Pietro Spirito
Ed. Laterza, Bari 2023
Pages 198
The author, who, in addition to being a journalist for the daily newspaper “Il Piccolo” of Trieste, is also a diver - as can be seen from the opening pages of this essay - as such, shares with us his encounter with the Pinnamozza shark in the waters of South Africa and, in the Foran des Aganis cave, in Friuli, with the Agane fairies; about them “Local mythology has fueled a series of stories and legends.” But it is above all the life of those who were pioneers in tackling the submerged world that is told to us in this book, starting with Narciso Monturiol, born on 28 September 1819 in Catalonia and “considered the inventor of the first authentic civilian submarine in history, the Ictineo, a vessel […] equipped with autonomous engine propulsion and an air recycling system”. The problem of hydrostatic pressure was solved by using the double hull system and by using olive wood for its construction, theIctineus, seven metres long and with a displacement of ten tons, was launched on 23 September 1859, succeeding “to navigate underwater for two hours and twenty minutes at a depth of twenty meters. No one, before then, had ever accomplished such a feat”. Then, short of finances, to attract government interest, Monturiol designed a Ictineus from war (a project that will remain on paper) and, subsequently, theIctineus II - seventeen meters long and with a displacement of seventy-two tons - which was launched on October 2, 1864 and on which a ten-centimeter diameter cannon was installed. But this addition was not enough to obtain state funding. “The time is not yet ripe to welcome Monturiol's invention: the military authorities are very reluctant to accept the new insidious weapon” while, for the civilized world, it is “of a beautiful invention, yes, but not capable of bringing immediate profits. […] In the end, the Ictineo II was seized by the debtors and demolished”.
The story continues with Raffaele Rossetti, an officer of the Naval Engineering Corps of the Royal Navy, the one who “on the night between 31 October and 1 November 1918, together with Raffaele Paaolucci, he sank the Viribus Unitis, flagship of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, in the port of Pola”. His invention, created on the suggestion of the engineer petty officer Luigi Martignon, the “he will call it a mignatta: a modified eight-meter long torpedo, […] with a diameter of just sixty centimeters, which moves with compressed air, guided by two commandos”, which, initially, Rossetti, not having met the interest of the higher authorities, experimented illegally, at night, in the sea of La Spezia until, in the spring of 1918, he obtained the green light for the experiments. The operation that made him famous began, together with the medical officer Raffaele Paolucci, on October 29, with the departure, from Venice, of the torpedo boat PN 65 carrying the leech, followed by the Mas 95, commanded by Costanzo Ciano, which had the task of towing the leech to the mouth of the port of Pola. The ship was mined, the two were discovered and taken aboard the Viribus Unitis which, in the meantime, had been ceded by the Austro-Hungarian navy to that of the newly formed government of the South Slavs. “So that newly mined ship is no longer an enemy.” But they could not have known this. Therefore, as soon as they realized it, they warned the commander, Janko Vucović de Podkapelski, of the imminent danger that his ship and its crew were about to run. The two were authorized to leave the ship, although immediately afterwards, they were recovered and brought back on board. At 06.30:XNUMX there was the explosion. The commander “he personally orders a rowing boat approaching from the stern to rescue the two raiders who have just destroyed his ship.” He “he will sink with his ship and his body will never be found.” Rossetti dedicated his book to him, Against the Viribus Unitis, with these words: “a war adversary who left me, in his death, an unforgettable example of generous humanity.” Rossetti donated hundreds of thousands of lire from his prize for sinking the ship to the widow and son of the missing commander.
The book also features Eugenio Wolk, who, born in Ukraine, after taking Italian citizenship, entered the Naval Academy in 1933, and then took part, during the Second World War, in the battle of Punta Stilo and, in 1941, was assigned to the Decima Flottiglia MAS, entering the Naval Academy's Divers School directed by Angelo Belloni, who had the idea of "soldiers marching on the seabed". In reality, however, this proved, after the exercises carried out, to be absolutely impracticable and then outdated, from the principle, adopted by Wolk and Junio Valerio Borghese, future commander of the Decima MAS, which “Men in the water must not walk, but swim. The raiders must not resemble heavily marching medieval warriors in their armor, but rather must blend in with the fish, and move like them.” With the adoption, by Wolk, of a new accessory, the fins, the Uomini Gamma were born, a group of divers, belonging to the Decima Flottiglia Mas who, embarked on a submarine, once they reached the planned location, went out and swam towards the established objectives. The secret base of the Decima was located at the mouth of the Serchio river, between Viareggio and Marina di Pisa. On September 8, with the split of the Decima, one part went under the command of Junio Valerio Borghese and followed Mussolini, the other, remaining faithful to the king, reorganized itself taking the name of Mariattacco. Wolk, on the other hand, “he decides to continue his private war under the sea to sink the enemy ship”. And, in 1995, shortly before dying, in an interview given to the magazine “Storia del XX Secolo” he stated that “it was not them, the former Decima MAS raiders, who sank the Italian battleship Giulio Cesare in the Black Sea forty years earlier, which ended up in Soviet hands as war compensation”.
Wolk's story, at a certain point, became intertwined with that of Lionel Crabb, as the two met in Venice. Crabb, born in London in 1909, discovered that underwater action suited him and, in the midst of the Second World War, he joined the divers of theUnderwater Working Party, a body created by the English to find out where they came from and what means they used to hit their ships at anchor, the Gamma Men. These, for their operations, used theOlterra, an old decommissioned cargo ship, anchored in the neutral port of Algeciras, opposite Gibraltar, and transformed, thanks to an idea of the lieutenant Licio Visintini, commander of the Ursa Major squadron of the Tenth MAS Flotilla, in a secret floating operational base from where the slow-moving torpedoes, the infamous "pigs", were launched, with the Gamma Men. On the night of 7 December 1942 Visintini, during an operation against the British battleship Nelson, lost his life due to an attack with depth charges, launched from the ground with special mortars, which were taken care of Lionel Crabb who, subsequently, having obtained a tricolor flag, paid homage to him by organizing his funeral. Arriving in Italy, Maria Visintini wanted to meet him and became his collaborator, as an interpreter. Lionel Crabb disappeared on April 19, 1956, in Portsmouth, where he had gone for an operation, unofficial, of underwater exploration of the keel of a Soviet cruiser, an operation from which he did not return, fueling the most disparate hypotheses about his disappearance, a mystery not yet solved.
Then there were those, like Luciano Mecarozzi, with Operation Atlantide, in Lake Cavazzo, in Friuli - Venezia Giulia, who tried to “to create the first underwater village in the world, composed of housing modules occupied, for at least a month, by several groups of aquanauts at the same time”, who had to pass a theoretical-practical training phase of sixty days, at the end of which, of the forty aspiring batinauts, twenty-four remained, including Silvana Polese, a sixteen-year-old girl who was the first batinaut in history. It was the summer of 1969.
Nine years earlier, on January 23, 1960 to be exact, four hundred miles southwest of the island of Guam, part of the Mariana archipelago in the Pacific Ocean, the bathyscaphe Trieste, with Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh, a U.S. Navy officer, on board, reached Challenger Deep, the deepest point on the planet, at -10.916 meters.
After the conquest of Everest, in 1953 and “on the eve of Yuri Gagarin's first space flight in April 1961 aboard the Soyuz spacecraft” had arrived “time to go and see what was in the darkest spot on Earth.”
Gianlorenzo Capano
