NOTES ON THE WAR NEWS

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 107, 1 November 1940, Page 8

NOTES ON THE WAR NEWS

GIBRALTAR RAID

AN ITALIAN FAILURE

TACTICS OF LAST WAR

The Italian attack at Gibraltar, which met with little success, shows that while the Fascists may not be inventive they can learn from history. For the Italian Navy in the World War used novel raiding tactics against the Austrians and after a bad beginning registered a dramatic success on the eve of the Armistice.

Three Ships Sunk,

This was the sinking of the Austrian battleship Viribus Unitis in Pola on the night of October 31, 1918. The Viribus Unitis is sometimes described as the only battleship sunk by Italy during the war, but this is not correct. Two other ships, one of them the Wien (Vienna) were the victims of Italian torpedoes. The Wien was sunk at Trieste on December 9, 1917. This was followed by an improvement of the defences of all Austrian ports and also by the court-martial of several officers and an anti-espionage hunt. The Italians had followed Britain in fostering the development of naval motor-boats; in fact., today they sometimes claim to have originated them. They made it possible to use these boats in port attacks by installing a noiseless electric motor giving a speed of- about four knots and supplied by a battery which would last about four hours This meant that the small boats could creep about enemy ports, though they had a very limited range, and by reason of their smallness they might hope to escape detection.

Motor-boats Useless

With these motor-boats the Italians made themselves something of a nuisance to the Austrian fleet which, like the Italian fleet today, was concerned with evading a decisive action at sea. But the improvement of the Austrian barrages after the sinking of the Wien ruled out the motor-boats. Aerial reconnaissance supplied plentiful photographs of Pola, at which port the Austrian capital ships lay. Complicated and numerous obstacles were revealed, and it was seen that something new was needed to overcome them. What was needed was a craft which .vould pass over and not through the new defences, and several experiments were made before it took its final -hape. This was a boat built by the Italian firm S.V.A.N. under the direction of the Naval Constructor General Pruneri. It was 36ft long, with the keel rising gently towards the bow. Along each side of the deck, and all .-Jong the bottom ran, over two cogvvheels, two stout flexible chains on which there were at short intervals ihree rows of steel teeth several aches long.

forked by Motor,

These chains could be set running jy an electric motor, of 30 h.p., and vvhen a barrage was attacked the toothed chains engaged the floating parts and raised first the bow and then the rest of the boat. The craft then crawled over the obstruction; it was a sort of naval tank. Another' motor of 15 h.p., inside a tunnel, drove the propeller. The speed at sea was only about 5 knots and the range of action only 20 miles.

The boat carried two 18in torpedoes and was manned by three men. But it was slow to prove itself. After six unsuccessful expeditions in which one of the two craft in use at the time had to be sunk outside Pola, Lieut-Com-mander Pellegrini attempted to enter the harbour on the night of May 13, 1918. The Cricket, as the boat was called, went over the first three lines of obstructions but failed to clear the last line of floats. Pellegrini found himself under fire from -the battleship Radetzky, which was moored about 300 yards away, and ordered the two torpedoes to be fired. At that moment a shot severed the arm of the torpedogunner and immediately afterwards the crew were over-powered by men from an armed steamboat and the Cricket was sunk.

Disastrous Sortie

The final attack of the Italians followed a sortie by the Austrian battle fleet, inspired by the Germans and directed against the Otranto barrage, which had cut off the Adriatic, and four of Austria's battleships emerged for the attack. But on the way the battleship Szant Istvan was met by two tiny torpedo craft near the Premuda Islands and was sunk, and the ships returned to port and remained there for the rest of the war.

For some time before October 31, 1918, Major Rossetti, of the Italian Naval Construction Corps, and Surgeon Sub-Lieutenant Paolucci had both projected a single-handed attack on Pola. Rossetti worked for a long time on his apparatus, which was finally adapted for the expedition and which he intended to push along by swimming. It was shaped like a torpedo, the front' part being composed of two detachable mines each containing 3501b of trotyl.

Compressed Air Used.

The after-part held a little engine worked by compressed air, sufficient in quantity to propel the whole apparatus at a slow speed for several hours. The mines could be promptly attached at any depth to the skin of a ship and an internal clockwork apparatus fixed the time at which the explosion would take place.

The plan was for the operators to lie astride the body of this queer craft, with the engine running, and steer it with their arms. It was with this contraption that the officers destroyed the battleship Viribus Unitis, a severe blow to Austria's navy. The Viribus Unitis was one of four Dreadnoughts (all-big-gun ships) which were built between 1912 and 1915. She was of 20,000 tons and mounted twelve 12in guns in four triple-gun turrets, was armoured up to llin in places, and was capable of 20 knots.

Sister Ship Sunk,

The Szant Istvan was another ship of this class, so that when the two officers made their way into the harbour at Pola with their torpedo-motor-boat (or motor-torpedo) they brought about the loss of a vitally-important vessel. It seems that the Italians planned to attempt a repetition of this feat, had the war continued, though whether it would have been possible, even against the easy-going Austrians, would appear % matter of doubt. The feat, incidentally, has provided a nice problem for naval historians, and some of them describe the Viribus Unitis as having been sunk by a torpedo while others ihore accurately say that she was blown up by a mine. What to call Bossetti's craft seems to remain a matIter of debate, _