Leonardo da Vinci (submarine)
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
_crowned.svg){kind=small}
The R.Smg. Leonardo da Vinci was the most successful submarine of the Italian Regia Marina in World War II .
history
Da Vinci was the third of the six boats in the Marconi class . Four boats were built between 1938 and 1940 in Muggiano near La Spezia , the Da Vinci together with the Marconi in Monfalcone near Trieste . The boat, which was handed over to the Navy on March 8, 1940, was named after the scientist and artist Leonardo da Vinci , who, among other things, had also submitted designs for submarines (preserved " Manuscript B ", 1488).
The submarine Leonardo da Vinci had to struggle with considerable technical problems, especially in the first time, and recorded the lowest operational readiness of all boats of the Marconi class. Only later was it able to achieve its considerable success.
After a few training trips, it left Naples on September 22, 1940 for the Atlantic. Initially, the boat operated unsuccessfully from Bordeaux off Ireland and the Azores . On June 28, 1941, west of Gibraltar, it sank the British flagged tanker Auris (8030 GRT), which was built in 1935 by CRDA in Italy for Shell . Several times Da Vinci was hunted by British destroyers and aircraft, but was always able to escape. From September 1941 to January 1942, Da Vinci was repaired and rebuilt in Bordeaux.
On January 28, 1942, the submarine ran for a mission in the Antilles , on the trade route between the United States and Brazil . On February 25, it sank the Brazilian merchant ship Cadebelo (3557 GRT) and two days later the Latvian freighter Everasma (3,644 GRT). Da Vinci returned from this mission on March 11, 1942.
The next patrol took the boat into the mid-Atlantic from May to July 1942, where it sank the Panamanian schooner Reine Marie Stewart (1087 GRT), then the Danish freighter Chile (6956 GRT) and the Dutch Alioth (5483 GRT) . The British merchant ship Clan Macquarrie (6471 GRT) followed on June 13, 1942 . On the high seas, Da Vinci handed over eleven tons of fuel to Enrico Tazzoli and entered his base on July 1, 1942. There was further renovation work in order to be able to carry out operations with externally transported manned torpedoes, which Junio Valerio Borghese planned against Allied facilities in the port of New York and in Freetown .
On August 10, 1942, Lieutenant Gianfranco Gazzana Priaroggia took command of Da Vinci and ran out on October 7 for a regular patrol in the Central Atlantic. On November 2, Gazzana Priaroggia sank the British merchant ship Empire Zeal (7009 GRT), after which he torpedoed the Dutch freighter Frans Hals , but missed it. On November 5, the boat sank the Greek merchant ship Andreas (6566 GRT), on November 10, the American Marcus Whitman (7176 GRT). After Gazzana Priaroggia had fired all of his torpedoes, he managed to sink the Dutch freighter Veerhaven (5291 GRT) with his on- board cannon . At another meeting with the Tazzoli submarine , Da Vinci dropped 30 tons of fuel and then drove back to the base.
On February 20, 1943, Da Vinci ran out on a long patrol in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean. On March 13, 1943, Gazzana Priaroggia sank the British steamer Empress of Canada (21,516 GRT) at 1 ° 13 ′ S , 9 ° 57 ′ W , on which there were 1,346 people, including 499 Italian prisoners of war. It was followed on the 18th by Lulworth Hill (7628 GRT), which the boat Giuseppe Finzi had previously signaled. Da Vinci then received nine tons of fuel, six tons of lubricants, ten tons of drinking water and three torpedoes from Finzi in order to be able to continue the mission in the Indian Ocean.
In the Indian Ocean, the boat Leonardo da Vinci sank the Dutch Semblian (6566 GRT) on April 17th off Durban , on the 18th the British Manaar (8007 GRT), the John Brayton (7177 GRT) and finally on the 25th the British tanker Doryessa (8078 GRT). Gazzana Priaroggia was promoted to corvette captain and then returned to France, where he never arrived. After the war, the British Admiralty confirmed that the destroyer Active and the frigate Ness had sunk the submarine Leonardo da Vinci on May 23, 1943 off Cape Finisterre . There were no survivors. The boat Leonardo da Vinci had sunk a total of 17 merchant ships (120,243 GRT).
A Sauro class boat handed over to the Italian Navy in 1981 was again given the name Leonardo da Vinci (S 520) . It is about to be phased out. Another, meanwhile modernized boat of the Sauro class (Bj. 93/95, S 525) is named after the former commander of Leonardo da Vinci , Gianfranco Gazzana Priaroggia .
See also
Web links
- Details in regiamarina.net (English)
Footnotes
- ↑ R.Smg. is the abbreviation for Regio Sommergibile and the name prefix of Italian submarines until 1946. R.Smg. means Royal Dive Boat .
- ↑ Clay Blair : The Submarine War. The hunters 1939–1942. Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-453-12345-X , p. 849.