Vittorio Cuniberti

Vittorio Cuniberti

Vittorio Cuniberti (born June 6, 1854 in Turin , † December 20, 1913 in Rome ) was an officer and engineer in the Italian Navy . He is considered the spiritual father of the Dreadnought - Battleship type .

Life

After studying engineering in Genoa , Cuniberti served from 1877 as an officer in the naval engineering corps, where he made it to chief designer and rear admiral . Among other things, he held a managerial position in the royal shipyard in Castellammare di Stabia near Naples and in various planning commissions.

At the turn of the century he planned a new battleship with the internal name monocalibro (standard caliber), the main armament of which should consist of twelve 305 mm guns. About this project he published the article "A new battleship type" in Germany in 1900; more followed in other journals. In Italy, his proposal was initially not heard by the conservative naval establishment, also because the financial resources for such ships were insufficient. Cuniberti's new type of battleship displaced over 17,000 tons with its 300 mm armor, but was able to reach 24 knots thanks to a new type of turbine drive. However, the revolutionary idea was to dispense with graduated, balanced armament and to focus uniformly on the largest possible caliber and to equip as many of these guns as possible. Six such ships should be enough to take out a fleet of traditional liners.

In 1903, Cuniberti published his latest ideas in Jane's Fighting Ships under the title An Ideal Battleship for the British Navy with the permission of the Italian government . He presented his project so convincingly on three pages that several navies decided to put it into practice. The pioneer was the British Royal Navy , which had carried out similar plans. The Royal Navy gave the new type of ship the name Dreadnought , which became the epitome of the turning point in battleship construction, but also an important reason for the uninhibited arms race and warmongering. After the first dreadnoughts (in Italy with the RN Dante Alighieri only 1909–1913) and super dreadnoughts had been built, they were suddenly exposed to the threat of the submarines with their new, effective torpedoes.

Web links

• bobhenneman.info about Cuniberti, Italian battleship building (English)
• warfare.it about Cuniberti (Italian)