Secret Naval Craft & Operations

[kookaburra]

Post # One:


At the entrance to the northern Adriatic port of Pula on the blustery wet night of October 31-November 1, 1918, two highly-trained Italian underwater saboteurs, Rafaelle Rossetti and Rafaelle Paolucci manhandled a 23ft submersible craft over a series of eight protective boom nets and made their way down the harbour towards the great Austro-Hungarian fleet flagship, Viribus Unitis.

Off-loaded from a Regia Marina torpedo boat outside the harbour, they had encountered many unexpected obstacles. But to their astonishment, when they finally arrived not long before dawn the 21,000-ton Austrian battleship was a blaze of lights, with some form of rowdy pre-dawn celebration taking place on board.

Fearing they would be seen on the well-lit waters, the Italian pair planed their compressed-air driven craft below the surface so that only the helmets of their underwater suits were showing. These helmets they had wrapped in bright cloth, hoping that - if seen - they would be mistaken for two floating bottles of Chianti!

The attack was about to begin. Had it not been for the needless loss of life and a great ship that followed, this early raid by an underwater ‘chariot’ had all the elements of an Italian comic opera.

Rossetti and Paolucci indeed managed to attach their 400lb Mignatta (‘Leech’) limpet mine to the hull of the ship, and to one other, without discovery. But making their way back out in the early morning light they were soon sighted by a liberty boat and captured. As prisoners they were then taken on board the Viribus Unitis , which they themselves had set to blow up at 6.30 a.m.

And it was in this predicament that the heroic pair learned that the exhausted Austro-Hungarian Empire had in fact collapsed the previous night, and that the fleet was taken over by Croatian revolutionaries. The great nationalist Croatian soldier-sailor Janko Vukovich de Podkapelski was now in command of the ship, and the fleet around it.

It was what the all-night celebration on board Viribus Unitis had been all about as the two ‘Chianti bottles’ crept closer.


Surrounded now by drunken Croat revolutionaries, Rossetti and Paolucci confessed their mission and pleaded with Vukovich to issue an order to abandon ship, which he did, and the process began in great panic. The Italian pair asked Vukovich if they might save themselves, and he consented, allowing both the gallant underwater commandoes to jump overboard.

A boatload of angry sailors soon seized them however, and brought them back to the doomed ship. Again Vukovich stepped in to save them as some pressure was being applied to disclose where the mine was attached. It was 6.20 a.m, and they demanded Prisoner of War status. Then the 6.30 a.m. deadline passed with no explosion. The Viribus Unitis’s lifeboats were now hovering around the ship in some uncertainty.

Thinking their mine had failed, Rossetti and Paolucci sank into disappointed lassitude, and were still sitting on deck at 6.44 a.m. when Viribus Unitis was suddenly shaken by a mighty explosion below its starboard bow coal bunkers, which, when full, were designed to provide additional protection.

Not now. The coal bunkers were empty. As the battleship quickly started to list, Vukovich again consented to the pair jumping ship, and shook hands with both before they leapt into the water to be picked up by a lifeboat. A fleet admiral for just 12 hours, Vukovich was himself last seen calmly standing at the stern, where he gave his men a final salute before Viribus Unitis capsized and sank within 15 minutes of the explosion, taking Vukovich and some 300 newly-liberated Balkan revolutionaries with her.

So ends the first post of this thread dealing with secretive craft: manned torpedoes, midget submarines and special ops vessels. In the lead-up to WW1 and during it, the Regia Marina had played a leading role in their development, and would apply that experience with considerable affect in the second great war that followed, as would other nations.

The pics below show some Italian manned torpedo ‘chariots’ and later maiale (‘Pig’) versions, three of which are preserved at the U.S. submarine museum at Gosport , Connecticut. Also some pics of the the grand but ill-fated target Viribus Unitis. ( Edit: There's some mix-up about Gosport, which I think is the RN submarine museum near Portsmouth - there's also a US one in Groton Connecticut where I think the Italian manned torpedo exhibits etc below are - I was mixed up by the similarity of the names).

[John Odom]

Great post, K! It takes a special kind of Sailor for that kind of mission.

[herakles]

What a classic story! It could only happen to Italians! There should be an opera made of this.

Now I am wondering if you are going to relate the story of the Italian frogmen and the damage they did at Suda Bay in WW2.

Thanks for this post. It brightened my day! :)

[kookaburra]

Oddly enough, a similar if less amusing misadventure to that narrated in post #1 occurred to two of the six Italian manned-torpedo raiders who wreaked considerable havoc on the British Fleet at Alexandria on December 19, 1941.


Their commander, Count Luigi Durand de la Penne and his crewman Emilio Bianchi were forced to the surface and were captured after laying a limpet mine beneath HMS Valiant. They too were then held captive on the ship they had mined, and forced to wait out the explosion.

Fifteen minutes before the charges set were due to go off, Commander de la Penne asked to see Valiant’s Captain Charles Morgan and informed him that
an explosion was imminent, but both men refused to divulge any further information.

They were returned to cabins below, and remained there – unharmed as it happens - when the limpets went off, causing both Valiant and her sister ship HMS Queen Elizabeth to settle on the bottom of the shallow harbour.

Off-loaded by the submarine Scire, the three two-man submersibles had got into the harbour by following three destroyers through the defence booms, and also succeeded in sinking the Norwegian tanker Sagona and destroyer HMS Jervis. The raid was a considerable blow to Admiral Andrew Cunningham’s Mediterranean Fleet and gave the Regia Marina the upper hand for a time had the Italians but known it. With the two capital ships sitting on the harbour floor however, extensive measures were undertaken to conceal the fact that they were flooded below (and both would be out of service for the best part of a year), with men kept moving about their decks and smoke issuing from the funnels.


The other Italian underwater commandoes in this raid, Vincenzo Martellotta and Mario Marino (maiale No 222) and Antonio Marceglia and Spartaco Schergat (maiale No 223) were also captured ashore by Egyptian police after the explosions.

Similar but less spectacular Italian human torpedo raids had been made on Valletta Harbour and Tobruk with mixed results , but the Decima Flottiglia MAS special operations group became the most decorated in the Italian Navy. One fact that did not become known until later in the war was that more than a year earlier a human torpedo attack on Alexandria had been thwarted when all-night attacks by the Australian destroyer HMAS Stuart finally forced the submarine Gondar to the surface 30 miles off the Egyptian base on September 24, 1940 and the Italians scuttled their boat to prevent its capture.

Eventually it would become patently clear why it was vital that they do this. On board Gondar had been three of the highly-secret human torpedo submersibles and crews en route to a raid on Alexandria, and one of the pioneers of these type of special craft, Elios Toschi, was captured.


After the December 19 disaster at Alexandria the following year, Winston Churchill shot off a cable demanding to know why the Royal Navy had not developed this type of craft: one of the factors that led to the development of the British X- craft and their famous attack on the Tirpitz at Kafjord on September 20-28, 1943, almost two years later.

Below, third photo is Commander Durand de la Penne, and the battleships temporarily 'sunk' at Alexandria, Valiant and Queen Elizabeth. Extraordinary results, when one thinks of it, for such small but specialized and manned weapons.

[herakles]

These stories portray an altogether different view of the Italians.

The planning was excellent and carried out with great aplomb.

[kookaburra]

Indeed Richard these Decima Flottiglia MAS were an elite group of daring men: another type of sea operation they engaged in was the surface use of small, fast and disposable boats called MTM’s, or ‘barchini’ (little boats), which – loaded with a 660lb charge in the bows – a frogman would steer at high speed at an enemy vessel, its single crewman rolling off at the last moment, about 100 yards from the target.

How they were expected to get back to their mother ships (destroyers usually) or a friendly shore, seems a bit imponderable.

I think their most famous attack was the one you alluded to in an earlier post: March 25, 1941, at Suda Bay, Crete. Dropped off by two destroyers, six of the MTMs attacked British warships and auxiliaries in the Bay. Two of them - ‘piloted’ by Lieutenants Cabrini and Tedeschi - hit the heavy cruiser HMS York amidships, flooding her boilers and magazines, causing the ship to be beached and eventually abandoned after demolition charges were set off by her crew. The 8,300 ton Norwegian tanker, Pericles was effectively wrecked in the same attack, while a second tanker and cargo ship were also sunk. Having wreaked this havoc with just six small ‘loaded’ motorboats (one pictured below), all the frogmen in the water were eventually captured.

The 'barchini' were also used, but without success, in the attack on Vallenta, and a number of these frogmen-commandoes went over to the Allied cause later in the war.

The photo shows a mundane-looking 'barchini' boat, and one of their somewhat more expensive victims, the heavy cruiser York beached and done for by just two of them, with an Italian escort destroyer coming in for a closer look. This was after Germans troops had successfully invaded the island.

[colombamike]

my contribution to this topic
wreck of hms york in suda bay, after being damaged by italian explosive motor boat

ANY PICTURES OF BRITISH BATTLESHIPS QUEEN ELIZABETH & VALIANT SUNK IN ALEXANDRIA HARBOR ? BY ITALIAN "MAIALE" ???

[kookaburra]

Some History Notes:

1.
The first recorded submersible attack took place during the American Revolutionary War, when a Yale University student, David Bushnell, came up the a maneouvrable diving bell-type design aimed at placing gunpowder under British ships. Bushnell's craft, Turtle (pic below), piloted by Sergeant Ezra Lee made the first recorded submarine attack in the early hours of September 6, 1776 on Admiral Howe's 64-gun flagship the Eagle. The Turtle was a small egg-shaped wooden vessel armed with an outside charge of gunpowder in a wooden case fitted with a time fuse driven by clockwork. The vessel itself was powered by a propeller turned by the operator with another propeller fitted vertically for up and down movement. A boring auger was attached to the top of the submarine and the operator would propel his craft under the wooden hull of the enemy warship, bore the auger into its underside and then make his escape leaving the blasting charge of 150 pounds of gunpowder attached to the auger by a rope.(4) On the first attempt, Sgt Lee was unable to make the auger bite into the hull of the Eagle due, probably, to the copper sheathing designed to discourage boring insects. The Turtle was in a state of positive buoyancy with a tendency to rise and Lee's efforts with the auger caused it to surface alongside the British ship when it was chased by a British patrol boat. Lee released his gunpowder charge which exploded on the surface and effectively scared off his pursuers.( edited from notes on the 'South African Military History' website).

2.

The American Civil War produced the so-called 'Davids', built for the Confederacy by several designers to differing plans. One of these, the Hunley powered by a hand crank turned by eight men and armed with a 90-pound keg of gunpowder fixed to the end of a 22 foot pole on the bow of vessel, succeeded in sinking the US sloop-of-war Housatonic outside Charleston Harbour on 17 February 1864, the world's first victory by a submarine (same notes source).

Interestingly, the wreck of the Hunley was discovered in Charleston Harbour in 1995 and raised in 2000. The presumably skeletal remains of the Confederate crewmen were subsequently buried with full naval honors.


3.

Finally for this post, I made a thread several weeks ago on the two combined Australian-British Special Force Z commando raids on Singapore Harbour shipping, under the command of the redoubtable British Major Ivan Lyon, in the Australian Navy and Ships section: 'The Epic Story of the Krait.'

http://www.worldnavalships.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2908

I don't want to repeat all that here, but in the photos below
are some pics of their secret craft: the simple 'folboat' kayaks used for the first raid, 'Operation Jaywick' ; then the submersible and powered canoes known as 'sleeping beauties' used for the second, 'Operation Rimau' (Tiger); and then, lastly, an X craft-like submersible vessel known as the 'wellfreighter' used in some way by the Australian special operatives, but of which the last page 'Secretive Craft' section of Ross Gillett's comprehensive book 'Australian and New Zealand Warships 1914-1945' (Doubleday 1983) gives no other details. Sort of makes it more intriguing, really.

The first two pictures are Bushnell-Sgt Lee's Turtle, and the Civil War Hunley, mentioned above.

Next: We All Live In A Midget Submarine

[kookaburra]

my contribution to this topic
wreck of hms york in suda bay, after being damaged by italian explosive motor boat

ANY PICTURES OF BRITISH BATTLESHIPS QUEEN ELIZABETH & VALIANT SUNK IN ALEXANDRIA HARBOR ? BY ITALIAN "MAIALE" ???

Gerboise, I looked pretty hard for that and found none: as the British were striving to keep secret the fact that the two battleships were left sitting on the harbour bottom (but with their main decks above water), I doubt many, if any, photos were allowed to get around.

[kookaburra]

We All Live In A Midget Submarine

I am much relieved to find that my naval historian compatriot Battlestar (Ian) has given a very full account of the famous British X-craft attack on the Tirpitz, relieving me of that obligation. It's here:

http://www.worldnavalships.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2887

Crews of the six X-craft used in Operation Source came primarily from Britain, three from Australia, at least one South African, and I think there were Canadians, one or more, involved. Only two of the boats, X-6 and X-7 reached Tirpitz to place their charges, and again - as in Post 1# and #4 - the captured crew of X-6 were aboard the great German battleship when their own charge, and X-7s, rent her hull, lifting one of the forward turrets of their rollers. Tirpitz was disabled for 6 months, and one of the most heroic operations of WW11 subsequently resulted in two VC, three DSO's and one Conspicuous Gallantry Medal being awarded.

As the pics below show, Germany operated several classes of midget submarines reputably with great success against merchant shipping, but I'm not familiar with any particular exploits.

When Japan surrendered at in the latter half of 1945, scores of midget submarines were found of blocks in her docks - again, as the first photograph shows, there were 84found in one vast dock alone.

Yet the Japanese midget submarines were singularly unsuccessul in terms of the effort put into their operations in the first 6 months of the war. They failed to get into Pearl Harbour, and of the two simultaneous major midget submarine attacks in Sydney Harbour and against the RN fleet at Diego Saurez in Madagascar on the night of May 31-June 1, 1942, only the second can be said to have made any marked success.

At Diego Saurez the battleship HMS Ramillies was severely damaged by a torpedo fired by M-20 , and was perhaps fortunate that the midget sub's commander Lt Saburo Akieda chose to fire his second torpedo at the 7000-ton tanker British Loyalty, otherwise Ramillies too may have sunk. As it was, she had to be towed to Durban for temporary repairs, and returning to Britain was out of the war for more than a year.

The simultaneous Sydney raid is perhaps the most famous because of its location and the excitement it stirred. Five large Japanese fleet submarines had converged off Sydney with three Type A Ko-Hyoteki submarines on their decks, the two others providing float planes for reconnaissance. There were 11 warships in the Harbour, the main ones being the heavy cruisers USS Chicago - which a Japanese plane mistook for a battleship - HMAS Canberra, and the light cruiser HMAS Adelaide, a destroyer tender and seven smaller ships.

With all these targets, the two midget subs that managed to get down the Harbour (another had become entangled in the boom net at the Heads) fired a torpedo at Chicago but only managed to hit the barracks ship Kattabul, a former ferry, killing 21 sailors. That was their total return for the raid, although they created plenty of panic and excitement - some wild secondary armament fire from Chicago initially richocheting off the Harbour waters into the staid North Shore suburbs of Mosman and Cremorne, and hitting the Martello Tower of the historic little Fort Denison.

An attempt may have been made to torpedo Canberra, and some of the action was at remarkably close quarters, a couple of the smaller harbour patrol vessels actually brushing against the submarines. Two were destroyed, and the third disappeared - its hull believed to have been found off the Northern Beaches near Lion Island by an amateur dive group only several years ago.

In fact, the Japanese midget submarines keep turning up:
a remnant of the Pearl Harbour raid was found in 2000; there is another on a beach at Kiska in the Aleutians; another at Madagascar; and one near Kavieng in New Guinea.

In Sydney, the crews of the Japanese subs committed suicide when their vessels were trapped. They were subsequently given funeral services with full naval honors, and their ashes returned to Japan with the repatriated Japanese Consul-General, a westernized and very popular figure in Sydney before the war. At the time it was thought that this gesture was in part at least a ploy
aimed a gaining decent treatment for the many Australian PoWs in Japanese hands after the fall of Singapore, and if that did not work at least the tradition of honouring these brave submariners has continued.

I've forgotten the details, but it was the aged mother and I think brothers of Lt Kieu Matsuo, commander of M-22, who were brought down to Sydney for memorial services 60 years after the attack, and treated with great respect - presented, from memory, with a traditional sash with stitches sewn by thousands of Australian schoolchildren.

The impressive midget submarine on display at the Australian War Memorial Museum in Canberra is a composite of the two boats that were recovered. There is also an intact A-type submarine now on display at the U.S. Pacific War Museum in Hawaiii.


Now let's see: pics 2 to 12 here relate to the Japanese raid on Sydney and the display in Canberra, 13-17 are the midget sub discovery, restoration and display in Hawaiii;
18 to 20 at German midget subs preserved; and the rest are the famous X-craft at the IWM Duxford hangar, with the last two being the remnants of an XT (training) at Aberlady Bay near East Lothian in Scotland, where it had been used for RAF target practice.

The colour pics from Flickr are contributed by FOrbe5, SBA73, and Kenny Macloed. And that's it from me for this thread atm.

[herakles]

For those who want a fuller description of Huntley, see here:

http://www.worldnavalships.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2553

[mik43]

superb work K, and very interesting!
Mik

[John Odom]

Related, but slightly different are the Kaiten of the IJN. These were human piloted torpedoes. The Nautical version of the Kamikaze. I was priveleged to see one at the Yakasune Shrine in Tokyo.

[Linton]

Have you ever read the story of the Italian Decima MAS?They were the unit behind the chariot attacks.
Their website is here:
http://www.decima-mas.net/apps/index.php

[Togo]

Sorry for nitpicking Kookaburra but your photo of Takao is of a Kongo class fast battleship.
Apart from that, a very interesting article.
Regards,
John.

[kookaburra]

Thanks for the correction. Must have been a mis-labelled pic, but I should have picked up the major difference - the Kongo class were such well known ships. I can't remove it, it seems, but I'll edit in a note on the post.:)