Raffaele Rossetti
Raffaele Rossetti (born July 12, 1881 in Genoa , Italy , † December 24, 1951 in Milan ) was an Italian marine engineer , officer in the First World War and politician .
Life
University and military career
Raffaele Rossetti studied at the Royal School of Engineering in Turin , which later became the Polytechnic , industrial engineering , which he successfully completed in 1904.
He joined the Naval Academy in Livorno and was promoted to first lieutenant in active service in the Naval Engineer Corps ( Italian Genio Navale ), the technical corps of the Italian Navy , in November 1904 . In December 1906 he completed a further specialization course in marine engineering and mechanics at the Polytechnic in Milan . In the same month he was recalled to the directorate for new ships at the Taranto naval base . On August 1, 1908, he was promoted to captain of the Genio Navale there. From May 1909 to November 1910 he served on the battleship Regina Elena the Regia Marina . Then until March 1912 on the armored cruiser Pisa. In the same month he switched to the auxiliary ship Vulcano, which was used as a ship's workshop, on which he remained for four months until July 1912.
Rossetti took part in the Italo-Turkish War in Libya on the battleship Pisa. From April 1915 to May 1917 he was in the technical department of the Regia Maina in Genoa and was then dismissed from the directorate for new ships at the La Spezia naval base and promoted to major on June 16, 1917.
"Mignatta" project
In November 1915 he presented a first project with which he wanted to use a converted torpedo to penetrate into enemy ports in order to carry out sabotage actions against ships lying there. But it was not until October 1916 that he received the green light for the first test attempts. From June 1917 to March 1918 he worked feverishly on the project at the La Spezia naval base . In March 1918 he presented his promising test results to the commander of the naval base in La Spezia, Umberto Cagni . Thereupon he got the order from the chief of the admiralty staff Paolo Thaon di Revel to produce a prototype. Rossetti had always emphasized that only he himself could be considered for a possible enemy deployment. In July 1918, two prototypes of the Mignatta were completed in the arsenal in Venice .
Pola company
On the night of October 31st to November 1st, 1918, Rossetti and Lieutenant Raffaele Paolucci carried out an attack on the Austro-Hungarian naval base at Pola . With the help of the torpedo developed by Rossetti, the two were able to approach the SMS Viribus Unitis anchored in Pola unnoticed and Rossetti attached one of the two detention mines carried to the battleship before the two officers were noticed. When they were brought aboard the Viribus Unitis at dawn, they learned that the ship had been handed over to the new state of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs the previous evening . Thereupon they decided to point out the imminent explosion controlled with a time fuse, whereupon the battleship was abandoned by the crew. When no explosion occurred after the time specified by both of them, the captain of the Viribus Unitis Janko Vuković-Podkapelski gave the order to reoccupy the ship. A short time later, however, the explosive charge exploded and the former flagship of the Austro-Hungarian Navy sank within a short time. Before that, the nearby steamship Wien sank , under which the torpedo equipped with a self-timer, which Rossetti and Paolucci were able to activate before they were captured, got stuck in the seabed and then exploded.
A few days later the war ended and the two officers were released from their captivity. Rossetti was awarded the Golden Medal of Bravery for the Pola company . After the end of the war, a dispute developed between Rossetti and Costanzo Ciano , Rossetti's superior in Venice and the father of Galeazzo Ciano , who claimed the authorship of the Mignatta project in order to claim shares in the Viribus Unitis premium of 1,300,000 lire . It was only after months of correspondence with the Admiralty's staff that Rossetti succeeded in putting his authorship out of discussion. However, this dispute made him decide to leave the military in 1919.
Antifascist
With the rise of fascism , Rossetti joined the Republican Party and in 1922 founded the anti-fascist movement L'Italia libera (German: Free Italy) together with Giovanni Conti , Randolfo Pacciardi , Fernando Schiavetti and Cino Macrelli . In early 1925 he published his memoirs about the sinking of the Viribus Unitis. The printing house in which the work was printed was the target of an arson attack carried out by fascists, which also burned a large part of the edition. On June 13, 1925, he was beaten up by black shirts at a solidarity event for the arrested dissident Gaetano Salvemini and had to be hospitalized. He then went into exile in France and worked there as a typesetter . A second edition of his book that went to press in September 1925 had since been confiscated.
In 1930, at the instigation of Carlo Rosselli , Emilio Lussu , Alberto Tarchiani and Alberto Cianca, he became a leading member of the Paris-based anti-fascist resistance movement Giustizia e Libertà , to which, however, he turned his back after a short time in the dispute, as he was more anti-fascist in the preparation of the dropping Giovanni Bassanesi had excluded leaflets about Milan for incomprehensible reasons. He then founded the underground movement La Giovane Italia (German Young Italy) together with Cipriano Facchinetti .
The break with the Giustizia e Libertà movement was so deep that at the fourth republican party in exile in Saint-Louis in March 1932 it stood up as a candidate for the anti-fascist alliance with other resistance groups, including the Italian Socialist Party , which was also in exile set up. The party wing led by Rossetti, joined by the extreme left wing under Fernando Schiavetti , received the most votes and Rossetti was elected party secretary of the Republican Party of Italy. He held this office until the next party congress in April 1933.
During the Spanish Civil War , he went to Barcelona and worked there as a spokesman for an anti-fascist radio station, which earned him the revocation of his gold medal for bravery, which was awarded to him for sinking the Viribus Unitis and which was only awarded to him again after the Second World War .
In the post-war period he no longer held any political office. Raffele Rossetti died in Milan in 1951. He found his final resting place in the cemetery of Zoagli in Liguria .
Others
The technical auxiliary ship class Rossetti of the Italian Navy is named after him, including the A5315.
literature
- Santi Fedele, I Repubblicani in esilio nella lotta contro il fascismo (1926-1940) , Le Monnier, Florence 1989.
- RH Rainero: Raffaele Rossetti. Dall'affondamento della "Viribus Unitis" all'impegno antifascista , Marzorati, Milano 1989.
- Raffaele Rossetti: Contro la Viribus Unitis , Libreria Politica Moderna, Roma 1925.
References and comments
- ↑ It was not until 1973 that the Genio Navale took over the designation of the naval ranks, until then the officers carried the ranks common to the army.
- ^ Project Mignatta on the website of the Italian Navy in Italian, accessed on July 27, 2017
- ↑ The sinking of the Viribus Unitis on the Italian Navy page in Italian accessed on July 27, 2017
- ↑ a b Viribus Unitis: Last Act in Italian (PDF; 1.33 MB), accessed on July 27, 2017.
- ↑ Santi Fedele, I Repubblicani in esilio nella lotta contro il fascismo (1926-1940) pp. 55–56.
- ↑ Santi Fedele, I Repubblicani in esilio nella lotta contro il fascismo (1926-1940) p. 63.
- ↑ A5315 Raffaele Rossetti on the website of the Italian Navy , accessed on July 27, 2017.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Rossetti, Raffaele |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Italian officer and politician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 12, 1881 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Genoa , Italy |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 24, 1951 |
| Place of death | Milan , Italy |