Raffaele Rossetti
Raffaele Rossetti (Genova, 1881 - Milano, 1951) 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 on his bright idea of a torpedo manned by a person, to be linked to enemy vessels underwater and explode under the ship hull. This weapon was called "mignatta" (leech) and was the precursor of the maiale of WWII and the actual human torpedo.
Using the long, slender shell of an unexploded German torpedo that had washed up on the Italian coast, Rossetti had built a sleek submersible craft that could be ridden through the water like a horse. Filled with compressed air that drove two small, silent propellers, Rossetti’s rebuilt torpedo was about twenty feet long, weighed one-and-a-half tons, and could carry a pair of riders through the water at a top speed of two miles an hour. At the front end of the apparatus were fitted two detachable watertight canisters, each of which had room for four hundred pounds of TNT. The craft could be raised or lowered in the water by adjusting a series of control valves Rossetti had designed. [2]
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.[3]
In 1919 retired as colonel and died in Milano in 1951.
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).[4]
There 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.
notes
- ^ Official Biography of Raffaele Rossetti
- ^ Assault on the Viribus Unitis, by Brian Warhola
- ^ Fotos of the "mignatta" and the Viribus Unitis sinking
- ^ Assault on the Viribus Unitis
Bibliography
- The Fate of the Viribus Unitis by Raffaele Paolucci. in "The Fortnightly Review" (New York), Vol. 105, 1919, 977-988.
- The Sinking of the Viribus Unitis by Raffaele Rossetti. in "Great Moments of Adventure". edited by Evan J. David. Duffield and Co., 1930.