following the armistice of Cassibile. Those that survived until after 1941 were subjected to work to reduce the size of the conning tower, in order to reduce the diving time and make them less visible from a great distance.

From Sirena was then derived, with a few modifications, the Perla class; according to some sources, the “Delfinul”, a submarine built in the Kvarner Shipyards for the Romanian Navy, was a modified version of Sirena class, but this seems rather strange if we consider that it was laid down in 1927, four years before Sirena and even before the Argonauta themselves (which were laid down only in 1929). However, since its construction took a long time, being completed in 1931-1932 (and it was not handed over to the Romanian Navy until 1936), it is possible that it was modified during construction based on Sirena’s design.

Sirena was supposed to be the first submarine of the Regia Marina (except for the old H 3, used for experimentation) to be equipped with the “ML” apparatus, designed in the first half of the twenties by the major of the Naval Engineers Pericle Ferretti. This apparatus, by sucking air from the surface and discharging the exhaust gases produced by the engines to the outside, allowed the submarine that used it to ventilate the rooms and to use the diesel engines even while submerged (as long as it remained at periscope altitude): in essence, it was a precursor of the snorkel, a revolutionary apparatus developed a few years later by technicians of the Dutch Navy and then adopted by the German Navy in the Second World War, and layer utilized by all the navies of the world after the end of the conflict.

The advantages of this apparatus were many, increasing speed (according to its designer’s estimates, by at least three knots) and autonomy while submerged, safety (even if it wanted to use electric motors, the submarine could recharge its batteries without being forced to surface and expose itself to enemy attacks) and attack capacity (thanks to the greater speed when submerged,  it would have been possible to increase the useful attack sector by up to 60%) and freedom of movement of the submarine that used it (which without surfacing could keep the batteries always charged), and which was no longer forced to use electric motors and resurface once a day to recharge the batteries.

Habitability was also improved, being able to ventilate the rooms even when submerged. After the success of the tests conducted for four years on the H 3, the top management of the Regia Marina ordered Ferretti to perfect his apparatus and then mass produce it and install it on the submarines of Sirena class (and according to a source, also of the Argonauta class). The final drawings for the mass production of the “ML” apparatus were made by the CRDA of Monfalcone and date back to 1934-1935, but in 1938 the new commander of the Italian submarine fleet, Rear Admiral Antonio Legnani, suspended the production of this equipment and even had those already produced scrapped, for reasons that remained unknown due to the subsequent loss of the relevant documentation. The result was that neither the Sirena class nor any other Italian submarine could use the snorkel until after the Second World War, when the equipment derived from the Dutch ones was also introduced into the Italian Navy.

It is not entirely clear whether or not these devices were installed on Sirena, before Legnani’s decision: according to some sources, including the book “Uomini sul fondo” by Giorgio Giorgerini, Sirena were prepared for installation but the equipment was never installed, while according to what Ferretti himself wrote, the “ML” were installed experimentally in 1934 on some of Sirenas under construction in Monfalcone,  only to be removed after the Legnani’s decision (“Some specimens were built which, after testing in a special ground test facility, began to be mounted on Sirena types. Admiral Legnani was appointed to head the submarines, and he [sic] ordered that the equipment already built be demolished and that the others under construction were discontinued»).

According to a source, the abandonment of the “ML” apparatus was motivated by unsatisfactory performance, and more precisely an increase in the submerged speed, using diesel engines, of “only” 1.7 knots (which in truth would not seem to be a small difference, considering that the maximum speed with the electric motors was less than eight knots).

During World War II, Sirena operated mainly in the eastern Mediterranean, in the Otranto Channel and in the Gulf of Taranto. The boat completed a total of 33 or 34 war missions (19 patrols, one transport and 14 relocations), covering 19,659 nautical miles on the surface and 3,052 submerged and spending 204 days at sea.

The Siren’s motto was “E gurgite dominans” (“from the whirlpools [comes out] dominant”).

Brief and partial chronology

May 1st, 1931

The boat is set up at the Cantieri Riuniti dell’Adriatico (C.R.D.A.) in Monfalcone (construction number 255).

January 26th, 1933

The boat is launched at the C.R.D.A and immediately placed at the disposal of the Pula Marine Command (on the same day of the launch), however it remains in Monfalcone for testing and fitting out.

February 17th, 1933

During the set-up, a fire broke out in the aft launch torpedo room. The flames are extinguished before they can cause any major damage, and there were no injuries.

October 2nd, 1933

Sirena entered active service.

November 23rd, 1933

Placed under the Submarine Inspectorate, Sirena was assigned to the X Submarine Squadron, based in Brindisi and under the Submarine Division Command, which the boat formed along with the twins Naiade, Nereide, Anfitrite, Ondina and Galatea; a squadron called, because of the names of the boats that compose it, of the “marine deities”. The first commander of Sirena was the Lieutenant Commander Primo Longobardo.

Taranto, May 1933: Sirena returns from a training patrol (note the torpedoes on deck)
(From “Navi e bugie” by Nino Bixio Lo Martire)

1934

Sirena made a long training cruise in the eastern Mediterranean, calling at Piraeus, Alexandria, Tobruk, Benghazi and Tripoli.

1934-1936

The boat made other training cruises along the Italian coasts.

January 2nd, 1937

Sirena (Lieutenant Commander Luigi Caneschi), at the time assigned to the IV Submarine Group of Taranto, sailed from Naples for a clandestine mission off Almeria and Capo de Gata, in support of Franco’s forces, during the Spanish Civil War. It was to attack any Spanish Republican warships, as well as merchant ships engaged in transporting supplies to Republican-controlled ports. The rules of engagement, with regard to the latter (whose recognition is rather difficult), were very restrictive, in order to avoid international incidents, and which severely limited the operation of submarines (as written by Francesco Mattesini: «avoid torpedoing outside the assigned limit, and carry out attacks only against warships or merchant ships clearly identified as Republican or Soviet and against those transiting with darkened lights in the areas prescribed for ambush. These impositions caused, as Admirals Canaris and Cavagnari had foreseen, a serious obstacle to the activity of Italian submarines, since it was indeed very difficult to be able to identify with sufficient certainty a merchant ship sailing under a false flag»).

Between the end of January and the beginning of February 1937, seventeen Italian submarines were deployed in ambush off the Spanish coast: their task was to undermine the ports in the hands of the Republican faction and cut off the flow of supplies to them. During the mission, Sirena initiated three attack maneuvers, but would not complete them (according to another source, however, it failed to spot any suspicious ships).

January 19th, 1937

Mission ended; the boat returned to base.

1938

Sirena was stationed in Brindisi, as part of the XLII Submarine Squadron along with Naiade, Nereide, Anfitrite, Ondina and Galatea.

May 5th, 1938

Under the command of Lieutenant Commander Luigi Caneschi, Sirena took part in the naval magazine “H” organized in the Gulf of Naples for Adolf Hitler’s visit to Italy. Most of the Italian fleet took part in the review: the battleships Cesare and Cavour, the 7 heavy cruisers of the I and III Divisions, the 11 light cruisers of the II, IV, VII and VIII Divisions, 7 “light explorers” of the Navigatori class, 18 destroyers (the Squadrons VII, VIII, IX and X, plus the Borea and the Zeffiro), 30 torpedo boats (the Squadriglie IX,  X, XI and XII, plus the old Audace, Castelfidardo, Curtatone, Francesco Stocco, Nicola Fabrizi and Giuseppe La Masa and the four “escort notices” of the Orsa class), as many as 85 submarines of the Submarine Squadron under the command of Admiral Antonio Legnani, and 24 MAS (Squadrons IV, V, VIII, IX, X and XI), as well as the training ships Cristoforo Colombo and Amerigo Vespucci,  Benito Mussolini’s yacht, the Aurora, the royal ship Savoy and the target ship San Marco.

The Submarine Squad was the protagonist of one of the most spectacular moments of the parade, in which the 85 boats carry out a series of synchronised manoeuvres: first, arranged in two columns, at 1.15 PM they pass, opposite direction, between the two naval squadrons proceeding on parallel routes. Then, at 1:25 PM, all the submarines made a simultaneous mass dive, proceeded for a short distance in immersion and then emerged simultaneously and executed a salvo of eleven shots with their respective deck guns.

June 10th, 1940

Upon Italy’s entry into World War II, Sirena was part of the LXI Submarine Squadron, belonging to the VI Grupsom of Tobruk, along with the boats of the same class Argonauta, Smeraldo, Naiade and Fisalia.

June 18th, 1940

Sirena (Lieutenant Raul Galletti) sets sail from Tobruk for the first war patrol, to be carried out off the Gulf of Sollum.

June 20th, 1940

Arriving in the area assigned for the patrol, at 9 PM Sirena sighted a British destroyer about twenty miles north of Ras Uleima (Gulf of Sollum) and maneuvered to move to a favorable position for a torpedo attack, but was located by the unit before being able to launch (according to another source, it  managed to launch a torpedo, but without hitting,  and then was located and subjected to the counterattack).

The attacked unit is part of a formation consisting of two French cruisers (the Suffren, heavy, and the Duguay-Trouin, light) and three British destroyers (H.M.S. Ilex, H.M.S Nubian, and H.M.S Imperial) which had left Alexandria at 5:30 PM the previous day to conduct a search for an Italian cruiser and destroyer, whose presence was reported off Tobruk during he operation “MD. 3” (bombardment of Bardia by an Anglo-French formation consisting of the battleship French Lorraine, the British light cruisers H.M.S Orion and H.M.S Neptune, the Australian light cruiser H.M.A.S Sydney, the British destroyers H.M.S Dainty, H.M.S Hasty and H.M.S Decoy and the Australian destroyer H.M.A.S Stuart).

Localized by the enemy units after failed attack, Sirena was subjected to heavy and precise chase with the launch of numerous depth charges, which cause serious damage including damage to the stuffing boxes of the propeller cases, with consequent abundant infiltration of water, such as to force it to interrupt the mission and return to base (it was no longer able to navigate submerged).

June 22nd, 1940

Arrival in Tobruk. For their conduct during this mission and during the air attacks on the port of Tobruk, Second Lieutenant Giuseppe Di Grande and Ensign Carmelo D’Urso (both from Augusta) would receive the War Cross for Military Valour, with the motivation: “Officer embarked on a submarine, stationed in an advanced base subjected to violent enemy air attacks,  He cooperated with fighting spirit and daring in the anti-aircraft reaction, directing the fire of the machine guns. During a war mission, the unit was subjected to intense and prolonged hunting, which caused damage, and contributed validly to the disengagement of the submarine from enemy action and to the repair of the damage suffered. Commander Galletti will receive the Bronze Medal for Military Valour (“Commander of a submarine, on a war mission, signaled for violent, prolonged hunting, he faced the difficult situation with determination and serene courage, maneuvering with skill to escape the repeated offense of the enemy forces. Despite the submarine’s failures, he was able to skilfully disengage and bring the unit under his command back to base.” (Gulf of Sollum, 19-22 June 1940)’).

June 25th, 1940

After temporary repairs were carried out on site, necessary to be able to put to sea with a certain safety, Sirena (Lieutenant Raul Galletti) left Tobruk at 8.25 PM bound for Taranto, where it was able to receive more in-depth repair work, which could not be carried out with the modest equipment of the Libyan base (it had to enter dry dock). Navigation took place while remaining on the surface.

Lieutenant Raul Galletti
(Photo U.S.M.M.)

June 26th, 1940

At the first light of dawn, with a sea that had remained calm throughout the night, it began to ripple. At 9.36 AM Sirena passes through Ras el Hilal, while the mistral (TN wind from NW) blew with increasing intensity, until it reaches force 7-8 in the afternoon. Worried by the strong pitching of the submarine, which he feared could cause a leak of liquid from the accumulators or even damage to the hull, at 6.30 PM Commander Galletti gave the order to dive.

June 27th, 1940

At 8.20 AM Sirena returned to the surface: the wind had calmed down a lot, while the sea was force 3-4. The boat proceeded on the surface along the Ras el Hilal-Capo Colonna route.

At 5.15 PM an enemy bomber was sighted which, on the route it followed, seemed to be flying from Alexandria to Malta: to avoid being spotted, Sirena dove.

June 28th, 1940

Shortly after noon, Sirena, sailing at periscope depth, sighted two planes approaching flying at a very low altitude; again, Commander Galletti decided to descend to a greater depth so as not to be spotted.

Resurfacing in the late afternoon, at 5:37 PM – a few minutes after returning to the surface – Sirena sighted another bomber towards the stern, similar to the one sighted the day before: once again a crash dive had to be ordered.

June 29th, 1940

At 6.30 AM (or 6.35 AM), while proceeding on the surface in position 37°54′ N and 18°04′ E (off Capo Colonna and 70 miles by 148° from Capo Rizzuto; according to Sirena report, while British sources indicate the position as 38°12′ N and 18°06′ E – (TN 35 nautical miles apart)), Sirena was attacked by a Short Sunderland seaplane of the 228th Squadron of the Royal Air Force (more precisely,  the “Q” aircraft of the 228th Squadron, marked L. 5086 (TN it actually was tail number L. 5806).

R.A.F. operational records
(National Archives, United Kingdom)

The plane was spotted by the lookouts in the conning tower on a polar bearing 315°, when it was still three kilometers away, and flying at an altitude of about 500 meters with a course perpendicular to that of Sirena, directed towards the submarine. Presenting a large vertical white band painted on the vertical plane of the tail, which from a great distance can be mistaken for the white cross painted on the planes of the Regia Aeronautica, the aircraft was initially mistaken for Italian, also because it was carrying out an approach maneuver perfectly compliant with the rules in force in the Regia Marina (Commander Galletti would write in his report:  “At a distance of about 3,000 m, the plane approaches to starboard and is on a course parallel to and opposite to mine. He performed the maneuver similarly to that prescribed by the S.M. 6 S., that is, passing astern and always at the prescribed distance and at an invariable altitude, he moves to my starboard side and against the sun»).

As a result, believing that he was dealing with a friendly plane, Commander Galletti flew the Italian flag; only then the seaplane, having reached 60° forward of the starboard beam, quickly approaches to port and begins to dive, aiming decisively at Sirena. Galletti realizes that it was an enemy plane, but it was too late to be able to escape the attack with the crash dive (the Sunderland would have dropped its bombs just as Sirena was most vulnerable,  during the dive: not yet underwater, and at the same time unable to defend itself with the machine guns), so Galletti orders to open fire with the machine guns, which were ready for use, and he himself  manned the forward machine gun on the starboard side (“I put the target in a sector of about 20° to starboard starting from the bow”). Sirena steered to port, to facilitate the firing of the starboard forward machine gun, but as soon as this maneuver began, the Sunderland also changed its course, to take the submarine from bow to stern. Galletti then steered even more to the port, after which he immediately ordered another change of course, this time to starboard. Shooting started when the distance has dropped to 700 meters.

The Sunderland changed its approach course of attack and flew over Sirena from bow to stern, from an altitude of only 50 meters, dropping four bombs that fell into the sea on the sides of the submarine, forward of the conning tower, at distances between 5 and 15 meters, two on the starboard side and two on the port side (“In the meantime, the plane, having reached a distance of 75-100 meters,  very fast and with a course almost crossing the submarine from bow to stern it launches, from an altitude of just under 50 meters, four bombs that fall two to starboard and two to port of the hull, at a distance of about 5 or 10 meters and about 15 meters forward of the conning tower”), adding new damage to that caused by the depth charges nine days earlier off Sollum. At the same time as the bombs were dropped by the Sunderland, Commander Galletti fired five shots from a machine gun towards the seaplane; then he increased the elevation of the weapon and waited for the plane to approach up to only thirty meters, and then unloaded the entire magazine on it, believing that he had scored several shots (“At the same time as the sighting of the four bombs dropped from the tail of the plane, I fired 5 shots from the machine gun and then increased the elevation waiting for a closer approach of the plane to hit it with certainty. When the plane arrived about 30 meters forward of the conning tower, I opened fire again, discharging all the rounds of the magazine at it and hitting it repeatedly in various parts»).

The seaplane seems to be visibly hit by the fire of Sirena’s machine guns and seems to immediately lose altitude. When it reached the stern of the conning tower, it opened fire with his machine guns, targeting the personnel present in the conning tower, but the burst was very short (no more than three seconds) and inaccurate, hitting only the base of the conning tower without causing damage to anyone, so much so that Commander Galletti believed that this was due to the mortal wounding of the British gunner by the fire of Sirena “The enemy aircraft immediately lost very quickly altitude. When he reached the stern of the conning tower of the submarine, the machine-gunned the personnel on the conning tower. I believe that the enemy gunner was fatally hit because the enemy machine gun burst, which was inaccurate, lasted a maximum of 3 seconds and having been carried out in the fall phase of the plane, it only hit the base of the conning tower»). After this last attempt at attack, according to Galletti’s report, the Sunderland continued to lose altitude, until it seemed to fall into the sea about 200 meters aft of the submarine: “… Quickly losing altitude, as already mentioned, when it reached about 200 meters downwind, it suddenly lowered its tail and tilted about 90° to the left, arranging its wings almost in the vertical plane and falling into the water heavily and in such a way as to consider it lost”.

In reality, Sunderland will be able to return to Malta; According to British sources, in fact, it did not suffer any damage.

At the end of the attack, since during the approach phase of the Sunderland what seemed to be another plane had been sighted on the horizon, and therefore fearing to be attacked again on the surface, without being able to adequately defend itself (as the aft machine gun was jammed by a bullet left in the barrel), Galletti ordered the rapid dive and continues towards Taranto.

At 2.10 PM Sirena resurfaced, but two hours later yet another enemy plane was sighted, flying at very low altitude on the same route as before, and once again the Italian boat was forced to dive.

For their conduct in the duel with Sunderland, the Second Lieutenant Giuseppe Di Grande, the Ensign Carmelo D’Urso, the second chief torpedo pilot Mario Saluzzo and sailor Giannino Loffredo (“Embarked on a submarine on a war mission, on the occasion of an air attack … he lent his work to the defensive manoeuvre with serenity and skill”). Commander Galletti, also because of the mistaken belief that the attacking plane had been shot down, will receive the Silver Medal for Military Valor (“Commander of a submarine in war navigation, he skilfully avoided repeated enemy hunting actions. Being attacked by an enemy four-engine aircraft at low altitude with bomb drop and machine gun fire, he promptly chose and executed the most suitable defensive and counter-offensive maneuver, and with machine gun fire personally shot down the enemy aircraft. An example of quick decision, calmness, contempt for danger. (Eastern Mediterranean, 25 June – 1 July 1940)’).

June 30th, 1940

At 6.30 AM Sirena re-emerged and set course for Crotone, where it arrived at 9.40 AM. Since its departure from Tobruk, it has covered 553 nautical miles, 124 of which were submerged. After mooring the submarine, Commander Galletti telegraphed to Supermarina and Maricosom a first brief report on the incident: “Sirena – Day 29 current at 06.30 at about 70 miles 148° from Capo Rizzuto bombed and machine-gunned at low altitude by seaplane 4 enemy engines alt Enemy repeatedly hit and shot down STOP I repeat destruction not ascertained “.

July 1st, 1940

At 5.18 AM Sirena left Crotone for Taranto, where it arrived a few hours later. After the arrival, Commander Galletti sent another telegram to Maricosom: «Sirena – During the Tobruk-Taranto transfer, daily presence was noted on the Ras el Hilal-Capo Colonne junction within Malta, Corfu and Malta Alexandria sectors, large four-engine British seaplanes that carry a white vertical stripe on the vertical rudders and approach submarines by performing a maneuver similar to that prescribed by S.M. 6/S, page n° 13 alt».

Once it reached Taranto, Sirena was placed in dry dock in the Arsenale for repairs.

Summer 1940

Once the repair work was completed, Sirena was deployed to Leros, in the Dodecanese, operating in the Aegean Sea until April 1941, where it carried out offensive missions in the eastern Mediterranean and some protective patrols in the Gulf of Taranto.

August 31st, 1940

Sirena, lurking south of Crete, did not spot the Mediterranean Fleet (battleships H.M.S. Warspite and H.M.S. Malaya, aircraft carrier H.M.S. Eagle, light cruisers H.M.S. Orion and H.M.A.S. Sydney, destroyers H.M.S. Stuart, H.M.S. Voyager, H.M.S. Vampire, H.M.S. Vendetta, H.M.S. Defender, H.M.S. Decoy, H.M.S. Hereward, H.M.S. Garland and H.M.S. Imperial) which had left Alexandria the previous day for operation “Hats” (consisting of various sub-operations: transfer from Gibraltar to Alexandria, to reinforce the Mediterranean Fleet,  the battleship H.M.S. Valiant, the aircraft carrier H.M.S. Illustrious, and the cruisers H.M.S. Calcutta and H.M.S. Coventry; sending a convoy from Alexandria to Malta and one from Nafplion to Port Said, bombing Italian bases in Sardinia and the Aegean), and passed not far from the patrol area.

September 1940

Sirena was sent on a patrol south of Crete, between Gaudo and Alexandria, Egypt.

November 22^nd through December 1^st, 1940

The boat was sent on patrol in the Otranto Channel, to protect convoys sailing between Italy and Albania.

The crew of Sirena in 1940

February 9^th through 18^th, 1941

Sirena and another submarine, the Beilul, were sent for patrols in the Aegean.

April 14th, 1941

Sirena was sent to patrol a stretch of sea 25 miles north of Suda, controlling access from the northeast of the Cerigo Channel. Around 11 PM (Lieutenant Rodolfo Scarelli), sailing on the surface north of Candia, the crew sighted a British destroyer “Afridi class” (i.e. Tribal class) sailing eastwards at high speed in position 36°07′ N and 24°15′ E (north/northwest of Capo Spada). At 11:37 PM, approaching less than 2,000 meters away, Scarelli launched two torpedoes from the bow tubes against the enemy unit, then remained on the surface – taking advantage of the thick darkness – to observe the result of the launch.

The crew of Sirena with Lieutenant Rodolfo Scarelli in the middle

A loud detonation was heard on board after 1 minute and 42 seconds, although no columns of water were sighted. The destroyer appeared to significantly reduce speed and pull towards Sirena, which at this point disengaged by diving. Commander Scarelli believes that he had probably hit the target with one of the weapons, although without sinking it. However, the torpedoes did not hit. (Some Internet sources identify the attacked destroyer with HMS Afridi, but this is impossible, since this unit was sunk as early as May 1940; this is a misunderstanding of Commander Scarelli’s identification of the target as an “Afridi-type” unit, i.e. Tribal class).

April 18th, 1941

Sirena left the ambush zone to return to base.

April 19^th and 20^th, 1941

Patrol was concluded arriving in Leros.

May 1941

Sirena was sent on patrol in the Aegean Sea, along with her twin boat Galatea.

May 20th, 1941

Sirena was sent to the waters between Crete, Sollum and Alexandria, along with numerous other submarines (Uarsciek, Tricheco, Topazio, Fisalia, Adua, Malachite, Dessiè, Squalo and Smeraldo), to support the German assault on Crete (Operation “Merkur”).

July 1941

Another mission in the Aegean Sea, departing from Leros.

February 10^th through 13th, 1942

Sirena was sent off the coast of Cyrenaica to counter the passage from Alexandria to Malta of a British convoy as part of operation “MF 5” and named “MW. 9” which departed Alexandria on February 12^th. The convoy consisted of the merchant ships Clan Campbell, Clan Chattan, and Rowallan Castle, escorted by four anti-aircraft cruisers (H.M.S. Naiad, H.M.S. Dido, H.M.S. Euryalus and H.M.S. Carlisle) and 16 destroyers (H.M.S. Lance, H.M.S. Heythrop, H.M.S. Avon Vale, H.M.S. Eridge, H.M.S. Hurworth, H.M.S. Southwold, H.M.S. Dulverton, H.M.S. Beaufort, H.M.S. Arrow, H.M.S. Griffin, H.M.S. Havock, H.M.S. Hasty, H.M.S. Jaguar, H.M.S. Kelvin, H.M.S. Kipling and H.M.S. Jaguar), all under the command of Rear Admiral Philip L. Vian. At the same time as the arrival in Malta of the “MW. 9”, a convoy of unloaded merchant ships (Ajax, Breconshire, City of Calcutta and Clan Ferguson) would leave the island, “ME. 10”, escorted by Commodore William Gladstone Agnew’s Force K (light cruiser H.M.S. Penelope, destroyers H.M.S. Decoy, H.M.S. Fortune, H.M.S. Legion, H.M.S. Lively, H.M.S. Sikh and H.M.S. Zulu).

To attack the British convoy bound for Malta, eleven Italian submarines were deployed in an area of just over 800 square miles: in addition to Sirena, also Topazio, Tricheco, Dandolo, Malachite, Perla, Platino, Ondina and Ciro Menotti.

Sirena did not make contact with the convoy “MW. 9”, which was completely destroyed by the Luftwaffe: Clan Chattan and Rowallan Castle were sunk by German bombers on February 14th, 250 miles east of Malta, while the previous day the Clan Campbell was damaged and forced to give up reaching Malta, entering Tobruk. Convoy “ME. 10”, on the other hand, would reach Port Said unscathed on February 16.

April 1942

Sirena carried out a patrol in the waters of Cyrenaica, in the later part of the month.

June 4^th through 16th, 1942

Sirena was sent to patrol the waters off Palestine, along with the submarines Ondina, Beilul and Galatea.

Around the middle of the month (June 12th, according to a source) Sirena, Ondina, Beilul, Galatea and the German submarines U 77, U 81, U 205, U 431, U 453, and U 559 were sent to Libyan waters to attack the British convoy “Vigorous” sailing from Alexandria to Malta, as part of the Battle of Mid-June. However, the Siren was not involved in the battle.

Mid-September 1942

Sent on a mission east off the Island of Rhodes.

November 1942

Sirena carried out another mission in the Eastern Mediterranean, departing from Leros.

December 1942-January 1943

Sirena underwent a round of modification works, lasting about two months, at the CRDA of Monfalcone. The conning tower was radically downsized, with a strong reduction in its volume and the shortening of the periscope jackets, which, after the modifications did not exceed the height of the parapet of the parapet.

March 1943

Sirena carried out a mission in the Gulf of Sirte.

Sirena in Monfalcone after refitting with the modified conning tower
(From the magazine “Storia Militare”)

April 10th, 1943

Sirena was in La Maddalena when, starting at 2.37 PM, the Sardinian base was subjected to a heavy bombardment by 84 Boeing B-17 “Flying Fortress” bombers of the USAAF.

Among the injured was the commander of the submarine Sirena, Lieutenant Luciano Garofani. He was found in the rubble of the Faravelli Barracks, in a state of semi-consciousness and with a serious hemorrhage in his right leg, by sub-chief radio telegraphist Dario Leli, 19 years old, from Castelfranco Emilia. Unharmed, Leli did his utmost to rescue his wounded comrades trapped in the rubble of the barracks. When he found Commander Garofani, he tried in vain to stop the bleeding in his leg, after which he carried him on his shoulders with the intention of taking him to the military hospital, half a kilometer away. However, realizing the impossibility of carrying such a weight for such a long journey, Leli loaded the half-unconscious officer onto a wheelbarrow found in the middle of the rubble, and thus ran and pushed the wheelbarrow with the wounded man, the distance that separates the barracks from the hospital. Arriving at the hospital, where confusion reigned due to the arrival of the large number of wounded caused by the bombing, Leli pointed out that the wounded man risked bleeding to death if he was not rescued immediately but was told to wait in line.

Then, secluding himself with the unconscious commander, he took off the officer’s uniform and puts it on in his place, and then presents himself again to the hospital staff pretending to be an officer, and ordering, this time successfully, that Garofani – whom Leli says was one of his sailors, in danger of life – be immediately taken to the operating room. (Garofani survived, and from this episode a lasting friendship was born: thirty-five years later, in 1978, it was the former commander of Sirena who had to say his last goodbye to his sailor, who had died prematurely from a serious illness).

A total of four men of Sirena lost their lives in the bombing: the chief torpedoman first class Arturo Brandani, 39, from Bondeno; the motorist Tommaso Ferragina, 20 years old, from Catanzaro, who will be missing; sailor Giuseppe Poggi, 21 years old, from Savona; electrician Giuseppe Tesoriero, 21 years old, from Lipari.

Two more dead and four injured were recorded among the crews of Topazio, Mocenigo and Aradam, while the personnel of the Submarine Station (Maristasom) complained of three dead, one missing and two wounded. At 9.15 PM the VII Submarine Group informs Maricosom of the dramatic situation in La Maddalena: «At 2.50 PM immediately air attack of which an objective east was the submarine base STOP Accommodation both for officers and personnel practically temporarily unusable STOP  Submarine workshop and torpedo workshop hit in full by unused bombs STOP  Units present only submarine Mocenigo drilled double bottom number 2 starboard oil case et tubing external compensation et double bottom air vent pipe number 2 starboard STOP  Arranged unless counter-ordered submarine Aradam immediately displaces Bonifacio STOP  Arranged appropriate thinning out of other units STOP  On submarine Mocenigo et submarine Topazio it is not possible to use semialt works I propose transfer other headquarters STOP  Units present from 08.00 current will all perform listening r t continuous STOP  Lieutenant Vascello Garofani Luciano Lieutenant G. N. Vigiari Carlo Maggiore G.N. Sini Mauro Sub-Lieutenant Vascello Sella Gregorio wounded STOP  I reserve the right to communicate the number of casualties and wounded STOP  Submarine Sirena not currently in condition given number of personnel wounded to carry out mission alt».

June 1943

Last ambush mission in the Eastern Mediterranean.

June 7th, 1943

Sirena transported a load of spare parts for engines and various materials from Taranto to Leros. Also in June (it is not clear whether as part of the same mission in which it went from Taranto to Leros) Sirena would appear to have transported a cargo of supplies to the island of Lampedusa, subjected to a naval blockade by the Anglo-American forces, who would conquer it a few days later (June 12th, 1943). Together with the one carried out at the same time by the large minelayer submarine Atropo, also destined for Lampedusa (in total, the two submarines landed 49.6 tons of supplies on the island), this is the last transport mission carried out by an Italian submarine before the Armistice.

August 3rd, 1943

Serena left Leros for Naples, with orders to carry out a patrol of the waters between Ras el Tin and the Gulf of Sollum during the transfer navigation.

August 20th, 1943

After a mission tormented by breakdowns, the boat reached Naples.

August 21st, 1943

Sirena left Naples for La Spezia, where it had to undergo repair work.

August 25th, 1943

The submarine arrived in La Spezia, after making an intermediate stop in Portoferraio.

The end

On the date of the announcement of the armistice between Italy and the Allies, on September 8^th, 1943, Sirena (Lieutenant Vittorio Savarese) was part of the V Submarine Group of Leros (commander Virgilio Spigai), along with the similar boat Ametista (sub-lieutenant Luigi Ginocchio), Beilul (lieutenant Pasquale Beltrame) and Onice (lieutenant Ferdinando Boggetti). Like the other units of the Group, however, it was not in the Aegean at that time: it was in fact undergoing work in the shipyard of La Spezia.

At the beginning of August 1943, Supermarina had recalled Sirena to Italy, like the other submarines of the V Grupsom, the boat had left Leros on August 3rd bound for Naples, with orders to carry out, along the way, a patrol in the waters of Cyrenaica. The mission had been tormented by a long series of mechanical failures, which, however, had not prevented Sirena from carrying out the planned patrol of the Cyrenaic waters. On August 20^th, the submarine had reached Naples (according to a source of uncertain reliability, in the final part of the navigation it had crossed the Italian minefields until it emerged a few hundred meters from Punta Carena, on the island of Capri, making itself recognized by a battery with optical means as the radio was also broken). Since the damage suffered could not be repaired with the means available in Naples, the following day Sirena left for La Spezia, where it arrived on August 25th, after a stop in Portoferraio. It entered the shipyard to repair the damage but was surprised there a few days after the news of the armistice.

There were several units under maintenance or repair in the large La Spezia Arsenal in September 1943: among them, in addition to Sirena, the old light cruiser Taranto, three destroyers, five torpedo boats, two corvettes, three submarines and two minelayers, as well as numerous smaller and auxiliary ships.

The manoeuvres for the scuttling of Sirena were carried out by a small group of officers and sailors who had remained on board for this purpose, including the commander Savarese and the sailor helmsman Giuseppe Costanzo.

The wreck of Sirena was recovered in 1946. Formally removed from the roster of the no longer Royal Italian Navy on October 18th of that same year; it was scrapped in La Spezia.

Note: A member of the crew of Sirena, the 24-year-old stoker Alberto Morbin, from Cervignano del Friuli, appears to have died in Italy on November 24, 1946; it is included in the registers of the fallen and missing of the Navy of World War II. Based on this, it seems possible that his death was caused by after-effects of injuries sustained on duty on Sirena, but no information could be traced on the matter.

Original Italian text by Lorenzo Colombo adapted and translated by Cristiano D’Adamo

Operational Records

Type	Patrols (Med.)	Patrols (Other)	NM Surface	NM Sub.	Days at Sea	NM/Day	Average Speed
Submarine – Coastal	33		19,659	3,052	204	111.33	4.64

Actions

Date	Time	Captain	Area	Coordinates	Convoy	Weapon	Result	Ship	Type	Tonns	Flag
6/30/1940		T.V. Galletti	Mediterranean	37°54’N-18°04’E		Machine Gun	Failed	Sunderland “Q” 228th Squadron, L.5806	Aircraft	18	Great Britain

Crew Members Lost

Last Name	First Name	Rank	Italian Rank	Date

Uarsciek was an Adua-class coastal submarine (TN 600 series, Bernardis type) with a displacement of 698 tons on the surface, 866 tons submerged. Together with the twin boats Dagabur, Dessiè and Uebi Scebeli, it was powered by Tosi diesel engines, instead of FIAT or CRDA like the other submarines of the class. The electric motors were Marelli, as for most of the other “Adua” (except for the group built by CRDA).

Uarsciek a few moments before its launch, on September 19th, 1937; in the background you can see a Mameli-class submarine. Note the name still written on the hull in the original version of “Uarsheich”
(from “Sommergibili Italiani” by Alessandro Turrini and Ottorino Ottone Miozzi, USMM, Rome 1999)

During the conflict she carried out 28 war missions (19 patrols, 1 transport and 8 transfers), operating from the bases of Taranto, Leros, Augusta and Messina, covering a total of 19,685 miles on the surface and 3,926 submerged. Initially intended (1940-1941) for offensive patrols along the main British shipping lines in the central and eastern Mediterranean, in 1942 it was instead used in the western Mediterranean, to contrast British air and naval operations.

The launch of the submarine Uarsciek in Taranto on September 19th, 1937

Brief and partial chronology

December 2nd, 1936

Uarsciek was laid out in the Franco Tosi shipyards in Taranto.

September 19th, 1937

Uarsciek (construction number 68) was launched at the Franco Tosi shipyard in Taranto, and the Archbishop of Taranto (TN Monsignor Ferdinando Bernardi) blesses the new unit before the launch.

Uarsciek a few moments before its launch, on September 19, 1937; in the background you can see a Mameli-class submarine. Note the name still written on the hull in the original version of “Uarsheich” (from “Italian Submarines” by Alessandro Turrini and Ottorino Ottone Miozzi, USMM, Rome 1999, via www.betasom.it and via Marcello Risolo)

December 4th, 1937

The boat entered service as ‘Uarsheich’, the seventh unit of the Adua class to be completed. Initially assigned to Taranto as part of the IV Submarine Group.

March 15th, 1938

The name was changed to Uarsciek, a version considered more faithful to the original name of the Somali village after which the submarine was named (provision made official by royal decree no. 393 of March 31^st, 1938).

June 1938

The boat made a cruise in the Aegean Sea and was stationed in Leros.

1939

Stationed in Tobruk, Uarsciek made a cruise along the coast of Libya.

June 9th, 1940

On the eve of Italy’s entry into the war, Uarsciek was sent to lie in wait off the Greek-Albanian coast, along with the submarines Anfitrite, Antonio Sciesa and Balilla, forming a barrage of submarines along the coasts of Greece, Albania and Yugoslavia. Uarsciek, in particular, was sent to lie in wait south of Kefalonia, in order to keep under surveillance the accesses to the roadstead of Argostoli and the Gulf of Patras. At the end of the mission, the boat reached Taranto without having made any noteworthy sightings.

June 10th, 1940

Upon Italy’s entry into the World War II, Uarsciek (Lieutenant Carlo Zanchi) was part of the XLVI Submarine Squadron (IV Grupsom of Taranto), along with the twin boats Dagabur, Dessiè and Uebi Scebeli.

September 6th, 1940

Uarsciek left Taranto under the command of Lieutenant Carlo Zanchi, to carry out a patrol off the coast of Egypt. Along with Uarsciek, a second submarine, the Ondina, also took to the sea. The two boats, which set sail within four minutes of each other, and were both bound for North African waters, travelled together.

September 7th, 1940

Uarsciek was accidentally attacked with depth charges by the destroyer Granatiere, who had mistaken it for an enemy submarine. The attack did not cause damages, but it caused the boat to lag slightly behind schedule.

September 12th, 1940

At three o’clock in the morning (according to another source 3.27) the British submarine H.M.S. Proteus (Lieutenant Commander Randall Thomas Gordon-Duff) sighted “suspicious lights” in position 32°21′ N and 24°39′ E, on a 150° bearing, and approached to see what it was. After a while he sighted an Italian submarine surfaced and began an attack maneuver, but the latter dived before H.M.S. Proteus could launch. The H.M.S. Proteus then dove in turn and descended to 30 meters, attempting to conduct a submerged attack with the help of the sonar, but the Italian submarine passes on its vertical, which thwarted this intention.

At 4:16 AM, the British boat sighted another Italian submarine (40 miles east-northeast of Tobruk), pulled over toward it and immediately launched a torpedo from 1,370 meters, submerging immediately after. The torpedo missed its target, probably passing aft (it was heard exploding at the end of its run ten minutes later). It is probable that the target of this attack was Uarsciek (more likely, since due to the delay it had probably remained further behind the Ondina), or another Italian submarine sailing from Taranto to North African waters. The Ondina (which had departed from Taranto with an interval of only four minutes with respect to Uarsciek, and with the order to conduct an ambush in North African waters).  None of the boats appeared to have noticed the attacks.

Uarsciek then reaches the area assigned for the patrol and began its mission regularly.

September 19th, 1940

On this date, according to a source of uncertain reliability, Uarsciek unsuccessfully attacked two British destroyers off the coast of Tobruk, along with the submarines Ruggiero Settimo and Ondina, but no confirmation of this events has been found.

September 21st, 1940

Following mercury vapor poisoning of several crewmen, caused by an accident that occurred on board, Commander Zanchi aborted mission and the return to Taranto and decided instead to reach the nearest port Benghazi, where the entire crew disembarks and were hospitalized (including Zanchi himself, later decorated with the Silver Medal for Military Valor:  “Commander of a submarine, during a war mission, due to an accident that occurred to the unit, he was struck by serious intoxication. For more than five days, he overcame the sufferings caused by the disease with great fortitude, and by his example he encouraged the crew, who were also seriously intoxicated, and succeeded in carrying out his mission. As soon as he arrived in port, he had to be hospitalized. An example of dedication to duty, a high spirit of sacrifice“).

One of the intoxicated, nineteen-year-old Ermanno Tironi from Bergamo, died on October 5th in the Benghazi hospital. A Bronze Medal for Military Valor would be awarded in his memory, with the motivation “Embarked on a submarine, during a war mission, due to an accident that occurred to the unit he was struck by serious intoxication. Despite the suffering caused by the disease, he continued to carry out his service serenely with a high sense of duty for over five days, succeeding in setting an example to the other soldiers who were also seriously intoxicated. As soon as he arrived in port, he had to be hospitalized, where he died of aggravated intoxication. (Central Mediterranean, 7-22 September 1940)“.

The news of Ermanno Tironi’s death on the “Rivista di Bergamo”
(From Rinaldo Monella)

Other members of the intoxicated crew would have serious health problems for the rest of their lives, such as the sailor Luigi Bolognesi, who will not even be able to obtain compensation for what happened to him.

Uarsciek was then summarily put back into service with the means available on site and transferred to Italy under the command of Lieutenant Commander Mario Resio, assisted by Lieutenant Marcello Bertini, Lieutenant Lorenzo Coniglione, chief electrician first class Angelo Pilon and chief mechanic first class Catello Primo Gargiulo.  They were in turn intoxicated by mercury during this transfer, and decorated for their work with the War Cross of Military Valor (for Resio, the motivation was: “He organized and directed at a naval base the reclamation and re-efficiency works of a submarine polluted by mercury vapors, overcoming with serene firmness continuous and harsh difficulties of a technical nature worsened by frequent enemy aerial bombardments. Once this task was completed, he managed to transfer the unit to his Command in a national base, although he was struck during the mission by mercurial gas poisoning”; for the others, “He participated with enthusiasm and a keen sense of duty at the naval base of the A. .ai reclamation and rehabilitation of a submarine polluted by mercury vapour, despite technical difficulties and continuous enemy bombing; embarked on the unit, contributed to its transfer to a national base, during which he was struck by mercurial gas poisoning”).

November 11^th through 12th, 1940

Uarsciek was in Taranto, moored at the submarine quay in Mar Piccolo (along with numerous other boats of the IV Submarine Group: Pietro Micca, Ambra, Anfitrite, Malachite, Naiade, Nereide, Ondina, Sirena, Atropo and Zoea, as well as at Dagabur, Serpente and Smeraldo of the X Grupsom, Giovanni Da Procida of III Grupsom and Ciro Menotti of VIII Grupsom), when the base was attacked by British torpedo bombers that sank the battleship Conte di Cavour and seriously damaged two others, Littorio and Duilio (the famous “night of Taranto”). The submarines are not affected by the attack.

Uarsciek in1940
(Erminio Bagnasco)

January 1st, 1941

Lieutenant Alberto Campanella took command of Uarsciek and held it for the next six months.

January 31^st through -February 12th, 1941

Uarsciek carried out a patrol in the Otranto Channel to protect the traffic between Italy and Albania, without sighting enemy ships.

March 6^th through 18^th, 1941

Another patrol south of the Otranto Channel, off the Ionian Islands, to protect convoys sailing between Italy and Albania.

April 21^st thought 30th, 1941

Third and final protective patrol near the Otranto Channel to defend convoys between Italy and Albania.

May 19^th through June 2^nd, 1941

The boat was part of a group of submarines (the others were Fisalia, Topazio, Malachite, Adua, Tricheco, Squalo, Smeraldo, Dessiè and Sirena) deployed in the waters between Crete, Alexandria and Sollum, in support of the German invasion of Crete. Uarsciek, in particular, patroled the Cyrenaic-Egyptian waters (according to Aldo Cocchia’s memoirs, in this mission Uarsciek attacked a British cruiser south of Crete, believing it to have torpedoed it).

June 17th, 1941

Lieutenant Alberto Campanella leaves the command of Uarsciek, passing to the minelayer submarine Zoea. He was replaced by Lieutenant Raffaello Allegri, who would command Uarsciek for a year.

June 1941

Patrol between Tobruk and Alexandria.

July 19^th through 31st, 1941

Uarsciek was sent on patrol off Alexandria, Egypt, along with the submarines Squalo and Axum.

July 29th, 1941

At 4:30 PM, Uarsciek (Lieutenant Raffaello Allegri), on a mission in the eastern Mediterranean off the Egyptian coast, was attacked north of Ras Haleima (in position 31°38′ N and 25°54′ E) by a Bristol Blenheim bomber of the 203rd Squadron of the Royal Air Force,  aircraft “Y”/Z6445 piloted by Lieutenant Coates, which dropped four bombs which fell into the sea about 150 meters aft of the submarine. Uarsciek reacted with machine-gun fire. At 5:45 PM, the submarine suffered a second attack by another Blenheim IV of the 203rd Squadron, aircraft “N”/Z6431 piloted by Sergeant E. Langston, which dropped six bombs that fell into the sea about 200 meters forward of Uarsciek. Once again, the submarine responds with machine gun fire. Langston’s plane, on its return to its base near Marsa Matruh, would be irreparably damaged following the failure of the landing gear, although the crew emerged unscathed. According to British sources, however, the damage was not caused by Uarsciek’s gunfire, which did not hit the plane (except for the book “The Bristol Blenheim” by Graham Warner, which instead states that the plane was damaged by the submarine’s fire).

August 11th, 1941

At 18.25 Uarsciek, while returning from Bardia, was strafed by an unidentified aircraft in position 34°05′ N and 22°20′ E. The under-helmsman Salvatore Bortone, from Diso, was seriously wounded (he was later decorated with the War Cross for Military Valor, with the motivation: “Embarked on a submarine subjected to violent air attack, although wounded he continued to carry out his task as a machine gun supplier with serene firmness, demonstrating a high sense of duty”). At some point, however, the attacking aircraft makes the German Air Corps recognition signal and left. It was, therefore, a “friendly fire” incident: a Luftwaffe plane had mistaken Uarsciek for an enemy submarine.

October 15th, 1941

The boat was sent to lie in wait off the coast of Cyrenaica.

1941

Uarsciek underwent a period of maintenance work in the Pula shipyards, after which it was deployed to Messina and then to Cagliari, from where it operated against the British ships that tried to supply Malta from Gibraltar.

Uarsciek moored in Taranto in December 1941
(from “Sommergibili in guerra” by Achille Rastelli and Erminio Bagnasco)

March 1942

Sent east of Malta along with other submarines (Corallo, Admiral Millo, Onice and Veniero), to protect operation “V. 5” (March 7^th thought 9th). The latter provides for the dispatch to Tripoli of three convoys from Brindisi, Messina and Naples, with a total of four modern motor ships (Nino Bixio, Gino Allegri, Reginaldo Giuliani and Monreale) escorted by the destroyers Bersagliere, Fuciliere, Ugolino Vivaldi, Antonio Pigafetta and Antonio Da Noli and by the torpedo boats Castore and Arethusa, as well as the indirect escort of the VII Cruiser Division (light cruisers Eugenio di Savoia,  Raimondo Montecuccoli and Giuseppe Garibaldi) and the destroyers Alfredo Oriani, Ascari, Aviere, Geniere and Scirocco. Another convoy of modern motor ships (Unione, Lerici, Ravello and the tanker Giulio Giordani, escorted by the torpedo boats Cigno and Procione and the destroyer Strale which will then be joined by Pigafetta and Scirocco) returning from Libya to Italy, will also be at sea for the same operation, which also benefited from the indirect escort of the VII Division.

The intervention of submarines would not be necessary; the operation ended without losses, despite repeated air attacks (while a British light formation, which had gone out to sea to attack the convoy, suffered the loss of the light cruiser Naiad, sunk by the German submarine U 565).

April 1942

At the end of the the month, Uarsciek patrolled the waters off Cyrenaica.

May 1942

Patrol in the waters of the Strait of Sicily and Tunisia.

Mid-June 1942

Uarsciek (Lieutenant Commander Raffaello Allegri) was sent to lie in wait in the Gulf of Philippeville during the air-naval battle of Mid-June, to counter the British operation “Harpoon”, consisting of sending a heavily escorted convoy from Gibraltar to Malta.

After an earlier supply operation in Malta in March 1942 (which resulted in the inconclusive naval clash of the Second Battle of Sirte) ended with the loss of 24,000 of the 25,000 tons of supplies sent by air, Malta’s situation became very critical: food rationing had to be introduced in May  and the calories supplied daily to the garrison were halved (from 4,000 to 2,000) while for the civilian population the reduction was even more marked (1,500 calories).

The British commands, therefore, planned for mid-June a double resupply operation, divided into two sub-operations: “Harpoon”, with a convoy departing from Gibraltar, and “Vigorous”, departing from Alexandria. The latter consists of sending a convoy of eleven merchant ships, escorted by seven light cruisers, an anti-aircraft cruiser, 26 destroyers, 4 corvettes, 2 minesweepers, 4 motor torpedo boats and 2 rescue ships, in addition to the old target ship Centurion, a former battleship disguised again, for the occasion, as a battleship in an attempt – failed – to make Italian reconnaissance believe that the escort also includes a battleship. The bulk of the Italian battle fleet, under the command of Admiral Angelo Iachino, took to the sea against “Vigorous”.

The convoy of Operation “Harpoon”, which departed from Gibraltar on June 12th, consisted of 6 merchant ships: the British steamers Burdwan, Orari and Troilus, the Dutch motor ship Tanimbar, the US motor ship Chant and the brand new US tanker Kentucky, which carry a total of 43,000 tons of supplies. The direct escort of the convoy, designated Force X, consists of the anti-aircraft cruiser H.M.S. Cairo (Captain Cecil Campbell Hardy, commander of Force X), the destroyers H.M.S. Bedouin, H.M.S. Marne, H.M.S. Matchless, H.M.S. Ithuriel and H.M.S. Partridge (belonging to the 11th Destroyer Flotilla), the escort destroyers (Hunt class) H.M.S. Blankney, H.M.S. Badsworth, H.M.S.  Middleton and Kujawiak (belonging to the 19th Destroyer Flotilla), the minesweepers H.M.S. Hebe,  H.M.S. Speedy, H.M.S. Hythe and H.M.S. Rye and 6 “motor launches” used for dredging (ML-121, ML-134, ML-135, ML-168, ML-459, ML-462). All the units of the escort were British with the exception of the Kujawiak, which was Polish.

In addition to the direct escort, in the first leg of the navigation (from Gibraltar to just before the entrance to the Strait of Sicily) the convoy was also accompanied by a powerful covering force, Force W of Vice Admiral Alban Curteis: it was composed of the battleship H.M.S. Malaya, the aircraft carriers H.M.S. Eagle and H.M.S. Argus, the light cruisers H.M.S. Kenya (Curteis’ flagship),  H.M.S. Charybdis and H.M.S. Liverpool and the destroyers H.M.S. Onslow, H.M.S. Icarus, H.M.S. Escapade, H.M.S. Wishart, H.M.S. Antelope, H.M.S. Westcott, H.M.S. Wrestler and H.M.S. Vidette.

According to an article by Enrico Cernuschi, Supermarina was alerted by the Navy’s Information Department as early as the morning of June 11th, following decryptions of British communications and direction finding from which it emerges that a British convoy bound for Malta was preparing to enter the Mediterranean from the Strait of Gibraltar. These were followed by reports from Italian observers stationed in Algeciras (near Gibraltar) and from Italian spies operating on Spanish fishing boats sailing in those waters. Finally, at one o’clock in the afternoon of June 12th, aerial reconnaissance dispelled all doubts.

According to the official history of the U.S.M.M., however, Supermarina received the first news of “Harpoon” at 7.55 AM on June 12th, when informants based in the Gibraltar area reported the departure from Gibraltar of a powerful naval squadron composed of H.M.S. Malaya, H.M.S. Eagle, H.M.S. Argus, at least three cruisers and several destroyers (Force W), heading east, as well as the passage through the strait,  with the lights off, of numerous ships coming from the Atlantic.

The Italian Navy Command has correctly assumed that a large convoy from the Atlantic was therefore sailing from Gibraltar to Malta, an impression confirmed by the subsequent sightings of aerial reconnaissance (although the possibility that it was instead an operation directed against North Africa, Corsica, Sardinia or the Gulf of Genoa was not completely excluded, eventualities, however, considered unlikely). To counter this convoy, Supermarina developed a plan that included sending a large deployment of submarines to the western Mediterranean, the deployment of torpedo boats and MAS lurking in the Strait of Sicily, cooperation with the Regia Aeronautica so that the convoy would be heavily attacked by aircraft south of Sardinia, weakening its escort, and the dispatch of a light naval formation (the VII Division of Admiral Alberto Da Zara, with the cruisers Eugenio di Savoia and Raimondo Montecuccoli and two squadrons of destroyers), particularly suitable for combat in circumscribed and treacherous waters, to attack the convoy by surprise at dawn on the 15th.

A total of 16 boats were deployed in the central and central-western Mediterranean to counter “Harpoon”. The doctrine of the use of submarines has changed compared to the past. Now it was planned to use them en masse against ships or groups of ships sighted and reported by aircraft. Uarsciek, along with the submarines Giada, Acciaio and Otaria, formed a barrier north of the Algerian coast, in the waters between Cape Bougaroni and Cape Ferrat. Uarsciek and Giada were located at the western end of the weir. While in mid-August, two months later, this tactic was very successful, in mid-June the submarines did not reap any results.

June 13th, 1942

In the late evening, 90 miles north of Bougie and east of Algiers (in position 38°02′ N and 05°06′ E), Uarsciek sighted a British naval formation composed of numerous units proceeding eastwards in several columns: these are the forces engaged in Operation “Harpoon” (according to a source it would have been, more precisely, Force X,  but this seems unlikely, since Force X did not include any aircraft carriers; Francesco Mattesini, on the other hand, speaks more generically of Force T, i.e. the complex of Forces W and X – not yet separated, at the time of the attack – which also included the aircraft carriers Eagle and Argus). Remaining on the surface, the Italian submarine approached to attack, and at 23:52 launched three torpedoes against the two largest silhouettes it could see. Not distinguishing superstructures, Commander Allegri believes that these are aircraft carriers.

Immediately after the launch, some escort units pull in the direction of Uarsciek, which is thus forced to disengage from diving without being able to verify the outcome of the launches. After 135 seconds from the launch, a loud explosion is heard on Uarsciek (according to other sources two or three would have been heard), which leads to believe that a torpedo was certainly landed, but in reality the torpedoes exploded prematurely; On the British side, in fact, the aircraft carrier Eagle felt two loud underwater explosions at 2.55 AM (for another source, the official British report states only that “at 1.42 AM the naval force was probably sighted and reported by a submarine”, and the explosions heard on board Uarsciek could be due to depth charges). After about twenty minutes, Uarsciek noticed that two British destroyers were stationed in its vicinity, one stationary and one moving slowly.

Italian informants in Gibraltar will later report that in this action Uarsciek probably damaged the fast minelayer Welshman (and Commander Allegri will be decorated with the Silver Medal for Military Valor, with the motivation “Commander of a submarine, on a war mission, he sighted an enemy naval formation at night, attacked it with a decisive aggressive spirit and high skill and, having passed the protection escort,  It hit her with two torpedoes, inflicting severe damage. Subjected to violent hunting, with prompt maneuvering he managed to elude it, demonstrating during the mission serene daring and conspicuous military skills”), but this is incorrect information: neither the Welshman, nor any other British ship was hit by torpedoes.

June 14th, 1942

At 1:40 AM, when the attack was over, Uarsciek sent the enemy formation discover signal the. (Giorgio Giorgerini, in his book “Uomini sul fondo”, gives different times for this attack: the sighting of the British forces by Uarsciek took place at 1.40 AM on June 14th, and the launch of the torpedoes at 1.52 AM In addition, Giorgerini claims that the launch took place against two units of the escort. Francesco Mattesini, in one of his essays on the “Pedestal” operation, indicates 1.20 AM as the time of the torpedo launch).

The unsuccessful attack by Uarsciek is the first ever launched against the “Harpoon” convoy during the Battle of Mid-June. All attacks by Italian submarines in the course of the battle were equally unsuccessful. The convoy, on the other hand, suffered serious losses due to the joint action of the Italian-German planes and the VII Naval Division of Admiral Alberto Da Zara, to which were later added those caused by minefields. A total of four merchant ships and two destroyers sank, while several other units suffered serious damage. Of the 43,000 tons of supplies carried by the ships of “Harpoon”, only 15,000 reached Malta (while the convoy “Vigorous”, with its 50,000 tons of supply, would be forced to give up its mission and return to Alexandria).

June 15th, 1942

Around nine o’clock in the morning, northwest of Cape Bougaroni, Uarsciek sighted the British W Force (aircraft carriers H.M.S. Eagle and H.M.S. Argus, battleship H.M.S. Malaya, cruisers H.M.S. Kenya and H.M.S. Charybdis – a third cruiser, H.M.S. Liverpool, left the formation after being hit by Italian torpedo bombers –, destroyers H.M.S. Antelope, H.M.S. Icarus, H.M.S. Escapade, H.M.S. Onslow, H.M.S. Westcott, H.M.S. Wishart, H.M.S. Wrestler, and H.M.S. Vidette) sailing towards Gibraltar. This formation, in charge of covering the convoy in the first phase of the navigation, reversed course at the entrance to the Strait of Sicily, at 8.30 PM the previous evening, allowing the convoy to continue towards Malta with the direct escort of Force X (anti-aircraft cruiser H.M.S. Cairo, 9 destroyers, 4 destroyers and some smaller units), and was then returning to Gibraltar at 16 knots. Force W arrived without suffering further losses, despite unsuccessful attacks by the submarine Alagi and the Italian-German air force.

June 17th, 1942

At 2.45 PM, during the return navigation to Cagliari, Uarsciek was sighted in position 38°27′ N and 08°21′ E by the British submarine P 211 (later Safari, Commander Benjamin Bryant). The latter tried to approach and attack, but Uarsciek, continuing its course without realizing it, continued moving away and was soon too far away to hope for a hit it.

June 21st, 1942

Lieutenant Gaetano Arezzo della Targia took command of Uarsciek, alternating with Commander Allegri; he would be his last commander. Under his command, Uarsciek carried out seven missions in the central Mediterranean between June and December 1942.

Picture of Lieutenant Gaetano Arezzo della Targia
(TN Barons Arezzo della Targia where a noble family from Catania, Sicily)

End of June 1942

Uarsciek carries out a new mission in the Western Mediterranean.

August 4th, 1942

Uarsciek (under the command of Lieutenant Gaetano Arezzo della Targia, and with the captain of the Naval Engineers Arturo Cristini as chief engineer), was part of the VII Grupsom of Cagliari. It sailed from La Maddalena bound for a patrol sector located halfway between Menorca – Formentera and the coast of Algeria.

August 7th, 1942

Uarsciek reaches its field of operations.

August 10th, 1942

The boat received a telegram from the Submarine Squadron Command (Maricosom) alerting to the passage of the “Pedestal” convoy, which had already been announced by faint and indistinct noises picked up by Uarsciek hydrophones.

The Battle of Mid-August was about to begin: the largest air-naval clash ever fought in the Mediterranean would see the air and naval forces of the Axis – bombers, torpedo bombers, submarines, motor torpedo boats, with even an ephemeral offensive bet by two cruiser divisions – fiercely oppose the transfer of a large British convoy sailing from Gibraltar to Malta,  with a supply shipment vital to prolonging the resistance of the besieged island.

The Italian and German submarines would play a leading role in this: their task was twofold: to attack the convoy directly and – since experience has shown that too often reconnaissance aircraft are intercepted and shot down by fighters embarked on aircraft carriers before they can carry out their task – to allow the commanders to have reliable information about the composition enemy formation, course and speed, which were essential for coordinating the action of the air and naval forces destined to attack the convoy, especially the air forces.

In fact, on August 10th, Supermarina ordered Uarsciek and the other submarines lurking in its area (Brin, Giada, Dagabur, Volframio, U 73 and U 331) to consider the reconnaissance and signalling of the enemy forces sighted as their primary task, and only an attack secondary.

The Battle of Mid-August was the consequence of the Royal Navy’s new attempt to supply Malta, besieged by Axis air and naval forces and exhausted after months of bombing and the partial or total failure of the refueling operations attempted in March (convoy “M.W. 10”, culminating in the second battle of Sirte) and June (operations “Harpoon” and “Vigorous”, culminating in the Battle of Mid-June). The new operation, called “Pedestal”, involves a single large convoy which, assembled in the United Kingdom (from where it departed on August 3^rd, 1942), crossed the Strait of Gibraltar between August 9th and 10th, and then headed for Malta.

The convoy consisted of the cargo ships Almeria Lykes, Melbourne Star, Brisbane Star, Clan Ferguson, Dorset, Deucalion, Wairangi, Waimarama, Glenorchy, Port Chalmers, Empire Hope, Rochester Castle and Santa Elisa and a large tanker, the American Ohio; the direct escort (Force X, Rear Admiral Harold Burrough) counted on four light cruisers (H.M.S. Nigeria, H.M.S. Kenya, H.M.S. Cairo and H.M.S. Manchester) and twelve destroyers (H.M.S. Ashanti, H.M.S. Intrepid, H.M.S. Icarus, H.M.S. Foresight, H.M.S. Derwent, H.M.S. Fury, H.M.S. Bramham, H.M.S. Bicester, H.M.S. Wilton, H.M.S. Ledbury, H.M.S. Penn and H.M.S. Pathfinder, of the 6th Destroyer Flotilla), and also in the first half of the voyage, up to the entrance of the Strait of Sicily, the convoy was accompanied by a powerful heavy force (Force Z,  Vice-Admiral Neville Syfret) consisting of four aircraft carriers (H.M.S. Eagle, H.M.S. Furious, H.M.S. Indomitable and H.M.S. Victorious), two battleships (H.M.S. Rodney and H.M.S. Nelson), three light cruisers (H.M.S. Sirius, H.M.S. Phoebe and H.M.S. Charybdis) and twelve destroyers (H.M.S. Laforey, H.M.S. Lightning, H.M.S. Lookout, H.M.S. Tartar, H.M.S. Quentin, H.M.S. Somali, H.M.S. Eskimo, H.M.S. Wishart, H.M.S. Zetland, H.M.S.  Ithuriel, H.M.S. Antelope and H.M.S. Vantsittart, of the 19th Destroyer Flotilla).

For their part, the Italian commanders received the first news about a major operation being prepared by the British, which was to take place in the Western Mediterranean, in the early days of August. At 5 AM on August 9th, Supermarina was informed that a group of at least eight ships had passed north of Ceuta, heading east (it was British Force B). In the early hours of the morning of the following day, news came that between 00:30 and 2:00 AM on the 10th, a total of 39 ships crossed the Strait of Gibraltar bound for the Mediterranean, and that a few hours later a dozen British ships set sail from Gibraltar, including the anti-aircraft cruiser H.M.S. Cairo. On the morning of August 10th, therefore, on the basis of the information received thus far, Supermarina estimated that at least 57 British ships from Gibraltar were heading east. As these ships include a number of large steamers in convoy, it was rightly assumed that the object of the operation was to supply Malta. The convoy would be protected by a powerful heavy naval force, and the convoy will probably try to cross the Pantelleria area under cover of darkness. The convoy was expected to arrive at Cape Bon (Tunisia) in the afternoon of August 12th. There did not appear to be any signs of a second convoy sailing in the Eastern Mediterranean, unlike what happened in June. On the morning of the 12th, a German U-boat reported in those waters a formation of four light cruisers and 10 destroyers apparently heading towards Malta at 20 knots, but it was rightly judged that this was a diversionary action (and in fact it was so: the “M.G.3” operation, a secondary operation of “Pedestal”, in fact provided for the dispatch from Haifa and Port Said of a small convoy that had to pretend to be headed towards Malta in the attempt to divert Italian forces from the actual convoy).

The Italian and German commands therefore organized the fight against the British operation: aerial reconnaissance throughout the western Mediterranean basin; warning of submarines already lurking south of the Balearic Islands, dispatch of a second group of submarines south of Sardinia (where they had to arrive no later than dawn on the 12th), laying of new offensive minefields in the Strait of Sicily, dispatch of MAS and motor torpedo boats lurking south of Marettimo, off Cape Bon and if necessary also below Pantelleria.

While sailing in the western and central-western Mediterranean, the British convoy would be subjected to a series of submarine attacks. Once in the Strait of Sicily, it would be the turn of MAS and Italian and German motor torpedo boats (fifteen units in all, which will attack under cover of darkness). Throughout the crossing, moreover, the enemy ships will be continuously targeted by incessant attacks by bombers and torpedo bombers (in all, as many as 784 aircraft), both of the Regia Aeronautica and of the Luftwaffe. It is also planned the intervention (later aborted) of two cruiser divisions (the III and the VII) to finish what should remain of the convoy decimated by the previous air, underwater and insidious attacks.

Altogether, as many as 16 Italian submarines and 2 German U-boats contribute to the formation of a powerful submarine barrage in the western Mediterranean: seven of them, including Uarsciek (which was the westernmost of all; the others are the Italian Brin, Giada, Dagabur and Volframio and the German U 73 and U 205), were located in the waters between Algeria and the Balearic Islands.  forming a sixty-mile-long barrier between the meridians 01°40′ E and 02°40′ E (i.e., north of Algiers and south of the channel between Mallorca and Ibiza), while the other eleven form a second group much further east, north of Tunisia.

At 11:20 PM, Uarsciek headed towards the center of the assigned ambush area, assuming a 160° course, which coincidentally happened to be perpendicular to the hydrophone survey carried out at 9:56 PM

August 11th, 1942

At 3.40 AM, Uarsciek, having entered the indicated area, dove to make a new hydrophonic listening; as predicted by Commander Arezzo, the hydrophones detect noises of turbines approaching in a large sector on 267° detection, force 4. At four o’clock the submarine emerged and after a few minutes began to move westwards, but without advancing at full strength: the captain intends to avoid generating a wake that would be too visible. Visibility was rather mediocre, which suggested that the sighting of enemy ships would take place at close range.

At 4.38 AM the aspiring midshipman Francesco Florio, on the lookout forward portside, announced the sighting of a dark silhouette for 340°-350°, at 3,200 meters. Upon observing it, the commander Arezzo della Targia immediately recognized it as an aircraft carrier, later identified as a U.S. unit of the Saratoga type.

It was the British H.M.S. Furious, headed south of the Balearic Islands to launch 39 Supermarine Spitfire fighters that would reinforce the decimated squadrons of Malta during “Pedestal”. This sub-operation was named ‘Bellows’. The inclusion of the old Furious in the operation was decided in the final stages of planning for “Pedestal”, after the commands of the Maltese Air Force asked to replenish their fighter squadrons, which have suffered serious losses in recent times (quantified at an average of 17 aircraft per week). The Chief of Staff of the Royal Air Force, Air Marshal Charles F. A. Portal therefore asked his Royal Navy colleague to provide another aircraft carrier to send 71 Spitfire fighters to Malta. In response to this need, Operations “Bellows” and “Baritone” were decided: it was planned that the Furious would first embark a first group of 39 Spitfires before leaving Great Britain and will be attached to convoy W.S.21S (i.e. that of “Pedestal”) to Algiers, where it would launch the Spitfires at 1 PM on August 11th (and this is “Bellows”). Then, it would return to Gibraltar, load another 32 Spitfires (sent from England on the steamship Empire Clive) and go out to sea again to launch them as well (Operation “Baritone”). The Spitfires would fly to Malta, where they would land at three different air bases. Eight destroyers based in Gibraltar, part of the reserve escort group, were made available to escort the Furious during her return voyage to Gibraltar: H.M.S. Keppel (Commander John Egerton Broome), H.M.S. Malcolm, H.M.S. Amazon, H.M.S. Venomous, H.M.S. Wolverine, H.M.S. Wrestler, H.M.S. Westcott, and H.M.S. Vidette. The latter, having set sail from Gibraltar, would join the H.M.S. Furious after escorting Force R to a predetermined point south of Mallorca, consisting of two tankers (Brown Ranger and Dingledale, which departed Gibraltar on August 9th) in charge of refueling the cruisers and destroyers escorting the convoy at sea.

H.M.S. Furious loaded the 39 Spitfires onto the Clyde, UK, from where she departed on August 4^th along with the light cruiser H.M.S. Manchester and the destroyers H.M.S. Sardonyx (which left the group on the night of August 5th-6th) and Blyskawica (the latter Polish). On August 7th, H.M.S. Furious and H.M.S. Manchester joined convoy WS.21S, with which they crossed the Strait of Gibraltar on August 10th (H.M.S. Furious was to accompany the convoy only for the distance necessary to reach “flight” range from Malta). The following day, H.M.S. Furious, escorted by the destroyers H.M.S. Lookout and H.M.S. Lightning, separated from the main group and moved to a predetermined point south of the Balearic Islands, about 584 (or 550, or 635) miles west of Malta, where she launched her spitfires in the early afternoon of August 11th. It was precisely as the Furious was heading towards this point south of the Balearic Islands that it was spotted by Uarsciek.

Estimating the beta (which was 30°, portside, with alpha of 330°), Arezzo estimated the course of the British ship as 90°, opposite to that of Uarsciek, which was 270°. Considering the relative approach speed of 25-27 knots (the speed of Uarsciek was 9 knots, that of the aircraft carrier was estimated at 18), it made the decision to enter the launch circle with an attack course, remaining on the surface, to launch its torpedoes immediately.

In the meantime, other ships were sighted: a battleship, on alpha about 0° and beta 0°, and a smaller unit a little further to starboard. The sighting of the battleship allowed the crew to better appreciate the route of the enemy formation, which appeared to be sailing in the detection line. Deciding to attack the aircraft carrier, commander Arezzo della Targia had to find himself across the battleship. Preparing to attack, he ordered the helmsman to come 190°, and provided the launch chamber with torpedo angle data.

At 4:42 AM, in position 37°52′ N and 01°48′ E (approximately in the northwestern corner of the patrol sector south of Ibiza and Mallorca), from a distance of about 1,000 meters, Uarsciek launched two torpedoes at the Furious (another version mistakenly speaks of three torpedoes), from tubes 3 and 4, with alpha 5°, beta 80° to the left,  20° range to the left, angle of impact calculated as 105°, aiming angle of 25° and correction for parallax of 50 meters. There was a light east-southeast wind with force 2, the sea was calm (force 1-2), visibility poor.

The wake of the torpedoes was immediately very visible: from aboard Uarsciek a light signal was seen on the aircraft carrier, which it was believed to have sounded the alarm after having sighted the torpedoes. Another torpedo, 450 mm, was ready on board Uarsciek, but the commander decided to dive without launching it since the enemy battleship was at almost 800-900 meters away and considering it more important – as ordered by Supermarina – to launch the detection signal to allow the other submarines to attack. He orders the crash dive and as soon as he descended into the control room, he heard two muffled explosions, at very short intervals from each other, about 50 seconds after the launches.

At 4:47 AM the first discharge of depth charges was heard, extremely violent (probably a very large cluster). Uarsciek remained at a depth of 80 meters, following the action of the destroyers on the hydrophones. The bulk of the British line-up, meanwhile, appeared to have come to a standstill. At 4:55 AM, a second discharge of depth charges was heard, also extremely violent; two minutes later another one followed, very close, which causes some minor damage and causes Uarsciek to descend to a depth of 96 meters. At 5:04 AM, more violent explosions were heard; At 5:10 AM a new, violent discharge of depth charges, which, however, seems to be farther away than those that preceded it.

From the hydrophone measurements, the aircraft carrier seems to be stationary, while the destroyers feel moving. At 5:33 AM the aircraft carrier was heard starting again, and at 5:58 AM it was detected moving away for 53° (its bearing gradually widened, passing from 53° to 58°, 62°, 67°, 76° and 81°). At 6:56 AM, the hydrophones no longer perceived any sound of the aircraft carrier, which had now moved away, while the destroyers were clearly perceived from within hull. They continued to cross on the vertical of Uarsciek, passing over it, stopping and then starting again. But the launch of depth charges appeared to have stopped. During the whole hunt, the characteristic noises of the asdic was not heard.

Commander Arezzo got the impression that the research was being conducted with hydrophones. Finally, the destroyers also left and at 9:37 AM all sound sources were moving away in different directions, and at 9:39 AM Uarsciek was finally able to surface, about sixty miles south of Ibiza, and launch the discovery and torpedoing signal, communicating the composition, course and speed of the enemy formation.

At 10:55 AM, Admiral Syfret, on board the battleship H.M.S. Nelson, would be informed by the British intelligence service, via Malta, of the interception of an enemy detection signal relating to Force F (i.e. the set of naval forces at sea for “Pedestal”), sent a few hours earlier (6:20 AM according to a source, but the time zone is not very clear): it was the one sent by Uarsciek.

Uarsciek, the westernmost boat of the entire Italian-German submarine line-up, was the first Axis submarine to come into contact with British forces during the Battle of Mid-August. Its attack was unsuccessful, but its action was of great importance on a strategic level, because thanks to its signal of discovery, received by Rome at 10.25 AM, Supermarina had for the first time reliable information on the position and speed of the British naval forces after their entry into the Mediterranean, which had taken place almost twenty-four hours earlier.

On the Italian side, based on the explosions heard by Uarsciek after the launches, it would be mistakenly believed that the torpedoes launched by the submarine had hit H.M.S. Furious, damaging it and forcing it to return to Gibraltar. This claim was in fact announced in bulletin no. 806 of the Supreme Command, issued on August 12 (“In the western Mediterranean one of our submarines attacked, at dawn yesterday, a large warship of an unspecified type heavily escorted, hitting it with two torpedoes“) and then further clarified in bulletin no. 809 of 14 August (“The aircraft carrier ship hit on the 11th by the submarine Uarsciek and returned damaged to Gibraltar,  it’s the Furious“).

According to British sources, Uarsciek attack was not noticed by British ships. The first submarine activity detected by them was noticed only at 8.15 AM that day, when the corvette H.M.S. Coltsfoot (Lieutenant K. W. Rous), part of the escort of Force R, sighted and reported two “dolphining” torpedoes, i.e. surfacing on the water, which passed quite far away, in position 37°56′ N and 01°40′ E. This is indeed rather strange, considering that Uarsciek report shows that the submarine was hunted with depth charges after the torpedoes were launched, which would assume that the enemy ships were at least aware of the attack. On the other hand, the essay “Operation Pedestal” by the historian Francesco Mattesini shows that at about five o’clock in the morning the British corvette H.M.S. Jonquil (Lieutenant Commander Robert Edward Heap Partington), also part of the escort of Force R but at that moment intent on maneuvering independently, heard the explosions of what were believed to be four depth charges.

However, the alarm was not raised. As for the sighting of two torpedoes by H.M.S. Coltsfoot, in a position very close to that of Uarsciek attack but four hours apart (at a place and time when there is no record of any attack by Italian or German submarines), the official history of the U.S.M.M. comments: “They could have been two of those launched by the submarine [Uarsciek] and that,  due to the irregular operation of the self-sinking device, had remained afloat: this consideration is ours and can only have the value of a more or less reliable hypothesis”.

A little less than an hour after surfacing, Uarsciek sighted in position 38°01′ N and 01°38′ E an aircraft flying at medium altitude with a course of 45°, which led Uarsciek to return to the depths at 10.32 AM. Commander Arezzo believed that he has not been sighted, but in application of the circular A1/SRP of Maricosom (containing the general rules for submarines on war missions) he nevertheless decides to temporarily leave the area and go to Formentera, where he hoped to be able to intercept some returning enemy ships en route to Cape Palos.

At 12:18 PM, Uarsciek emerged and continued in the direction of Formentera, sailing on the surface, and at 2:05 PM sighted portside, in position 38°08′ N and 01°32′ E, a Fairey Swordfish biplane (in the report it is referred to as “a biplane of the Swordfish or Farei type for aircraft carriers“) approaching with an attack course. Although he did not consider him a very dangerous adversary, commander Arezzo della Targia decided to dive anyway because at 10.25 PM he received a signal of discovery relating to an aircraft carrier off the Balearic Islands. Immediately after diving, the crew of Uarsciek heard the explosion of two small-caliber bombs. Submerged navigation continued until 8.59 PM, when the submarine resurfaced and began to cross off the coast of Formentera.

August 12th, 1942

At 1.50 AM Uarsciek dove briefly to perform hydrophonic listening. The hydrophones detected a rather uncertain source for 312°, and considering the direction of the sound, Commander Arezzo deduces that they must be neutral merchant ships. Back on the surface, the submarine dove again at 6:05 AM to begin approaching the assigned area. Depth charges and explosions of aircraft bombs were heard several times, at varying distances; on board they were interpreted as a sign of the attacks in progress against the British convoy by Italian-German submarines and aircraft.

At 1:32 PM, Uarsciek’s hydrophones detected a turbine noise of 188°. The bearing then changes to 198°, 218° and 240°, after which it gradually decreases, while the intensity (1-2) remains constant. The submarine followed the source of this noise for a long time, at the same time exploring the horizon with its periscope. Then, at 3:20 PM, it emerged approaching the noise on the surface. Twenty minutes later a column of water four- or five-meters high was sighted, approximately two-quarters aft of the starboard beam, but no sound of an explosion was heard. Commander Arezzo also got the impression that it was a bomb dropped from a plane very high on the horizon, or the explosion of an electric torpedo, so he decides to dive to continue the hunt underwater. The hydrophones continued to signal a source with constant force (2-3) and variable direction between 180° and 240°. Believing that it was a destroyer or a submarine destroyer that sweeping on patrol ahead of some larger ship, Arezzo ordered to assume a course of 210°, equal to the average bearing. Uarsciek continued on this course throughout the afternoon, continuing to hear the source on the hydrophones, but without being able to spot anything.

At 8.13 Pm the boat was ordered by Maricosom to move to a new sector, so Arezzo decided to interrupt once and for all the fruitless chase of the ship that was producing the noise. At 7 PM, in fact, the Command of the Submarine Squadron issued orders for Uarsciek, Dagabur, Brin and Volframio to move westwards, at the same time informing them that a part of the British ships (the heavy support force, which was to accompany the convoy only to the entrance of the Strait of Sicily, and then return to Gibraltar) had reversed course.

At 10:00 PM Uarsciek emerged, and the crew noticed a strong smell of naphtha, which was attributed by the captain to some significant loss of fuel, but in the darkness, nothing can be seen. The submarine therefore continues to sail on the surface towards the newly assigned sector.

August 13th, 1942

At 2:50 AM, a new order arrived, moving the area assigned to Uarsciek even further west. At four o’clock in the morning, the odor of naphtha was again smelled, but the leak could not be detected. Commander Arezzo summons Chief Engineer Cristini and questions him about it, but after an inspection he claimed to rule out any leaks.

At 6.05 AM, Uarsciek dove and began occult navigation. Throughout the rest of the day, and especially around the hours of listening to the SITI (TN messages from base), very frequent discharges of aircraft bombs were heard, sometimes very close, and planes passing near the boat were heard continuously, sometimes clearly perceptible through the hull. At 5:19 PM a telegram was received from Maricosom reporting the presence of a battleship and three destroyers, with a course of 270° and a speed of 24 knots, sighted at 1:30 PM in square 0462. Commander Arezzo, having made some calculations, judges that if the reported formation, once it reaches the south of Formentera, would movein the direction of Alboran (as he considers probable), Uarsciek could succeed in intercepting it at the northern end of the new area assigned to it, around midnight. The submarine then continued to cruise towards the assigned area.

At 9:25 PM, Uarsciek emerged, and this time the loss of naphtha was unmistakable and abundant: it was a damaged naphtha tank. On the water there are very visible patches of oil, and it became evident that the insistent hunting by the planes suffered during the day was caused precisely by this tangible, conspicuous sign of the presence of the submerged submarine. Captain Arezzo listened to the opinions offered by Chief Engineer Cristini, who stated that he considered it impossible to eliminate the leak with the means available on board> Therefore the captain decided to abandon the ambush, informing Maricosom of it by radio – as provided for by circular A1/SRP – even though he believes that by doing so (breaking the radio silence) Uarsciek was exposing itself to the risk of being radio localized.

At 11.45 PM, in position 37°02′ N and 00°09′ W, a white light was sighted for 350° over the water; Uarsciek immediately heads towards it, but after a few minutes the light begins to expire rapidly at the stern, until it went out. Commander Arezzo, believing that it was a Short Sunderland anti-submarine seaplane that has landed on the surface of the sea to listen, orders a crash dive. Once submerged, the submarine detects aircraft noise on the hydrophones that covers the entire area, and which was indeed clearly perceptible through the hull. At midnight the hunt began with frequent discharges of bombs presumably from several planes (given the number of bombs dropped) whose noise could be heard in the hull. Some of the discharges explode quite close. The systematic nature of the hunt leads Arezzo della Targia to believe that Uarsciek must certainly have been sighted and he speculates that the Sunderland located him by direction finding – as he feared – and that they had been lurking for some time, waiting for his arrival.

August 14th, 1942

At 1:37 AM, the hydrophones detected noises of approaching force 2 turbines, on 80° detection. Commander Arezzo believes that this was the formation reported by Maricosom a few hours earlier, which arrived on the scene at the time estimated by the calculations previously made. However, the approach of the noise of the turbines was accompanied by an intensification in the dropping of bombs by the planes. Evidently, they were trying to preclude Uarsciek from any attempt of attacking the approaching ships. At 2.50 AM the sound source detected by the hydrophones reached maximum intensity, on detection bearing 183°. The turbines could be felt through the hull of the boat. Uarsciek seemed to be clearly tending to steer to starboard against the will of the captain, who had to order a strong rudder angle to bring it back on course. At first Arezzo thought that the rudder indicator may be out of calibration, but then it turned out to be perfectly working, which lead the commander to believe that Uarsciek was in a vortex of current, perhaps generated by the explosions of the bombs.

Uarsciek crew members pose for a photo after the Battle of Mid-August, August 14, 1942.
Bottom right, Commander Arezzo della Targia; clinging to the pole waving the “Jolly Roger”, sailor helmsman Franco Calia
(Coll. Davide Calia)

On the other hand, he believed it is unlikely that the magnetic compass could have gone out of order by the presence of the magnetic masses of British ships, since the hydrophone bearing widens very regularly. At 3:04 AM, the sound source reached its maximum intensity, then began to move away. At 4:14 AM it was detected with force 1 for bearing 249°. At 4.30 AM Uarsciek emerged in position 37°08′ N and 00°15′ W, but spotted seaplanes resting on the sea again, and thus it dove again. As soon as they spotted the submarine emerging, the planes took off. Their noise was heard again both on the hydrophones and through the hull, and again the bomb drops began, several times, with some explosions quite violent and close, but not enough to cause damage.

At 6.10 AM the crew heard a sound on the hydrophones again for bearing 120°, intensity 1; very far away, since the hydrophones picked it up at a minimum. At 6.30 AM the source was intensity 2 on bearing 110°-120°; Half an hour later, another turbine was detected for bearing 98°, force 1, but this ship also passed a great distance. The maximum intensity was 2. At 7:50 AM, nothing could be heard. For the rest of the day, the explosions continued, becoming more and more sporadic.

At 6.40 PM, after a tour of exploration at the periscope to be sure of being under the Spanish coast, Uarsciek emerged and began the return navigation.

August 15th, 1942

At 6.30 AM, Uarsciek, having reached the traverse of Cape de la Nao, in an area of hidden navigation, dove. It resurfaced at 2 PM and continued on the surface, passing during the day outside the Balearic occult navigation zone.

August 17th, 1942

At 2.40 AM, Uarsciek landed on the conventional point “B” of Asinara, and at 8.20 AM it moored at La Maddalena.

For the action of Mid-August, which on the Italian side mistakenly believed to have led to the torpedoing of enemy ships, commander Arezzo della Targia was decorated with the Silver Medal for Military Valor, with the motivation “Commander of a submarine of high professional ability, he participated with serene courage and indomitable aggressive spirit in the Mediterranean battle of mid-August, decisively attacking a large enemy convoy powerfully escorted by naval forces and Aerial. With the timely and effective launch of torpedoes, it inflicted certain losses on the enemy formation, causing the sinking and torpedoing of warships and merchant vessels. He demonstrated in his arduous brilliant action chosen military virtues and a tenacious will to victory.”

Also decorated with the Bronze Medal for Military Valor will be the commander in second lieutenant Remigio Dapiran, who was injured during the depth charges bombardment (motivation: “Officer in 2nd submarine, he participated in the Mediterranean battle of mid-August against a large enemy convoy strongly escorted by naval and air forces, assisting the commander with boldness and skill in the daring actions against the adversary. Although wounded during the hunting action, to which the unit was subjected, he continued to bravely hold his combat post, demonstrating high military qualities”).

The chief engineer, Lieutenant of the Naval Engineers Armano Cristini, the aspiring midshipman Francesco Florio, the chief electrician third class Ilario Mazzotti, and the second chief engine engineer Pietro Battilana were also decorated. For Arezzo della Targia, Dapiran, Mazzotti and Battilana, however, the decoration came posthumously: the royal decree sanctioning the awarding of their medals, in fact, was dated December 18th, 1942, three days after the sinking of Uarsciek and their death.

September-December 1942

Uarsciek makes several training runs.

Uarsciek navigating toward La Maddalena
(From the magazine “Storia Militare”)

October 31st, 1942

In the middle of the battle of El Alamein, Uarsciek sailed from Messina to Tobruk at 6.45 PM, on a transport mission: it had 19-20 tons of ammunition on board.

November 4th, 1942

The boat arrived in Tobruk at 1:15 PM, disembarked the ammunition and left again at 6:15 PM, with orders to carry out a patrol off the Egyptian coast. On the same day, the British attacks on El Alamein succeeded, and the long retreat of the Axis troops began.

November 7th, 1942

In the morning, Maricosom, in anticipation of the possible passage of an enemy convoy in the Strait of Sicily, orders Uarsciek and other submarines (Ascianghi, Granito and Dessiè) to reach patrol areas in the Strait of Sicily.

The convoy sighted is part of the Anglo-American invasion fleet at sea for the operation “Torch”. The ships that were part of it did not cross the Strait of Sicily, but instead participate in the landing on the coasts of Morocco and Algeria, which was considered a more likely target even by Supermarina which in fact had deployed twenty-one submarines in the western Mediterranean:  the dispatch of Uarsciek, Ascianghi, Granito and Dessiè to the Strait of Sicily was merely a precautionary measure for the hypothesis, which cannot be excluded a priori although considered unlikely, of sending a convoy heading east.

November 9th, 1942

Due to damage suffered during the patrol, Uarsciek had to set course for Tripoli, where it arrived at 1.30 AM, stopping there for five days to receive some temporary repairs.

November 14th, 1942

The boat left Tripoli at 1:00 PM to return to Italy.

November 16th, 1942

Uarsciek arrived in Messina at 2.25 PM and underwent other work to get it back into working order.

Another picture of the ’Uarsciek
(ANMI Montebelluna)

The Sinking

At 5:25 PM on December 11^th, 1942, Uarsciek, under the command of Lieutenant Gaetano Arezzo della Targia, sailed south of Augusta for a patrol south of Malta.

This was to be one of her last missions before a period of major maintenance work scheduled for February 1943, although the Special Commission of Inquiry set up in early 1947 to review her sinking described the vessel as “in good working order” at the time of the loss. Not long before, Uarsciek had already undergone work to solve problems with the diesel engines, which had come to light during the Battle of Mid-August. Work had also been carried out to resize the conning tower to reduce diving times, as well as work on the machinery to make it quieter.

Sailor Domenico Di Serio, embarked on Uarsciek in Naples, met on board an old acquaintance of his, the chief electrician Ilario Mazzotti (in the past embarked with him on another submarine, the Malachite), who had announced that the submarine would soon have to go to Pula for a period of major works. Leaving Naples, in fact, Uarsciek had moved to Messina, where the crew had waited for the order to continue to Pula, instead, it was time to reach Augusta, and then to put to sea for a mission off Malta.

Of the 47 crewmen on board that outing, only 30 % had already served on Uarsciek in previous missions; 15 % were conscripts on their first embarkation, 55 % submariners had transferred to Uarsciek from other vessels. Commander Arezzo della Targia was feverish, in poor health. Chief engineer, Lieutenant of the Naval Engineers Lorenzo Coniglione, embarked a couple of months earlier, had previously been disembarked from Uarsciek due to a serious nervous breakdown.

On the other hand, the sub-chief electrician Brunetto Montagnani, who had already “played” death for before (TN was reported as a casualty), had arrived just before this mission. Assigned to the crew of the submarine Medusa, he was at home on leave when it was sunk with the death of 58 of the 60 men on board, in January 1942. After the loss of the Medusa he was transferred to Uarsciek, where he had the surprise of meeting as commander lieutenant Arezzo della Targia, who was embarked on the Medusa (he had been one of the only two survivors): “At embarkation time, when he reads Montagnani, he looks up and recognizes me. He greets me joyfully, happy to be together again after the tragic events.” However, Montagnani had been ordered to transfer to Taormina for a period of “oxygenation”, which the submariners had to undergo after accumulating a certain number of hours underwater. Montagnani remained on the ground while Uarsciek left for its last mission. He would escape by chance on a third occasion, remaining on land – because he had not been warned, returning from a leave – while the steamer that was taking his unit to Corsica was sunk.

The orders received by commander Arezzo from the X Grupsom of Augusta indicated that Uarsciek, along with the submarine Topazio, would reach a patrol sector south of Malta to operate with total offensive-exploratory tasks, and to provide for indirect protection of the motor ship Foscolo, navigating from Naples to Tripoli, which had left on December 12th with a load of fuel and ammunition. Uarsciek and Topazio were to position themselves in sectors close to each other, about fifty miles south of Malta, and prevent attacks by enemy ships, and especially by Force K, which was expected to exit to attack the convoy.  Force K would have fallen into the ambush set by the two submarines.

The situation in North Africa looked dark: a month earlier the Italian-German forces had suffered the decisive defeat at El Alamein, and on the same days in which Uarsciek mission took place they were fighting at El Agheila, on the western edge of Cyrenaica, to try to stop or at least slow down the British advance. Casualties on the route to Libya had soared in the face of intensified Allied air and naval warfare.

Foscolo’s voyage would also end at the bottom of the sea, on December 13th, off Cape Lilybaeum. Uarsciek would follow her two days later. (According to an article by Aldo De Florio in the February 2014 issue of UNUCI magazine, indeed, Uarsciek was supposed to meet with the Foscolo in the south-east of Sicily, after the crossing of the Strait of Messina by the motor ship; the meeting, however, could not take place due to a variation of the order of operations following which the Foscolo changed its course,  coasting along western Sicily and being sunk by torpedo bombers. Uarsciek ran into enemy destroyers while waiting in vain for the Foscolo). Within a month and a half, all of Libya would be lost.

Uarsciek reached the sector assigned for the ambush at five o’clock in the morning of December 13th, 1942, Sunday. For nearly 24 hours nothing happened, then, in the early hours of December 14th, two light units were sighted at a great distance, too far away to attempt an attack (they were perhaps part of a formation – estimated to be composed of three cruisers and two destroyers – already sighted and attacked, a few hours earlier, by the Topazio, which at 1.40 AM had launched three torpedoes without success).

Uarsciek continued its patrol. The sub-chief torpedoman Michele Caggiano, from Taranto, would later recount that on the evening of December 14th, around ten o’clock, commander Arezzo della Targia had called him to the bridge, since he was the food delivery person, to have a pizza prepared for midnight for the whole crew, to celebrate Saint Lucia, patron saint of his Syracuse, whose celebration occurred that day.

Even the Istrian sailor Domenico Di Serio, a veteran submariner but on his first patrol on Uarsciek (he had disembarked from the Malachite the previous December 5th, in Naples, and had immediately received orders to pass on Uarsciek, which had immediately left for Messina), later recalled the special lunch for the whole crew organized in honor of Santa Lucia, to whom the commander was particularly devoted:  “We had a wonderful two hours. Then we were ordered: the party is over, everyone back at their post.”

Nothing else happened until about 3:00 AM on December 15th, when Uarsciek, while on the surface, sighted at close range, about 45-50 miles south/southeast of Malta, a group of units that were identified as a cruiser and three destroyers. There were only two destroyers, the British H.M.S. Petard (Lieutenant Commander Mark Thornton) and the Greek Vasilissa Olga (Lieutenant Commander Georgios Blessas), sailing from Benghazi – from where they had departed on December 14^th for Malta.

According to the narration of the torpedoman Michele Caggiano, it was the stern lookout, just as they were preparing for the changing of the guard, that sighted at a short distance a ship that seemed to be following the submarine emitting three green light signals, evidently signals of recognition. Domenico Di Serio was in the control room at the time. When the dismounting lookouts came down from the bridge for the changing of the guard, Di Serio asked one of them what the weather was like, and he replied: “It’s cold, it’s foggy and you can’t see it an inch from your nose”. Before the lookout had even finished speaking, the alarm was sounded. From the conning tower they were asked for the signs of recognition, which Di Serio himself prepared daily with lamps of various colors. Uarshiek broadcast the prescribed signals but received no response.

When it became clear that the ship sighted was an enemy ship, heading towards Malta, and finding Uarsciek in a favorable position for an attack, commander Arezzo della Targia immediately ordered two torpedoes to be launched against the enemy ships from the stern tubes (tubes 5 and 6), after which he ordered a crash dive to disengage, assuming a course of exit. As the submarine descended into the depths, two loud explosions were heard on board, which led the crew to mistakenly believe that they had hit one of the enemy ships. No explosions of depth charges were heard (but since the torpedoes had not hit, it is possible that the two loud explosions heard on board were depth charged), while the sound of the sonar of the enemy ships intent on the search could be heard through the hull.

According to the British version, Uarsciek was surprised on the surface at 3.05 AM (Italian time; 4.05 AM according to the time followed by the British units) on December 15th, in position 35°08′ N and 14°28′ E (or 35°08′ N and 14°22′ E), by the H.M.S. Petard’s lookouts, who sighted it on portside forward, in conditions of calm sea. At first, British lookouts thought it was a surface ship. When they realized that it was instead a submarine that had surfaced, Commander Thornton initially believed that it could be the British submarine H.M.S. Umbra (other sources mistakenly speak of the H.M.S. Ultimatum, but the latter was at that time under construction in the United Kingdom), returning to Malta after a mission in the Gulf of Hammamet. H.M.S. Petard then made the reconnaissance signal, and it was at that point that the Italian submarine dove and launched its torpedoes. Considering the two versions, the sighting was probably reciprocal and simultaneously.

H.M.S. Petard alerted Vasilissa Olga with two loud siren whistles and avoided the torpedoes – spotted despite the darkness thanks to their phosphorescent wakes – with the maneuver, veering in their direction and passing between their wakes (Greek sources claim that the two torpedoes would have passed forward of the Vasilissa Olga, at a short distance), after which both exploded.  At 3:10 AM, they unleashed a heavy hunt with depth charges. H.M.S. Petard, which had almost immediately obtained ASDIC contact, made a first attack at that time with the launch of a single depth charge and ordered the Vasilissa Olga to circle around that position, describing circles with a width of two miles. At a certain point, Uarsciek came to the surface unexpectedly, and then immediately returned to the depths, and the Petard attacked it with ten depth charges, and then ordered the Vasilissa Olga to attack in turn. The Greek destroyer launched six depth charges, set to explode at a depth between 45 and 90 meters; this third and final attack caused serious damage to the essential equipment of Uarsciek, especially in the aft compartment, to the point of forcing it to maneuver the boat for a rapid surfacing about 180 meters from H.M.S. Petard.

On the Italian side (both according to the official version and according to the memory of the survivor Michele Caggiano) it appeared that, during the rapid dive maneuver following the launch of the torpedoes, the submarine sank excessively, falling rapidly to a depth of 160 meters (twice the test depth) heavily down by the bow. This problem, due to the failure to empty the rapid tank, made the commander give air to the double bottoms, to stop the dangerous descent and climb back to a more adequate depth. This maneuver, however, had an excessive result. Perhaps because too much air had entered the double tanks, Uarsciek climbed too quickly and ended up surfacing involuntarily with the entire conning tower, making it easier for destroyers to spot it. Immediately afterwards, the submarine returned to the depths, this time with a control maneuver, but by now the enemy ships knew where it was and immediately subjected it to heavy bombardment with depth charges, seriously damaging it and forcing it to surface once and for all.

Domenico Di Serio later recalled that Uarsciek, once it had descended to a depth of 80 meters, had remained motionless trying not to make noise, but in vain: it had been located and hit by the explosion of a cluster of depth charges – eight, according to his memory – which turned off the lights and even detached the paint from the bulkheads of the submarine,  causing the fragments to fall on the floor “like a snowfall”.

Maneuvering with a single engine, Uarsciek descended again – to 100 meters, according to Di Serio – again trying to minimize the noise, but shortly afterwards four more depth charges exploded very close together, all around the hull. Uarsciek skidded under the violence of the detonations, the light went out again, many lamps broke, water began to seep into the bilges from the propeller shaft cases. Lighting was restored, but this time the damage was very serious; Commander Arezzo della Targia gathered all the officers in the control room, and Chief Engineer Coniglione explained that the hull was badly damaged, there were dangerous waterways: “Commander, we can remain in these conditions only for a short time. Either we emerge, or it’s the end for everyone, because the water keeps coming in and weighs down the boat even more.” Arezzo remained thoughtful for some time, then called all the personnel to the control room and announced his decision: “Let’s face the enemy.” His intention was to try to escape to the surface using the diesel engines, but it was a hopeless attempt. The personnel assigned to the weapons took their places in the conning tower, then the order was given to emerge.

Sub-chief Michele Caggiano would later recall that when they emerged, Commander Arezzo gave the order to arm the cannon to face the enemy units in a fight on the surface: “Let’s take them out like this!“, he urged his men. Caggiano himself, being part of the armament of the cannon, reached the hatch of the forward hatch, which it was his task to open; Grabbing the hatch handwheel to release it, he realized with some astonishment that it appeared to open much more easily than usual, without requiring much effort. This was due to the pressure inside the submarine, which had increased a lot during the bombardment: to the point of making the hatch open abruptly and Caggiano himself being thrown out; he landed on the left side of the deck, between the hatch and the conning tower, with his feet in the air. The deck was still half-submerged, and Caggiano realized that he was falling towards the stern. With his left hand he grabbed a cockerel from the lid of the left ready-use stowage, thus avoiding being dragged into the sea. Before the main deck had even fully surfaced, a beam of light from four o’clock lit up the conning tower in full, immediately followed by a storm of machine-gun fire, tracers that left behind green light trails.

Domenico Di Serio, staying below deck, could hear the bursts of machine-gun fire hitting the hull of the Uarsciek. The machine guns were outside their quarters, one pointed towards the sky and the other towards the enemy, but they could not be reached, like the cannon: anyone who tried to approach was immediately hit. Shrapnel even fell into the control room. Commander Arezzo, on the bridge, gave the order for everyone to go on deck.

Uarsciek illuminated by the floodlights of H.M.S. Petard and Vasilissa Olga
(“Ultra versus U-Boats” by Roy Convers Nesbit)

Commander Thorton of H.M.S. Petard had previously missed an opportunity to capture an enemy submarine (the German U 559, sunk on the previous October 30th: surfaced after being seriously damaged by depth charges, and immediately abandoned by the crew, the U-boat had been boarded by a squad of H.M.S. Petard who had seized ciphers that later proved to be fundamental for the decryption of the “Enigma code“,  but the submarine had sunk shortly afterwards taking with it a British officer and a sailor trapped on board), and he was determined, this time, to capture his opponent intact, to take possession of the ciphers and secret documents on board.

As soon as the Italian boat emerged, therefore, he had it illuminated with searchlights – according to a source, the Vasilissa Olga also pointed its searchlights at Uarsciek – and ordered the servants of all his 20 and 40 mm machine guns to open fire on it, with the intention of preventing any attempt at reaction or self-sinking by the Italians,  without causing too much damage to the submarine (historian and submariner Clay Blair writes that the British Admiralty’s policy was to force the crews of submarines to stay below deck with machine gun fire to prevent them from attempting to scuttle, and that Thornton complied with these provisions).

The firing of the 20 mm Oerlikon machine guns and the deadly 40 mm quad “pom-poms” had a devastating effect on the crew of Uarsciek, mowing down almost everyone who tried to climb the deck or conning tower. Twice the gunners of H.M.S. Petard, deeming it excessive to continue strafing, stopped firing, and twice Thornton ordered them to open fire again; according to the book “The Enigma Code” by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, H.M.S. Petard’s commander himself personally took up a machine gun and opened fire on the men visible on the bridge of Uarsciek. The circumstances and nature of this last action remain rather controversial: while some British sources justify it as a normal act of war aimed at crushing any attempt at reaction or self-sinking by the Italian crew (“the submarine, badly damaged, showed no sign of being abandoned by the crew and, as was logical, H.M.S. Petard continued to fire, not to kill the shipwrecked, but to kill the shipwrecked,  but to force them to hasten the abandonment of their ship“), other authors believe that Thornton committed a grave excess, killing men who were attempting to surrender.

Thornton’s orders to his gunners, repeated twice, to reopen fire should also be placed in this perspective: the latter would have hesitated to carry it out because, unlike their commander, they believed that the survivors were now surrendering and that it was not necessary to kill them. The opinion that Thornton’s behavior would have represented an “excess” seems to be shared by several members of the crew of H.M.S. Petard, starting with the ship’s doctor William Prendergast and the radio operator Reg Crang, as well as by various survivors of Uarsciek.

On the other hand, another sailor of the H.M.S. Petard, Trevor Tipping, appears to be of a different opinion. In an interview given after the war, he stated instead that he considered the fire action of H.M.S. Petard completely justified, given that the men who came out on deck on Uarsciek were running towards the gun: “The question was, either us or them. Better them than us.” Answering a specific question, Tipping also added that Prendergast had been impressed by what he had seen because he was a doctor who had recently joined the Navy, and that “A doctor’s opinion of war is different from that of a combatant“. According to Tipping, the rest of the crew had not been particularly impressed by the carnage, it had been a legitimate act of defense on the part of H.M.S. Petard and in any case those sailors were now accustomed to similar scenes (although Tipping himself mentioned in the interview that “some people” did not “like” the order to fire on the men running on the deck of the submarine,  but that Commander Thornton had said they were trying to arm the gun, so “it’s either us or them.“)

In an essay on the loss of Uarsciek published in 2006 by the historian Franco Prosperini, he speaks of two distinct fire actions that hit the submarine, sweeping the deck with bursts of machine guns: the first occurred immediately after the surfacing and caused the death of the commander Arezzo della Targia, the second in command Dapiran and the boatswain Mazzotti. At this point the navigation officer gave the order to abandon ship, and as the crew began to go on deck the Petard opened fire again, shooting mainly against the forward area around the gun (this version would therefore seem consistent with the position according to which even the second firing action was simply aimed at preventing a reaction from Uarsciek. In fact Prosperini did not speak, on his part, of “exaggerated” or criminal conduct by Commander Thornton.

Clay Blair, on the other hand, believes that Thornton had simply complied with the Admiralty’s directives, trying to keep the Italian crew below deck to prevent the submarine from sinking, and seems rather critical of the landing of the captain of H.M.S. Petard caused, apparently, by this episode and by Prendergast’s denunciation.

In the confusion H.M.S. Petard, trying to board Uarsciek without realizing that it was still moving and now out of control, also collided with the submarine, hitting it with the bow and “climbing” its hull, suffering some damage to the bow (a “recess” of about one meter and twenty centimeters, and damage to the hull such as to require repairs in dock – then carried out in Alexandria in January 1943 -,  although overall the ship’s buoyancy was not threatened, and H.M.S. Petard remained able to sail at least 20 knots).

Reg Crang, a radio operator on board H.M.S. Petard, gave a very vivid description of those moments in his diary: “As naked men emerged from the conning tower to jump on deck, both ships opened a killer volley of fire. No one on the bridge could escape the massacre. After a long pause with no more shots, the Petard approached. A few other naked men came out [of the submarine], we thought about surrendering, but a machine gun on the bridge opened fire and started mowing them down. Our crew was horrified by what was thought to be an act of personal revenge by the commander [Thornton]. Fortunately, she soon stopped, but at this point H.M.S. Petard was so close to the submarine that she could not avoid a collision. With a terrible crack H.M.S. Petard rammed and climbed on the hull of the submarine. Then, with the engines all the way back, the ship backed away; The battle was over. Now we could think about saving the survivors, instead of killing them.”

In a few minutes commander Arezzo della Targia, the second lieutenant commander Remigio Dapiran, the boatswain Ilario Mazzotti and six other non-commissioned officers and sailors were killed by the gunfire of the enemy ships; Many other men were injured. The survivors surrendered; The navigation officer ordered the hatches to be opened, the scuttling maneuvers to begin and the ship to be abandoned.

Michele Caggiano, confused and frightened, had saved himself because he was sheltered by the conning tower: he heard the voice of commander Arezzo, already wounded, repeating “Don’t abandon the boat – Sink the boat”. Other voices came from the stern: shouts, the men down there were hit by enemy fire. Caggiano distinctly recognized the voice of the second chief engineer Pietro Battilana, a thirty-one-year-old native of Treviso, who shouted to his comrades to surrender: “They’re going to kill us all!” Caggiano could not have known it, but these were probably the last words of Battilana, who shortly afterwards was shot and killed. Even Caggiano, despite his sheltered position, was slightly injured by numerous small metal splinters.

Very similar are the scenes recounted by the twenty-two-year-old torpedoman Catello Iovino, from Castellammare di Stabia. A worker at the Castellammare shipyard, called up for military service in 1941, Iovino was part of the 15% of the crew that was on its first assignment: he had in fact recently been sent to Augusta to await assignment, after completing his training at the Submarine School in Pula, and had been assigned to Uarsciek for that mission, replacing a torpedoman who had disembarked shortly before departure because he had been suddenly seized by fever.

At the time of the attack, Iovino was in the aft launch torpedo room of the Uarsciek. When the submarine surfaced, it climbed onto the deck, swept by machine-gun fire. He saw the commander and the gunners dead on the conning tower, and the gunners all fallen in their places; The survivors had raised their hands, but machine-gun fire continued. Iovino slipped down the hull of the submarine, injuring himself on the barnacles, and ended up in the sea.

Below deck, the chief engineer Coniglione, together with three sailors including Domenico Di Serio, carried out the maneuvers to scuttle the submarine (maneuvers which, however, was ineffective), after which the personnel gathered at the foot of the ladder leading to the conning tower, to get out. The machine-gun fire had ceased, but as soon as Di Serio – who was the first – put his head out, fire was reopened; a volley hit the hatch, slightly wounding Di Serio with his shrapnel, and he stopped where he was and blocked all the men who were behind him, and who were insisting that he get out. The volleys stopped again, then resumed again when Di Serio and his companions came out. Di Serio saw the multicolored tracers coming out of the barrels of the machine guns, and then widening. He sought shelter behind the conning tower.

The strafing was as devastating as it was short: after a short time, the shooting stopped, the beam of light changed direction, the bridge fell back into the semi-darkness. When H.M.S. Petard hit Uarsciek with her starboard side, the submarine heeled 90 degrees to port, and Michele Caggiano fell into the sea; fortunately for him, the railing held him back, and as soon as Uarsciek returned to its trim he found himself on deck again. The submarine still seemed to be moving; Caggiano heard the voice of his dying commander, fainter, and fainter, as if he were leaving; he believed that Arezzo had fallen into the sea when Uarsciek had skidded as a result of the collision.

In fact, this is exactly what had happened: Domenico Di Serio, who had taken shelter behind the conning tower to escape the strafing, had seen the commander Arezzo lying on deck towards the stern; Together with a Sicilian sailor, he had reached him and grabbed him by the arms, trying to drag him towards the conning tower, but a wave had dragged the officer into the water. (Guido Morassutti, submarine commander and friend of Arezzo della Targia, tells a different version: Arezzo was killed by a shot that almost decapitated him, immediately after giving the order to scuttle. But Morassutti was not physically present on Uarsciek). Di Serio also ended up into the sea a little later: after the searchlights had gone out and the fire had ceased, realizing that Uarsciek, despite the maneuvers put in place, was not sinking, he tried to reach a hatch to return to the control room, but he tripped over a corpse and then was thrown into the sea by a wave.

Uarsciek about to be taken in tow by H.M.S. Petard, in the early morning of December 15th, 1942
(from the magazine “STORIA militare”)

At a certain moment Michele Caggiano heard and then saw sailor Francesco Paniscotti holding on to the rear of the port saddle-tank, towards the stern; he said something, but Caggiano didn’t understand. The enemy ship seemed to be moving away in the opposite direction to that in which Uarsciek was. Recovering from his stupor, Caggiano crawled along the deck to the hatch, so as not to be seen, went inside with his head forward and reached the control room, determined to carry out the last order of his commander. Below deck, however, there was no one left. Thus, the sub-chief decided to go it alone and headed for the aft launch chamber. On the way, as he passed through the engine room, he realized that the left-hand electric motor, whose telegraph had remained in the forward position slowly, and was still running. He did not feel that Uarsciek was still moving. The rudder was locked at 15 degrees to starboard. First, Caggiano thought of scuttling: although wounded in the hands, he opened the caps of the torpedo tubes and opened the air vents. After seeing the seawater enter the hull, he went to detach the power supply switch at the helm, stopped the electric motor still running, and locked the watertight doors by inserting screws between the gears. Returning to the bow, he found no anomalies or signs of failure. There was only water covering the floor of the officers’ quarters. Finding a decipher on the floor, he picked it up and went to the commander’s bunk; Here he found the flag in its place, above the bunk, so he took it, wrapped it around the decipherer, and carried the bundle thus made on deck, where he then pushed it into the sea.

It would also appear that the chief engineer Coniglione, the midshipman Francesco Florio and sailor Allocca remained on board Uarsciek to try to scuttle the submarine.

Once it was clear that Uarsciek had ceased all resistance, a boat was immediately launched from H.M.S. Petard with a boarding party on board, led by Lieutenant David Nasmith (second in command of H.M.S. Petard) and Sergeant (petty officer) Randell Chapman. The boat reached the submarine and took on board the Italian survivors, who were taken aboard H.M.S. Petard. Several of the Italian sailors, however, had jumped into the sea before H.M.S. Petard had even lowered her launch, and immediately began to swim towards the destroyer, and some, especially among those who were wounded, drowned or disappeared in the darkness under the eyes of their enemy-rescuers. Six other Uarsciek men died in this way. Reg Crang describes the scene: “The first light of dawn began to rise, and the Italian sailors began to jump into the sea and swim towards us. Many were shouting something that sounded to me like “Aiota” [evidently “help”], presumably “help.” Some, perhaps injured or perhaps inexperienced in swimming, drifted out of reach, too far away to be rescued. It was a pitiful sight.”

When Michele Caggiano went on deck, a British officer who had boarded Uarsciek shot him in the right knee with a firearm, and then kicked him in the back of the head. Caggiano cursed the officer and tried to cling to him to make both of them fall into the sea, but he realized that right below them was the motor launch of the Petard, not to mention that the railing would have prevented his attempt anyway. He was thus taken prisoner; the British officer ordered the motorboat to move from the point where it was to the horizontal rudder on the left, which was in a downed position, and had Caggiano, the engine engineer Pio Mario Leonardelli and the sub-chief electrician Sergio Tarraboiro, both mortally wounded, transship there. Before the motor launch moved away from the submarine, it was also joined by a helmsman, Gabrielli, who had swum and was taken on board.

The torpedoman Catello Iovino would recount, many years later, that H.M.S. Petard did not stop to pick up the survivors fearing the presence of another Italian submarine, and [Iovino] clearly heard that English sailors address shipwrecked people with the term ‘fascists’. Some of them, wounded, let themselves go to the bottom shouting “Long live Italy” and some “Long live the Duce”. Iovino, after spending what seemed like six hours in the icy water, was rescued by a boat of the Vasilissa Olga and taken on board the Hellenic destroyer. Here he received food from a Greek sailor who spoke Italian, who asked him, “Why do we have to fight among ourselves?” Domenico Di Serio, after spending what seemed like an eternity in the water, was rescued by a boat from H.M.S. Petard.

While the 32 Italian survivors were hoisted on board H.M.S. Petard and the Vasilissa Olga, the members of Lieutenant Nasmith’s squad penetrated inside the submarine to stop its self-sinking (some Italian sources instead attribute the failure to self-sink to a supervening failure: “Lost military ships” of the USMM speaks of “unforeseeable failure” that stopped the process of self-sinking,  as well as Alberto Santoni who in his “The real traitor” states that Uarsciek “failed to sink due to failure of its apparatus”, and Giorgio Giorgerini who in “Men on the bottom” writes that “the self-scuttling maneuver failed due to a failure of its apparatus”; Another source specifies that the flood valves did not open because of the damage suffered), inspect him for ciphers or other secret documents.

Their search was successful: on their return they brought back to the destroyer a large number of ciphers, code books and signals and other secret documents found on Uarsciek, including maps with the location of Italian and German minefields. (The latter were then exploited in April 1943, when H.M.S. Petard and another destroyer, H.M.S. Paladin, bombed the Tunisian port of Susa – in the hands of the Axis forces – avoiding the minefields and submarines lurking thanks to those maps; according to the book “Fighting Destroyer – The story of H.M.S. Petard” by G. G. Connell,  indeed, it would be the maps of the minefields captured on Uarsciek that would allow British cruisers and destroyers, in the following months, to conduct their offensive bets in the Strait of Sicily without suffering losses due to mines).

A sack containing various secret documents, already ballasted and ready to be thrown into the sea, was found next to the lifeless body of commander Arezzo della Targia: according to Reg Crang, he “had been killed while trying to get out of the conning tower to throw the sack into the sea” (which, however, is in contrast with Domenico Di Serio’s version,  according to which the captain’s body had ended up in the sea).

(It is possible that among the documents captured on board Uarsciek there was also a copy of Circular A/1-SRP of 25 August 1941, “Regulations for the Use of Submarines in War”, issued by Maricosom under secret protocol No. 08400. Copy number 85 of this circular, with the appendix “Conduct of the War on Traffic” dated December 26^th, 1941, is now preserved in the archives of the Public Record Office in London. However, since it does not have any cover letters, it is not clear on which submarine it was captured, although from a series of notes relating to it, dating from April-May 1943, it is possible to deduce that its capture dated back to the end of 1942 or the beginning of 1943. In that period only two Italian submarines were boarded before the self-sinking, with the capture of documents: Uarsciek and the Avorio, the latter lost on February 9th, 1943).

Crang then described the arrival of Uarsciek survivors on H.M.S. Petard in these words: “The towing began, and we commenced taking care of the survivors. They were very friendly and happy to be safe, quite different from the Germans we had picked up [on the occasion of the sinking of U 559, a month and a half earlier]. To be honest, they were just like us! We had a few in our cafeteria and soon they started showing us photographs from their wallets, which they had managed to save. One was very proud of his girlfriend at home, a girl so pretty that she seemed to smile just for him.” The wounded were treated by H.M.S. Petard’s ship’s doctor, William Finbar Prendergast; One of them had an arm so badly injured that it had to be amputated. After the operation, Prendergast asked a British sailor to throw the limb overboard.

Among Prendergast’s patients was the second chief torpedoman Michele Caggiano, who later recalled being welcomed on H.M.S. Petard “with unexpected human warmth”. He was taken to the infirmary, where he was carefully cared for. His injured knee was dressed, small metal splinters were extracted from his upper and lower limbs, face and back (the bullet that had hit him in the leg was not extracted: he would remain there for the rest of his life). In the meantime, he was asked for his personal data. From the infirmary, located on the stern deck of H.M.S. Petard, Caggiano could see Uarsciek still afloat.

H.M.S. small motorboat returning to the ship after having boarded Uarsciek
 (From “The Real Enigma Heroes”, di Phil Shanahan)

With the help – it is not clear whether voluntary or obligatory – of an Italian engineer officer, Sergeant Chapman, a signal specialist, and former submariner, initially managed to keep afloat the battered Uarsciek, which was taken in tow by H.M.S. Petard. As a sign of victory, the British sailors hoisted the White Ensign onto the bow net cutter; then the navigation began. H.M.S. Petard towed Uarsciek, while the Vasilissa Olga circled them to protect against possible attacks by other submarines. Thornton hoped to take the captured submarine to Malta as a trophy, but this project did not last long: the tow cable, in fact, broke, and when the Italian engineer officer went to the stern to manually operate the rudder, to put it to center, the opening of the watertight doors ended up compromising the buoyancy of Uarsciek.  that began to sink. (One wonders if the Italian officer’s decision to go aft to manually operate the rudder was not rather a pretext to scuttle the submarine.) According to another version, however, the tow line was deliberately cut by H.M.S. Petard because Uarsciek had begun to sink. Finally, an article from Greek sources (apparently based on the accounts of veterans of the Vasilissa Olga), attributes the sinking of Uarsciek to Commander Thornton’s decision to increase the towing speed, which would have caused the watertight door of the aft compartment to collapse, causing the submarine to flood and sink.

At 10:30 AM, the destroyers H.M.S. Kelvin and H.M.S. Paladin sailed from Malta to assist in towing the captured submarine, but at 11:33 AM Uarsciek, with both engines still running, reared her bow to the sky and sank aft at position 35°40′ N and 14°32′ E. The crew and the Italian engineer officer managed to save themselves by taking a seat in a small boat.

Michele Caggiano witnessed the end of his submarine from the Petard infirmary: “… Numerous times I saw the boat in tow in normal trim, but which nevertheless tried to pull over on the right, resisting the tow. The last time I saw Uarsciek was around noon. It had its bow to the sky with the English flag on the net-cutter. It was a moment of sadness but also of my inner joy because I had not allowed the boat to fall into the hands of the enemy, as ordered by the Commander. Then, shortly after, I felt a jolt, probably due to the release of the tow cable. Thus, the valiant Submarine was lost.”

Uarsciek was the last of the twenty Italian submarines lost during 1942. His loss was announced in Italy only on March 12th, 1943, without mentioning the name, with a laconic announcement in war bulletin no. 1021: “One of our submarines has not returned to base. Almost all the crew are safe.”

The last few moment of the Uarsciek
(From “Sommergibili in guerra” di Achille Rastelli ed Erminio Bagnasco)

Once the prey was sunk, Thornton and H.M.S. Petard’s men were left with Uarsciek combat flag as a trophy (evidently there were more flags on board, considering Michele Caggiano’s account). When H.M.S. Petard and the Vasilissa Olga reached Malta, at 4.15 PM on December 15th, they found a large crowd of Maltese civilians waiting for them, apparently aware, who knows how, of the action that had taken them as protagonists; Reg Crang writes in his diary: “When the commander ordered the Italian flag to be waved, [the crowd] erupted in loud cheers. But many of us couldn’t feel complacent about our success. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the cries of ‘Aiota’ [help] from drowning men.” In the war diary of the Mediterranean Fleet, it was noted that “the destruction of the Italian U-Boat [sic] Uarsciek by Petard and Queen Olga on December 15 southeast of Malta is particularly encouraging. It [Uarsciek] had been the first [Axis submarine] to appear in the eastern Mediterranean for some time now.” Commander Thornton then sent the ceremonial flag of Uarsciek to Walker’s Yard in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the shipyard that built H.M.S. Petard, as a tribute (a flag of Uarsciek, it is not clear if it is the same one sent to the Newcastle shipyard, is now preserved in the Imperial War Museum).

For this success shared by H.M.S. Petard and Vasilissa Olga there was a sort of “exchange” of decorations between the United Kingdom and Greece; In addition to decorating H.M.S. Petard’s men for the destruction of Uarsciek, King George VI of the United Kingdom also awarded a medal to Commander Blessas of Vasilissa Olga, and King George II of Greece (in exile in London) did the same with Commander Thornton of H.M.S. Petard, who received the War Cross III Class from the Greek authorities. The crew of H.M.S. Petard were awarded by the British authorities, for the sinking of Uarsciek, two Distinguished Service Orders (one of them to Commander Thornton), a Distinguished Service Cross (to Lieutenant David Arthur Dunbar-Nasmith), two Distinguished Service Medals (to Sergeant Randell Chapman and Sub-Chief Trevor Tipping, foreman of one of the “pom-pom” quad machine guns), as well as two “Mentions in Dispatches”  for aspiring Ensign Peter Thomas Alleyne Goddard and signalman Kenneth Hannay. For all of them, the motivation was “For skill and enterprise while serving in H.M.S. Petard in a successful attack on an enemy submarine”.

After the celebrations for H.M.S. Petard’s second victory in less than two months in the anti-submarine fight – and moreover with the capture, for the second time in a row, of important codes and ciphers, a more unique than rare case – the question of the strafing of the Italian survivors ordered by Thornton also came to light. The ship’s physician Prendergast, on his return to port, immediately reported the incident to his superiors, stating that the captain of H.M.S. Petard had gone too far, and that he believed that Thornton needed a medical examination and a period of rest. Apparently his superiors agreed with this judgment, because, on one hand, on January 12th, 1943, the Lieutenant Commander Thornton was decorated with the Distinguished Service Order for the sinking of Uarsciek, on the other hand already on January 9th he was “suddenly” replaced in command of H.M.S. Petard, leaving “without the usual farewell ceremonies”, and did not regain command of a naval unit for over a year and a half.

It was not until September 1944 that he was given command of another destroyer, H.M.S. Verulam, which he left after just over two months. He had no further command duties at sea for the remainder of the war. Some British sources claim that Thornton would have left the command of H.M.S. Petard at his personal request, due to the consequences of the “attrition of command”, but the fact that this occurred a few weeks after the sinking of Uarsciek, together with the report of doctor Prendergast and the fact that a highly decorated commander like Thornton, with two notable successes to his credit (including that of the U 559 with the capture of the ciphers,  A key contribution to the Code War), was left without a command for the remainder of the war, except for a couple of months, remains somewhat suspect.

Above, Commander Mark Thornton of the Petard
(from “The Enigma Code”, by Hugh Sebang-Montefiore)

Ship’s physician William Prendergast
(from “The Enigma Code”, by Hugh Sebang-Montefiore)

The book “The Enigma Code” by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore describes the story in these terms: “William Prendergast, H.M.S. Petard’s ship’s doctor, was increasingly concerned about how Thornton treated his men. He was also disturbed by the behavior in December 1942, when another submarine, the Italian Uarscieck, was captured by the Petard. Thornton had seized a machine gun and mowed down a line of Italian submariners standing on the deck of the submarine, although the rest of H.M.S. Petard’s crew was convinced that the men were surrendering. A fine line had to be drawn between the act of ruthlessly but appropriately opening fire on submariners to prevent them from throwing priceless secret ciphers overboard and murdering in cold blood unarmed men who are trying to surrender. Although there was always a risk that the men would rush to grab the submarine’s gun, Prendergast thought Thornton had gone too far. So, he told the authorities that Thornton needed rest. This is one possible reason for Thornton’s sudden departure from H.M.S. Petard. One rumor that circulated among the crew was that Thornton had collapsed after believing he saw rats running around on the floor of his cabin. Whatever the real reason, Thornton himself, when he thanked his men for their help, attributed his forced premature abandonment of the ship to a loss of eyesight.

The same author, based on interviews with H.M.S. Petard veterans (Reg Crang, Douglas Freer, Jeff Richards, Jack Hall, Eric Shove, Charlie Sewell, Ken Lacroix) and the book “Fighting Destroyer HMS Petard” by G. G. Connell, draws this description of Thornton’s personality: “Like all destroyer commanders, he was eager to attack the enemy, but he seemed to have an extra obsession. He wanted to capture a U-boat, and its codes. (…) He believed that the only way to survive the war was to terrorize the crew so that they would become super-efficient. (…) Thornton was famous among his crew for insisting that his men always remain on the lookout for any submarines, whether they were on guard or not. He climbed the crow’s nest and tied himself to the tree to set an example.

May heaven help anyone who did not meet its exacting standards; he would be hit with rocks, chalk, and even teacups if Thornton felt, from his vantage point, that he was wasting his time. On one occasion Thornton set off a firecracker in the middle of the night, and then opened a fire hydrant on his men as they ran to the fighting posts. On another occasion he ordered his officers to jump into the sea and swim around the ship, even though a gale was raging. His men were spared this ordeal only when a superior officer persuaded Thornton that they could all die if he did not give up this exercise. Such behavior led some of the crew to suspect that Thornton was going mad.

He was certainly very eccentric. When he was seen shooting at a flock of gannets with a machine gun, he shouted to his men that he could not stand the sight of the killer birds as they were robbing the sea of his fish. Whether Thornton was a little crazy or not, his regime certainly kept his men on their toes.”

Trevor Tipping stated that Commander Thornton’s landing was indeed due to the action of doctor Prendergast, who was concerned about his mental stability, but does not link it to the Uarsciek affair; Tipping simply states that the weight of command, loneliness, and long war service had negatively affected Thornton’s nerves, and he began to give wrong orders and become increasingly grumpy, until he became “a dangerous man to the crew.

H.M.S. Petard, with another commander (Lieutenant Commander Rupert Cyril Egan, who in command of the destroyer H.M.S. Croome had already sunk an Italian submarine in the Atlantic – Maggiore Baracca – and a German submarine in the Mediterranean – the U 372 –), achieved a third and final success against submarines on February 12^th, 1944, when she sank the Japanese submarine I 27:  This gives H.M.S. Petard the distinction of being the only warship to have sunk a submarine from each of the three major Axis navies. She survived the war and continued her service with the Royal Navy until 1967, when she was scrapped.

Commander Georgios Blessas of Vasilissa Olga, who shared with H.M.S. Petard the merit of the destruction of Uarsciek, was decorated by both King George II of Greece and George VI of the United Kingdom: the former awarded him, on March 12^th, 1943, the War Cross III class; the second awarded him the Distinguished Service Order (Blessas was the first Greek officer to receive such a decoration). In addition to Blessas, two other men from the Vasilissa Olga were decorated for the sinking of Uarsciek: Lieutenant E. Danil and sonar operator E. Amourgi, who received the “Medal for Exceptional Acts”. (The King of Greece, in a sort of “exchange” of decorations for this joint action between the two navies, also conferred a medal on Commander Thornton, as George VI had done on Blessas.) The Vasilissa Olga would be sunk, with the death of Commander Blessas and most of the crew, less than a year later, by German planes during the battle of Leros: fighting – not without friction, to tell the truth – alongside the Italians, no longer enemies after the armistice.

A chronometer taken from aboard Uarsciek from H.M.S. Petard’s raiding party, now on display at the Bletchley Park Museum.
Note the incorrect date shown on the explanatory plate (June 1943).
( Anthony Robertson).

Of the 32 survivors of Uarsciek rescued by destroyers, two died in Malta from their wounds: the 21-year-old sailor Pio Mario Leonardelli died on December 21^st, 1942. Today he is buried in his native Turin. The 20-year-old sub-chief electrician Sergio Tarraboiro, a Piedmontese like Leonardelli, died in Malta on  January 8^th, 1943.

The final toll for the crew of Uarsciek was thus 17 dead and 30 survivors: two officers, six non-commissioned officers and nine sub-chiefs and sailors had lost their lives, while four officers (including the chief engineer and the course officer), four non-commissioned officers and 22 sub-chiefs and sailors had survived.

The fallen:

• Gaetano Arezzo della Targia, lieutenant (commander), from Syracuse (deceased)
• Pietro Battilana, second chief engineman, from Riese Pio X (deceased)
• Bruno Bressan, second chief mechanic, from Abano Terme (deceased)
• Pietro Brigantini, second chief torpedo pilot, from Desenzano del Garda (deceased)
• Carlo Ceriani, sailor stoker, from Origgio (missing)
• Remigio Dapiran, Second Lieutenant, from Rovinj (missing)
• Corrado Di Lorenzo, sailor, from Santa Croce Camerina (deceased)
• Ugo Fotia, sailor, from Lamezia Terme (missing)
• Angelo Galeandro, sub-chief torpedo pilot, from Laterza (missing)
• Antonio Garufi, sergeant furiere, from Santa Teresa di Riva (missing)
• Pio Mario Leonardelli, sailor motorist, from Turin (died in Malta on 21/12/1942)
• Alberto Leporini, sub-chief engineman, from Spoltore (missing)
• Ilario Mazzotti, Chief Electrician Third Class, from Ravenna (deceased)
• Giovanni Romano, sailor gunner, from Naples (missing)
• Giovanni Rossi, helmsman sergeant, from Iglesias (deceased)
• Sergio Tarraboiro, sub-chief electrician, from Carmagnola (died in Malta on 8/1/1943)
• Sebastiano Zelo, sub-chief motorist, from San Nicola La Strada (deceased)

The survivors, after spending a short time in a prison camp in Malta (the seriously wounded were admitted to the island’s hospital), were transferred to a prison camp in Palestine, where they remained for the rest of the war. The camp was divided into two zones, one for prisoners who accepted collaboration with the British, the other for the “diehards”; the former could choose to work for the British, as did the torpedoman Catello Iovino, who was assigned to agricultural work in the surrounding area.

The “diehards”, on the other hand, refused any form of collaboration; Iovino then recounted that he looked with admiration at the prisoners of the other half of the camp who “despite a thousand difficulties, continued to maintain a military behavior and carried out the raising and lowering of the flag every day.” On the other hand, he was surprised when one day, while working on an agricultural estate outside the camp, he heard a female voice singing “Funiculì funiculà”, a song from his land; He never knew who the woman who sang it was. Returning to Italy in 1948 (which seems a bit strange indeed, since most of the Italian prisoners, even those held in territories as far away as India, were repatriated by 1947), Iovino returned to his job as a worker in the Castellammare shipyard. He then moved to the post office job  in Naples, where he died in 2005 at the age of 85.

Twenty-five-year-old midshipman Antonio Rizzo, from Taranto, also ended up a prisoner in Palestine, after a brief hospitalization at the General Hospital of Valletta: to his family, after the failure of Uarsciek, the Ministry of the Navy had communicated that he had to “consider himself missing during a war action”. He was able to return home after two years of captivity in Palestine, landing directly in his native Taranto.

The disembarkation in Malta of the survivors of the sinking of the submarine Uarsciek
(from “The Real Enigma Heroes”, di Phil Shanahan)

In 1947, when the survivors of Uarsciek returned to Taranto from captivity, the Italian Navy – no longer a royal – started the investigation into the loss of Uarsciek. Particular attention was paid to the submarine’s failure to sink, and to the capture of ciphers and secret documents on board. Major responsible for the slowness of the sinking, which had allowed the British to get on board and capture Uarsciek, was considered the chief engineer Coniglione, “for not having put in place all the preparations for a rapid flooding of the boat”; It was also established that technical deficiencies had also contributed to this outcome. The destruction of ciphers and secret documents was the responsibility of the navigation officer, who was the custodian; the latter, “unable to take action to combat boarding”, had delegated the recovery of those documents to the chief engineer and to a midshipman, who had been unable to recover the container of documents, which had remained on the deck of Uarsciek, because it had been thrown into the sea by the collision with the Petard. Also in this case, Lieutenant Coniglione was held responsible, “for not having adequately urged the midshipman to throw the container into the sea”.

In the 1990s, retired Admiral Vittorio Patrelli Campagnano, a former submariner during the World War II (he had commanded the submarine Platino) and now the “dean” of Italian submariners, had the opportunity to read the statement of the former sub-chief Michele Caggiano relating to his attempt, at the time of the loss of Uarsciek, to scuttle the submarine. Interested in this unprecedented version of the facts, Patrelli Campagnano attempted to reconstruct the incident with the help, for the technical aspect, of captain Attilio Ranieri, director of the Submarine School of Taranto; he went so far as to propose to the Ministry of the Navy and the Historical Office a reopening and revision of the 1947 investigation, but nothing came of it because too much time had passed, and it was now not possible to find confirmation of Caggiano’s account, which was not confirmed by the interrogations of the survivors, including Caggiano himself (who claimed to have been superficial, in answering the interrogation of 1947, because he was “offended at not having been questioned by the persons in charge of the investigation, but by a junior officer“).

The motivation for the Silver Medal for Military Valor awarded to the memory of Lieutenant Gaetano Arezzo della Targia, born in Syracuse on July 31, 1911:

“A valiant submarine commander during an arduous war mission, sighted an enemy naval formation at night, and moved boldly to the surface to attack. Although the submarine had been discovered, it managed to torpedo an enemy cruiser with skillful maneuvers. Subjected to violent hunting by three enemy torpedo boats, unable to resist longer in the dive due to the considerable damage sustained, it emerged with the intention of facing the overwhelming enemy forces on the surface.

In the daring attempt, as he reached his fighting post in the conning tower, he fell mortally wounded by the enemy’s volley.

(Mediterranean Sea, December 15th, 1942).”

The motivation for the Bronze Medal for Military Valor awarded to the memory of Lieutenant Gaetano Arezzo della Targia:

“Commanding Officer who, in impaired health and fever, demonstrated a high sense of duty and aggressive spirit, attacking an enemy naval force and launching two torpedoes against enemy units with probable positive results and falling in his place of duty, confirmed the qualities of impetus and dedication demonstrated in the previous circumstance by the loss of the submarine Medusa.”

Original Italian text by Lorenzo Colombo adapted and translated by Cristiano D’Adamo

Operational Records

Type	Patrols (Med.)	Patrols (Other)	NM Surface	NM Sub.	Days at Sea	NM/Day	Average Speed
Submarine – Coastal	27		19,685	3,926	200	118.06	4.92

Actions

Date	Time	Captain	Area	Coordinates	Convoy	Weapon	Result	Ship	Type	Tonns	Flag
8/11/1942	04.42	T.V. Gaetano Arezzo della Targia	Mediterranean	37°52’N-01°48’E	WS21S	Torpedo	Failed	Furious	Aircraft Carrier	19826	Great Britain

Crew Members Lost

Last Name	First Name	Rank	Italian Rank	Date
Arezzo della Targia	Gaetano	Lieutenant	Tenente di Vascello	12/15/1943
Battilana	Pietro	Chief 2nd Class	Capo di 2a Classe	12/15/1942
Bressan	Bruno	Chief 2nd Class	Capo di 2a Classe	12/15/1942
Brigantini	Pietro	Junior Chief	Sottocapo	12/15/1942
Ceriani	Carlo	Naval Rating	Comune	12/15/1942
Dapiran	Remigio	Sublieutenant	Sottotenente di Vascello	12/15/1942
Di Lorenzo	Corrado	Naval Rating	Comune	12/15/1942
Fotia	Ugo	Naval Rating	Comune	12/15/1942
Galeandro	Angelo	Junior Chief	Sottocapo	12/15/1942
Garufi	Antonio	Sergeant	Sergente	12/15/1942
Laporini	Alberto	Junior Chief	Sottocapo	12/15/1942
Leonardelli	Pio	Naval Rating	Comune	12/21/1942
Mazzotti	Ilario	Chief 3rd Class	Capo di 3a Classe	12/15/1942
Romano	Giovanni	Naval Rating	Comune	12/15/1942
Rossi	Giovanni	Sergeant	Sergente	12/15/1942
Tarraboiro	Sergio	Junior Chief	Sottocapo	1/8/1943
Tironi	Ermanno	Naval Rating	Comune	10/5/1940
Zelo	Sebastiano	Junior Chief	Sottocapo	12/15/1942

The Axum was an Adua-class (600 series, Bernardis type) coastal submarine (698 tons displacement on the surface and 866 tons submerged).

Axum in Monfalcone – 1936
(From the magazine “Rivista Marittima” n. 2 February, 1995)

During the war, It completed 27 patrols and 22 transfers, covering a total of 22,889 miles on the surface and 3,413 submerged, sinking a light cruiser of 4,190 tons and damaging a light cruiser of 8,530 tons and a tanker of 9,514 GRT.

Brief and partial chronology

March 8th, 1936

Setting up of the boat begun in the Cantieri Riuniti dell’Adriatico (C.R.D.A.) in Monfalcone (construction number 1178).

September 27th, 1936

The boat was launched at the C.R.D.A. in Monfalcone.

December 2nd, 1936

Axum officially entered active service.

March 20th, 1937

Placed under Maricosom (the command of the Italian submarine fleet), it was assigned to the XXXII Submarine Squadron based in Naples.

August 2nd through September 5^th, 1937

The submarine carried out a secret mission in the Strait of Sicily as part of the Spanish Civil War but did not spot any suspicious ships.

1937-1940

It carried out intense training activities while based in Naples.

May 5th, 1938

Axum took part in the naval magazine “H” in the Gulf of Naples and in the simultaneous surfacing maneuver in formation of one hundred submarines, which then executed an artillery salvo.

June 10th, 1940

Italy entered the World War II. The Axum was formally part of the LXXI Submarine Squadron of the VII Grupsom homebased in Cagliari, with the twin boats Adua, Alagi and Aradam, but it was based in Naples. In the first months of the war, it was mainly deployed in the western Mediterranean.

June 1940

Sent to form a barrage south of Sardinia.

July 4^th through 5th, 1940

Sent to lie in wait to the north of Algeria.

July 9^th through 11th, 1940

Patrolling the island of La Galite, then transferred to the southwest of the island of Sant’Antioco (Sardinia).

November 9th, 1940

Axum sailed from Cagliari in the late afternoon bound for the waters off the island La Galite, where it had to form a barrage (along with the Aradam, Alagi, Medusa and Diaspro) to counter the British operation “Coat”, consisting of sending to Malta a convoy (of warships: the battleship H.M.S. Barham, the heavy cruiser H.M.S. Berwick, the light cruiser H.M.S. Glasgow and three destroyers, with a covering force consisting of the aircraft carrier H.M.S. Ark Royal – which will also launch a diversionary air attack on Cagliari – the light cruiser H.M.S. Sheffield and three destroyers) with troops and anti-aircraft weapons, as part of the complex operation “MB.8” (which also includes other secondary operations: the transfer of war units from Gibraltar to Alexandria, the dispatch of convoys to Greece, the attack of torpedo bombers against Taranto on 11th-12th November and an offensive against Italian convoys in the Otranto Channel). The five boats were positioned at 315° bearing from La Galite, 30 miles apart, with the task of carrying out night search by parallel routes without going more than 120 miles west of the line of formation.

Shortly after 7 PM on November 9th, Axum heard distant noises of turbines on the hydrophone, to the southeast, but at such a distance as to make any approach maneuver impracticable.

November 12th, 1940

It detected faint noises on the hydrophones.

November 27th, 1940

I was sent south of Sardinia, at 9.35 PM the crew sighted three destroyers and disengaged by diving.

January 1941

Sent to patrol in the waters off Algeria and Tunisia.

June 16, 1941

The Axum (Lieutenant Commander Emilio Gariazzo) was sent between Ras Uleima and Marsa Matruh, to counter, with other boats, the coastal bombardment operations by British naval units, in support of the retreat of British ground troops.

June 20th, 1941

Axum was ordered to move closer to Benghazi.

June 23rd, 1941

At 10:26 PM the crew sighted a ship heading west and launched a torpedo from 800 meters. It was defective (irregular run) and missed the target. The Axum launches a second torpedo, but this too misses the ship, passing a few meters aft. Spotted by the enemy unit, the submarine was forced to dive and subjected to a short but precise bombardment with depth charges, from which, however, it arises unscathed (the bombs explode very close, but the engines were stopped, all noisy activity ceased, and it dove almost to the bottom, finally managing to escape).

July 19^th through 28th, 1941

The boat is sent on patrol off the coast of Tobruk, where it detects intense air and naval (surface) activity.

Axum at sea
(U.S.M.M.)

Summer 1941

Axum is sent to Leros (Greece), arriving nearby, it came to the surface near the island, sighted from land but mistakenly believed to be enemy, and therefore attacked by a MAS that opened fire with machine guns and launched a torpedo. Fortunately, the Axum was missed, there were no injuries, and the misunderstanding was clarified. Later, it transferred to Messina, then (September) to Cagliari.

September 1941

Sent east of the Balearic Islands and south of Menorca, for defensive purposes and along with three other submarines (Aradam, Diaspro and Serpente), during the British operation “Halberd” (consisting of sending a convoy to Malta, but which the Italian commanders believe could instead be a naval bombardment against targets on the coasts of the peninsula); However, the British squadron will not pass through the area.

October 24th, 1941

Sent on patrol in the waters off Malta.

December 1941

Sent on patrol in the waters of Cap Bougaroûn.

January 4th, 1942

Sent to lie in wait south of Malta (the ambush began at noon on January 4th), in the area between the meridians 14°00′ E and 14°40′ E and the parallels 34°40′ N and 35°00′ N, with the task of spotting and attacking any British naval forces that might be put to sea to oppose Operation “M. 43”,  consisting of sending a large convoy of supplies to Libya. Such a threat did not materialize.

February 1942

Sent to lie in wait in Algerian waters.

Mid-June 1942

Axum is sent to lie in wait in the Ionian Sea during the Battle of Mid-June, to which it did not take part. Later it was sent to lie in wait northwest of Algiers.

June 22nd, 1942

Transferred to the waters off the Island Linosa.

July 15th, 1942

The Axum (Lieutenant Renato Ferrini) was sent to lie in wait between the Isle of Dogs and La Galite, and in the late afternoon, six miles east of the Isle of Dogs, it sights the British fast minelayer H.M.S. Welshman proceeding at high speed towards Malta (where it is headed with supplies). At 8 PM the Axum launched three electric torpedoes, under cover of darkness (but with the difficulty of rough seas, which prevented it from maintaining periscope depth), without being able to hit, due to bad weather that diverted the course of the torpedoes.

Mid-August

The Axum reached the brightest point of its “career” in August 1942, during the great air-naval battle of Mid-August.

After the substantial failure of the “Harpoon” and “Vigorous” refueling operations in the air-naval battle of Mid-June, two months earlier, the British commanders had in fact planned a new attempt to supply the exhausted garrison and population of Malta: “Operation Pedestal”. This was consisting of sending a convoy of 14 merchant ships (the cargo ships Almeria Lykes, Melbourne Star,  Brisbane Star, Clan Ferguson, Dorset, Deucalion, Wairangi, Waimarama, Glenorchy, Port Chalmers, Empire Hope, Rochester Castle and Santa Elisa and the tanker Ohio) with heavy escort: four light cruisers (H.M.S. Nigeria, H.M.S. Kenya, H.M.S. Cairo and H.M.S. Manchester) and twelve destroyers (H.M.S. Ashanti, H.M.S. Intrepid, H.M.S. Icarus, H.M.S. Foresight, H.M.S. Derwent, H.M.S. Fury, H.M.S. Bramham, H.M.S. Bicester, H.M.S. Wilton, H.M.S. Ledbury, H.M.S. Penn and H.M.S. Pathfinder) to escort all the way,  and four aircraft carriers (H.M.S. Eagle, H.M.S. Furious, H.M.S. Indomitable and H.M.S. Victorious), two battleships (H.M.S. Rodney and H.M.S. Nelson), three light cruisers (H.M.S. Sirius, H.M.S. Phoebe and H.M.S. Charybdis) and twelve destroyers (H.M.S. Laforey, H.M.S. Lightning, H.M.S. Lookout, H.M.S. Tartar, H.M.S. Quentin, H.M.S. Somali, H.M.S. Eskimo, H.M.S. Wishart, H.M.S.  Zetland, H.M.S. Ithuriel, H.M.S. Antelope and H.M.S. Vantsittart) as additional escorts in the first half of the voyage (up to the entrance of the Strait of Sicily).

For their part, the Italian commanders had concerted adequate countermeasures: in the western and central-western Mediterranean, the convoy would have been subjected to a series of attacks by submarines, then, having arrived in the Strait of Sicily (under cover of night), by MAS and Italian and German motor torpedo boats (fifteen units in all), as well as incessant attacks by bombers and torpedo planes (in all, 784 aircraft) of both of the Regia Aeronautica (TN Italian Air Force) and the Luftwaffe, until their arrival in Malta. Also, it was planned the intervention (later aborted) of two cruiser divisions (the III and the VII) to finish what was left of the convoy decimated by the previous air, underwater and insidious attacks.

A total of 15 Italian submarines and two German U-boats contributed to forming a powerful submarine barrage in the western Mediterranean; the Axum was to form a barrier line of the western entrance to the Strait of Sicily, north of the La Galite- Skerki Banks junction (TN also known as the Skerki Channel), along with Alagi, Ascianghi, Avorio, Bronzo, Cobalto, Dessiè, Dandolo, Emo and Otaria. The orders, for all, were to act with great offensive determination, launching as many torpedoes as possible against any target, merchant, or military, larger than a destroyer.

On August 11^th, 1942, the submarine, under the command of Lieutenant Renato Ferrini, left Cagliari for an area 25 miles northwest of Cape Blanc, where it arrived the following day. The boat thus became part of a barrage of eleven submarines, sent north of Tunisia (between Scoglio Fratelli and Skerki Banks) to attack the British convoy. In particular, the Axum positioned itself in the channel of Skerki Banks, together with Alagi, Bronzo, Dessiè and Granito (belonging to a different barrage): all, except the last, would achieve successes against the convoy.

At six o’clock in the morning of August 12th, the Axum arrived at the assigned spot and submerged. At 2 PM Commander Ferrini – considering, based on the signals of discovery, that the convoy would pass far close to the coast, keeping the naval formation assigned to its protection to the north – ordered to sail for Cape Blanc, with a 230° course, remaining submerged.

At 6:21 PM, the boat sighted in position 37°37′ N and 10°21′ E, on a 229° bearing (on the starboard side, very far away) and with an alpha angle of 11°, a dark mass that Ferrini, after studying it thoroughly, concluded to be a large merchant ship or an aircraft carrier. While approaching submerged to better understand what it was, at 6.40 PM the Axum sighted two smoke trails on the starboard side (295° bearing), and then the smoke produced by anti-aircraft fire against two aircraft, which were moving away to the east. Realizing that the British squadron must be there, at 6:41 PM Commander Ferrini steered to the north, to get closer, and at 6:50 PM, seeing that the smoke was now at a 300° bearing, he leveled off to 20 meters and headed at maximum speed for 30° bearing.

Returning to periscope depth at 7:27 PM, he sighted eight kilometers away portside, on a 110° angle (with an alpha angle of 290° and beta 10°), an enemy formation in position 37°37′ N and 10°19′ E. A minute later Axum approached starboard and assumed a course like that of the opposing formation, in order to better observe it.  The captain found out that it was the convoy, about fifteen merchant ships, escorted by two cruisers and several destroyers. They proceeded in wedge-shaped formation in three lines of merchant ships, with the cruisers in the center and the destroyers all around in outer rows. There was also another ship, half-hidden from the others, which appeared to have two tall masts, like those of American battleships (TN hyperboloid lattice shell structures known within the service as cage masts), although there were no such units in Mid-August. At 7:33 PM, Ferrini noted that the British squadron had turned 30° to starboard, so he himself steered to starboard, but 180°. At 7:37 PM a new check showed that the distance had dropped to 4000 meters, the enemy formation had a course of 140° and a speed of 13 knots.

At this point, the Axum approached starboard (for 220° bearing) to assume a suitable position for launching torpedoes. At 7:42 PM, after a quick check at periscope depth, Ferrini brought his boat to 15 meters and ordered half speed forward to approach.

Returning to periscope depth at 7:48 PM, the commander noticed that he now had a 28° angle of sight for the second-row cruiser, which was preceded by a destroyer and followed by a large merchant ship.

At 7:55 PM, from an estimated distance of 1,300 meters from the first line of the convoy and 1,800 meters from the target cruiser (the position is variously reported as 37°26′ N and 10°22′ E, or 37°40′ N and 10°06′ E, 75 miles north of Cape Bon), Axum launched all four torpedoes from the forward tubes:  First the number 1, straight, then the 4, angled 5° to starboard, then the 3, angled 5° to the left, and finally the 2, straight. Soon after, the boat disengaged.

After 63 seconds from the launch, a bang was heard; After another 27 seconds, two more, very close.

Ferrini thought he had hit a ship in the first row and then one in the second, but the reality was even better: not two, but three ships had been hit (all on the port side) with that single salvo of four torpedoes, the most brilliant result achieved by an Italian submarine in the Mediterranean.

A torpedo, the first to hit, had hit under the bridge the modern light cruiser H.M.S. Nigeria (Captain Stuart Henry Paton), displacement of 8,530 tons, flag ship of Admiral Harold Borrough (commander of Force X, assigned to the direct escort of the convoy), while advancing at 14 knots. The explosion opened a gaping hole thirteen meters wide. The forward boiler rooms were flooded, the pumps stopped operating, power went out to the entire ship, the rudder got stuck making the ship turn in circles, some contained fires broke out and 52 crew members lost their lives. To prevent sinking or capsizing, several bulkheads had to be shored up, the flooded compartments had to be insulated, and some others on the opposite side had to be flooded to reduce heeling.

H.M.S. Nigeria heeled port side
(U.S.M.M.)

At 8:10 AM the cruiser, considerably heeled port side (the ship immediately listed 13°, becoming 17° after three minutes; later reduced to 5°), had to transfer Admiral Borrough to the destroyer H.M.S. Ashanti and then return to Gibraltar at 14 knots, escorted and assisted by the destroyers H.M.S. Derwent, H.M.S. Bicester and H.M.S. Wilton. Repairs took over a year and were not completed until September 1943.

Damage caused by the Axum’s torpedo
9U.S.M.M.)

Two torpedoes had then hit the old anti-aircraft cruiser H.M.S. Cairo (of 4,190 tons, under the command of Captain Cecil Campbell Hardy) on the stern, portside, which at that moment was proceeding at 8 knots, removing the stern (including the port propeller) and causing the entire ship to lose electricity, as well as killing 24 members of its crew. After the evacuation of the crew, the Cairo (376 survivors), laid, ablaze and immobilized, and was finished off with cannon fire by the escort destroyer H.M.S. Derwent (another, H.M.S. Pathfinder, had already missed it with four torpedoes and launched some depth charges in vain to accelerate the sinking).

Finally, the fourth torpedo had hit the tanker Ohio (Captain Dudley William Mason), the most important merchant ship of the convoy (being the only tanker, with a vital cargo of fuel), amidships, causing heavy damage: a gash of seven by eight meters in the port side of the pump room (the explosion had also opened a leak on the starboard side,  completely flooding the room, and the gash extended to the main deck), disabling the compasses and rudder transmissions (forcing the construction of an improvised emergency steering station at the stern), and the turning off the boilers (leaving it temporarily immobilized) and a violent fire on board. Within twenty minutes, the crew of the tanker managed to contain the fire and continue at 13 knots despite the damage. The ship was hit again by several air attacks (by bombs and even by a German Junker Ju 87 bomber which, shot down by machine guns, crashed on its bulwark), but the superhuman determination of its crew,  towing by the minesweeper H.M.S. Rye and destroyer H.M.S. Bramham and support from destroyers H.M.S. Ledbury and H.M.S. Penn, which flanked her on each side, would eventually enable her to reach Malta on August 15th. Here it would eventually sink, breaking in two, after unloading the precious fuel.

The hit on the Ohio

The Axum attack would have had further negative implications on the convoy as H.M.S. Cairo and H.M.S. Nigeria were the only units of Force X equipped with personnel and equipment for coordination with the fighters of the air escort, and their disabling greatly weakened the effectiveness of the air escort, which could no longer coordinate with the convoy (thus facilitating the subsequent Italian-German air attacks, which claimed many victims). Moreover, the attack had occurred during the maneuver to go from a formation of four columns to one of two (to maneuver in narrower waters), which were to have H.M.S. Cairo and H.M.S. Nigeria at the head of each column: without guidance, without orders (during the time necessary for the transfer of Admiral Burrough from H.M.S.  Nigeria to H.M.S. Ashanti, which in turn had to temporarily absent himself from its role as flotilla leader of the 6th Destroyer Flotilla) and almost half of the escort (since five destroyers had to be detached to assist the damaged cruisers), the convoy was temporarily plunged into chaos.

Four and a half minutes had passed since the launch when the reaction of the escort began. The Axum was 65 meters away when the first discharge of depth charges was thrown, which was centered. Ferrini brought his unit to 100 meters, then stopped every machine so as not to produce noises detectable by the hydrophones.

This was followed by two hours of anti-submarine hunting, very slow, with discharges whose accuracy varied from time to time. Whenever the Axum rose to 80-90 meters, the sonar beats could be clearly heard, always followed by the immediate launch of a barrage of depth charges. As a result, Ferrini decided to keep the submarine at depths between 100 and 120 meters, especially after that, at 9:35 PM, a destroyer was heard starting and moving from bow to stern, producing, in addition to the noise of the propellers, what seemed to be the noise produced by a darting cable, which made one think of the use of a towing torpedo.

After 10:15 PM it was noticed that there was another ship, further away, but even the one engaged in the hunt seemed to be finally moving away. In total, about 60 depth charges were dropped.

At 10:50 PM, the Axum emerged with a 330° bearing and sighted, three kilometers aft, a large ship on fire; another ship on fire, shrouded in copious smoke, at 45° on the starboard side; and a third already consumed by the flames, 70° from the stern (to port), from which a dense and grayish smoke was rising. The fire of the first ship lit the Axum all too well, and Ferrini saw not far away two destroyers in motion, which were beginning to make signals, he dived to avoid enduring a new hunt and thus was able to move away from the area to change air and recharge the batteries.

At 1:30 AM on August 14th, Axum emerged and moved away to the north, continuing to see a large fire in the distance, from which high flames rose from time to time in the sky.

Returning to dive at 6.10 AM, Ferrini found that the damage suffered in the hunt consisted of a loss of over 400 liters per hour, at a depth of 40 meters, from the trim box, a loss (at the same depth) of 700 liters per hour from the rapid dive tank, and minor losses from other cases. The leak from the AV tank prevented the submarine from diving more than 40 meters.

Ferrini decided to stay in the area. At 10.25 AM, having received an order from Maricosom to patrol a stretch of sea, he surfaced and set course for the assigned area, but at 10.50 AM a new order from the same Command made him submerge again, since it was likely that a British formation heading west would soon pass through the area (the remains of the convoy’s escort, which were now returning).

Between 11:45 AM and 1:30 PM, explosions were heard in the distance, without seeing anything, and at 3:50 PM the order was received to search for an aircraft carrier, so the Axum surfaced and proceeded on the surface for a 230° bearing, towards the indicated area. At 4.33 PM a further order led the boat to dive again, but the loss of the AV trim tank worsened; this did not induce Ferrini to leave the area, wanting to be able to attack any isolated and damaged enemy ships. At 8 PM order came to attack an isolated and damaged unit, so Axum resurfaced and set out in search of it.  At 11:45 PM, while proceeding with on a 270° course, the crew saw in the distance, on a 110° bearing, the launch of two illuminating flares, and ten minutes later the launch of three more rockets, this time very close, aft. Immediately stopping the engines, Ferrini saw two more rockets landing lower, right on his vertical; He made a quick dive, clearly hearing the engine of an airplane, and when he was twenty meters deep he heard a bomb explode in the distance.

The loss of the forward trim tank prevented descending to more than 40 meters, so the Axum kept at this depth and moved away submerged in a northerly direction. Between 00:17 AM and 00:40 AM on August 14th, the crew detected suspicious noises on the hydrophones, which did not diminish even after the boat approached.

Resurfacing at 1:30 AM., the Axum lurked around again until 5:45 AM, when it dove again for the rest of the day, during which time it heard, at intervals, bomb discharges in the distance. Emerging at 9 PM, in consideration of the damage sustained two days earlier, Ferrini finally decided to return. Arriving at point “T 3” in Trapani at 7.30 AM on 15 August 15th, he followed the safety routes and moored at the submarine quay at 10.05 AM, thus concluding his victorious patrol.

The Battle of Mid-August, the largest air-naval battle ever fought in the Mediterranean, ended with very heavy losses on the Allied side. In the face of the loss, by the Axis, of the submarines Dagabur and Cobalt and about sixty aircraft, and the serious damage to the cruisers Muzio Attendolo and Bolzano, the British lost the aircraft carrier H.M.S. Eagle, the light cruisers H.M.S. Manchester and H.M.S. Cairo, the destroyer H.M.S. Foresight and nine of the merchant ships – all except Ohio, Rochester Castle, Port Chalmers, Brisbane Star and Melbourne Star – and complained of severe damage to the aircraft carrier H.M.S. Indomitable, the light cruisers H.M.S. Kenya and H.M.S. Nigeria and three of the surviving merchant ships (Ohio, Rochester Castle and Brisbane Star). However, the arrival in Malta of five merchant ships with 29,000 tons of supplies brought partial relief to the exhausted island, which was gradually able to regain its offensive capabilities.

October 1942

Sent to lie in wait in the waters off the Balearic Islands.

November 1942

Patrol off the Balearic Islands again.

November 7th, 1942

Axum sighted enemy units in position 37°14′ N and 02°23′ E, but was subjected to anti-submarine hunting and damaged, and the attack was thus prevented.

November 9th, 1942

Leave the assigned patrol sector in the evening and return to base.

February 1943

Patrol in the Gulf of Sirte to attack any enemy traffic.

April 1943

Sent to lie in wait northwest and then southeast of Cape Fer.

April 11th, 1943

While in the waters off Sardinia along with the submarines Argo, Velella and Acciaio, and navigating during a violent mistral wind, Axum took on a lot of water due to a sea gust and suffered the disabling of both periscopes, thus being forced to return to base.

June 21st, 1943

The Axum, while sailing from La Spezia to La Maddalena, was sighted at 1.20 PM, in position 42°35′ N and 08°38′ E (five miles northwest of Calvi, Corsica, while the Axum was proceeding on a 210° course) and from 3,660 meters away, by the British submarine H.M.S. Templar (Lieutenant Denis John Beckley). At 1.30 PM H.M.S Templar launched a torpedo from 1,370 meters, missing the target, and three minutes later (after regaining suitable depth, which had been briefly lost) launched four more, from the same distance. Avoiding the weapons from the Axum, the British boat launched two more at 1.40 PM, from a distance that had now risen to 2,750 meters, again without result. The Axum briefly spotted the attacker’s periscope but limited itself to evasive maneuvers without counterattacking with torpedoes from the stern tubes, because the distance was so short, and the weapons would not have had time to activate.

September 8th, 1943

When the armistice was announced, the Axum (Lieutenant Vittorio Barra) was in Gaeta, where it had arrived the same day from Pozzuoli (considered too close to the front) to carry out some repair work on the diesel engines (the original ones, now worn, had in fact been replaced with new German-made engines, but one of them failed during sea trials in the Gulf of Naples).

The announcement of the armistice was given to the crew, gathered in assembly, by Commander Barra. Many sailors, especially conscripts, rejoice for what they believe to be the end of the war and the imminent return home, while the career officers and non-commissioned officers, sensing what was really going to happen, were worried. Captain Barra brought the crew back to order, and for a few hours the activities on board continued as normally as every day.

September 9th, 1943

In the early hours of the 9th, German troops attacked the quay and overwhelmed the sentries, attempting to capture the moored ships (in addition to the Axum, some corvettes). At 2:15 AM, the men on the Axum saw more men running towards them in the dark, gesticulating and shouting to run quickly, because the Germans were occupying the harbor and capturing the ships at the mooring. Without wasting time in moving the gangway (which remains on the pier) and untying the moorings (which will be torn by the departing submarine), the only working diesel engine was immediately set in motion and brought to full force. In the haste to leave, the Axum slightly bumps into the corvette Pellicano, which was also fleeing.

Having escaped capture by the German forces, the submarine set course northwards, and at dawn, in the waters off Civitavecchia, it passed close to German patrol boats which, however, did not pay attention to its presence.

To buy time and understand what was happening, Commander Barra took the Axum to the island of Monte Cristo, where he spent the night in a cove.

September 10th, 1943

Axum reached Portoferraio (Tuscany), where numerous torpedo boats, corvettes and submarines from the ports of the Upper Tyrrhenian Sea had gathered. Admiral Amedeo Nomis di Pollone assumed command of these forces.

September 12th, 1943

Axum left Portoferraio bound for Palermo, still propelled by a single engine. According to the provisions of the armistice, black rims were painted at the bow and a black pendant was hoisted on the periscope. Due to its slow speed, the Axum remains alone on its journey, but it still managed to reach Palermo.

September 19^th thought 20th, 1943

Axum departed from Palermo along with five other submarines (Filippo Corridoni, Nichelio, H 1, H 2 and H 4) and several surface ships (the torpedo boats Aliseo, Animoso, Ardimentoso, Ariete, Calliope, Fortunale, Indomito and Antonio Mosto, the corvettes Ape, Cormorano, Danaide, Gabbiano, Minerva and Pellicano, the auxiliary submarine destroyer AS 121 Regina Elena, the motor torpedo boats MS 35,  MS 55 and MS 64, the submarine destroyers VAS 201, VAS 204, VAS 224, VAS 233, VAS 237, VAS 240, VAS 241, VAS 246 and VAS 248) and moved to Malta, where the boat moored next to the light cruiser Luigi di Savoia Duca degli Abruzzi (on board which the crew of the Axum went for meals, and on which men of the Axum would mount guard). The following day it was moored, along with the submarines Atropo, Fratelli Bandiera, Marcantonio Bragadin, Filippo Corridoni, Giada, Marea, Nichelio, Vortice and Luigi Settembrini in Marsa Scirocco, under the command of the battleship Giulio Cesare.

During the stay in Malta, there was no shortage of tensions; some career non-commissioned officers, not agreeing with the surrender to the Allies, exploited the discontent created among the crew for the theft of cigarettes from the rations on board and proposed seizing the small arms on board, with the intent, in fact, of seizing the submarine, but it did not happen.

October 9th, 1943

Axum left Malta (alone and four days earlier than the other submarines, given his lower speed) and returned to Taranto, still at low speed and with only one engine.

During the co-belligerence, once the engines were finally repaired, it was used in infiltration missions by spies and saboteurs, who landed on the Greek and Italian coasts occupied by German troops.

November 30th, 1943

Axum (Lieutenant Giovanni Sorrentino) departed from Brindisi at 4.20 PM for its first infiltration mission, with 15 agents of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA) on board, some of whom were members of the “Vittorio” mission (in charge of setting up an information network in Rome).

Axum in Malta in a rare color picture of the time

December 4th, 1943

The agents in charge of the missions “Iris” (head of mission Captain Enrico Sorrentino, who will reach Rome) and “Syria” (led by the second lieutenant of artillery Arrigo Paladini, in charge of establishing radio contacts between the partisan groups operating in central Italy and the US forces; it was the first joint mission of the OSS and the ORI, the Organization for the Italian Resistance, disembarking in Pesaro;  a sort of “secret service” of the Resistance). On the same day, the second chief signaler, Antonio Maddalozzo, who had joined the OSS, landed at Gabicce Mare (Cattolica) and reached Friuli to arrange for the delivery of supplies to the partisans operating in the area of Cismon del Grappa, as well as to collect information on concentrations and movements of German troops and on lines of communication.

December 8th, 1943

The “Pescia 2” mission of the OSS-ORI (radio telegraphist Giovanni Alberto Fabbri) was disembarked in Gabicce, then the return navigation began, during which, due to an engine failure, reached Taranto instead of Brindisi.

December 19th, 1943

Still under the command of Lieutenant Sorrentino, Axum sailed from Brindisi for the second special mission, consisting of the disembarkation of Greek agents of Force 133 of the SOE (Special Operations Executive), but was immediately forced to return by a failure of a diesel engine.

December 21st, 1943

Back in port.

The end

After surviving three years of hard war against the Anglo-American forces, without ever being seriously damaged and indeed reporting a remarkable success in mid-August, Axum was one of the few Italian submarines that were lost during the co-belligerence.

On December 25th, 1943 – after repairs to the engine failure were completed – the boat, under the command of Lieutenant Giovanni Sorrentino, left Taranto for a mission to recover informants in the Gulf of Arcadia (now Kyparissia), south of Cape Katacolon and the channel between Zakynthos and Morea.

After two days’ sailing, Axum arrived at the point indicated for the recovery of informers (west coast of the Morea) at eight o’clock in the evening of December 27^th. When the pre-arranged signals arrived from land, the crew put to sea a dinghy under the command of a British officer. While waiting for the dinghy to return with the informants, the Axum began to move back and forth in front of the point, a short distance from the shore, but this led it to run aground on a rocky shoal not indicated in the mediocre nautical charts available (they were on a small scale, and a detailed hydrographic chart was missing), near the beach of Kaifas (TN Loutra Kaiafa) , in position 37°31′ N and 21°35′ E.

No maneuver was able to free it. The crew finally had to resign themselves and go ashore. All the removable material, weapons and ammunition on the submarine were removed and handed over to the Greek partisans. On the afternoon of December 28th, Commander Sorrentino placed the explosive charges intended to destroy his boat. In the early hours of December 29th, having obtained the consent of the British captain Peter (in charge of the mission), Commander Sorrentino, with a few other men remaining on board, lit the fuses and blew up the Axum.

Aware of the danger of the sea in that area, Sorrentino decided not to request the sending of a ship to recover its crew, but to move to a safer place for the rescue ship, even at the cost of having to spend time in territory occupied by German forces.

The Italian crew and Allied informants therefore had to take refuge in the Morea mountains, under the protection of Greek partisans, and spent a month there. On January 22nd, a Royal Air Force plane dropped winter shoes and clothing for them to enable them to cross the mountains. Finally, towards the end of January 1944, Italian sailors and British agents made a five-day march through the Morea Mountains, to reach Marathopolis, near the island of Proti. Here they were finally rescued by the escort torpedo boat Ardimentoso on January 29^th, 1944, and brought back to Taranto the following day.

On January 22nd, German soldiers found the devastated and half-submerged wreck of the Axum on a beach 20 km southeast of Pyrgos. German divers had dived into it to finding it stripped of everything.

Relict of the Axum. Only the resistant hull is left.
(Phono N. Klimi)

It was left where it was. It remained there for several years, with the conning tower emerging from the surface, subject of visits by locals. What was left of the Axum was finally demolished in the 1950s (TN The actual date was 1971 and the boat was resurfaced and taken to Perama, near Piraeus, from scrapping).

Recovery of the Axum destined for ship-breaking

Giuseppe Bocci, second chief electrician, died in the metropolitan area on December 12^th, 1942

Original Italian text by Lorenzo Colombo adapted and translated by Cristiano D’Adamo

Operational Records

Type	Patrols (Med.)	Patrols (Other)	NM Surface	NM Sub.	Days at Sea	NM/Day	Average Speed
Submarine – Coastal	49		22,889	3,413	233	112.88	4.7

Actions

Date	Time	Captain	Area	Coordinates	Convoy	Weapon	Result	Ship	Type	Tonns	Flag
8/12/1942	19.55	C.C. Renato Ferrini	Mediterranean	37°26’N-10°22’E	WS21S	Torpedo	Sank	HMS Cairo	Light Cruiser	4200	Great Britain
8/12/1942	19.55	C.C. Renato Ferrini	Mediterranean	37°26’N-10°22’E	WS21S	Torpedo	Damaged	HMS Nigeria	Light Cruiser	8670	Great Britain
8/12/1942	19.55	C.C. Renato Ferrini	Mediterranean	37°26’N-10°22’E	WS21S	Torpedo	Damaged	Ohio	Tanker	9625	United States

Crew Members Lost

Last Name	First Name	Rank	Italian Rank	Date
Bocci	Giuseppe	Chief 2nd Class	Capo di 2a Classe	6/28/1941
Poletti	Emilio	Naval Rating	Comune	4/6/1942

The Avorio was a coastal submarine of the Platino class small (TN 600 series, type Bernardis), 712 tons displacement on the surface and 865 tons submerged. The boat completed 15 war missions (7 patrols and 8 relocations), covering a total of 5,676 nautical miles on the surface and 685 submerged.

Avorio at sea
(U.S.M.M.)

Brief and partial chronology

November 9th, 1940

The Avorio was laid out at the Cantieri Riuniti dell’Adriatico in Monfalcone (construction number 1266).

September 6th, 1941

The boat was launched at the Cantieri Riuniti dell’Adriatico in Monfalcone. From November 1941, the fitting out was overseen by Lieutenant Marco Revedin.

The Avorio still on the slip
From “Gli squali dell’Adriatico” di Alessandro Turrini

March 25th, 1942

The Avorio entered active service.

March-August 1942

Period of intensive training so that the boat could become operational as soon as possible.

At the beginning of August, after completing training, the unit was deployed to Cagliari and assigned to the VII Submarine Group.

May 20^th,1942

Lieutenant Mario Priggione (28 years old, from Genoa) took command of the Avorio.

August 11th, 1942

The Avorio (Lieutenant Mario Priggione) departed Cagliari for its first war patrol during the air-naval battle of Mid-August. Along with nine other submarines (Alagi, Ascianghi, Axum, Bronzo, Cobalto, Otaria, Dandolo, Dessiè and Emo), it was deployed north of the Tunisian coast ( the assigned sector was located 20 miles from the coast of Tunisia), between Scoglio Fratelli (TN Sicily)  and Skerki Banks (east of La Galite to the approaches of the Strait of Sicily, forming a barrier line of the western entrance to the Strait of Sicily, north of the La Galite- Skerki Banks junction), to attack the British convoy bound for Malta as part of Operation “Pedestal” (consisting of 14 merchant ships with the direct escort of 4 light cruisers and 11 destroyers, plus a support force composed of 2 battleships,  3 aircraft carriers, 3 light cruisers and 15 destroyers). The orders were to act with great offensive determination, launching as many torpedoes as possible against any target, merchant or military, larger than a destroyer.

 Avorio, along with Dandolo, Cobalto, Granite, Emo and Otaria, formed a group operating west of La Galite.

August 12th, 1942

The Avorio arrived in the assigned sector, about fifteen miles north of Bizerte. During the day the crew heard bomb explosions but did spot anything. Based on the news received by radio regarding the movements of the convoy, it moved into the area and at 5.08 PM an enemy formation was finally spotted with the periscope proceeding on a course 90° (with Alfa 300°). It included numerous merchant ships and destroyers and there were three battleships behind which, from what look like masts in a lattice. Commander Priggione mistakenly believed they are Americans.

The periscope sighting was followed by detection from the hydrophones, which indicated a source covering a sector of about 40°. At the time of the sighting, merchant ships were about 8 miles away (with beta 80° on the starboard side), destroyers 6.5 miles away (with beta 70°-80° on the starboard side), and battleships less than 10 miles away (with beta 50° on the starboard side); wind and sea were completely calm, although there was a strong vibration.

The Avorio took a true course of 30° to attack the battleships, but at 5.16 PM two of the destroyers escorting the merchant ships (which preceded the battleships), approached on a beta 0°, leading commander Priggione (who excluded having been sighted, being still too far away) to believe that the whole convoy was approaching. The submarine continued its attack, checking with the periscope from time to time, and at 5:25 PM the two destroyers (one was H.M.S. Lookout, which having sighted the periscope of the Avorio, attacked it and then rejoined the convoy at 5:40 PM; the other was perhaps H.M.S. Tartar) were 3,000 meters away, again with beta 0°, while the convoy remained on the previous course (90°).

At this point Priggione concluded that he had certainly been sighted, therefore he ordered a slow dive to the depth of 40 meters, without disengaging. At 5.30 PM, the first four depth charges exploded nearby, and a systematic hunt began. The sources detected by the hydrophones remained in the aft sectors, with the boat stopping from time to time to listen. The Avorio then descended deeper, up to 100 meters, while the enemy ships continued to hunt it. In all, 180 depth charges were launched, while the ping of the sonar was distinctively heard.

Following various bearings to the south, looking for shallow waters, the Avorio finally manages to disengage after hours of chasing. At 10:25 PM, the hydrophones continued to report sound in the area, but Commander Priggione orders the boat to the surface to scan the horizon with binoculars. The observation reveals that there were no more enemy ships nearby. In conditions of absolute calm wind and sea, the Avorio headed north, starting to recharge the batteries and change the air.

August 13th, 1942

The Avorio moved several times according to orders given by the Submarine Squadron Command (Maricosom), looking for a burned aircraft carrier. At 4:21 PM, a cloud of black smoke was sighted. Believing it to be the reported aircraft carrier, the submarine reported to Maricosom. During the day, the Avorio sighted, and was sighted by, numerous aircraft.

At 7:38 PM, the boat was attacked by an aircraft and subjected to a short chase, with bombs being dropped.

August 13^th through 15th, 1942

The nights of August 13, 14^th, and 15th the Avorio continued to make various movements according to the orders it had received from Maricosom.

August 14th, 1942

At 5.16 PM the Avorio, and the  other submarines of his group (in the meantime reduced by three units, following the sinking  of the Cobalto, the damaging of the Dandolo and the  return of the Granito,  which had spent all its torpedoes), were ordered to emerge and move immediately to sub quadrant 5 of quadrant 0434, where the presence of an immobilized and damaged enemy cruiser had been reported,  to sink it. Subsequently, since this information turned out to be erroneous, another message was sent ordering the submarines, once they arrived at the point indicated in the previous order, to assume began patrolling in the same manner as before, in an area located 140 miles west of the one in which they were previously located.

In the evening, the Avorio and the other boats of the group were ordered to move 30 miles further west, to attack any British units sailing back after the surviving merchant ships of “Pedestal” had arrived in Malta.

August 16th, 1942

In the afternoon, the Avorio attempted an attack on the surface based on a hydrophone pickup, but did not spot any ships.

August 17th, 1942

The submarine was back in Cagliari.

August 18th, 1942

At 00.27 the Avorio (Lieutenant Mario Priggione) left the moorings and headed out of the port of Cagliari.

The Battle of Mid-August had just ended, but at 6.50 AM on the 17^th, a group of British ships (the aircraft carrier Furious, a cruiser and seven destroyers) was sighted off Algiers, and it was also reported that on 16th other British ships were preparing to leave Gibraltar. This information determined a state of alarm and the order to put to sea all submarines in readiness, Avorio included.

At 00.37 AM, once the port obstructions were cleared, the Avorio headed towards the conventional point “Z”, and at 2.55 AM, when it was close to this point (in the waters between Sardinia and Tunisia), and on the surface recharging the batteries (proceeding at 8 knots on a true 164° course), it sighted only 500 meters away,  on alfa 90°, an unknown submarine with beta 30° to starboard and 50° course. It was the British P 211 (later Safari, Commander Benjamin Bryant).

The Avorio at sea
(From the magazine Storia Militare)

The enemy submarine was approaching and aiming at the Avorio, which in turn approached full rudder to port and – since torpedoes 5 and 6, the aft ones, were ready to launch and the order of operations prohibits attacking other submarines – it turned its stern to P 211. Despite the order not to attack other submarines, motivated by the fear of possible incidents of “friendly fire” due to the many Italian boats at sea in the Central Mediterranean, Commander Priggione correctly judges that the newcomer could not be an Italian submarine, both because he has not been informed of the arrival of a Italian submarine bound for Cagliari,  and because Priggione knew that Italian submarines, as a rule, made landings at other points. As soon as the Avorio had its stern to the enemy, however, he dove, disappearing before an attack was possible.

At 3.30 AM the Avorio returned to take a 164° course, and at 3.18 AM it launched the signal of discovery, to warn of the presence of the enemy unit in the area. Then, it continued the navigation to the assigned sector.

At six o’clock in the morning, the Avorio sighted about 5.5 miles away the steamship Perseo (Captain Giorgio Blok), bound for Cagliari following a rerouting order issued by Supermarina – due to an erroneous sighting of enemy warships by the destroyer Maestrale – while it was sailing from Bagnoli (Naples) to Bona (Tunisia). At first, Commander Priggione, given that  the Perseo had a funnel at the stern (unusual at the time for cargo ships, but common for tankers), believed he has encountering a large oil tanker, which presented itself at the crossbeam (the two units were sailing on the opposite direction). Priggione had been informed  of the transit of the Perseus  rerouted from Tunisia to Cagliari, and, although confused by the appearance of the ship (which “from the estimate must have been a steamer”, while from the appearance it looks like a tanker), on the basis of the course he was following (350°) assumed that the ship encountered was indeed the Perseus (which, however, he still assumed to be an oil tanker), so he turned around to recognize it. At the same time, given that in the three hours that had elapsed since the launch of the detection signal no message has been received or intercepted that referred to the presence on the landing point of the submarine sighted at 2.55 AM, Priggione correctly assumes that  the Perseus had not been informed, so he tried to get as close as possible to warn the ship of the danger.

However, this is how a misunderstanding with fatal consequences began. Having spotted the Avorio, the Perseus mistakenly believed that it was an enemy submarine, and it  soon as it spotted it approaching towards it, accelerated to move away. Commander Prigione tried to call the Perseus with  a flashing light, receiving no answer. He then tried to catch their attention with the searchlight, but again to no avail. The Avorio accelerated to its maximum speed and reduced the distance to 4500 meters, but in the meantime, under the light of dawn, it was noticed that the stern gun of the steamer was pointed at the submarine. Moreover, the Perseus had in turn increased speed further, as the distance between the two units remained constant. From 6.05 to 6.40 AM the Avorio continued unabated and by any means possible to call the Perseus but, despite the fact that at that distance the signals made with the searchlight should be perfectly visible, no response came from the merchant ship, which instead continued its escape.

In reality, on the Perseo it was noted that the unknown submarine made “some brief optical signals”, but it was only possible to understand the segment “ENEMY ?”; an attempt was made to answer with a flashing light, but these signals were not seen by the Avorio, as it was already too bright. The Perseus then tried to respond with the masthead light, but as soon as the switch was activated, a fuse burned, making the light unusable. The ever-increasing distance between the steamer and the submarine had become too great to allow effective communication.

At 6.40 AM, the Avorio transmitted the message “Sighted enemy submarine in lat. 38°51’40” – and lon. 9°29’40”. Be careful”, but this time the Perseus did not answer either; at 6.47 AM, finally, Priggione gives up any further attempt, and the Avorio returned to its original course.

The Perseus, which could not be informed of the danger, ended up right in the jaws of P 211: at 9.25 AM it is torpedoed by the British submarine, and then sank at 11.50 AM.

The Avorio, meanwhile, continued its course, navigating on the surface. At 10.31 AM, having arrived in the assigned area, it dove, then waited in ambush at periscope depth.

At 7:36 PM, the submarine resurfaced and, on Maricosom’s orders, began to sail back.

Having clarified the situation, in fact ( the Furious group  was at sea to launch planes bound for Malta to replenish its air forces – it had become known that in Gibraltar, before leaving, the aircraft carrier had embarked 35 Hawker Hurricane fighters – while the ships departing from Gibraltar on the 16th were headed to the Atlantic and England, not to the Mediterranean),  The alarm has concluded, and all submarines were recalled to port.

August 19th, 1942

According to a new order, the Avorio reaches Trapani instead of Cagliari.

November 5^th through 7^th,1942

The Avorio (Lieutenant Mario Priggione) was sent to the waters off Algeria along with numerous other Italian submarines (twenty: Axum, Argo, Argento, Asteria, Acciaio, Aradam, Alagi, Bronzo, Brin, Corallo, Dandolo,  Diaspro, Emo, Mocenigo, Nichelio, Platino, Porfido, Topazio, Turchese and Velella), to counter the “Operation Torch”, the Anglo-American landing in French North Africa. Avorio, in specifically, was located north of Bizerte along with the Bronzo, Alagi, Corallo, Diaspro and Turchese.

The landings began on November 8th: 500 Anglo-American transport ships, escorted by 350 warships of all kinds, disembarked a total of 107,000 soldiers on the coasts of Algeria and Morocco.

November 6th, 1942

The Avorio was sighted at one o’clock in the afternoon by the British submarine P 46 (later Unruffled, Lieutenant John Samuel Stevens), which, however, given the excessive distance, did not even attempt to attack it,

November 9th, 1942

At 7:09 PM the command of the Italian submarine fleet, Maricosom, reported to all the boats at sea that enemy steamers were moving eastwards, and that landings were taking place in Bona and Philippeville. Therefore, it gave the order to attack any merchant or military ship leaving those ports but avoid (in order not to risk incidents of “friendly fire” with other units sent to the area) attacking submarines, MAS and motor torpedo boats.

November 11th, 1942

At 5:56 PM Maricosom informed the submarines that enemy troops were landing in the waterfront of Bougie, and ordered the Avorio and other submarines (Argento, Ascianghi, Argo, Diaspro , Emo) to move immediately to this area to attack “without any limitation with energy and determination”, and then return the following day to the assigned ambush sectors.

The Avorio then headed full speed towards Bougie but was spotted by enemy ships and subjected to a systematic anti-submarine chase from dawn to dusk on the 11th, without however suffering any damage.

November 24th, 1942

During the morning, the Avorio, sailing towards Bougie (Algeria) for an offensive reconnaissance, sighted off Cape Carbon a darkened ship proceeding at low speed. Due to continuous rainfall, it was difficult to recognize the ship, which turned out to be a thin enemy unit, probably a destroyer. The Avorio reduces the distance to less than 800 meters, then attacked the ship by launching a salvo of three torpedoes, after which it disengaged by diving deep to escape any reaction. After 40 seconds (the time allowed for the torpedoes to reach their target) some detonations were heard, leading to the belief that the enemy ship was sunk, but in reality, the torpedoes missed the target.

The Avorio then penetrates the bay of Bougie and carried out the planned reconnaissance but did find enemy ships.

January 9th, 1943

At 11:47 PM, the Avorio, while sailing towards its patrol area located off the coast of Tunisia, was suddenly attacked by an aircraft. The submarine immediately began the rapid dive maneuver, but the late closure of the diesel engines’ intakes caused an abundant amount of water to enter the boat, forcing it to return to the surface;  the Avorio opend fire with its machine guns on the attacking aircraft, damaging it. Hit several times, the aircraft retreatd, leaving a trail of smoke in its wake.

Due to the damage caused by the water taken aboard in the rapid immersion maneuver, however, the Avorio had to return to port.

January 24th, 1943

At 1:16 AM, the Avorio, navigating towards the bay of Bougie, sighted an enemy ship off Cape Carbon and attacked it with torpedoes, but failed to score a hit. (According to one source, the Avorio sunk the armed trawler Stronsay, but in fact this ship was sunk on 5th February, several days later, and by a collision with a mine).

February 3^rd,1943

Lieutenant Priggione handed over command of the Avorio to Leone Fiorentini (27 years old, from Livorno).

February 5th, 1943

According to some sources, the Avorio torpedoed and sank the British armed trawler Stronsay, weighing 545 tons, off the coast of Philippeville. In reality, as shown by archival research by historian Francesco Mattesini, the Stronsay almost certainly sank due to collision with mines laid by German motor torpedo boats of the 3. S-Boote Flotille, and in any case twenty-four hours before the Avorio (which never fired torpedoes during its last mission) had arrived in the area.

The Sinking

On February 6^th, 1943, the Avorio, under the command of Lieutenant Leone Fiorentini, sailed from Cagliari for a new mission in Algerian waters. The boat had been assigned an operational sector along the coast between Bona and Philippeville, where it was to operate in liaison with other submarine units.

On the evening of February 8th, the submarine, after having remained submerged during the day, emerged in the dark to recharge its batteries, proceeding to the surface at 7 knots with all the hatches open, performing hydrophone listening to detect any approaching units (but the noise of the engines disturbed the use of the hydrophone, greatly reducing its effectiveness). At midnight the Avorio, while sailing on the surface east of Algiers, intended on recharging the batteries, sighted at a short distance the Canadian corvette H.M.C.S. Regina (under the command of the Lieutenant Commander – or more precisely, “acting lieutenant commander”, Harry Freeland), apparently alone, engaged in a antisubmarine patrol.

H.M.C.S. Regina was escorting the steamer Brikburn, sailing from Algiers to Bona with 1,500 tons of gasoline in barrels; along with a second merchant ship, the Brikburn had lagged behind the rest of the KMS 8 convoy (which had departed Londonderry on January 21^st, with 53 merchant ships, escorted by 9 Canadian corvettes and 6 British units).  It was now a small group of two stragglers escorted by H.M.C.S. Regina and the British minesweeper H.M.S. Rhyl. The Avorio, however, only sighted H.M.C.S. Regina without noticing the presence of the other ships. Judging the position of his boat unsuitable for an immediate attack, which moreover would have involved more risks than benefits (a corvette was a rather modest target in terms of tonnage, while teasing it could have triggered a deadly reaction, being a ship specifically designed for anti-submarine warfare), Commander Fiorentini gave the order to dive deep, in order to avoid a possible chase by the enemy ship. H.M.C.S. Regina, being 3,660 meters forward to the left of the small convoy, had already located the Avorio with her radar at 11.10 PM, while this was still on the surface. (According to Canadian sources, the Avorio would spot H.M.C.S. Regina at the last moment, while she was already attacking, and did a rapid dive while changing his course.)

It was the radar operator Joseph Saulnier who had made the first generic radar contact three and a half miles away. He had gone to the officer of the watch to report it, but the latter, despite resorting to night vision instruments, had been unable to see anything. Saulnier, confident that he had seen something on the radar, then woke up Commander Freeland, who had ordered him to turn back.

H.M.C.S. Regina approached the contact to find out what it was, increasing speed to 12 knots, and the radar contact was soon lost, as the Avorio had dived. At the same time, however, the corvette gained asdic (sonar) contact at 915 meters and went on the attack.

The first discharge of ten depth charges caught the Avorio while it was at a depth of about 60 meters (according to another source, however, the ten bombs launched by  H.M.C.S. Regina were  adjusted to explode at depth between 15 and 42 meters), immediately causing very serious damage: the rudder was put out of action, the torpedo tubes were deformed,  and the hull had cracked; It became impossible to maintain buoyancy while submerged, and there were several leaks

Commander Fiorentini had no choice but to order to emerge, giving full air to the tanks, and attempting to give battle on the surface, and, if possible, escape the corvette by pushing its engines to the maximum (since the maximum speed achievable on the surface was much greater than submerged). H.M.C.S. Regina, meanwhile, after launching the first volley of ten depth charges, had moved 915 meters away from the point of attack, and then reversed course to attack again on a course parallel and opposite to that of the previous attack.

When the Avorio surfaced (five minutes after the launch of the first depth charges), it was discovered that the damage caused by the depth charges had also disabled the cannon: between this and the deformation of the forward torpedo tubes, the only weapon that the submarine could still oppose to the enemy ship was a 13.2 mm Breda twin machine gun. As if that was not enough, the jamming of the rudder, caused by the bursts of the depth charges, prevented the boat from keeping on course, forcing it to describe a series of “S” turns.

Nevertheless, the Avorio still attempted to engage in combat and on the surface. With the only machine gun remaining effective, the submarine attempted to hit H.M.C.S. Regina’s bridge, which in the meantime zigzagged to disturb the boat’s fire and opened fire in turn. On H.M.C.S. Regina ‘s bridge, Second Lieutenant Doug Clarance, standing next to a machine gun, saw the trail of a tracer heading towards the submarine, and then seemed to come back: he then realized that the Avorio was returning fire, and “suddenly I found myself six feet taller than I wanted to be.”

Sailor Gib Todd, chief of the 40 mm “pom-pom” quad machine gun located on the aft deck of the corvette, landed a few hits on the submarine, whose lone machine gun for its part “splashed with abundantly water ” its quad, with a shot that was “unpleasantly close” but which caused no damage or injuries. It all happened so quickly that Todd didn’t even have time to be afraid; He was more afraid when things were done, when he thought about what could have happened.

The fire of the Avorio’s machine gun did not cause damage to the corvette, while H.M.C.S. Regina’s shot s were precise and devastating: from the outset, several gun shots and machine gun volleys had repeatedly hit the Italian boat, causing further and serious damage and decimating the crew. The firing of the 20 mm Oerlikon machine guns on the bridge, the first to fire, silenced the Avorio machine gun, while the deck gun and the pom-pom quad swept the deck of the submarine, killing or wounding all who were there.

A 101 mm projectile hit the conning tower at its base and killed commander Fiorentini, the second in command, second lieutenant Silvio Grandesso Silvestro, and the navigational officer, along with other men. In the brief but bloody battle, more than half of the Avorio’s crew was killed or wounded.

The survivors began the scuttling maneuvers and then began to abandon the unit. H.M.C.S. Regin, seeing that the submarine was now out of action, ceased fire and interrupted a ramming maneuver she had just begun, pulling over. The corvette had fired a total of eight rounds from the 101 mm gun, 20 rounds from the 40 mm “pom-pom” and 635 rounds with the 20 mm Oerlikon machine guns.

La news of the sinking of the Ivory on the front page of Toronto’s “Evening Telegram”. The tone of the article follows the line dictated by the directives of British propaganda, always contemptuous of Italians

Commander Freeland of H.M.C.S. Regin ordered the surviving Italians to keep the submarine afloat, “or worse for them”. The corvette inspected the surrounding area for a quarter of an hour to make sure there was no other submarine, then sent a boarding squad on a launch, with orders to check the severity of the damage and assess whether it was possible to tow it to port. Nine men took their places in the boat; sailors Vic Martin and Byron Nodding rowed to the submarine, after which the boat boarded the dying Avorio, which was sinking very slowly, with the intent of capturing it. The stern of the Avorio was already low on the water; survivors who had not already jumped into the water were standing on the bow.

Six men boarded the submarine and began to round up the survivors of the Italian crew, who were then transferred to H.M.C.S. Regin on several voyages. As the corvette kept moving in order not to become a fixed target in the event of an attack, it sometimes struggled to track the dingy in the darkness.

Among the six members of the boarding party was Sergeant Raymond Alexander, who noticed that the bow of the Avorio had been “opened” by depth charges. A couple of his comrades were armed with pistols, and they handed him a machine gun, saying that if there was any trouble, he would have to do nothing but pull the trigger. One of the six men on the boarding party spoke Italian, which greatly facilitated communication with the prisoners.

All the surviving Italians were transferred to the Regina with the exception of the chief engineer and a non-commissioned officer, who were kept on board to force them to try to restart the engines and bring the submarine to run aground on the coast. Raymond Alexander received a pistol and orders to take the Italian non-commissioned officer below deck and go to the engine room, to see if anything could be done. So, he did, but the two found themselves knee-deep in water; Unable to speak to the petty officer due to differences in language, Alexander motioned for him to come back, and they both went back on deck, while the Avorio continued to lower itself to the water. The Canadian also took out a pair of binoculars, which he kept for himself.

Survivors of the Avorio aboard H.M.C.S. Regina
 (Jim Peters – from  www.thememoryproject.com)

Another member of the boarding party, John W. Potter, was ordered to go down to the submarine and retrieve all the documents he could find. Once inside the narrow half-flooded room, alone, he was seized by claustrophobia, quickly grabbed what he found and then hurried back on deck, and then deposited in the H.M.C.S. Regina life boat  what he had recovered on the Avorio.

The scuttling maneuver attempted by the crew had not been very effective, also because the damage caused by the depth charges had caused the flooding of the depot in which the explosive charges for self-destruction were placed. However, reconnaissance by the boarding team (which inspected all the rooms still accessible) showed that the submarine was unable to move by its own means. Commander Freeland of H.M.C.S. Regin decided not to attempt towing her ship, because the explosions of the depth charges had knocked out her radar, and he feared being attacked by another submarine while slowed by the heavy burden of towing the Avorio. Nevertheless, not wanting to give up appetible prey, Freeland requested a tugboat, and at 3:45 AM the military tugboat Jaunty arrived on the scene.

It was possible to secure the submarine to a tow cable, but the damage suffered by the Avorio was too severe: by five o’clock in the morning the water on board was too much to hope to keep it afloat, and the crew of the Jaunty cut the tow cable. Raymond Alexander later recalled that he and the other members of the boarding party asked the tugboat to take them on board, since the submarine was sinking, but from the Jaunty they replied that there was no talk of it, and then left. H.M.C.S. Regin then sent a boat to recover the six men of the squadron and the two Italians who had been detained on board with them.

On the Avorio the eight men, standing on the deck, found themselves with water up to their knees. Alexander told the others that he was going to jump, and he did, followed by the others. Once in the water (he still had the binoculars he had taken on board the boat around his neck, which he would take home with him), he looked around and saw the bow of the Avorio rise into the sky and then sink rapidly.

February 9th, 1943, at 5:15 AM, the Avorio sank in position 37°10′ N and 06°42′ E, off Philippeville and Cape Bougaroni.

H.M.C.S. Regina lifeboat fished out of the sea, one after the other, the six men of the boarding party and the two Italians. On the Queen, the survivors of the Avorio were astonished to find someone in the Canadian crew who spoke their language. They were cleaned and fed, and then disembarked in Bona, interrogated, and sent to captivity.

Eight of H.M.C.S. Regina’s crew were decorated for sinking the Avorio; Commander Freeland received the Distinguished Service Order, while radar operator Joseph Saulnier, who had gained first contact, was mentioned in the dispatches.

Of the 46 men who made up the crew of the Avorio, 27, including seven wounded (two of them seriously), were rescued by H.M.C.S. Regina and  taken prisoner, while another 19 lost their lives: three officers (including Commander Fiorentini), three non-commissioned officers and 13 sub-chiefs and sailors.

Their names:

• Giovanni Campus, sub-chief radiotelegraphist, missing
• Dante Cappellini, sailor electrician, missing
• Domenico Cascella, sailor furiere, missing
• Francesco De Angelis, sailor and motorcyclist, missing
• Guido De Bortoli, radio telegraph sergeant, missing
• Antonio De Francisci, midshipman, missing
• Giocondo De Longhi, sailor, missing
• Carletto Fabro, sub-chief gunner, missing
• Leone Fiorentini, lieutenant (commander), missing
• Antonino Galati, sailor, missing
• Sergio Grandesso Silvestri, second lieutenant (second in command), missing
• Edmondo Peretti, gunnery sergeant, missing
• Paolo Pittalis, torpedo sailor, missing
• Adolfo Querzola, sub-chief radiotelegraphist, missing
• Luigi Romano, sailor and motorcyclist, missing
• Umberto Servillo, torpedo sailor, missing
• Gino Soave, sub-chief electrician, missing
• Mario Stucchi, sub-chief radiotelegraphist, deceased
• Benedetto Zappa, sailor helmsman, missing

A twentieth member of the crew, electrician sergeant Giuseppe Ferrara, died in captivity on 27 March 1945 at Melcombe Regis, UK. He is buried in the military cemetery of Brookwood, Surrey, along with three hundred other Italians of all branches who died in captivity on British soil.

Giuseppe Ferrara’s grave in Brookwood Cemetery (Surrey, England)
(from www.findagrave.com)

At least two of the Avorio men had not been able to participate in the last mission, for different reasons, and had thus been saved.

Sergeant electrician Enrico Casagrande, from Frascati, had to disembark on February 2nd, six days before departure, due to a wound sustained during the previous mission, which had become infected. He learned of the loss of the Avorio while he was hospitalized at the military hospital of La Maddalena. Sixty-two years later, Casagrande, who had become president of the ANMI (Navy veterans) group in Frascati, would succeed in having a monument built in Cagliari in memory of the men of the VII Submarine Group who disappeared at sea with their boats, which left the Sardinian base and never returned: in addition to the Avorio, Adua, Acciaio, Asteria, Alabastro, Aegento,  Cobalto, Corallo, Dagabur, Emo, Gorgo, Malachite, Pordido, Tritone, Topazio, Veniero, e Zaffiro.

The monument to the men of the VII Grupsom who disappeared at sea during the war
(Photo ANMI)

A happy ending, in a certain sense, is the story of Giuseppe (Joseph) Costanzo, sailor and helmsman of the Avorio. Costanzo was the son of an Italian-Canadian father (an Italian who emigrated to Canada and became a railroad worker in Schreiber, Ontario) and an Italian mother; he had his father, uncle and several cousins in Canada, but he was born in Italy, and at the time of the entry into the war he was in Italy, which had become an enemy of Canada. In his family, siblings and cousins had found themselves fighting on opposite sides. Forced to remain in Italy, in December 1941 Costanzo, twenty years old, was conscripted by the Regia Marina and subsequently embarked on the Avorio; with his companions in the submarine’s crew he had forged indelible bonds of friendship, almost fraternal.

In early February 1943, while drinking in a bar in La Spezia, Costanzo was insulted by another sailor, who called him “Canadian shit” and insulted his father. Constantius, who had drunk a lot and could not tolerate his father being offended, responded with one punch, the other reacted in the same way, and soon knives were drawn as well. Their comrades intervened to stop them. Since the sailor he had punched was of higher rank, Constantius was arrested, demoted, and sentenced to two months’ imprisonment and a month’s suspension of pay. Eight days after his arrest, the Avorio had set sail without him on what was his last mission.

When he was released from prison, Constantius learned that the Avorio had not returned from its patrol. For a month, he went to the radio station in La Spezia every day to ask if there was any news, but each time the answer was the same: “Avorio doesn’t answer.” After some time, the submarine was declared lost at sea with all its crew. Due to a bureaucratic error, Constantius himself was declared missing at sea, and a small funeral ceremony was even celebrated in his country, before the misunderstanding was cleared up.

Costanzo was assigned to another submarine, the Sirena, on which he served until the armistice of September 8^th, 1943. After sinking the boat, which was under construction, and fortunately escaping capture by German soldiers, Costanzo managed to cross the lines and reach his hometown, in southern Italy, where he returned to the ranks of the Navy and was again embarked on submarines, now used for the training of Allied anti-submarine vehicles. In 1947 he was finally able to reunite with his father and the rest of the family in Schreiber, Canada, where he settled, started a family, and lived for the rest of his life.

For sixty years, Costanzo believed that the Avorio had sunk with all the crew, including many of his great friends, whose memory drove him to tears even after so many years. Marchi, the musician who swore that he would marry the prostitute he loved; Battaglia, the officer whose sister Costanzo courted in Venice; Soles, the prankster with whom he spent his free time; the commander, whom he adored.

When in 1994 his son Robert, studying Canadian military history, discovered that the Avorio had been sunk by HMCS Regina, the thoughts that a Canadian ship had caused the death of his friends only aggravated the pain of Costanzo, who had now become a full-fledged Canadian. In 2003 Robert Costanzo discovered almost by chance from his lawyer, a naval history enthusiast, the complete story of the sinking of the Avorio. Joseph Costanzo was thus able to learn, at the age of 82, that his companions in the Avorio had not all died at sea; more than half, including some of his best friends, had actually survived.

In the years that followed, Costanzo, who had never wanted to talk about the war so as not to bring back the memory of his friends who he believed dead, managed to contact several veterans of H.M.C.S. Regina, former enemies who had now become compatriots, with whom he shared images and stories of that distant era, although he was unable to track down his old companions in the Avorio.

Original Italian text by Lorenzo Colombo adapted and translated by Cristiano D’Adamo

Operational Records

Type	Patrols (Med.)	Patrols (Other)	NM Surface	NM Sub.	Days at Sea	NM/Day	Average Speed
Submarine – Coastal	15		5,676	685	45	141.36	5.89

Actions

Date	Time	Captain	Area	Coordinates	Convoy	Weapon	Result	Ship	Type	Tonns	Flag
2/5/1943	–	T.V. Leone Fiorentini	Mediterranean	Philippiville		Torpedo	Failed	Uknown	Uknown		Unknown

Crew Members Lost

Last Name	First Name	Rank	Italian Rank	Date
Campus	Giovanni	Sub-chief radiotelegraphist	Sottocapo radiotelegrafista	2/9/1943
Cappellini	Dante	Sailor electrician	Marinaio elettricista	2/9/1943
Cascella	Domenico	Sailor	Marinaio	2/9/1943
De Angelis	Francesco	Sailor	Marinaio	2/9/1943
De Bortoli	Guido	Sergeant radio telegraph	Sottocapo radiotelegrafista	2/9/1943
De Francisci	Antonio	Midshipman	Guardiamarina	2/9/1943
De Longhi	Giocondo	Sailor	Marinaio	2/9/1943
Fabro	Carletto	Sub-chief gunner	Sottocapo cannoniere	2/9/1943
Fiorentini	Leone	Lieutenant	Tenente di vascello	2/9/1943
Galati	Antonino	Sailor	Marinaio	2/9/1943
Grandesso	Sergio	Lieutenant	Tenente di vascello	2/9/1943
Peretti	Edmondo	Sailor torpedoman	Marinaio silurista	2/9/1943
Querzola	Adolfo	Sub-chief radiotelegraphist	Sottocapo radiotelegrafista	2/9/1943
Romano	Luigi	Sailor	Marinaio	2/9/1943
Servillo	Umberto	Sailor torpedoman	Marinaio silurista	2/9/1943
Soave	Gino	Sub-chief electrician	Sottocapo elettricista	2/9/1943
Stucchi	Mario	Sub-chief radiotelegraphist	Sottocapo radiotelegrafista	2/9/1943
Zappa	Benedetto	Sailor helmsman	Marinaio nocchiere	2/9/1943

The Liuzzi was an ocean-going submarine of the eponymous class (1,166.47 tons displacement on the surface and 1,484.20 submerged). It completed  a single war patrol, covering 1,695 miles on the surface and 420 miles submerged.

Brief and partial chronology

October 1st, 1938

Setting up was started at the Franco Tosi shipyards in Taranto.

September 17th, 1939

The boat was launched at the Franco Tosi shipyard in Taranto.

The Liuzzi’s launch
(Photo U.S.M.M.)

November 21st, 1939

The Liuzzi entered active service to become, along with the other boats of the same class (Capitano Tarantini, Alpino Bagnolini, Reginaldo Giuliani) the XLI Submarine Squadron, part of the IV Submarine Group of Taranto. 

The submarine after the launch
(from“Gli squali dell’Adriatico. Monfalcone e i suoi sommergibili nella storia navale italiana” di Alessandro Turrini)

In the seven months that separated its entry into service and Italy’s entry into the World War II, the boat was exclusively engaged in training activities.

January 1940

The Liuzzi carried out its final test off the Gulf of Taranto, diving to a depth of 107 meters and remaining there for half an hour. All systems were in optimal operation state.

June 1st, 1940

The command of the Liuzzi was assumed by the Lieutenant Commander Lorenzo Bezzi.

Lieutenant Commander Lorenzo Bezzi, Gold Medal for Valor

MA 3

When Italy entered the war on June 10^th, 1940, the Liuzzi was still part of the XLI Squadron of the IV Grupsom based in Taranto, along with the Bagnolini, Tarantini and Giuliani.

On June 16^th, 1940, the Liuzzi, under the command of Lieutenant Commander Lorenzo Bezzi, left Taranto to reach the assigned patrol area in the waters off Famagusta (TN east coast of Cyprus), where it was supposed to attack enemy shipping on the routes between Cyprus, Syria and Egypt.

 It was the first war patrol for the Liuzzi. The five days of waiting off Famagusta, however, did not lead to any sighting, and on the evening of June 25th, having received orders to return, the submarine began the navigation back to Taranto.

At that time, however, a vast anti-submarine sweep was underway in the central Mediterranean to protect the British operation “MA 3”, which provided for the dispatch of convoys between Malta, Egypt, and Greece: the destroyers H.M.S. Dainty, H.M.S. Defender, H.M.S. Decoy, H.M.A.S. Voyager and H.M.S. Ilex were thus engaged in a hunt for Italian submarines, grouped into Force ‘C’, as well as numerous anti-submarine seaplanes.  In the days that followed, this deadly deployment of forces would also sink three other Italian submarines, the Argonauta, Uebi Scebeli and Rubino.

The Liuzzi at sea
(Photo Naval History and Heritage Command)

Force C (whose destroyers belonged to the 2nd and 10th Destroyer Flotillas) had left Alexandria at dawn on the 27th, with the aim of providing remote protection to a naval formation (aircraft carriers H.M.S. Eagle, battleships H.M.S. Ramillies and H.M.S. Royal Sovereign, cruisers H.M.S. Orion, H.M.S. Neptune, H.M.S. Liverpool and H.M.S.  Sydney) at sea escorting convoys ‘MF 1’ and ‘MS 1’ from Malta (that consisted of ‘MA 3’).

It was at 6:30 PM on June 27th when the Liuzzi, navigating on the surface, ran into the units of Force C: the sighting of the destroyers by the Italian boat was simultaneous with the detection by the British ships (the time indicated by the British side is 6:28 PM the position about 100 miles southeast of Crete).

The submarine dove rapidly, attempting to attack or evade the chase, but soon H.M.S. Dainty, H.M.S. Defender, H.M.S. Decoy and H.M.S. Ilex were on top of it, and began bombarding it heavily with depth charges, making five attacks in the space of a few minutes (H.M.S. Dainty, H.M.S. Defender and H.M.S. Ilex were equipped with the most modern sonar in use in the British Navy at the time).

The first discharge of ten bombs caught the boat at a depth of 100 meters and blew out all the lights except in the control room, smashed the depth gauges and tore the naphthalene tank (TN, probably the external naphtha tanks) from the bulkhead, the second (ten bombs that exploded when the submarine was at depth of 120 meters) caused further damage, including waterways in the aft compartment,  which damaged the batteries, causing the release of harmful gases.

The other sweeps violently shook the submarine and further aggravated the situation, disabling all instruments and rudders, making it unmanageable and taking the boat down to a depth of 190 meters (where the test depth was 100 m).

After these attacks, the British the units observed a trail of fuel on the surface, and H.M.S. Dainty followed the trail as darkness fell. Seriously damaged by the explosions, after a chase of 90 minutes (during which the crew counted the explosions of about sixty depth charges) the Liuzzi had to emerge. On the orders of Commander Bezzi (who had ordered air to all tanks after consulting with the chief engineer), not to lose the entire crew, and to try to react on the surface with its deck cannon, the boat surfaced. Following the fuel trail, the British units spotted the submarine 2,290 meters away, and H.M.S. Dainty and H.M.S. Defender immediately opened fire, hitting it forward and in other places.

The damage caused by the depth charges had immobilized the Liuzzi, which found itself on the surface without sufficient energy left in the batteries to start the engines (TN electrical power was used to compress air which was then used to start the engines), and without any more naphthalene (TN naphthalene is the word used in the official Australian documentation, but it was indeed naphtha). In addition, the sea was rough, and this further worsened the already limited characteristics of stability that made the submarines a bad platforms for artillery, the gunners of  the Liuzzi were unable to aim, while for their part the destroyers, which had no similar problems, were able to repeatedly hit the Italian boat with their guns (according to another source the submarine’s weapons had been rendered useless by the bombardment).

Some of Liuzzi’s crewmembers were killed, and the submarine was put out of action. After a brief clash with a predictable outcome, a white light was shown from the Liuzzi to ask for a ceasefire. Whilst the destroyers ceased fire, Commander Bezzi ordered the submarine to be scuttled and abandoned.

The crew members gathered in the conning tower; H.M.S. Dainty approached to take them on board and retrieve those who had jumped into the sea. Other destroyers put their boats to sea: the dingy of H.M.A.S. Voyager rescued thirteen shipwrecked people.  H.M.S. Dainty almost put her bow practically on the Liuzzi before the last two members of the crew could be persuaded to jump into the sea.

It took a total of three and a quarter hour for the most reluctant to abandon the submarine, then H.M.S. Dainty gave the coup de grace, sinking it with more cannon fire and depth charges. When the last man had abandoned the unit, Commander Bezzi decided to follow the fate of his boat. He returned inside and locked himself in, sinking with the Liuzzi when, shortly before eight o’clock in the evening. The Liuzzi sank southeast of Crete, in position 33°46′ N and 27°27′ E, at a point where the sea is 2,500 meters deep. Posthumous, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Military Valor, and, on May 17th 1957, the Non-Commissioned Officers’ School of Taranto (Mariscuola) was named after him .

The ANMI (Associazione Nazionale Marinai d’Italia – Navy Veterans Association) section of his town, Tortona (Alessandria , Piedmont), was also named in his memory, as well as streets and squares in several cities in the province of Alessandria. The medal was received by Commander Bezzi’s wife: the daughter, one and a half years old at the time, and would never see her father.

The chief engineer of the Liuzzi, Lieutenant Commander (engineering) Gaetano Tosti-Croce (who had assumed his post only on May 20th, replacing Lieutenant (Engineering) Umberto Bardelli, who had been chief engineer of the Liuzzi since it had entered service, taking care of its fitting), before abandoning the submarine gave his life jacket to the sailor torpedo man Aldo Carnevalini.  He was one of the last to go on deck when the boat was already half-submerged. He did not have a life jacket (he had not found it in its place, perhaps taken by someone else) and he did not know how to swim (and was moreover intoxicated by the sulfuric acid vapors that he had inhaled in the aft rooms).

Tosti-Croce had returned on board to open the Kingstone valves for scuttling (with him, the warranty worker (civilian) Alessandro Bonaca, who later disappeared at sea, also returned below deck for this purpose) and to try, in vain, to convince Commander Bezzi to save himself. As soon as Carnevalini had put on his life jacket (which Tosti-Croce wanted to make sure of, since Carnevalini was semi-conscious due to the vapors he had inhaled), both were thrown into the water by a splash from the sea, and Tosti-Croce hit his leg, injuring himself. Both were saved; Tosti-Croce’s gesture of self-sacrifice was rewarded with a Silver Medal for Military Valor.

Carnevalini was rescued after some time in the water along with a boatswain from Taranto, who told him to “play dead” and not uselessly consume energy to fight against the rough seas; at the right moment, helped by a wave from the sea, Carnevalini jumped aboard one of  H.M.A.S. Voyager rescue boats.

The Florentine midshipman Everardo Facibene, a swimming champion, tried to take some of his men (a dozen or so) to safety, but they all died, including him.

Aldo Carnevalini, now ninety-three years old, attended the commemoration of the 73rd anniversary of the sinking, celebrated in the Lorenzo Bezzi Non-Commissioned Officers’ School, and remembered the heroic act of Major Tosti-Croce.

Non-Commissioned Officers’ School in Taranto

Gesuino De Montis, a twenty-year-old sailor, recalled that the men went on deck through the conning tower. The last to come out were those who were forward, including himself. No one wanted to jump into the water, but Commander Bezzi ordered everyone to jump into the sea. He did the same, but with others he found himself farther away than the bulk of the shipwrecked and was not immediately sighted.

He remained in rough seas for what seemed like hours, praying as his strength failed him, then, just as he was on the verge of losing consciousness and drowning, he was reached by one of the British units, waking up aboard the destroyer. He was naked; It was the unit’s British doctor who gave him clothes to wear.

All the survivors of the Liuzzi (eleven men were missing) were rescued by British destroyers and disembarked in Alexandria on the evening of June 30th. Interned in the prison camp of Geneifa, in Egypt, they were subsequently sent to imprisonment in India, where they remained for five years.

At home, Gesuino De Montis had been reported missing (Interview in full) He returned there safe and sound after five years, finding there a funeral program held for the Mass in his suffrage celebrated in 1940, and is now alive and well at the age of 95. He has often attended many commemorations of the sinking of the Liuzzi, such as the inauguration of a statue of Commander Bezzi in Taranto in 2010, and the 72nd commemoration of the sinking of the submarine in Taranto, when he read the Sailor’s Prayer, dedicating it to the memory of its commander.

They never returned:

• Lorenzo Bezzi, corvette captain (commander), 33 years old, from Tortona
• Alessando Bonaca, militarized guarantee worker, 45 years old, from Trevi
• Ideo Cassatella, radio telegraph sergeant, 24 years old, from Bari
• Stelio Degli Innocenti, sailor gunner, 21 years old, from Poggibonsi
• Everardo Facibene, midshipman, 24 years old, from Florence
• Alberto Furlan, 19-year-old sailor from San Vendemiano
• Giuseppe Luppino, sailor stoker, 21 years old, from Trapani
• Francesco Monopoli, sailor electrician, 19 years old, from Trani
• Luigi Nobili, sailor electrician, 20 years old, from Monza
• Bartolomeo Sabatini, torpedo sailor, 21 years old, from Arezzo
• Rodolfo Scrobogna, sailor stoker, 20 years old, from Rijeka (Fiume)

The motivation for the Gold Medal for Military Valor awarded in memory of Lieutenant Commander Lorenzo Bezzi, born in Tortona (AL) on 22 October 1906:

“The commander of a submarine on a war mission in waters intensively guarded by the adversary was sighted and subjected to violent prolonged hunting. Unable to maintain the dive due to serious damage suffered by the unit, he emerged with the intent of engaging the enemy on the surface. Surrounded at a short distance and subjected to fire from five destroyers seeing that every attempt at defense was useless due to the rough sea that prevented the use of the cannon, he decided to scuttle the submarine.

Having rescued the crew after having ordered the voice salute, he voluntarily shared the extreme fate of the unit under his command by returning to the hull and closing, with a cold and conscious act, the hatch of the conning tower on himself. In this way he confirmed high military and leadership virtues and made the noble tradition of heroism of seafarers shine forth by his gesture.

Eastern Mediterranean, June 27, 1940.”

Original Italian text by Lorenzo Colombo adapted and translated by Cristiano D’Adamo

Operational Records

Type	Patrols (Med.)	Patrols (Other)	NM Surface	NM Sub.	Days at Sea	NM/Day	Average Speed
Submarine – Oceanic	1		1,695	420	11	192.27	8.01

Crew Members Lost

Last Name	First Name	Rank	Italian Rank	Date
Bezzi	Lorenzo	Lieutenant Commander	Capitano di Corvetta	6/27/1940
Cassatella	Ideo	Sergeant	Sergente	6/27/1940
Degli Innocenti	Stelio	Naval Rating	Comune	6/27/1940
Facibene	Everardo	Ensign	Guardiamarina	6/27/1940
Furlan	Alberto	Naval Rating	Comune	6/27/1940
Luppino	Giuseppe	Naval Rating	Comune	6/27/1940
Monopoli	Francesco	Naval Rating	Comune	6/27/1940
Nobili	Luigi	Naval Rating	Comune	6/27/1940
Sabatini	Bartolomeo	Naval Rating	Comune	6/27/1940
Scrabogna	Rodolfo	Naval Rating	Comune	6/27/1940
Bonaca	Alessandro	Militarized Civilian Warranty Worker	Operaio militarizzato di garanzia	6/27/1940

The Atropo was a Foca-class minelaying submarine (displacement 1305 tons on the surface, 1625 submerged). The boat differed from the twin vessels Foca and Zoea in the periscopes, which were both of the Galileo type, while on the twin boats they were one of the Galileo and one of the San Giorgio types. The Atropo and Zoea were powered by Tosi engines, the Foca by FIAT engines.

The Atropo in 1941, with a camouflage scheme with spots with rounded edges instead of straight edges
(From the Magazine Storia Militare)

During the 1940-1943 conflict the submarine completed 30 war missions, all in the Mediterranean, covering 27,884 miles on the surface and 2,703 submerged and spending 171 days at sea. It was the most active submarine in transport missions, carrying out 23 of them. After an accident in the first mine-laying mission, in fact, it was withdrawn from this use and assigned almost exclusively to transport tasks, for which it was particularly suitable precisely because it could transport a considerable number of supplies in the holds normally reserved for mines.

After the armistice, during the co-belligerence (September 1943-September 1945), the Atropo carried out three transport missions for the Dodecanese garrisons and participated in 118 exercises in the Atlantic with Allied anti-submarine vessels.

The boat’s motto was “Relentlessly.”

Brief and partial chronology

July 10th, 1937

Setting up started at the Franco Tosi shipyards in Taranto.

November 20th, 1938

Launch at sea at the Franco Tosi shipyard in Taranto.

February 14, 1939

Entry into service, third and final unit of the class.

The sub-chief engineer Santo Rettondini (born in San Pietro di Morubbio (TN Near Verona)) October 21^st, 1920), who volunteered for the Navy in 1938 and was a crewmember of the Atropo for the duration of its operational life (1939-1946), would recall, in an interview held more than seventy years later, an incident that occurred during the tests of the Atropo:

“… There were still civilians who came and worked on the boat, modifying certain things, and doing other things. The company’s technicians (…) Not many days had gone by, one day they said, “Tomorrow we’re going out to sea, we’re going to do depth tests.” And the workers on board also come (…) Let’s go out to sea, and there I had my first baptism. It was a scare, which I will remember for the rest of my life. We were out at sea, we started to dive, and down, and down, and down… When we reached a depth of 80 meters, a gasket came off a door (TN probably a Kingston) in the control room, and sea water started pouring in: it looked like bullets. Fortunately, the chief boatswain, who was (…) at the helm, had the readiness to give air to the tanks to go up, and he let this air so intensively, that when we came out of the sea we jumped and fell on one side, like this. I stuck to my engine control wheel… The emotion I felt was tremendous, because it was the first time, I found myself in those conditions there… not knowing what had happened (…) Then we entered port, and the workmen continued to work on this defect, but they said they wouldn’t come out to rehearse anymore, because they had gotten a fright too. They said, “We’re not coming anymore.” That was my baptism [at sea] I had when I was embarked on the submarine Atropo.”

Together with the twin boats Foca and Zoea, the Atropo was assigned to the XLV Submarine Squadron (IV Submarine Group of Taranto), to which belonged all the other minelaying submarines of the Regia Marina: Pietro Micca, Marcantonio Bragadin, Filippo Corridoni, X 2, and X 3.

In peacetime, it carries out intensive training and mine-laying exercises with inactive ordnance.

April 1939

The Atropo took part in operations related to the occupation of Albania. During this period, Ensign Licio Visintini, future Gold Medal for Military Valor, served on the Atropo.

June 1939

During the celebrations for the Naval Week of the year XVII (NT Fascist Calendar, from October 29^th, 1938 to October 28^th, 1939), the Atropo received its combat flag in Livorno, along with eleven of the twelve new Soldati-class destroyers. The ceremony was attended by representatives of the armed forces and the secretary of the PNF (NT Fascist Party) Achille Starace; the combat flags of the new units were blessed by the military ordinariate, Monsignor Bartolomasi.

June-July 1939

The Atropo made a cruise from La Spezia to El Ferrol (Atlantic coast of Spain), under the command of Commander Luigi Gasparini (one of the most experienced and prepared submariners of the Regia Marina), to test the conditions for crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, in view of a possible future use of Italian submarines Atlantic. It was necessary to collect information on the possibilities of going out into the Atlantic and especially of crossing the strait, the passage of which is rather complex from a nautical and hydrographic point of view.

Navigation took place submerged during the day and on the surface at night, but the crossing of the strait, in order to avoid the passage by diving in the area of greatest traffic, where the currents are strongest, took place on the surface (from 60 miles east of Gibraltar to 80 miles west of the same city) instead of – as it would be done in wartime –  submerged, thus nullifying part of the experience.

The mines holds of the Atropos (other sources identify this photo as depicting the Foca)
(from www.modelshipworld.com)

Summer 1939

Following the establishment of the Submarine Squadron Command, Atropo, Foca and Zoea formed the XLIX (or XLVIII) Submarine Squadron. Subsequently, the Foca was transferred to another squadron.

June 10th, 1940

When Italy entered the war, the Atropo, along with the twin boat the Zoea and the older Filippo Corridoni, formed the XLIX Submarine Squadron of the IV Grupsom, based in Taranto.

June 22nd, 1940

Under the command of Commander Luigi Caneschi (39 years old, from Naples), the Atropo departed for Leros on a mission to transport materials. It was its first war patrol.

June 26th, 1940

During the return navigation to Taranto, at 2.45 AM the Atropo sighted an enemy submarine east of the island of Amorgos (TN easternmost island of the Cyclades island, Greece). The Atropo attacked it with two torpedoes, but to no avail.

The OTO mod. 1927 100/43 mm deck gun of the Atropos, in its unusual original position, mounted on a turntable on the aft part of the conning tower, in the autumn of 1940
(From the Magazine Storia Militare)

October 27^th through 30^th, 1940

The Atropo carried out a patrol in the Otranto Channel, to protect convoys between Italy and Albania.

October 29th, 1940

During the night, the Atropo (Lieutenant Commander Peppino Manca) laid a minefield southeast of Zakynthos (TN Zante, Greece), in the stretch of water between this island and the mainland. The laying plan called for the submarine to lay five groups of mines, but after having laid sixteen mines, the Atropo stopped following the premature explosion of two of the ordnance, thus returning to base.

This incident, along with a similar one that had occurred four months earlier to the Zoea and also the concurrent disappearance of the Foca (which had left on October 8^th to lay a minefield off the coast of Palestine and vanished without a trace), which is presumed to have been caused by the accidental explosion of the mines it was laying, lead to the decision to stop the covert mining operations by means of submarines because it was deemed too dangerous. Thereafter, the Atropo, Zoea and the other Italian mine-laying submarines would be used exclusively for transport assignments.

The accidents that occurred to the Atropo, Zoea and presumably the Foca would be attributed not to problems inherent in the mine-laying system of the Foca-class submarines, but to defects in the mines themselves (type T. 200/800 and P. 150/1939 PA), considered of having poor performance, and being inefficient and very dangerous.

The sub-chief Santo Rettondini recalled this episode decades later:

“Before going to Africa, the Navy used to make us lay mine barriers (…) in front of enemy ports (…) we started with the aft tubes (…) every so many seconds one went down (…) you could hear them coming off (…) the mine had a plate at the bottom, an anchor came off, and along with its line it went to anchor onto the bottom, and it was placed at 3 meters, at 4 meters (…) except that, we began… the first tube went well, then we started another… Out of nowhere, an explosion… As the mine fell, it exploded (…) we proceeded slowly (…) the mine fell off, we went on, it exploded, it didn’t harm us. We communicate the matter to Rome, and were sent back to Taranto, the mines were unloaded. (…) A rumor was heard that it had been a saboteur, that they had found him. These were the gossips. One of the submarines of our squadron – which consisted of three submarines: the Atropo, the Foca and the Zoea – the Foca never returned. Nothing happened to the other one (the Zoea), this happened to us, the Foca never came back.”

November 1940

The command of the Atropo is assumed by the Lieutenant Commander Bandino Bandini (34 years old, from Florence).

Lieutenant Commander  Bandino Bandini
(from “Dizionario Biografico Uomini della Marina”)

November 11^th through 12th, 1940

The Atropo was docked at the submarine quay in Mar Piccolo in Taranto (along with the Ambra, Amphitrite, Malachite, Pietro Micca, Naiade, Sirena, Ondina, Uarsciek and Zoea of the IV Grupsom – of which Atropo itseld was a member –, Dagabur, Serpente and Smeraldo of the X Grupsom, Giovanni Da Procida of the III Grupsom and Ciro Menotti of the VIII Grupsom), when the base was attacked by British torpedo bombers taking off from the British aircraft carrier H.M.S. Illustrious,  which sank the battleship Conte di Cavour and seriously damage the battleships Littorio and Duilio (the so-called “Night of Taranto”).

November 19th, 1940

The 24-year-old sub-chief engine engineer Angelo De Michelis dell’Atropo, from Remanzacco, died aboard in the central Mediterranean.

November 20th, 1940

The Atropo left Taranto with supplies for the garrison of Leros.      

November 21st, 1940

British codebreakers from the “ULTRA” organization intercepted and deciphered a message with which Rome informed Rhodes of the expected arrival of the Atropo at the conventional point “E” on November 27th. However, the British could not organize an interception, as they did not know the location of point “E”.

1941

Modification works: the 100/43 mm gun, placed in an unusual position in the aft part of the conning tower (to allow, theoretically, to fire even in less-than-optimal weather conditions), was removed and replaced with a 100/47 mod. OTO 1938 (with a reserve of 140 rounds), placed in a more traditional position on the main deck, forward of the conning tower.

The Atropo reconfigured with the deck gun mounted in a more traditional position.
(Photo U.S.M.M.)

May 9th, 1941

At 9.30 PM the Atropo (Lieutenant Commander Bandino Bandini) sailed from Taranto on a transport mission, with 78 (or 79) tons of ammunition on board bound for Derna.

Derna had been recently recaptured by the Italian-German forces advancing in Cyrenaica, and it was one of the closest ports to the front line. The Command of the Axis forces in North Africa has expressly requested that military supplies, and in particular ammunition, be sent by sea to anchorages as close as possible to the front line (Derna and Porto Bardia). Therefore, an intense and regular supply traffic to Derna was immediately started with the use of minelaying submarines. The only units (together with motorsailer) able to land in these small and poorly equipped ports. The convoys of merchant ships, which carry much larger quantities of supplies, were in fact forced to dock in Benghazi or Tripoli,  Libya’s only real ports (there was also Tobruk, but at the time in British hands), but hundreds of kilometers away from the front line.

On submarines, ammunition was stored everywhere. Not just in the mine holds, but wherever there was space, even on berths and crew quarters, thus worsening the already spartan living conditions on board.

If the boat arrived at its destination during daylight hours, it had to settle on the bottom (around 70 meters deep) and wait for darkness to come. Once night fell, the boat would come to the surface and enter port, transferring the drums and jerry cans of gasoline onto boats that took them ashore. The Atropo was the first submarine ever to carry out a transport mission to Derna.

May 12th, 1941

The Atropo arrived in Derna at 7 PM and unloaded ammunition.

May 13th, 1941

The boat left Derna at seven o’clock to return to Taranto.

May 15th, 1941

It arrived in Taranto at 3.15 PM, after having covered 1,091 nautical miles on the surface and 42 submerged, consuming 40 tons of naphtha.

May 18, 1941

The Atropo set sail from Taranto at 6.25 AM for a new transport mission to Derna with 79 tons of ammunition on board.

May 20th, 1941

The boat arrived in Derna at 9 PM.

May 21st, 1941

After unloading the ammunition, the Atropo left Derna at 6.48 AM.

May 22nd, 1941

During the return voyage, between 8.25 AM and 7.20 PM the Atropo was subjected to intense and prolonged hunting by light surface units, which, however, caused only light damage.

This episode is remembered by Santo Rettondini as follows:

“… they used us to load cans of gasoline; tons loaded. They were placed in the mine holds, where there which were filled with gasoline. (…) and we went to Bardia and Derna (…) once, I remember that our commander delayed the dive. Because during daylight you have to try to hide, diving, because if you’re on the surface, they can see you. He wanted to go a little further and it happened that we were spotted at about five o’clock in the morning by three British destroyers. We were surprised. Crash dive, down to 80 meters deep. What happened, what didn’t happen, out of the blue it started to rise, it starts to go up, and it reaches almost 15-16 meters, then it went down, it went down, one didn’t know how to stop it… because he had picked up a bit of speed, going down, one had to be careful because when you go down you have to maintain a certain balance… At one point, we went down again, almost to 100 meters, it was starting to drip water… The destroyers arrived above and started with depth charges. I won’t tell you what happened inside, we were all [incomprehensible] because it was the first time that a bombing with deep mines [sic] had happened. It looked like they were bursting up in the mountains, from the explosion they had. And all close together, eh, all close, there were light bulbs that were almost going out, from the flickering that these mines made. Damage from having to climb?  No.

A little water was beginning to come in. This bombardment was very long, it started in the morning, until one o’clock in the morning. There were three of them, and they kept dropping depth charges. It was like a dog and a cat, a mouse and a cat, it was like that. Because they heard us, and we heard them. When they stopped, we stopped, so as not to be heard. But they had an advantage: that as the submarine moved, they did together, in three, one moved in one direction, and they made the angle, the rest of us down there felt [that] one coming from here, the other coming from there, instead of running away we went towards them, that was the trick: take the midpoint of where they came,  so that we could pass them [before] they launched the depth charges. And in fact, with this trick, we had a chief engineer and a commander who were good because they said, “Let’s take a risk. Here we all lose our skin, we go over 100 meters”.

We went to 110 meters; the submarine was tested for 100. We went over the hundred meters, that they (TN the British) knew – they told us later – that depth charges were set at 25, 50, 75 and 100 meters. They were fishing, weren’t they? One exploded at a certain height, another at a certain height, so that we could be hit at whatever depth the submarine was. Instead, they never hit the submarine. Always close, always on this side, always on the other side, never hit. Until noon, half past noon, one o’clock, the bombs were all nearby, we were not able to get away. We were like a mouse, lying down, all standing still with the watertight doors closed, all closed, all still. And for the buoyancy of the submarine, instead of the pumps, we used compressed air. This was a detail so as not to be heard (…) To be silent.

You couldn’t even speak, so as not to be heard. After half past one, two o’clock, we began to breathe a little more, because the bombs began to fall a little farther away. Towards evening farther away, farther away, at ten o’clock in the evening, farther and farther, until midnight when they were almost no longer heard, they may have stopped chasing us, because they might have dropped all the bombs. At one o’clock in the morning the commander decides to go up, give air, come to the surface. We had been without food since the day before because we were all day under bombardment, (…) slowly we tried to come to periscope depth, to look out and see if there were any planes, if there was anything nearby that prevented us from going out. They saw that there was no one there, and slowly we got out, but with difficulty, because during all this long dive to a depth of a hundred and more meters, the submarine at taken a certain crushing, its size was reduced, and it could not rise, because during the day so much water had entered from various leaks, that we had to go to the pumps to send out all the water that had come in,  so that we could lighten it more and come out. The fact is that little by little we managed to open the first hutch of the conning tower, and one could immediately feel the air different from what was inside because we couldn’t breathe anymore because there was no more oxygen. We did the test of lighting a candle, it didn’t light up, it sparked and that was it because there was no more oxygen. (…) In short, we were at the limit, that’s it.”

May 24th, 1941

The Atropo arrived in Taranto at 1.20, after having covered 1,063 miles on the surface and 92 underwater. (According to a German document, the Atropo carried 59.4, 56.8, and 57 tons of fuel respectively on its three May missions.)

For the cycle of transport missions in May 1941, Commander Bandini was awarded the Bronze Medal for Military Valor, with the motivation “Commander of a submarine, destined for a supply mission, without stopping in hard fatigue, he took his unit several times to the difficult goal, countering the enemy offensive and the frequent inclemency of the weather. He showed enthusiastic dedication to service and serene courage in these missions which, with the help he brought, contributed to the success of the other Armed Forces.”

June 1st, 1941

The third-class chief helmsman Giovanni Panichi dell’Atropo, 28 years old, from Perugia, dies in the metropolitan area.

June 5th, 1941

The Atropo set sail from Taranto at 5.35 AM with 40 tons of ammunition on board to be transported to Derna.

June 7th, 1941

The boat reaches Derna at 8.10 PM.

June 8th, 1941

Once the cargo was unloaded, the boat left Derna for Taranto at 00.12 (or 5.35) AM.

June 10th, 1941

The Atropo arrived in Taranto at eleven o’clock, after having covered 1,119 miles on the surface and 32.9 submerged.

June 13th, 1941

The boat sailed from Taranto to Derna at 10:20 AM, carrying 68 tons of ammunition.

June 15th, 1941

The Atropo arrived in Derna at 9.31 PM.

June 16th, 1941

The boat left Derna at 3.20 AM.

June 19th, 1941

The boat reached Taranto at 11.10 AM, after having covered 1,050 miles on the surface and 116 submerged.

The loading of a 533 mm torpedo on the Atropo t(Taranto, in 1941).
The weapon is of the training type, without a warhead
9From the Magazine Storia Militare)

June 25th, 1941

Now under the command of Lieutenant Commander Guido D’Alterio, the Atropo left Taranto for Derna at 9.30 AM, carrying 40 tons of ammunition.

June 27th, 1941

The boat arrived in Derna at 9 PM.

June 28th, 1941

The Atropo departed Derna at 2 AM (or 1.50 AM).

July 1, 1941

The boat arrived in Taranto at eleven o’clock, after having covered 1,072 miles on the surface and 70 submerged.

July 21st, 1941

The boat departed Taranto for Derna at 10.40 AM, carrying 47 tons of ammunition.

July 23rd, 1941

The boat arrived in Derna at 11.30pm.

July 25th, 1941

The Atropo, having unloaded the cargo, left Derna at three o’clock in the morning (or 3.05 AM).

July 27, 1941

The boat arrived in Taranto at 12.45 PM, after having covered 1,038 miles on the surface and 125 submerged.

Meanwhile (on July 6^th, 1941) Admiral Eberhard Weichold, liaison officer of the Kriegsmarine in Italy, wrote a letter to his Italian colleagues in which – expressing great satisfaction on the part of the Afrika Korps and the Quartermaster General of the German Army for the transport missions already carried out by Atropo and Zoea, which with their somewhat small quantities of materials brought to Derna allowed a considerable lightening of supplies to the front,  since the road from Derna was much shorter than then one from Benghazi and Tripoli – proposed, among other things, the intensification of the traffic of transport submarines with the use of additional units in this task, and also advocated the use of Porto Bardia for the unloading of supplies, since this harbor is even closer than Derna to the front line.

Porto Bardia was a poorly equipped and poorly defended marina, and its utilization was full of problems and unknowns; nevertheless, Supermarina agreed to use it as a landing for some transport missions carried out by submarines.

August 12th, 1941

Under the command of Lieutenant Libero Sauro, the Atropo departed Taranto for Bardia at 12.30 PM, carrying 44,138 tons of gasoline (or diesel) in 3044 cans.

August 16^th, 1941

The boat reached Porto Bardia at 4.55 PM (or 10 PM).

August 17th, 1941

It left Porto Bardia at 2.40 AM.

August 20th, 1941

The boat reached Taranto at 3.20 PM.  

The performance of this mission (and of the almost simultaneous ones of the Zoea and the Corridoni) is described by Supermarina memo no. 141 of August 27^th as follows:

“The units have carried out their task with considerable skill, managing to brilliantly overcome the difficulties and risks inherent in the operation. Navigation was conducted on the surface until one day before the arrival and continued submerged during the daylight hours of the day of the arrival in order to avoid being sighted by the enemy. Entry into Bardia was generally made after sunset, due to the danger presented by air attacks on the locality, which were always frequent and strong. Entering the port in such conditions presents some navigational difficulties due to the lack of light signals and the configuration of the coast which does not offer special characteristics for recognition.

In the port, the unloading operations, carried out during the night by means of rafts and rubber floats provided by the German army, lasted an average of 4 hours, and were carried out by the ship’s personnel with the cooperation of German soldiers. It should be noted that, in the event of aerial bombardment during unloading operations, the unit could not dive as the hatches were open for the unloading of the material and it was surrounded by numerous barges (up to 6 at a time) loaded with exceptionally flammable material and without any effective fire-fighting means. In addition, a possible maneuver to leave port was long and laborious given the narrowness of the stretch of water. All these difficulties were brilliantly overcome by the commanders and crews of the submarines, who noted with deep pride the satisfaction expressed to them by the German Command of Bardia for the transport of essential material to the expeditionary corps for the conduct of war operations.”

October 17th, 1941

The Atropo (Lieutenant Libero Sauro) departed Taranto for Bardia at 12.30 PM, carrying 57 tons of gasoline in cans.

October 19th, 1941

At 9.00 AM the Atropo suffered its first aerial attack, with bomb dropping and strafing, which it managed to survive unscathed. At 12.30 PM it was attacked again by another aircraft, which it also managed to repel and caused damage with the anti-aircraft guns. (Another source speaks of a single air attack, which took place in the morning, by a British Bristol Blenheim bomber, which strafed it and dropped several bombs on the boat without success, while the Atropo managed to hit it repeatedly with the fire of its machine guns, damaging it and forcing it to retreat, and then disengaged diving).

October 22nd, 1941

It arrived in Bardia at 2.30 AM, unloaded the cargo and then left at seven o’clock to return to Taranto.

October 26th, 1941

The Atropo arrived in Taranto at 1 PM.

November 13th, 1941

At a particularly critical moment in the convoy war – a few days earlier the large convoy “Duisburg”, with 34,000 tons of supplies (half of them fuel), had been completely destroyed by the British Force K – the Atropo, along with other submarines, was included in an emergency program for transporting urgent supplies to Libya by warships.  Prepared by Supermarina following pressure from Germany and the Italian Army. The submarines would transport supplies to Derna and Bardia. Supermarina had already objected in the past to those two ports because they were poorly equipped and therefore had a very modest unloading capacity, but the German Commands insisted that the materials be delivered there, since these ports were much closer to the front line than the larger and better equipped port of Benghazi.

November 16th, 1941

At four o’clock in the morning, while sailing to Bardia in rough seas, the two aft batteries suddenly exploded: two men were killed, others were seriously injured. The submarine suffered serious damage, and it was difficult to avert the danger of a fire which, given the nature of the cargo, would have had a catastrophic result.

The victims were the motor sailor Domenico Albanese, 20 years old, from Reggio Calabria, and the chief helmsman third class Giovanni Bagnaschino, 29 years old.

The NCO quarters and the batteries hold where the explosion took place.

Not being in conditions to continue the mission (also due to the state of the sea), the Atropo set course for Navarino. By order of Supermarina, the destroyer Giovanni Da Verrazzano left Benghazi in the evening to rescue the submarine (which will have to be escorted for the final stretch of the navigation, starting at 5 PM on the 17th), whose intervention, however, would be completely superfluous, as the Atropo arrived in Navarino before being reached by the Da Verrazzano.

Having managed to restart the diesel engines, which had stopped after the explosion, the chief engineer of the Atropo, Lieutenant of the Naval Engineers Rinaldo Rinaldi (30 years old, from Sedegliano), was decorated with the Bronze Medal for Military Valor, with the motivation “Head of the Naval Engineering Service of a submarine on a war mission, there was an explosion in the batteries hold that caused the stopping of the motors.  He directed and personally carried out the operations aimed at ensuring the start-up of the combustion engines, remaining in a dark and gas-impregnated environment. Despite the adverse sea conditions, he restored the main security services, making a valuable contribution to the ship’s rescue with a serene spirit and a spirit of sacrifice.”

A similar decoration would be conferred on Commander Sauro, with the motivation “Commander of a submarine on a war mission, after an explosion occurred in the accumulator batteries with consequent shutdown of the motors, he organized with serene courage and high competence the operations to restore the efficiency of the unit, made difficult due to the adverse sea conditions. With an unyielding will, he boldly overcame the precariousness of the situation and returned to base, giving proof of elite military virtues.”

November 17th, 1941

The Atropo arrived in Navarino (TN Greece) at 5.30 PM, stopping there for two days.

November 19th, 1941

The boat left Navarino at 1 PM to return to Taranto.

November 20th, 1941

The Atropo arrived in Taranto at 2.30 pm.

The entire episode is recalled by the deputy chief engine engineer Santo Rettondini:

“This explosion took place because of the strong sea present, there was such a strong sea (…) because we had just left Taranto, we were loaded, we were sailing on the surface, it was just passed two o’clock. I was on duty at two o’clock in the morning, and I had just started my shift. My comrade, who had gone to sleep in the non-commissioned officers’ room because there was no room there, was left dead, because the explosion took place right there.

The batteries that supplied the power to the whole submarine exploded, they were big batteries, there was a hold full of them (…) under the non-commissioned officers’ square, there was this hold full of electric accumulators. With the slamming of the sea, (…) there was a leak from some battery, a sulfuric acid leak, and it created gas into this chamber. This chamber has swelled so much, an enormous pressure, that the floor, usually flat, had developed a curve like this, it has swelled. What happened? The hatch had handles, it was closed, the bending, rising, let the latches came out, (…) and exploded. Then, when the top had curved, the pegs that were closed came out, and an explosion followed, it made a mess, all the wooden walls of the non-commissioned officers’ quarters, the bunks, were made into a pile of rubble.

And [there were] two dead and 4-5 injured. (…) I was at the stern (…) I had just taken up my duties, I was in charge of the left-hand engine, the other, on the right, there was a NCO, the chief engineer was in charge. As usual, there was a lot of noise (…) a huge noise, and the air only came out of the conning tower hatch, because the others were closed. (…) Out of the blue… It was instantaneous, an explosion, coals, dust, gases come to your face, everything comes to your face. “What happened? Was the submarine hit somewhere, help. Not here, because we are alive.” Somewhere, being eighty meters long, perhaps somewhere it took a mine, a torpedo, I don’t know, something happened.

So, the first thing you do is close the exhaust manifolds, because you have to close those, otherwise water gets in… But some of the crew, both a non-commissioned officer and the electric motorist, slipped up the hatch to open it at the back, to get out, didn’t they? And there is an opening where you cannot pass two at a time, one behind the other yes, together it is difficult. The conning tower was already full. And that was when I thought: here the engines go, in speed it goes down faster, you don’t have time to get out. And so, I stopped the engine and tried to escape too, but I couldn’t escape, because the exit from conning tower was full, and they weren’t able to open the hatch. There was a flywheel, and they couldn’t turn it. And I said, “But it’s not possible that you can’t open it, open this thing…”, but we were already in the dark by then, we were all scared. (…) I went down in the boat again. I had the handwheel to get the diesel engine going, I had a key made like this, I took the flyer and opened it. I took the key and pass it to the first one there, he managed to open it, he succeeded, he opened it and then we began to go out. As one came out, there was a rough sea. The crew had to attach themselves to the metal line that was there – from the hatch to the conning tower, there was a steel cable that they could attach to, to go to the conning tower (…) and we got out of there, with the conviction, who knows what will happen. We were at the mercy of the waves by then, everything had stopped, there was no light. Blown up, engines stopped, we floated, at the mercy of the waves. Suddenly, I hear the motorists calling. And so, we stepped forward. They give us a mask, [saying] to get in the hull, to see if we were able to restart the engines; Because nothing serious happened, enough to sink [the submarine], but this explosion had happened. So, to go to the engine room, you had to go through the maneuver room, you would came down, then move to the non-commissioned officers’ room, which was devastated, and the air, it almost closed… the watertight door, which was open, because we were sailing, was open. And then the explosion and the displacement of the air almost closed the door, almost the whole door. And then we had to move all the stuff, always in the dark. And then I made a small gap, and I managed to get through.

And when I lay down to lay my hand, I don’t see that I really put my hand on the leg of a person who was there! There’s someone underneath, dead now! And so, I managed to get through, I went inside the engine room, and slowly, always – they gave us a small flashlight, in our hands, so we could at least see where you put your feet – and then we tried to get these engines going. You had to go after the engines and bleed them, if water got in, make it go away! And so, I did that job there, of my engine, I can get it going. Like I put it to go… It sucked up all the smoke that was in it, all the dust that was in it, it sucked it all up. And you could feel the fresh air coming down from above. At that moment there was our salvation because we managed to get at least one [engine] to move (…) we managed to put only one engine to go.

The other one, we couldn’t get it going. Then, all at their posts, navigation began, the day began, with the hope that they would not see us. A good wish, because there was bad weather, it was raining, it was windy, and that helped us. (…) we went as far as Navarino (…) always with only one engine, we did 4-5 miles [knots], because only one was bad. (…) Meanwhile, during the day, they put everything in place, they tried to recover the two who had died there, the wounded began to be treated. And when we arrived at this port of Navarino, they decided to disembark and have the funeral of the two fallen. At that time there was a section of soldiers on the ground (…) and they organized the funeral with the village’s priest and place them in his cemetery. And then the rest of us marched with the priest, with these two dead, we put them to rest in this cemetery, waiting for something to be decided in Rome.

And in fact, after two days, they sent an escort destroyer to take us to Taranto to drydock. Not just because of the batteries, but because you couldn’t dive anymore, you couldn’t dive at all because we were devastated inside. Where there used to be the non-commissioned officers’ quarters, there were also pumps for the service of the various mechanisms, they were called “Calzoni” pumps, which were used by pressure to open the doors of the mines hold, torpedoes tubes, all these activities of submarine movements, of the famous rudders, both horizontal and directional, they were all moved by these machines (…) And then, since the submarine was in this state and could do nothing more, they sent us this escort. We went to Taranto, to the basin, and there they did all the repairs, everything was new. In the meantime, while they were doing these repairs, they gave the whole crew a fortnight’s premium leave in a hotel in Merano, Albergo Italia. Fifteen days, first one part [of the crew] and then the other. Fifteen days of premium leave.”

Mid-June 1942

The Atropo was sent to lie in wait off Malta during the Battle of Mid-June, in which it was not involved.

Atropo in Taranto, 1942
(From the Magazine Storia Militare)

A total of 16 boats are deployed in the central and central-western Mediterranean to counter “Operation Harpoon”. The doctrine of the use of submarines had changed compared to before: now it was planned to use submarines en masse against ships or groups of ships sighted and reported by aircraft. While in mid-August, two months later, this tactic was very successful, in mid-June the submarines did not reap any results.

June 1942

Following insistent requests from the German Commands, on June 21st the Grupsom Taranto received orders to use some of its units to transport aviation gasoline for the Luftwaffe. The German authorities were pressing for the use of submarines in transport missions to bring supplies close to the front lines, during the advance of Rommel’s forces which has just recaptured Tobruk and was advancing towards the Egyptian border. All this even though normal traffic of merchant ships was going smoothly, with very limited losses, and despite the fact that a submarine cannot carry even a tenth of what a small merchant ship can cargo. Other German agencies and commands made similar requests, but the order remains strictly limited to aircraft gasoline only.

The Atropo was among the submarines chosen for this service, along with her sister ship Zoea, the minelayers Micca, Corridoni and Bragadin and the large and elderly Enrico Toti, Antonio Sciesa, Narvalo and Santorre Santarosa.

As complained by Supermarina, the use of submarines to transport fuel to North Africa was not very convenient: a Foca-class minelaying submarine, for example, consumes 57 tons of diesel to transport 60 tons of gasoline from Naples to Tobruk.

June 23rd, 1942

The Atropo departed Taranto for Derna at 11.30 AM, carrying 56 tons of gasoline in cans.

June 26, 1942

The boat arrived in Derna at 8.15 PM.

June 27th, 1942

It left Derna at two o’clock in the morning.

June 30^th, 1942

The Atropo arrived in Taranto at 12.05 PM.

July 6th, 1942

The Atropo set sail from Taranto at noon, carrying 50 tons of aviation gasoline and one and a half tons of ammunition, to be transported partly to Tobruk and partly to Derna.

July 8th, 1942

The boat arrived in Ras Hilal at 8.40 PM, staying there until the next morning.

July 9TH, 1942

It left Ras Hilal at 7:30 AM for Derna, where he arrived at 8:15 PM

The Atrlopo (right) in Ras Hilal on July 10th, 1942, along with the Enrico Toti and Santorre Santarosa
(From the Magazine Storia Militare)

July 11, 1942

Having disembarked part of the cargo, it left Derna at 8.15 PM.

July 13th, 1942

It arrived in Tobruk at nine o’clock in the morning and delivered the remaining part of the cargo. Then, left at 6 PM to return to Taranto, along with the submarine Narvalo, also returning from a transport mission.

July 16th, 1942

It arrived in Taranto at eleven o’clock in the morning.

The Atropo in Tobruk, 1942
(From the Magazine Storia Militare)

July 21st, 1942

It left Taranto at noon, carrying 54 tons of gasoline (50 tons in bulk, four tons in cans) to be taken partly to Derna and partly to Ras Hilal.

July 23rd, 1942

It arrived in Derna at 12 PM, disembarking part of the cargo there.

July 25th, 1942

It arrived in Ras Hilal at 8 PM and delivered the rest of the cargo, and then left immediately for Taranto.

July 26th, 1942

The Atropo stopped in Benghazi from midnight to nine in the morning.

July 28th, 1942

It arrived in Taranto at ten o’clock.

The Atropo unloading drums and jerry cans of gasoline at Ras Hilal, in 1942
(from “Uomini sul fondo. Storia del sommergibilismo italiano dalle origini ad oggi” dby Giorgio Giorgerini)

August 12th, 1942

The boat left leaves for Tripoli at 7 PM, carrying 52 tons of gasoline in cans.

August 15th, 1942

It reached Tripoli at 9.50 AM, unloaded the cargo and departed again at 4 PM

August 18th, 1942

It arrived in Taranto at 3.30 PM

September 1st, 1942

It left Taranto for Benghazi at 5:30 PM, carrying 67.5 tons of ammunition and 10 tons of food.

September 4th, 1942

It arrived in Benghazi at 7.45 am, unloaded the cargo and left again at 4.10 pm.

September 7th, 1942

The Atropo arrived in Taranto at 11.30 AM.

September 15th, 1942

It left Taranto for Benghazi at noon, carrying 65 tons of ammunition and 1.5 tons of food.

September 18th, 1942

It arrived in Benghazi at eight o’clock.

September 19th, 1942

It left Benghazi at 7 PM.

September 22nd, 1942

It arrived in Taranto at 10.50 AM.

October 9th, 1942

The Atropo departed Taranto for Benghazi at 12:30 PM, carrying 39 tons of supplies.

October 12th, 1942

It arrived in Benghazi at 8.20 AM, unloaded the food and left at 4.30 PM to return to Taranto.

October 15th, 1942

It arrived in Taranto at 4 PM.

November 10th, 1942

At 12.10 PM, the Atropo sailed from Taranto for Tripoli, carrying 50 tons of spare parts and artillery material.

November 13th, 1942

The boat arrived in Tripoli at 7.45 AM.

November 14th, 1942

After disembarking the supplies, the Atropo left Tripoli at 3.25 PM.

November 17th, 1942

It reached Taranto at 3.20 PM.

June 1943

Command of the Atropo was assumed by Lieutenant Commander Rino Erler.

June 1943

It transported a cargo of supplies to the island of Lampedusa, subjected to a naval blockade by the Anglo-American forces, who would conquer it a few days later (June 12th, 1943) after heavy bombardment. This mission of the Atropo, along with the one carried out at the same time by the smaller submarine Sirena, also destined for Lampedusa (in total, the two submarines landed 49.6 tons of supplies on the island), constituted the last transport mission carried out by an Italian submarine before the Armistice.

September 8, 1943

At the time of the proclamation of the armistice of Cassibile, the Atropo was in port in Taranto (according to another source, it would have reached Taranto following the armistice).

From the memoirs of Santo Rettondini:

“On September 8th we were in Taranto, in the port of Taranto. We were already safe in Taranto because we were in port. (…) we were in the Navy arsenal, in port. There was located the admiral in charge. We were all under Admiralty. And we were there waiting for orders; Orders dind’t come, and we’re there. So was that the troops, from Sicily, landed on our area and the British arrived first in Taranto. And we we transferred (…) under the new government, that of southern Italy (…) with Badoglio.”

September 12th, 1943

The Atropo left Taranto at 9.55 AM along with the submarines Fratelli Bandiera and Jalea to move to Malta, as per the armistice provisions. The group was accompanied by the destroyer Augusto Riboty.

September 13th, 1943

The boat arrived in Malta at 8.35 PM, along with the Jalea, Fratelli Bandiera and Riboty. The four vessels, together with the torpedo boats Libra and Orione, the seaplane carrier Giuseppe Miraglia and the submarine Ciro Menotti, went to moor in St. Paul’s Bay.

September 21st, 1943

The Italian submarines in Malta, previously scattered in the various moorings of the island, were grouped into two groups, one concentrated in Marsa Scirocco and the other in São Paulo.

The Atropo was temporarily stationed in the mooring of Marsa Scirocco, together with nine other submarines (Axum, Bandiera, Bragadin, Corridoni, Giada, Marea, Nichelio, Settembrini, Vortex; from October 6^th also the Turchese), under the “dependence” of the battleship Giulio Cesare.

October 16th, 1943

Following Italy’s declaration of war on Germany, the Atropo left Malta at 8.30 AM along with the submarines Zoea, Corridoni and Ciro Menotti, bound for Haifa (Palestine). (According to the war diary of the British Levant Command, these submarines were sent to Haifa from Taranto, but a mistake seems likely.)

The Atropo (second boat from the left in the front row) and other Italian submarines moored at Sliema Creek (Marsa Muscetto, Malta) in September 1943
(Imperial War Museum)

Since the Italian garrisons of some of the Dodecanese islands were still resisting German attacks, these submarines were sent to Haifa to be employed in missions to supply arms and ammunition to those islands (as well as to evacuate wounded on the way back), especially Leros. Their estimated carrying capacity was 70 tons of ammunition or 40 tons of food.

The refueling of Leros took place under particularly difficult conditions: German air supremacy was such that the units carrying supplies could only move at night, and they had to ensure that they are outside of the Luftwaffe’s range by dawn. Unable to use merchant ships, everything had to be transported by destroyers, caiques, smaller boats. Several units fell victim to German air attacks. Not even an airlift was conceivable, as few transport aircraft were available. In view of the situation, submarines seem to be the most appropriate means of transporting to supplies Leros in conditions of reasonable safety. In addition to the Italian boats, the British submarines Severn and Rorqual were also used to supply Leros. The use of the six submarines to supply Leros was authorized during a meeting of the Commanders-in-Chief of the Allied Forces in the Middle East, in the presence of the First Sea Lord and the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom; the request to the Command of the Regia Marina to make submarines available for transport missions was made by the Allies on October 13th.

October 20th, 1943

The Atropo reached Haifa at 8.55 am, one day ahead of Zoea, Menotti and Corridoni.

Here the Italian Higher Naval Command of the Levant (Maricosulev Haifa) was established, with a Submarine Group of the Levant (Grupsom Levante), under the command of Commander Carlo Liannazza. The Group’s submarines were under the command of the Royal Navy’s 1st Submarine Flotilla. Their operations were coordinated with the Senior Submarine Officer Levant Area, Haifa, which issued the operation orders for individual missions. According to the book “Spoils of War: The Fate of Enemy Fleets after the Two World Wars” by Aidan Dodson, during its period of operation in waters under British jurisdiction the Atropo received the temporary “pennant” N31.

Beginning on October 26th, the four Italian submarines departed Haifa at regular intervals, carrying 45 tons of supplies on each trip. All journeys come to a happy ending.

October 26th, 1943

At 11:15 PM, the Atropo (Lieutenant Aredio Galzigna) left Haifa for Leros with a cargo of supplies.

October 30th, 1943

It arrived in Leros at 9 PM.

October 31st, 1943

After unloading the supplies, it left Leros at 3.30 am.

November 3rd, 1943

It arrived in Haifa at 6:55 pm.

Regarding the use of submarines to supply Leros, the official narration of the U.S.M.M. (TN Historical Bureau Italian Navy) writes: “The actual contribution of the submarines to suppling (Lers) were of course not of great importance, given their natural poor carrying capacity. They brought ammunition, gasoline, various materials, and even Bofors guns on deck. On the other hand, the moral contribution that the nocturnal visits of the Italians submarines gave the defenders of Leros for the satisfaction and prestige that they derived from this Italian military activity. In fact, it was carried out without any particular British control (except for a representative of the Allies for the communications service), despite the fact that the submarines were if full war asset and ready to fight during the crossing, which was, for the most part, carried out under covert navigation.” Unloading operations must be carried out at night, because it is only in the dark that the Luftwaffe suspends its continuous air attacks.

November 16th, 1943

At one o’clock in the morning, the Atropo departed Haifa (for another source, Beirut) with a cargo of supplies for the garrison of Leros.

November 17th, 1943

At 6:12 PM, after 36 hours at sea, the Atropo received orders to return to Haifa (according to another source, Beirut): Leros had fallen.

November 19th, 1943

The Atropo arrived in Haifa at 7.05am.

November 22nd, 1943

It left Haifa at 10.10 AM with a load of supplies for Castelrosso, still in Italian-British hands.

November 25th, 1943

It arrived in Castelrosso at 8.55 AM, but did not unload the supplies; On the other hand, the soldier Vincenzo Di Domenico, of the 16th Infantry Regiment (Division “Regina”), captured by the Germans in Leros but escaped from captivity, was embarked. The Atropo then departs for Haifa, where it arrived at 5.20 pm.

November 28th, 1943

With the German victory in the Dodecanese, the Atropo left Haifa at 6 PM to return to Taranto. (According to one source, during the stay in Haifa, the Atropo also carried out some training missions with British corvettes.)

December 3rd, 1943

The submarine arrived in Taranto at 5.10 pm. In the following months, it participated in exercises with Italian units, as well as in escort and patrol missions, with a British liaison officer on board.

May 1944

Subjected to a period of refetting in Taranto.

September 15th, 1944

The Atropo (Lieutenant Aredio Galzigna) left Taranto at 5.10 PM bound for the Atlantic, where it would be used as a target in exercises for the training of Allied anti-submarine vessels.

A total of eight Italian submarines were assigned to this task (West Atlantic Submarine Flotilla), based in Bermuda, Guantanamo Bay, Key West, Port Everglades, New London and Casco Bay, between February 1944 and the end of 1945. In addition to the Atropo, also the Vortice, Onice, Marea, Dandolo, Giovanni Da Procida, Tito Speri and Goffredo Mameli. They were part of the U.S. Navy’s Submarine Squadron 7, along with seven Free French submarines (Argo, Amazone, Antiope, Archimedes, Casabianca, Le Centaure and Le Glorieux).

September 27th, 1944

After a stopover in Augusta, the Atropo reached Gibraltar and moored at the Pigmy pier, next to the British submarine Truant.

October 7th, 1944

The boat departed Gibraltar at 10:53 AM bound for Bermuda, escorted by the U.S. destroyer Frederick C. Davis.

October 20th, 1944

Arrival in Bermuda.

November 8^th 1944 through March 3^rd, 1945

The Atropo participate in 48 drills between Malatar and Port St. George.

December 11^th though 12th, 1944

The boat participated in an exercise with a task group consisting of the escort aircraft carrier USS Core, seven destroyer escorts, and the PCE-846 submarine destroyer.

January 2^nd through 5^th, 1945

The boat participate in an exercise with another task group, consisting of the escort aircraft carrier USS Bogue, the escort destroyers USS Haverfield, Swelling, Willis, Janssen, Wilhoite, and Cockrill, and the submarine destroyer PCE-846.

January 9^th through 11^th, 1945

Another exercise with the Bogue and the PCE-279 submarine destroyer.

February 12^th though 14th, 1945

Antisubmarine exercise with the destroyer escort USS Cross and the fast transport USS Register. The Cross made eighteen passes with depth charges.

March 3rd, 1945

The Atropo left Port St. George, Bermuda, bound for Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, escorted by the newly commissioned U.S. Coast Guard frigate Racine.

March 7th, 1945

It arrived at Guantánamo Bay. In the following months, it took part in another 70 exercises in these waters.

September 24th, 1945

At the end of the Second World War, following the surrender of Japan, the Atropo and another Italian submarine, the Dandolo, left Guantanamo for Port Royal, Jamaica.

September 30th, 1945

Atropo and Dandolo arrived at Port Royal.

October 5th, 1945

At noon, Atropo, Dandolo and the Italian submarines Vortice, Onice, Marea, Giovanni Da Procida and Tito Speri set sail from Bermuda escorted by the U.S. submarine rescue ship Chain to return to Italy.

October 16th, 1945

The submarines reach Punta Delgada, in the Azores, in the morning; the exception was Atropo, which reaches São Miguel at 8.23 AM.

October 18th, 1945

At 8:14 AM, the Atropo left São Miguel, rejoining the rest of the group, which also left Punta Delgada around noon and headed for Gibraltar.

October 26th, 1945

The Atropo and the other submarines reach Gibraltar in the morning.

October 28th, 1945

The Atropo and the other submarines departed Gibraltar at about three o’clock in the morning.

November 3rd, 1945

The Atropo and the other submarines finally reach Taranto: the war is over for them too. The Atropo was laid up in Taranto.

February 10th, 1947

The Atropo was included in the “List of ships that Italy will have to place at the disposal of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and France” by the provisions of the peace treaty signed in Paris. More precisely, the Atropo was assigned to the United Kingdom, along with the submarine Alagi, the battleship Vittorio Veneto and some motor torpedo boats, as reparation for war damages.

The Atropo in Taranto, 1947
(From the Magazine Storia Militare)

The British, not needing new units in addition to those mass-produced under the war construction programs (they have, in fact, more than were needed in peacetime), renounce delivery, but demand that the units destined to them be immediately scrapped.

February 1st, 1948

The Atropo was removed from the roster of the navy by the provisions of the peace treaty. (According to some sources, including “The Italian Submarines 1940-1943” by Erminio Bagnasco and Maurizio Brescia, the radiation took place as early as March 23, 1947).

December 5th, 1948

The Taranto fisherman Francesco Intini gets on board the Atropo, decommissioned in Taranto and awaiting demolition, to steal some metal components; In order to conceal the theft, he voluntarily damaged some equipment and thus caused the submarine to sink, which sank slowly, within a few hours. Intini, caught in the act by the carabinieri and security guards and immediately arrested (the sinking of the Atropo took place just as the carabinieri were drawing up the arrest report), was sentenced in March 1951 to twelve months’ imprisonment for theft of scrap and for insulting a public official, while he was acquitted of the charge of culpable sinking. The wreck of the Atropo was later recovered and demolished in Taranto.

Original Italian text by Lorenzo Colombo adapted and translated by Cristiano D’Adamo

Operational Records

Type	Patrols (Med.)	Patrols (Other)	NM Surface	NM Sub.	Days at Sea	NM/Day	Average Speed
Submarine – Medium Range	30		27,884	2,703	171	178.87	7.45

Actions

Date	Time	Captain	Area	Coordinates	Convoy	Weapon	Result	Ship	Type	Tonns	Flag
6/26/1940	02:45	C,F. Luigi Caneschi	Mediterranean	East of Amorgos		Torpedo	Failed	Unknown	Submarine		Unknown

Crew Members Lost

Last Name	First Name	Rank	Italian Rank	Date
Albanese	Domenico	Naval Rating	Comune	11/16/1941
Bagnaschino	Giovanni	Chief 3rd Class	Capo di 3a Classe	11/16/1941
De Michelis	Angelo	Junior Chief	Sottocapo	11/19/1940
Panichi	Giovanni	Chief 3rd Class	Capo di 3a Classe	1/6/1941

The Asteria was a coastal submarine of the Platino class, “600” series, type Bernardis, with a displacement of 712 tons on the surface and 865 tons submerged. During the war, it completed 9 offensive or exploratory patrols, mainly in the central Mediterranean, and eight transfer journeys, covering 10,842 miles on the surface and 1,370 miles submerged, and spending 97 days at sea.

The Asteria soon after delivery to the Regia Marina photographed on November 27th, 1941.
(Photo Collezione Turrini)

Brief history

October 16th, 1940

The boat was set up at the Cantieri Riuniti dell’Adriatico in Monfalcone. Build number 1262.

June 25th, 1941

The boat was launched at the Cantieri Riuniti dell’Adriatico (C.R.D.A.) in Monfalcone.

November 8th, 1941

The boat entered active service immediately after a period of intense training.

February 9, 1942

Antonio Pardo, 21, from Portici, died on the Asteria in the central Mediterranean.

May 13th, 1942

The boat began the first war patrol, in the waters off Cyrenaica.

May 15th, 1942

The Asteria, while emerging in the evening to begin the night patrol on the surface, spotted a destroyer that was approaching at high speed in an attempt to ram it. The submarine quickly dove and it was then subjected, for a long time, to a hunt with depth charges, but damage was not serious. The boat continued its mission, concluding it on May 24th.

July 7th, 1942

Asteria (Lieutenant Pasquale Beltrame) took position between Cyprus and Syria for a week, and there were no sightings.

July 14th, 1942

At 02:00 AM of July 14th, the lookouts spotted a unit at a short distance that was identified as a destroyer and attacked it with the launch of a torpedo, which was avoided with a maneuver. The Asteria launched another one and then heard a loud explosion, however no enemy units are damaged.

On the evening of July 14th, at 11:47 PM, the boat was sighted in position 33°57′ N and 34°34′ E (about fifty miles west of Beirut), while sailing on the surface with a 100° course, by the British submarine H.M.S. Turbulent (from half a mile away). The Asteria, having already sighted H.M.S. Turbulent from 1000 meters away and believing it to be an Italian submarine with a course of 290° (the position given, 33°52′ N and 34°46′ E, is slightly different from that indicated by the British unit), turned to starboard and moved away at maximum speed to lose contact (probably in order to avoid mishaps). H.M.S. Turbulent, which correctly identified the unknown submarine as an Italian unit, mistakenly believed that it had dived, therefore, a minute later (at 11.48 OM) it dove in turn. This is how the meeting ended.

August 12th, 1942

The boat was deployed west of Malta to counter the British operation “Pedestal” (Battle of Mid-August). No major events.

November 13th, 1942

The Asteria (Lieutenant Dante Morrone) sighted two smaller units in the waters of Capo Carbon and at 02.05 AM launched two torpedoes against one of them. Due to the high phosphorescence of the water, the ship sighted the torpedoes in time and avoided them with a maneuver. Then the Asteria was subjected to a hard chase with several depth charges, from which, however, it managed to escape with only minor damage.

At 12.45 PM of the same day, the Asteria, on its way back to to base (according to another version to return to the patrol area), was attacked by a Lockheed Hudson of the USAAF (?), which attacked with bombs dropped at low altitude, but the boat avoided the bombs with a maneuver – only one exploded, on deck, without incredibly causing serious damage – and returned fire with the machine guns,  damaging the plane which flew away with an engine on fire.

December 4th, 1942

During a mission off Algeria, in the evening of December 4th, the Asteria, while coming to the surface at six miles by 45° from Cape Fer, hit the keel of a British corvette with the conning tower. The boat immediately dove, but suffered a long bombardment with depth charges, suffering serious damage (in addition to those already sustained in the collision), which forced it to return to Cagliari.

The damage to the conning tower of the Asteria
(Photo STORIA militare)

December 16th, 1942

Second Lieutenant Pietro Eugeni, 21, from Rome, died on the Asteria in the central Mediterranean.

The Last Mission and the Sinking

On February 11^th, 1943, after the completion of the repair works, the Asteria, under the command of Lieutenant Dante Morrone, left Naples for the ninth war patrol, an ambush to counter Allied traffic to and from the port of Bougie (Algeria). On February 13th, the submarine arrived in the assigned patrol area, off Cape Carbon. No ships were sighted for four days, but at 3 AM on February 17th, the boat spotted two enemy units not far away, searching for submarines.

Lieutenant Dante Morrone, born in Ravenna January 28th, 1914, the last commander of the Asteria.
Note the “wings” on his uniform as he was a “osservatore aereo”.
(Photo Giovanni Pinna)

They were the British destroyer escort H.M.S. Wheatland (sometimes mistakenly referred to as “Westland”; under the command of Lieutenant Commander Ronald L. Brooke, who would receive the Distinguished Service Order for the action) and H.M.S. Easton of the Hunt class (under the command of Lieutenant C. Wickham Malins, who would receive a second Distinguished Service Cross for the action), which together with two other destroyers of the same class,  H.M.S. Lamerton (which had already sunk the submarine Ferraris in the Atlantic) and H.M.S. Bicester, were escorting an Allied convoy off the Algerian coast.

The Asteria, remaining on the surface, immediately maneuvered to approach the launch distance and, having reached 700 meters, prepared to attack with the torpedoes, but H.M.S. Wheatland and H.M.S. Easton (H.M.S. Bicester and H.M.S. Lamerton took part in the search for the submarine, in defense of the convoy, but not in the hunt) located the submarine with radar and at first tried to ram it,  then, after the boat had made the rapid dive to avoid collision, they bombarded it with depth charges. According to the book “Ultra Versus U-Boats: Enigma Decrypts in the National Archives”, however, it was H.M.S. Wheatland and H.M.S. Easton that first sighted the Asteria, which was sailing west at eight knots, when their ASDICs reported contact less than 1200 meters away. The Asteria, for its part, sighted the two destroyers, in conditions of poor visibility, and Commander Morrone ordered the dive.

The Asteria on the surface just before being scuttled by its crew
(Photo ‘The National Archives”, U.K.)

The Asteria suffered seven hours of bombardment, suffering severe damage to various equipment. First, immediately after spotting the submarine, H.M.S. Wheatland dropped five depth charges adjusted to a depth of 15 meters, which caused some damage, then the hunt continued for about an hour, after which contact was lost for two hours. Then H.M.S. Easton carried out another attack, very effective, which totally put the Asteria’s engines out of control: the submarine, having run out of compressed air – and therefore no longer being able to change its depth adequately, and having discharged the batteries of the electric motors, had to surface, so that at least the crew could get to safety.

As soon as it reached the surface, the Asteria was immediately hit by the fire of H.M.S. Wheatland and H.M.S. Easton’s guns, which caused further damage and killed four men. When they realized that the submarine was sinking, the two destroyers ceased fire. The rest of the crew surrendered, started the scuttling maneuvers (according to another version the procedures for scuttling had already begun during the surfacing maneuver) and abandoned the unit, which at 9.40 AM of  February 17^th sank astern at 37°14′ N and 04°27′ E (for another source 37°14′ N and 04°50′ E),  about 25 miles northwest of Bougie. 

The final moments of the Asteria
(Photo ‘The National Archives”, U.K.)

The version proposed when Commander Brooke of H.M.S. Wheatland’s died, however, differs in several respects. According to this version, H.M.S. Wheatland was on patrol off Bougie with H.M.S. Bicester, H.M.S. Easton, and H.M.S. Lamerton, when, shortly before midnight on February 16^th, H.M.S. Wheatland spotted a dark shape ahead of her and went on the attack; the contact disappeared and H.M.S. Wheatland, in spite of problems with the Asdic, continued the chase throughout the next day until shortly before midnight, when the Asteria, which had been seriously damaged during the first attack on H.M.S. Wheatland and had not been able to get away, had to surface, having run out of air. It then surrendered and was scuttled. However, this version has several errors, for example in the timing, because the photos taken of the sinking Asteria clearly show that the boat sank when the sun was still brightening the day, so certainly not around midnight.

H.M.S. Wheatland

Commander Morrone, after ordering the crew to abandon ship, remained on board until the end, saving himself last (recalling the episode decades later, he said that he risked “being hit by the machine guns of enemy planes”). He was awarded a silver medal for Military Valor, the second for him (the first had been awarded in 1940 for his activity as an observer on reconnaissance aircraft). The 46 survivors (for another version 47 or 48) were rescued by H.M.S. Wheatland and H.M.S. Easton, and ended up in captivity in North Africa, Britain, and the United States. Commander Morrone returned to Italy in 1946.

Details on the casualties of the sinking of the Asteria:

• Ugo Baldini, sub-chief engineman, 22 years old, from Ancona
• Biagio Di Salvo, sailor electrician, 21 years old, from Caronia
• Giovanni Mazzon, second chief torpedo pilot, 20 years old, from Roncade
• Umberto Terigi, sub-chief gunner, 20 years old, from Camaiore

One of the survivors, sailor helmsman Nicola Daugenti, 21, from Noicattaro, died while a POW in the United States on August 27th, 1943.

Historic Fort Douglas Cemetery (Utah, USA), the grave of Nicola Daugenti

Original Italian text by Lorenzo Colombo adapted and translated by Cristiano D’Adamo

Operational Records

Type	Patrols (Med.)	Patrols (Other)	NM Surface	NM Sub.	Days at Sea	NM/Day	Average Speed
Submarine – Coastal	17		10,842	1,370	93	131.31	5.47

Actions

Date	Time	Captain	Area	Coordinates	Convoy	Weapon	Result	Ship	Type	Tonns	Flag
7/4/1942	2:10	T.V. Pasquale Beltrame	Mediterranean	33°48’N, 34°56’E		Torpedo	Failed	HMSAS Protea (?)	Armed Whaler	955	South Africa
11/13/1942	01:00	T.V. Dante Morrone	Mediterranean	36°46’N, 05°08’E		Torpedo	Failed	HMS Pentstemon	Corvette	940	Great Britain

Crew Members Lost

Last Name	First Name	Rank	Italian Rank	Date
Baldini	Ugo	Junior Chief	Sottocapo	2/17/1943
Daugenti	Nicola	Naval Rating	Comune	8/27/1943
Di Salvo	Biagio	Naval Rating	Comune	2/17/1943
Eugeni	Pietro	Sublieutenant	Sottotenente di Vascello	12/16/1942
Mazzon	Giovanni	Chief 2nd Class	Capo di 2a Classe	2/17/1943
Mazzon	Giovanni	Junior Chief	Sottocapo	2/17/1943
Pardo	Antonio	Naval Rating	Comune	2/9/1942

The Aradam was a Class Adua, “600” series, Type Bernardis, coastal submarine (displacement of 698 tons on the surface and 866 tons submerged). Along with the twins Adua, Alagi and Axum, it differed from the other units of the class for the engines: CRDA, both diesel and electric (while on the other boats the electric engines were from Marelli, and the diesel, some from FIAT and some from Tosi).

Aradam early configuration with a fully enclosed conning tower
(Colletion Bonadies)

During the war, it completed a total of 50 patrols (30 offensive/exploratory and 20 transfer), covering 26,144 miles on the surface and 3,223 submerged, and spending 280 days at sea.

Brief and Partial Chronology

March 14th, 1936

Laid down at the C.R.D.A. (Cantieri Riuniti dell’Adriatico) in Monfalcone (construction number 1179).

October 18th, 1936

Launch at the C.R.D.A.

January 13th, 1937

The boat entered active service. In the first months, it was at the disposal of the Submarine Squadron Command (Maricosom).

Aradam and the twin boat Alagi in Monfalcone
(From “I sommergibili classe 600 serie Adua” dbyAlessandro Turrini, published on “Rivista Italiana di Difesa” n. 3, March 1986)

March 6th, 1937

The boat was assigned to the XXIII Submarine Squadron, based in Naples. The commander, at the time, was Lieutenant Gino Spagone.

1937-1940

The Aradam completed training cruises between Tobruk, Benghazi and the Dodecanese.

May 5th, 1938

Under the command of Lieutenant Massimo Alesi, the Aradam took part in the naval magazine “H” organized in the Gulf of Naples for Adolf Hitler’s visit to Italy. The Submarine Squadrons were the protagonist of one of the most spectacular moments of the parade, in which the 85 boats carried out a series of synchronized maneuvers. First, at 1.15 PM, arranged in two columns, they passed opposite course two naval squadrons proceeding on parallel routes. Then, at 1:25 PM, all the submarines made a simultaneous dive, proceeded for a short distance submerged, and then surfaced simultaneously and fired a salvo of eleven shots with their respective guns.

1939

The commander of the Aradam was transferred to Lieutenant Mario Signorini, from Rome.

December 20th, 1939

Lieutenant Commander Giuseppe Bianchini, 32, from Palermo, replaced Lieutenant Signorini.

June 10th, 1940

Italy entered the World War II. The Aradam was part of the LXXI Submarine Squadron of the VII Grupsom of Cagliari, along with the sister boats Adua, Alagi and Axum.

It was sent on patrol south of Sardinia and north of the island of La Galite (according to another source, the boat was already lurking at the time of the declaration of war).

June 14th, 1940

The Aradam returned to Cagliari without having encountered any enemy ships.

June 21st, 1940

The boat was sent on patrol in the Gulf of Lion to attack French traffic heading to North Africa. The Aradam noticed numerous aircraft on anti-submarine patrol boats, which it interpreted as a sign of the passage of a convoy.

June 23rd, 1940

At 3.12 AM, in position 42°40′ N and 04°25′ E the crew sighted an unidentified light unit, probably believed to be French, proceeding at high speed. It launched a torpedo at the unit, which did not hit due to the unfavorable launch conditions.

July 1940

The boat was sent off Gibraltar and it did not observe any enemy units.

August 1940

Another mission in the waters of Gibraltar, again without encountering enemy units.

October 1940

The Aradam was sent off the island of La Galite (on a 315° bearing from the island), and was subsequently ordered to move about 60 miles north of Cap de Fer (Algeria) and then moved again 45 miles west of La Galite.

October 27th, 1940

At dawn the crew sighted a destroyer and avoid any engagement by diving.

November 9th, 1940

In the late afternoon, the unit leaved Cagliari heading into the waters north-northeast of the island of La Galite to form a large barrage (along with the Alagi, Axum, Medusa and Diaspro) southwest of Sardinia to contrast operation “coat”.

The Aradam, and the other four boats, were positioned at 315° bearing from La Galite, 30 miles apart, with the task of carrying out night search on a parallel course without going more than 120 miles west of the line of formation.  Supermarina (Admiral Domenico Cavagnari) ordered Maricosom (Admiral Mario Falangola) to form this barrage in the western Mediterranean after having already formed another one southeast of Malta with the submarines Topazio, Pier Capponi and Fratelli Bandiera.

The purpose of the barrage, of which the Aradam is part, is to intercept Force H, which, according to reports from French and Spanish aerial reconnaissance was sailing towards the Strait of Sicily. According to another source, Force H was located on the morning of November 9th by the Regia Aeronautica following the air attack against Cagliari launched by the Swordfish of the Ark Royal.

Cavagnari’s order (no. 1772, very urgent and delivered by hand), in particular, states: «Arrange that five submarines be ready to leave Cagliari at sunset today executing, during the night, a transfer to a barrage line oriented from La Galite to the northwest (stop) Submarines at a distance of 30 miles from each other on the aforesaid line will remain in deep hydrophone ambush during the day and will perform during night hours ambush on the surface moving by parallel within the limits of the initial line and parallel line moved 120 miles to the west (stop) Purpose is to attack enemy naval forces moving in the waters between Sardinia and the Balearic Islands (STOP) During the night 2 torpedo tubes are to be kept ready at each end (stop) Units will return to order (STOP) secure (STOP) Cavagnari».

Consequently, in the early hours of November 9th, Maricosom ordered the VII Grupsom based in Cagliari, with message number 43846, to send five submarines (among those chosen there was the Aradam) which were to position themselves parallel to the northwest of La Galite, moving at night, sailing on the surface, and 120 miles to the west. The Aradam did not spot any enemy ships.

November 14th or 15^th,1940

After having just returned to Cagliari, in the evening, the Aradam is sent out again, along with the Alagi and a third submarine, the Diaspro, to counter operation “white”. The Aradam did not spot enemy ships.

November 18th, 1940

The unit returned to base.

November 25th, 1940

The boat was sent south of Sardinia along with the submarines Axum, Diaspro, and Alagi, following the sighting by an Italian civilian aircraft of the British Force D. The Aradam did not spot any units.

January 1941

The Aradam was sent on patrol north of Bizerte and 40 miles east of La Galite.

January 9th, 1941

At 5:20 PM, the crew detected propeller noises on the hydrophone, and, twenty minutes later, it was subjected to an anti-submarine hunt by three enemy units, a hunt that lasted until 7:20 PM.

April 1941

During the first half of the month, the Aradam was sent on patrol off the Cyrenaic-Egyptian coast.

July 29th, 1941

Lieutenant Commander Bianchini relinquished the command of the Aradam and was replaced by Lieutenant Oscar Gran, 32, from Trieste.

Late July-early August 1941

The Aradam was sent, along with three other submarines (Alagi, Diaspro, and Serpente), lurking in ambush southwest of Sardinia in contrast to a British operation. The Aradam’s patrol is completed without any enemy units being sighted.

September 3rd, 1941

The Aradam was sent on patrol off the coast of La Galite.

September 25-29, 1941

The Aradam was sent on patrol in the Tunisian’s waters. The boat was ordered to move east of the Balearic Islands (in the Sardinian Sea, between Sardinia and Menorca) and south of Menorca (precisely, in the Menorca Channel and north of Cape Bougaroni) to create a barrage along with three other submarines, Axum, Diaspro and Serpente.

October 1941

The Aradam was sent on patrol about 60 miles east of La Galite.

November 1941

The Aradam was sent to ambush 45 miles northeast of Tunis.

December 1941

The Aradam was sent for another ambush in the waters of the Galite.

December 19th, 1941

The Aradam was sent on patrol to the north of Algeria, along with the Alagi, and further east than Tricheco and Axum (which have been deployed off Cape Bougaroni), in anticipation of a possible entry of Force H into the Mediterranean.

January 3rd, 1942

The boat was sent to lie in wait south (or east) of Malta, in the area between the meridians 14°40′ E and 15°20′ E and the parallels 34°00′ N and 34°20′ N, with the task of sighting and attacking any British naval forces that might take to the sea.

February 10th, 1942

The Aradam was sent as part of a barrage in Algerian waters. There, it detected on the hydrophone and then sighted a naval formation heading east, reporting it to the General Commands (according to another source, however, it only detected it on the hydrophone, without being able to spot it).

March 1942

The Aradam was ordered on a patrol in the waters of Cape Bougaroni.

The Aradam in Cagliari. Note the mimetic painting scheme.
(From the magazine Storia Miltare)

March 27-29, 1942

The Aradam was sent to lie in wait in the Strait of Sicily along with the submarines Narvalo, Turchese and Santorre Santarosa, to intercept Force H (under the command of Admiral Neville Syfret), which had left Gibraltar and headed eastwards, should it make it that far.

April 1th, 1942

At 00.45 AM, in position 38°29′ N and 07°40′ E (southwest of Sardinia), the Aradam was sighted on a 240° bearing, while proceeding on the surface with a 340° course, by the Dutch submarine O 23 (Lieutenant Commander Albertus Marinus Valkenburg). The Dutch vessel maneuvered to get closer, remaining on the surface, but in doing so it was spotted by the Aradam, which immediately dove at 00.52 AM not being sure if it had sighted a friendly or enemy unit. At 00:54 the O 23 also dove and managed to detect the noise of the Aradam engines on the hydrophones, but without being able to establish the exact distance and bearing; after an hour of fruitless submarine hunting, at 1:56 AM, O 23 emerged and resumed navigation towards Alexandria.

April 4th, 1942

At 1.03 AM, having finished embarking provisions the previous evening, the Aradam (Lieutenant Oscar Gran) left Cagliari along with another submarine, the Turchese, for an ambush in Tunisian waters, with the dual purpose of protecting the Italian convoys bound for Libya from incursions of the British naval forces based in Malta, and of attacking any isolated British traffic that might cross these waters.

The ambush area of the Aradam was east of Cape Kelibia, the one of Turchese north of Cape Bon. Maricosom Operation Order (209/SRP of 3 April, 7.45 PM) established: “Confidential personnel (STOP) Executive ambushes Kappa one submarine Turchese and Kappa two submarine Aradam (STOP) Turchese submarine outward route number one (STOP) return route number four with return to Trapani new location (STOP) Aradam outbound route number one (STOP) return route number five with return to Trapani new location (STOP) Leave ambush to order (STOP)  Partial modification of the general order of operation Kappa during ambush during daylight hours, remain perched on the bottom without coming periscope depth for listening to SITES (STOP) instead of sunset day five, arrive on ambush points as soon as possible after having performed hidden navigation daylight hours day four“.

April 5th, 1942

The Aradam reached the assigned area, east of Kelibia (east coast of Tunisia), not far from the lighthouse of the same name and south of Cape Bon, and began the patrol.

April 6th, 1942

At 3.12 AM the second in command of the Aradam, Second Lieutenant Edoardo Burattini, at that time on duty on the bridge, sighted a dark silhouette with an estimated course to the south, and summoned Commander Gran to the bridge; the silhouette soon turns out to be that of a large destroyer sailing westwards with a route that passed the Cape Bon peninsula at a beta angle of 25° to starboard and about 2,400-2,500 meters away.

Commander Gran gave orders to take a new route to intercept the enemy unit. The rapid drop in distance indicates that the enemy ship was proceeding at low rpm, which is why he decides to idle the engines. The destroyer passes between the Aradam and the Tunisian coastline at a sufficient distance to allow it to be detected with the Panerai (a sort of range finder).  At 3:17 AM, having reached position 37°47′ (or 36°47′) N and 11°05′ E and a distance of less than 500 meters, thus suitable for launch and subsequent rapid disengagement, Commander Gran ordered two torpedoes to be launched from tubes 3 and 4, setting for a depth of three meters and a course angle of 15° to starboard.

However, while the torpedo of tube number 3 came out regularly, the one in tube 4 did not start due to the malfunction of the electric launch system. Moreover, the noise caused by the Aicardi mechanism for the recovery of the compressed air bubble generated by the launch, covered the manual launch order given from the bridge to the chief torpedo operator, who already worried by the rapid dive signal, had consequently closed of the outer caps of the launch tubes.

No explosions were heard. While the crew worked to restore trim which had been altered by the change in weight due to the launch (a maneuver complicated by the particularly shallow waters in which the Aradam found itself). Commander Gran decided to place the submarine on the seabed, while the hydrophones were carefully monitored for any sources of noise, which lead to fear that there could have been a second British unit in the area, one not noticed previously.

After about an hour, since the hydrophones no longer detect sound sources, Commander Gran decides to return to periscope depth; this was done at 4.30 AM.  Sailing in silent mode, and at periscope level, a destroyer was sighted stationary on a bearing of about ten degrees to the left, with a beta close to zero. Fearing that this unit would detect them and hunt them, the crew of the Aradam returned to the seabed for another hour.

At 5:52 AM, as the hydrophones still did not detect any noise, the boat returned to the surface to transmit the discovery signal. After about ten minutes – it was by then dawn – the destroyer was sighted again, as it appeared motionless and indeed immobilized.  Although confused by the unit’s lack of reaction, Gran decides to return once again to lie on the seabed, this time until 7.30 AM, when he decides to return to periscope depth to examine the situation more carefully.

Proceeding at minimum revs, so as to be able to steer without producing too conspicuous a wake with the periscope, the Aradam once again sighted the stern of the destroyer, which stood out against the coast of Kelibia, and saw clouds of black smoke rising from its bow. It was assumed that the destroyer had tried to run the coast in an attempt to save itself. The hydrophone, however, picks up noises “of considerable importance”, causing it to return once again to the bottom.

The Aradam remained in the area throughout the the 6th, so to make sure that the destroyer was sunk.

April 7th, 1942

At dawn the Aradam sighted a tugboat near the stranded destroyer and decided to return once more to the seabed to await new developments. In the evening, a radio message was received from Rome confirming the presence of a destroyer that had run aground and been set on fire and the accuracy of Gran’s previous estimations.

A few days later, the Maritime Military Command of Pantelleria sent a squadron of MAS to the site to ascertain the condition of the destroyer, which continues to emit abundant smoke; the ship, which was broken in two and half-sunk in shallow water, would be identified by the call sign painted on the bulwark, H 43, as the British destroyer H.M.S. Havock.

Based on this, in the report on the incident Maricosom assessed that the Havock was torpedoed by the Aradam. This will be the version delivered to Italian historiography. For example, Giorgio Giorgerini wrote in his book “Men on the Bottom”: “The Aradam had hit the enemy destroyer from a distance of 500 meters, immobilizing it. The Havock, coming from Malta and bound for Gibraltar, tried to save itself by trying to put back into operation at least part of its engine to try to run aground on the coast, but was prevented by the violent fire that broke out on board. Shortly thereafter, the British ship blew up and sank, broken into two pieces.”

According to some sources, after the launch, the Aradam surfaced, observing the enemy unit immobilized on the coast near Ras el Mirk, with a fire on board. Running aground on the coast, H.M.S. Havock would soon be broken in two by the explosion of the ammunition depots, observed from aboard the submarine (however, there seems to be no mention of this explosion in the description of the action of Commander Gran).

Quite different is the version given by British sources, according to which H.M.S. Havock ran aground due to a navigational error, without any involvement of the Aradam. The destroyer, under the command of Lieutenant Commander Geoffrey Robert Gordon Watkins, had been damaged a few days earlier during the Second Battle of Sirte (by the fire of the battleship Littorio, which had damaged a boiler, with eight casualties among the crew) and then further damaged by an air attack on Malta on April 3rd, during a first attempt to repair the damage in a dry dock in Valletta. It had left the island on the evening of April 5^th bound for Gibraltar, with one hundred British soldiers on board who were due to leave Malta.

Before leaving Malta, Commander Watkins had been advised to scan the seabed when approaching the Kelibia lighthouse (the crossing of Tunisian waters would necessarily take place at night), and pay attention to the shallow waters to the north of the lighthouse and the shoals off Ras el Mir and Cape Bon, and to keep no more than two miles from the coast in order to avoid the minefields located further east.

He would have to decide for himself how fast he would have to keep and adjust so that he would be as far west as possible by dawn. While crossing the area, Watkins could have encountered enemy motor torpedo boats and minesweepers, as well as Axis convoys bound for Libya. Watkins had decided to round Cape Bon at a speed of 30 knots (both to be as far west as possible by dawn, and to minimize the chances of sighting in case he encountered an enemy naval force in the channel), and to keep the armament ready in case of an encounter with Italian or German motor torpedo boats.

Arriving in sight of the Tunisian coast, H.M.S. Havock had moved to pass about a mile and a half from the lighthouse of Kelibia, about ten degrees from the shore. The night was clear, moonless and with fog banks on the coast, and Watkins – who had taken over command of the voyage shortly before – had been informed by the navigation officer Lack that the ship was proceeding slightly further ashore than planned, but that this would not be a problem.

In rounding the lighthouse of Kelibia, H.M.S. Havock had made four approaches; Watkins had repeatedly asked Lack if the ship was on a safe course, each time receiving an answer that it was “a little” shifted toward land, but still safe. At 3.50 AM Watkins, who had remained on the bridge because the last segment of the course traced by Lack to round Cape Kelibia had seemed strange to him, had sighted what seemed to be a whitish wave towards the bow and had pulled a little out, and then ordered the engines to be put all the way back and the rudder all the way to starboard.

However, it was already too late: at 3:58 AM H.M.S. Havock had run aground at thirty knots on a sandbank three hundred meters from the coast, near Kelibia (more precisely, on the beach of Hammam Ghezzaz, in a position variously reported as 36°52’23.1″ N and 11°08’171″ E or 36°52′18″ N and 11°8′24″ E or 36.87167° N and 11.14° E),  in depths of about five meters.

A sump in the main steam pipe had burst, killing one man, and severely burning five others, one of whom would later die in hospital. After a vain attempt to lighten the ship by throwing ammunitions overboard, the captain concluded that the H.M.S. Havock was lost and gave orders to the crew and passing personnel to land on the nearby coast, also starting preparations to self-destruct the ship. The plan was to sprinkled the ship with fuel and cordite, and after all the crew had been disembarked (in the meantime it was dawn), ignited the cordite. A depth charge placed in the sonar room was detonated, tearing the bow apart and reducing H.M.S. Havock to an unserviceable wreck. Prior to the self-destruct, at 4:15 AM, Watkins had reported that the ship had run aground 2.5 miles by 20° from the Kelibia lighthouse (in position 36°48′ N and 11°08′ E, or by another source 36°52′ N and 11°08′ E), that he could not disentangle it and was preparing for scuttling.

David Goodey and Richard Osborne, authors of a monograph on the history of the Havock (“Destroyer at War: The Fighting Life and Loss of HMS Havock from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean 1939-1942”), compare the official Italian and British versions, emphasizing the times indicated by both sides. According to the British, when the H.M.S. Havock ran aground, the engine room clock, which followed the Maltese time zone (Malta Standard Time), stopped at 3:58 AM. This was when the ship hit the shoal while proceeding at thirty knots. The Aradam supposedly followed the Central European time zone; if the two units were in the same time zone, the Aradam probably sighted H.M.S. Havock as it proceeded along the coast and fired a torpedo at it, missing it.

Alternatively, the Aradam sighted H.M.S. Havock when it was already stranded and the torpedo exploded against the seabed (due to the shallowness) or missed the target, as it was immobilized while Commander Gran had calculated the launch data for a moving unit. The description of the attack according to Italian sources – H.M.S. Havock hit at 3.17 AM by a torpedo, run aground and then broken in two by the explosion of the ammunition depots, caused by a fire triggered by the torpedo – is incompatible with what was reported by the survivors, according to whom the ship was not hit by torpedoes at the time of the grounding nor did there be any explosion until two o’clock the following afternoon, when the crew of H.M.S. Havock, already under guard by the French and out of sight of the wreck, heard a violent explosion and saw a column of smoke hundreds of meters high, and which Watkins attributed to depth charges and/or the aft ammunition depot, probably reached by the fires that were still raging on board (and which throughout the day caused several minor explosions of reserves and other ammunition).

In reality, the controversial mention of explosions on the wreck of H.M.S. Havock seems to be the result of the retrospective reworking of the attack made by secondary sources, while in the original account it is said, on the contrary, that no explosion was heard, so much so that Commander Gran remained for several hours in the impression that the destroyer was still able to counterattack, which would have been impossible if it had been torpedoed.

The Italian (original) and British versions do not seem to be in contrast: the most logical explanation is that the Aradam launched the torpedo against H.M.S. Havock, missed it, and while the submarine disengaged and lay on the seabed, the destroyer ran aground due to a navigational error, without realizing that it had been attacked. By the time the Aradam returned to periscope depth – only for brief moments, hours apart – the destroyer had already been abandoned and set on fire by the crew, and this spectacle led to the erroneous belief that it had been torpedoed.

Other versions reported by secondary Italian sources state that H.M.S. Havock was torpedoed by the Aradam and tried to run aground, but was broken in two by the explosion of the ammunition depots; or that it would run aground on its own and be torpedoed and destroyed by the Aradam after it ran aground; or that it would have run aground in an attempt to avoid the torpedo of the Aradam, then being scuttled by the crew once it was established that it was impossible to disentangle it. None of these versions, however, is confirmed by Commander Watkins’ report or by the survivors’ accounts.

The wreck of H.M.S. Havock in a picture taken by an Italian airplane on April 11th, 1942
(From “In Passage Perilous” by Vincent O’Hara)

According to what was noted at the time in the diary of the operations division of the General Staff of the Kriegsmarine, “according to the claims of the British prisoners [of the Havock], the destroyer ran aground and was blown up by its crew after an Italian submarine attacked it unsuccessfully.”

The crew of the Havock, camped on the coast near the wreck, surrendered to the local authorities (loyal to Vichy France) and was first taken to the Coast Guard barracks in the nearby town of Kelibia, and then interned in the concentration camp of Laghouat, in Algeria, where the British were in fact treated, rather than as military belligerents interned by a neutral country (which Vichy France claimed to be),  as prisoners of war in an enemy country; they were kept by the French in worse living conditions than those of the British prisoners in Italy and Germany until November 1942, when they were liberated following the Anglo-American landings in French North Africa (Operation “Torch”) and the passage to the Allied cause of the Vichy troops stationed there.

On the night between April 7^th and 8^th, 1942 the wreck of H.M.S. Havock was boarded by the Italian tugboat Instancabile and inspected by Italian soldiers under the command of Liutenant Commander Ernesto Forza, who seized secret documents that remained on board (this too, however, is in contrast with what was stated by Commander Watkins, according to whom all secret documents would have been destroyed by fire before abandoning ship,  destruction extended even to devices such as sonar and direction finders and torpedoes which were launched towards the open sea to prevent parts from being found). This, evidently, was the tugboat observed by the Aradam near the wreck of the Havock.

The news of the sinking of the Havock was announced by the Italian Supreme Command in the war bulletin no. 675 of April 7th 1942 (“… Our naval vessels set fire to and sank the British destroyer Havok”) and then further specified in bulletin no. 691 of 23 April (“Further investigations have made it possible to establish that the British destroyer Havock referred to in bulletin no. 675 was torpedoed and sunk by our submarine Aradam under the command of Lieutenant Oscar Gran returning from a cruise“).

Commander Gran would be decorated with the Bronze Medal for Military Valor (“Commander of a submarine, on a war mission in the Mediterranean, he attacked and torpedoed an enemy destroyer with serene courage and skill, demonstrating that he possesses high fighting spirit and fine military qualities“), and his second, Second Lieutenant Edoardo Burattini, with the War Cross for Military Valor (“Second Officer of a submarine,  it ensured the combat efficiency of the unit and assisted the commander with serene courage and daring in the attack and torpedoing of an enemy destroyer“).

April 14th, 1942

Since an Italian convoy was expected to pass through the area escorted by the torpedo boat Lince and the destroyer Premuda, the Aradam reduced its activity in order to avoid accidents.

April 15th, 1942

Strong noises on the hydrophones were detected, but they are attributed to the transit of a French convoy reported from Rome and which according to estimates should pass right off Kelibia.

April 18th, 1942

Despite rough seas and reduced visibility, the Aradam sighted a ship, but shortly thereafter also noticed a CANT Z. 506 seaplane on its vertical, indicating that it was an Axis ship to which the seaplane provided air escort.

April 19th, 1942

The crew sighted off Cape Bon an Italian steamer, the Nino Claudio, heading north.

April 20th, 1942

Visibility worsens even more, so much so that it was more profitable to stay at periscope depth to carry out hydrophones listening. Indeed, sound of propellers was picked up and the submarine emerges to try to spot the ship or ships in question; however, it was impossible to distinguish both the number and the type of ships detected on the hydrophones, and since the passage in the area of an Italian convoy (tanker Panuco and two torpedo boats) had been reported, Commander Gran preferred not to approach, thus avoiding incidents of friendly fire.

At 10:24 PM, the Aradam received an order to return to base, which was transmitted at 6:10 PM (“No. 162173 – Smg Aradam – zone A – Smg Micca fictitious. Maricosom – I cancel my previous communications (STOP) Leave ambush immediately by returning to Cagliari (STOP) Reverse return routes the outward one»). During the mission, the Aradam had received 45 telegrams from Supermarina regarding the possible presence of other targets in the area.

May 1942

The Aradam was sent on patrol north of Cape Blanc.

June 11th, 1942

The Aradam was sent, along with four other submarines (Ascianghi, Onice, Corallo and Dessiè), to lie in ambush first near Cape Blanc and then west of Malta (in the triangle between Malta, Pantelleria and Lampedusa).

September 4th, 1942

Lieutenant Gran relinquished command of the Aradam, being replaced by the 35-year-old Alpinolo Cinti, from Ripatransone.

October 20th, 1942

Lieutenant Cinti relinquished command of the Aradam and was replaced by Carlo Forni, 34, from Genoa.

November 7th, 1942

Following the sighting of large Anglo-American naval forces sailing from Gibraltar to the west (it is the invasion fleet of Operation “Torch”, the Allied landing in French North Africa, but Supermarina – while believing that a landing in North Africa is the most likely hypothesis – does not exclude the possibility that it is a convoy bound for Malta), the Aradam was sent to patrol the Gulf of Philippeville,  in the waters of Algeria, together with numerous other Italian submarines (Acciaio, Argento, Asteria, Brin, Dandolo, Emo, Galatea, Mocenigo, Porfido, Platino and Velella). In total, Maricosom – on the basis of an order from Supermarina, transmitted at 10.06 PM on November 6^th – sent 21 submarines to the western and central-western Mediterranean, to counter the enemy operation: 12 submarines of the VII Grupsom (including the Aradam) were deployed west of the island of La Galite (zone “A”), 7 submarines of the VIII Grupsom were sent off Bizerte (zone “B”),  and 2 others in an advanced position between Algeria and the Balearic Islands.

The directive was to ‘widen the waters allocated to the ambush of submarines … to give them more freedom of action in the areas themselves.” These positions turned out to be too far from the actual landing zones (Oran and Algiers), but they were not modified, because the Germans mistakenly believed that the Allies could attempt further landings in Tunisia as well (in which case the Italian submarines would be in an ideal position).

At 03:31 PM Maricosom (the Submarine Squadron Command) informed all submarines patrolling in the western Mediterranean of the position of a British naval squadron and an enemy convoy, reported at 10:40 AM. At 08:07 PM, the Submarine Squadron Command reported the position of two convoys sighted on two separate occasions, both heading east and consisting of merchant ships escorted by battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers and escort ships.

November 8th, 1942

The landings began: 500 Anglo-American transport ships, escorted by 350 warships of all kinds, land a total of 107,000 soldiers on the coasts of Algeria and Morocco. Since these operations take place in the areas of Algiers and Oran, the Italian submarines are too far east to intervene; since the Germans believed that the Allies could make further landings further east, towards Tunisia, it was initially decided to leave the submarines where they were.

November 9th, 1942

At 07:09 PM the command of the Italian submarine fleet, Maricosom, reported to all boats at sea that enemy steamers are moving eastwards, and that landings are taking place at Bona and Philippeville; It therefore gives the order to attack any merchant or military ship leaving these ports, but avoids (in order not to risk incidents of “friendly fire” with other units sent to the area) attacking submarines, MAS and motor torpedo boats.

November 13th, 1942

Informed of the landing of British troops at Bona and Philippeville, Supermarina ordered the submarines at 06:38 PM to enter these harbors, attack with the utmost determination, and then return to their respective patrol sectors at dawn. In particular, Aradam, Emo, Granito and Volframio were sent to the bay of Bona, while Argento, Ascianghi, Asteria, Mocenigo and Velella were sent to that of Philippeville. None of the boats, however, were successful: many did not spot any ships, the others were unable to attack them due to the unfavorable sighting conditions and the strict enemy vigilance.

November 14th, 1942

At 06:02 PM Maricosom arranged a new offensive in the harbor of Philippeville: Aradam, Granito, Emo and Volframio received orders to carry out an offensive search during the night, acting with the utmost decisiveness, then returning to their respective patrol sectors. However, this second raid was also fruitless.

November 16th, 1942

Under the command of Lieutenant Carlo Forni, the Aradam penetrates the bay of Bona at night for an offensive reconnaissance; having sighted a convoy heading towards Bona (for another source, to the west) made up of three merchant ships, with a large escort of light units (according to another source it would have sighted an isolated ship, with a 210° course), it approached on the surface with the favor of repeated showers and launches two pairs of torpedoes against a merchant ship of 2500 GRT,  the first at 3:58 AM and the second at 5:06 AM, from close range (500 meters, in both cases).

All weapons missed their targets. Due to the counter-maneuvers of the attacked ships; having now reached waters too shallow to attempt a new attack with torpedoes, at 5.14 AM the Aradam attacked the nearest merchant ship, which was heading towards the coast, with its deck gun, believing that it had damaged it slightly (the third shot fired seems to hit between the bridge and the funnel. According to another source, it would have scored several shots. At 5:44 AM, however, a shot exploded prematurely outside the muzzle of the gun, dazzling the gunners, and forcing them to cease firing. At this point, being only three miles southeast of the entrance to the port of Bona, Forni gave up the chase due to the reduced availability of electricity and the shallow waters. The Aradam was already crawling on the bottom, and continuing like this it would end up running aground. Forni then disengages towards the open sea, diving. (According to another source, after shelling and hitting the steamer, he disengaged by diving due to the quick reaction of the escort.)

According to Giorgio Giorgerini, however, this attack would have taken place in the harbor of Bougie, while the strong enemy anti-submarine surveillance would have prevented the Aradam from penetrating the bay of Bona. According to a different version, this action took place in the bay of Bona, and then the Aradam tried to force this bay again, but failed due to enemy surveillance.

The convoy attacked was probably ET. 1, consisting of five ships, sailed from Algiers on February 18^th and it arrived in Gibraltar on November 20th. Alternatively, but less likely, it is possible that it was TE. 3, made up of about fifteen units, which left Gibraltar on November 11^th and arrived in Bona on November 17th.

The Supreme Command will give news of this action in the war bulletin no. 906 of November 17th: “One of our submarines under the command of Lieutenant Carlo Forni, forced the entrance into the roadstead of Bona and seriously damaged a large enemy merchant ship with cannon fire“.

November 20th, 1942

At 8.30 PM the British submarine P 228 (later H.M.S. Splendid, Lieutenant Ian Lachlan Mackay McGeogh) detected diesel engines noise from the southwest and after a few minutes, having begun the attack maneuver against what it correctly assumes to be a submarine, it notices that it is sight onto the left there was an approaching submarine, which is identified as Italian.

At 08.40 PM, in position 40°38′ N and 13°48′ E (off Naples), P 228 launched a salvo of six torpedoes from the bow tubes; Non hits, two of the weapons explode at the end of the run after twelve minutes. McGeogh would conclude that he had missed the target by underestimating its speed. The submarine attacked was most likely the Aradam, which did not notice the attack.

December 1942

The boat was sent for an unsuccessful ambush in the waters of Cyrenaica.

January 1943

The boat was sent for another ambush off the coast of Cyrenaica.

February 1943

The boat was sent for another ambush in the waters of Cyrenaica (Gulf of Sirte).

March 1943

The boat was sent for ambush in the Gulf of Sirte.

April 10, 1943

The Aradam was in La Maddalena when, starting at 2.37 PM, the Sardinian base was subjected to a heavy bombardment by 84 Boeing B-17 “Flying Fortress” bombers of the USAAF. Immediately after the bombing, the Aradam was transferred to Bonifacio, to save it from any new air attacks.

April 1943

An inspection estimated the state of efficiency of the Aradam as “good” but highlighted the poor condition of the horns. Even more curious is the judgment expressed about the state of the crew: “regular”.

May 1943

The boat was sent for a patrol to the west of Sardinia.

Summer 1943

The Aradam entered the shipyard in Genoa to be transformed into a “carrier” submarine ” of slow-moving torpedoes (SLC), with the installation on deck of the special cylindrical containers for the transport of these assault vessels. Supermarina intended intensifying the operations of assault craft against the Anglo-American ships, and to this end increased the number of “carrier” submarines both with the conversion of existing units (the Aradam), and by adapting submarines under construction (such as the three new Murena, Grongo and Sparide of the Tritone class).

Epilogue

At the time of armistice between Italy and the Allies, on September 8^th, 1943, the Aradam  was caught in Genoa, (still under the command of Lieutenant Carlo Forni, but according to another source at the time of the armistice it would have been momentarily under the command of Lieutenant Mario Tromba) undergoing overhaul and maintenance work as well as the conversion into a “carrier” of slow-moving torpedoes.

Unable to sail, the Aradam was scuttled by its crew on September 9th, to prevent it from falling intact into German hands. The crew of the Aradam dispersed; the twenty-three-year-old sailor Gregorio Barone, after the sinking of the submarine, managed to leave Genoa and cross the peninsula which had plunged into chaos, reaching his home in Torre del Greco where he remained hidden to escape the roundups during the brief German occupation of the city. When the Allies arrived, he returned to civilian life by opening a newsstand.

The Germans resurfaced the Aradam, after which there is information that is not entirely agreed upon regarding the details of its demise. According to most sources, including the book “Attack from the Sea” by Giorgio Giorgerini, the Germans gave it to the X Flotilla MAS of Junio Valerio Borghese, loyal to them, so that they could repair it and use it as an approaching unit for assault units; in December 1943, in fact, the X MAS had reconstituted the SSB operational group, equipped with the new San Bartolomeo torpedoes, built in the workshops of the same X MAS and evolution of the Slow Running torpedoes successfully used in the raids against Alexandria, Algiers and Gibraltar between 1940 and 1943.

The submarine, already equipped with the appropriate cylinders for the transport of SLC and SSB, was placed in dry dock for repairs, and the “Aradam” assault vehicle transport group was established in Genoa (under the X MAS Underwater Assault Vehicles Department) intended to provide the crew and the necessary support. Lieutenant Carlo Forni, his old pre-armistice commander, who had in the meantime joined the Italian Social Republic, was appointed to its command.

According to “Italian Ships and Sailors in the Second World War” by Erminio Bagnasco, however, after scuttling, the Aradam was recovered by the National Republican Navy, the small Navy of the Italian Social Republic, of which theoretically the X MAS was part but which in reality constituted a force clearly distinct from it and indeed rival, since Borghese answered directly to the Germans and there was no good blood between him and the leaders of the M.N.R.

On August 18th, 1944, while the Aradam was being refitted, the Germans seized it “by force”, an episode that Bagnasco gives as an example of the difficult relations existing between the M.N.R. and the Germans, studded with “accidents” of considerable gravity, very different from those that ran between the Germans and the X MAS.

In any case, the refitting work never came to an end, because on September 4^th, 1944 the Aradam, still under refit, was sunk in Genoa by an American air raid.

A different version is the one contained in the book “The Black Prince” by Alessandro Massignani and Jack Greene, according to which the X MAS would have put the Aradam back into service by January 1944; But a mistake seems likely.

The date of the sinking is also incorrect, given as September 1^st, 1944, instead of 4 September. Massignani and Greene also speculate that the bombing would not have been accidental, and that “the Regia Marina del Sud was well informed that the Aradam was ready with containers to carry the ‘pigs’ beyond the Allied lines.” A website dedicated to the X MAS also states that in January 1944 the Aradam “was able to carry out sea trials and go into action”, however there is no record of any mission carried out by this unit from January to September 1944; another, apparently referring to a book by Sergio Nesi, states that the Aradam was put back into service and began sea trials at the beginning of January 1944, but was sunk in September before it could operate.

The wreck of the Aradam in Genoa.
(From the Magazine Storia Militare)

Sub-chief Giovanni Croce, 22 years old, from Piove di Sacco, part of the crew of the Aradam, was killed in the bombing. Another member of the crew, the sailor Salvatore Frega, died on 2 December 1944 in the Santa Tecla sanatorium in Genoa, from an illness contracted in service.

The sinking of the Aradam also led to the disbandment of the X MAS Assault Vehicle Transport Group. The wreck of the submarine was recovered in March 1947, just a few days after its formal removal from the roster of the now no longer Royal Navy, which took place on February 27th of the same year. It was then demolished by the Bartoli and Cavalletti company of Savona.

Original Italian text by Lorenzo Colombo adapted and translated by Cristiano D’Adamo

Operational Records

Type	Patrols (Med.)	Patrols (Other)	NM Surface	NM Sub.	Days at Sea	NM/Day	Average Speed
Submarine – Coastal	50		26,144	3,223	280	104.88	4.37