The Adige was a landing ship of the Italian Regia Marina . She was a single ship and a forerunner of the much larger Sesia class ships built between 1933 and 1937 . For reasons of military secrecy, the ship was officially declared a water tanker ( motocisterne per acqua (MC) ).
The Adige was on May 9, 1927 in the shipyard "Cantiere navale di Castellammare di Stabia" (now part of Fincantieri ) in Castellammare di Stabia to put Kiel , ran on 31 October 1928 by the stack and was on 26 April 1929 in service posed. It was 47 m long and 9.6 m wide. Her draft was a maximum of 2.8 m at the stern and 0.5 m at the bow. The water displacement was 793 tons . Two diesel engines of 140 hp each allowed a top speed of 8 knots . The ship was armed with six 6.5 mm machine guns. During mine operations, up to 48 mines could be picked up. The crew consisted of 33 men.
history
The Adige could transport an entire infantry battalion and land on a beach using a crank-operated, 2.38 m wide and 8.15 m long bow ramp . However, two serious weaknesses soon emerged: the ship could not carry vehicles because of the narrow bow ramp, and its engines were too weak to get going again on their own after landing on the beach. These errors were then avoided in the ships of the Sesia class. The Adige was used because of these disadvantages only for normal transportation.
At the time of the Italian surrender or the armistice of Cassibile , the ship was in Patras, Greece . There it was confiscated by the German Wehrmacht on September 8, 1943 and then assigned to the Patras sea transport station by the Navy . When it was in August 1944, during the German retreat, disbanded, the ship was in the port of Patras scuttled .
literature
Enrico Cernuschi: Source cinque navi segrete e incomprese. Rivista Italiana Difesa (RID), December 1993 (ital.)
Erminio Bagnasco, Enrico Cernuschi: Le navi da guerra italiane 1940-1945 / Italian Warships of World War Two. Ermanno Albertelli Editore, Parma, 2003, ISBN 9788887372403 (Italian & English)
Footnotes
↑ Formed in August 1941, subordinate to the main sea transport center in Piraeus and the sea transport chief Aegean Sea
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