Raffaele Rossetti
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Raffaele Rossetti was an Italian engineer and military naval officer who sank the main battleship of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of WWI.[1]
Biography
Raffaele Rossetti graduated as engineer from the University of Torino in september 1904. He went to study in the Italian Navy Academy of Livorno, where become lieutenant for "Navy engineering" (called in Italian:"Genio navale").
In december 1906 he graduated in the speciality of "naval mechanics engineering" at the Politecnico di Milano.
In 1909 was promoted to captain and in 1911 went to Libya during the Italo-Turkish War with the cruiser "Pisa". During the first years of WWI worked as Director of the Navy Arsenal in La Spezia and was promoted to major.
While working there he started to create a new weapon, based con a torpedo manned by a person, to be linked to enemy vessels underwater. This weapon was called "mignatta" (leech) and was the precursor of the maiale of WWII and the actual human torpedo.
At the end of october 1918 Rossetti used his "mignatta" to assault the main austrian battleship, the SMS Viribus Unitis. He succeeded and thus obtained the Italian Gold Medal of Military Valor.[2]
In 1919 retired as colonel and died in .
---I am doing the translation from it. wikipedia----
L'ordigno, chiamato anche "mignatta", fu personalmente impiegato in azione di guerra dal suo ideatore, coadiuvato nell'impresa dal Tenente Medico Raffaele Paolucci, per l'azione del 1º novembre 1918 nella base navale austriaca di Pola, che culminò con l'affondamento della corazzata austriaca Viribus Unitis.
Riposa nel cimitero di Sant'Ambrogio di Zoagli, con un epitaffio preso da Gabriele D'Annunzio.
Sinking of the Viribus Unitis
On November first 1918 two men of the Regia Marina, Raffaele Paolucci and Raffaele Rossetti, in diving suits, rode a primitive manned torpedo (nicknamed Mignatta or "leech") into the Austro-Hungarian Navy base at Pola (Istria), where they sank the Austrian battleship Viribus Unitis and the freighter Wien using limpet mines. They had no breathing sets and they had to keep their heads above water, and thus they were discovered and taken prisoner.