The Scirè was an Adua class and was built from 1937 to 1938 in Muggiano near La Spezia . In June 1940, it was under the 15th submarine squadron in La Spezia. On July 10, 1940, the French merchant ship Cheik sank off the island of Asinara . It was then rebuilt to be able to use manned torpedoes . Together with the boats Gondar , Ametista and Iride it was assigned to a special unit ( 10ª Flottiglia MAS ).
From October 1940 to September 1941 it brought under the command of Corvette Captain (Capitano di Corvetta) Junio Valerio Borghese four combat swimmers to the British naval port of Gibraltar , where merchant ships could be sunk or damaged. On the night of December 18 to 19, 1941, the mission took place in Alexandria, Egypt . The boat dropped three manned SLC torpedoes in front of the Ras-El-Tin lighthouse . The six combat swimmers penetrated the naval port of Alexandria and caused great damage to the British Mediterranean fleet.
In July 1942, the submarine Scirè was supposed to bring a team of combat swimmers to the port of Haifa , where the British naval associations had withdrawn because of the fighting near El Alamein . Before the start of the mission, the boat was forced to surface off Haifa by depth charges from the British corvette HMS Islay and then sunk five nautical miles off the coast by fire from an Anglo-Palestinian coastal battery. The crew and the combat swimmers were killed. In September 1984 the Italian Navy salvaged parts of the crew and the boat.
1984 salvaged part of the Scirè in Vittoriano in Rome. Other parts of the boat are kept in other museums.
The Italian Navy has named a new boat of the German submarine class 212 A built in Italy after the boat that sank near Haifa in 1942.
Footnotes
↑ R.Smg. is the abbreviation for Regio Sommergibile ( German : Königliches Tauchboot ) and was used as a name prefix for Italian submarines until 1946.
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