Regia Marina

• 1. Introduction

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  The Regia Marina, Italy's Royal Navy, was born on the 17th of March 1861 from the wreckage of rival kingdoms. It entered its first major battle just five years later and lost badly. It helped pioneer radio communications, invented the concept that would become the dreadnought battleship, and sent frogmen into an enemy harbor to sink a flagship. Then, at the moment of its greatest test, it went to war without radar, without sonar, and without a single aircraft carrier. How did a navy with such a distinguished record of innovation fall so far short when it mattered most? And what became of its ships and men when Italy finally changed sides in 1943?

• 2. A Navy Built from Rivals

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  When the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861, its new navy was assembled from the fleets of former adversaries. The main building blocks came from the navies of the former kingdoms of Sardinia and Naples, which had not long ago been on opposite sides of history. Officers from those different traditions eyed each other with open hostility. Equipment, standards, and operating practices differed from ship to ship.

  Two separate officer schools, one at Genoa and one at Naples, continued to operate independently, deepening the divisions. The institutional fracture was not resolved until a single unified Naval Academy opened at Livorno in 1881. Even then, the underlying tensions between the old constituent forces left their mark on the culture of the fleet.

  The timing of unification made things harder still. France launched a new kind of warship in 1858, and the celebrated duel between two armored vessels in 1862 showed the world that wooden hulls were finished. Italy lacked the shipyards to build the modern ships the moment demanded, so Admiral Carlo di Persano, then Minister for the Navy, launched a programme to buy warships directly from foreign yards. The fleet was new on paper but assembled from borrowed parts and borrowed ideas.

• 3. Blood at Lissa

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  On the 20th of July 1866, the Regia Marina fought its first fleet action at the Battle of Lissa, near the island of Vis in the Adriatic Sea, during the Third Italian War of Independence. Admiral Persano commanded 12 ironclads and 17 wooden-hulled ships against an Austrian force that was smaller in both numbers and equipment. The Italians had every reason to expect a victory.

  The Austrian commander, Admiral Wilhelm von Tegetthoff, used superior seamanship to turn the engagement into a melee, including deliberate ramming. The Italian fleet lost two armored ships and 640 men. It was a severe defeat, made more embarrassing by the numerical and material advantage Italy had held at the start.

  Lissa became one of the most analyzed battles of the 19th century. Naval planners around the world studied it as evidence that ramming remained a viable tactic in the ironclad age. That conclusion shaped warship design and fleet doctrine for decades afterward, even though the battle's outcome owed far more to command quality than to the ram itself. For the Regia Marina, Lissa meant years of budget cuts and reduced activity while the navy rebuilt its confidence and its finances.

• 4. Innovation and Its Limits

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  By the 1880s the Regia Marina had recovered enough to commission warships that were, briefly, the most powerful in the world. The fleet also gathered a record of genuine intellectual achievement. In 1896 the corvette Magenta completed a circumnavigation of the globe. The following year the navy conducted experiments with Guglielmo Marconi in radio communications. In 1909 it became one of the first navies to integrate aircraft into fleet operations.

  In 1903, Italian naval officer Vittorio Cuniberti published an article envisioning a warship armed entirely with heavy guns of a single caliber. His concept would later define a whole class of battleship known as the dreadnought. It was a striking contribution to international naval thought from a navy that was still rebuilding its reputation after Lissa.

  Yet the same instinct toward conservatism that had once kept the officer schools divided persisted in a different form. By the 1930s, Admiral Domenico Cavagnari, whom Mussolini appointed Chief of Staff of the Navy in 1933 and later promoted to Secretary of the Navy, actively discouraged the adoption of radar and sonar. Writing to Admiral Iachino, Cavagnari argued to "proceed with extreme caution regarding brilliant technical innovations that have not yet been tested or with which there is no practical experience." He called new devices "traps in your way." Ugo Tiberio and Guglielmo Marconi were both conducting scientific research on these technologies in Italian universities and military laboratories, but their work was not incorporated into the fleet. That decision would cost Italy dearly.

• 5. The War in the Mediterranean

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  On the 10th of June 1940, Italy entered the Second World War. Benito Mussolini described the Mediterranean as "Mare Nostrum," meaning "Our Sea," and his ambitions stretched toward Nice, Corsica, Tunis, and the Balkans. The Regia Marina entered the conflict with six battleships, 19 cruisers, 59 destroyers, 67 torpedo boats, and 116 submarines. On paper it was the fourth largest navy in the world.

  The fleet's commanders, however, were forbidden from committing their forces without first conferring with headquarters, even when the tactical situation favored action. During "Operation Hats," the Regia Marina held superior forces and failed to use them. Intelligence made things worse: British codebreakers had broken Italian naval codes, and Ultra intercepts gave Allied commanders precise information on convoy routes, departure times, and ship composition.

  On the night of the 11th of November 1940, the British carrier launched two waves of Fairey Swordfish torpedo-bombers in a surprise raid on the Italian naval base at Taranto. Three battleships were sunk. At Cape Matapan, the Royal Navy and Royal Australian Navy used radar to locate and destroy three heavy cruisers and two other vessels at night, killing over 2,300 Italian seamen. The Italians could not range their guns in the dark without being able to see their targets.

  The Italian fleet did achieve real success in the second half of 1941. On the night of the 19th of December, Italian frogmen planted limpet mines on the British battleships in Alexandria harbor, knocking both out of action for nearly two years. That same night, Force K, comprising three cruisers and four destroyers, sailed from Malta into an Italian minefield off Tripoli. One cruiser was lost, one destroyer was sunk, another destroyer was seriously damaged, and 800 seamen were killed. Force K, which had been disrupting Axis convoys, was destroyed in a single night. For several months afterward, the Axis supply routes from southern Europe to North Africa ran almost uncontested.

• 6. Special Weapons and Distant Seas

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  The Regia Marina's greatest tactical inventions were small. During the First World War, MAS boats had, by chance, sunk an Austro-Hungarian battleship in the Adriatic on the 10th of June 1918. On the 1st of November 1918, just days before the armistice, a crewed torpedo codenamed Mignatta, or "leech," carrying two men, slipped into the harbor of Pola and planted two magnetic mines under the Austro-Hungarian flagship, sinking it with considerable loss of life.

  In the Second World War, Italian frogmen and small craft continued that tradition. Thirty-two Italian submarines operated from the BETASOM base in Bordeaux, France, alongside German U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic, sinking 109 Allied ships totaling 593,864 tons. The Regia Marina even planned a midget submarine attack on New York Harbor for December 1942, though delays meant it was never carried out.

  Italian naval units also operated on Lake Ladoga during the Continuation War from 1941 to 1944, as part of Naval Detachment K, conducting operations against Soviet vessels during the Siege of Leningrad between the 21st of June and the 21st of October 1942. In May 1942, at German request, the Regia Marina transported torpedo boats and midget submarines overland to Vienna, then by water to Constanta, Romania, for operations in the Black Sea. The fleet's reach extended even to East Asia: Italian submarines in the Far East were converted into transport vessels to exchange goods with Japan, operating under the name Monsun Gruppe.

• 7. The Armistice and Its Aftermath

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  In 1943, Mussolini was deposed and Italy's new government agreed to an armistice with the Allies. The terms required the Regia Marina to sail its fleet to Allied ports. Most ships headed for Malta. A flotilla departing from La Spezia steered toward Sardinia and was intercepted by German aircraft. Two Fritz X guided glide-bombs struck the battleship Roma. Among the approximately 1,600 sailors killed was Admiral Carlo Bergamini, the Italian Naval Commander-in-Chief.

  The surviving ships formed the basis of the Italian Co-Belligerent Navy, which fought on the Allied side for the remainder of the war. Mussolini's rival pro-German National Republican Navy, the Marina Nazionale Repubblicana, never grew to more than a twentieth the size of the co-belligerent fleet. The loyalties of individual sailors and crews varied widely. In the Far East, the crew of the submarine Ammiraglio Cagni heard of the armistice and surrendered to the Royal Navy off Durban, South Africa. Three other submarines in Japanese-controlled waters were taken over by German U-boat command and renamed; one of them, Reginaldo Giuliani, was sunk by a British submarine in February 1944. The submarine Luigi Torelli remained active until the 30th of August 1945, when, in Japanese waters, it shot down a North American B-25 Mitchell bomber of the United States Army Air Forces. It was the last combat action of any ship flying Fascist Italian colors.

  On the 10th of February 1947, a peace treaty signed in Paris placed strict limits on what Italy could maintain at sea. Total displacement of the future navy was capped at 67,500 tons, and staff was capped at 25,000 men. Italy was banned from owning battleships, aircraft carriers, submarines, and amphibious assault units. Three battleships, five cruisers, seven destroyers, six minesweepers, eight submarines, and a sailing school ship were handed over to the victorious powers as war compensation. One of those vessels, a convoy escort, was converted into the presidential yacht Galeb and used by Marshal Josip Broz Tito for foreign trips and official entertaining. On the 2nd of June 1946, the Italian monarchy was abolished by referendum, and the Regia Marina became the Marina Militare.