Audace (ship, 1916)
 The Audace
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The second destroyer Audace of the Royal Italian Navy ( Regia Marina ) was a single ship there. The ship, built in Scotland, was ordered by Japan before the First World War .
In 1916 it was sold to Italy shortly before it was launched. In 1918, immediately after the surrender of Austria-Hungary , the Audace ran to Trieste and took possession of it for Italy. In 1929 Audace was reclassified as a torpedo boat. In 1937 it was converted into a radio control boat for the target ship San Marco , and in 1940 it was dismantled to become a training and escort boat. In 1943, when the Italians surrendered, the ship fell into the hands of the Germans. They put the Audace into service in the Adriatic Sea in October 1943 as the TA 20 torpedo boat . On November 2, 1944, British destroyers escorted TA 20 sunk south of the island of Lussino in the Adriatic Sea.
History of the destroyer
Audace was built at Yarrows in Glasgow -Scotstoun for the Japanese Navy , which ordered two destroyers based on a new design because they were dissatisfied with the Japanese-built Umikaze -class destroyers .
The new ships were to have Brown Curtis turbines and were the first oil-only ships for the Japanese Navy. German diesel engines were planned for the march , which were not delivered due to the outbreak of war. Like most British shipyards, Yarrows had many jobs that could not be completed as planned under the war conditions. At the request of the British government, the Japanese Navy sold the unfinished Kawakaze to the Italian Regia Marina , which needed modern units. The Kawakaze should first get the name Intrepido . Shortly before its launch on September 27, 1916, it was given the name Audace (brave, daring), which a destroyer had previously carried. The first Audace was completed by the Orlando shipyard in Livorno in 1914 for the Italian Maine and sank on August 30, 1916 near Capo Colonna after a collision with the cargo ship to be secured on the way from Taranto to Saloniki .
The sister ship Urakaze was completed in 1915, but did not reach Japan until 1919. In 1936 it was decommissioned and later used again as a training ship. It was destroyed in a US air raid on July 18, 1945.
Technical specifications
The Audace had a length of 87.6 m over all (83.9 m pp.), Was 8.4 m wide and had a draft of 2.5 m. She displaced 907 ts under normal conditions and 1,150 ts fully equipped.
The two Brown Curtis turbine sets each drove a shaft. Three Yarrow boilers produced the necessary steam . The machine had a design output of 22,000 hpw for a top speed of 30 knots (kn) . Audace exceeded this in their test drives with 34.5 kn with incomplete equipment. Before delivery, only two two-pounder pom-poms were installed. The range of the destroyer was 2180 nautical miles (nm) at 15 kn and 560 nm at 30 kn. At the end of December 1916, the Audace was transferred to Naples , where he arrived on January 9, 1917.
The Italian Navy armed the destroyer with seven Ansaldo 102 mm L / 35 guns . In addition to the two 40 mm L / 39 Vickers anti-aircraft guns that had already been installed in Great Britain, two 457 mm twin torpedo tube sets were also placed on the sides of the ship between the rear funnel and a small deckhouse. Of the seven cannons, three were on the center line in front of the bridge on the forecastle and aft on a deckhouse and almost at the stern. The four other 102 mm cannons were in two pairs on the sides of the hull between the funnels and between the deckhouse and the stern gun.
Mission history
From March 1917, the new Italian destroyer was then used. After a short time in Brindisi , the destroyer moved to Venice and from there remained in action against the Austro-Hungarian Navy until the end of the First World War and was involved in several smaller skirmishes.
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As on November 3, 1918, the Armistice Commission of the decaying Austro-Hungarian Army under Viktor Weber of Webenau at Padua the Armistice of Villa Giusti signed that landed Audace Venice Coming on request Triester citizens in Molo San Carlo of Trieste and took the city symbolic of Italy Possession. She led the destroyers Giuseppe La Masa, Nicola Fabrizi and Giuseppe Missori and brought 200 carabiniers and the Italian general Carlo Petitti di Roreto to Trieste. The landing site has been called Molo Audace since 1922 . In the spring of 1919, the destroyer also brought the Italian king and other Italian dignitaries to Trieste for the first time. In addition, she was in Pula and Zadar in autumn 1918 to protect Italian interests and to transport military personnel .
From September 1920 and June 1921 the destroyer was assigned to the "Divisione del Levante" stationed in Smyrna, today Izmir , which then moved to Šibenik during this time . After an overhaul in Taranto, the ship was then used off Crete and was then available to the governor of Tripoli from January to April 1923 . In August 1923, she traveled to Tangier with an investigator and twelve police officers , who investigated Italian citizens who had violated the rules of the international city. The destroyer was then available to the commanding admiral in Taranto as a kind of yacht until 1928, and so took part in trips and maneuvers of the fleet as far as the Aegean and the Dodecanese , mostly in summer . On September 1, 1929, the destroyer was downgraded to a torpedo boat and operated in the northern Adriatic, then again in Tripoli and from 1934 in the Red Sea , where it was used with the cruiser Bari , the flotilla leader Pantera and the destroyer Palestro .
During the Spanish Civil War , the Audace was used off the coast of Spain in 1937 and visited Tangier, Cadiz and other cities on the western Mediterranean.
In the same year, the Audace was converted into a radio control ship for the remote-controlled target ship San Marco , a former armored cruiser . The torpedo tubes were removed. In this function she was stationed in La Spezia until Italy joined the war in the summer of 1940 .
During the Second World War , the old torpedo boat did not play any significant role. It served as a training ship at the artillery school and the submarine school (both in Pula). Occasionally it also looked for enemy submarines or secured transports in the mostly calm Adriatic.
In 1942/43 the Audace was re- armed in order to be able to better defend escorts against attacks from the air. The 102 mm L / 35 cannons were reduced to two and the 40 mm anti-aircraft gun was built. Ten 20 mm L / 65 Fla machine cannons M.1935 of the Breda type and two depth charge launchers came on board . The northern Adriatic remained the operational area.
When the armistice was proclaimed on September 8, 1943, Audace was at the pier in Trieste that she had named and was moving to Venice the next day. The boat tried to continue south to reach an Allied port. However, due to machine problems it had to turn back and came back to Venice, where it was occupied by German troops.
Operation under the German flag
The German Navy put the former Audace into service as TA 20 on October 20, 1943. By the end of the year, the 20 mm Breda automatic cannons were replaced by mostly German weapons. The ten twin guns were replaced by an Italian 37 mm L / 54 twin cannon M1938, a 20 mm L / 65 Flakvierling C / 38 and six 20 mm L / 65 C / 30 anti-aircraft guns. The boat was also prepared for laying up to 20 mines .
The T-boat TA 20 was assigned to the 11th Security Division and used in March 1944 for various mining companies, such as on the 15th south of Ancona or on the 29th east of Porto San Giorgio .
The TA 20 ex Audace formed the 2nd escort flotilla with TA 21 ex Insidioso , TA 22 , TA 35 ex ( Missori or Giuseppe Dezza ) and TA 36 ex Stella Polare .
On November 1, 1944 TA 20 with the corvettes UJ 202 (ex Melpomene ) and UJ 208 (ex Spingarda ) of the Gabbiano class south of Lussino at 44 ° 37 ′ N , 14 ° 38 ′ E by the British conduct destroyers Wheatland and Avon Vale sunk.
The wreckage of the sunk German units can be dived today.
Footnotes
- ↑ 37 mm / 54 (1.5 ") Models 1932, 1938 and 1939
- ↑ Rohwer: naval warfare , 15.- 03.29.1944 Mediterranean / Adriatic
- ^ Escort flotillas in the Mediterranean
- ^ Rohwer: Sea War , November 1–20, 1944 Mediterranean / Adriatic
- ↑ Wrecks of the Audace (TA 20), Melpomene (UJ 202) and Spingarda (UJ 208).
Web links
- AUDACE destroyer (1917) on navypedia.org (accessed January 13, 2018)
- TA20 torpedo boat (1917/1943) on navypedia.org (accessed January 13, 2018)
- AUDACE on italie1935-45.com (accessed January 13, 2018)
- AUDACE (II °) EX KAWAKAZE 1913 on agenziabozzo.it (accessed January 13, 2018)
- Audace Cacciatorpediniere on marina.difesa.it (accessed January 13, 2018)
- Jürgen Rohwer, Gerhard Hümmelchen: Chronicle of the Naval War 1939–1945 , published by the Library for Contemporary History, Württemberg State Library, Stuttgart 2007–2017
literature
- Harald Fock : Z-before! International development and war missions of destroyers and torpedo boats , Volumes 1 and 2, Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Hamburg 2001,
- Gardiner, R. Chesnau, R.: Conways All the Worlds Fighting Ships 1922-1946, 2008, ISBN 0-85177-146-7 .
- MJWhitley: Destroyer in World War II . Motorbuch Verlag, 1995, ISBN 3-613-01426-2