Exactly seventy-four years ago, operation GA3 began. In the late afternoon of December 3, 1941 the submarine Scirè, under the command of the commander of the corvette Junio Valerio Borghese, left the port of La Spezia, to be reached, in the dark, by a self-propelled pontoon, with on board the equipment of the raiders and the three SLCs ( Slow-running torpedo, better known as "pigs"). The vehicles were transferred to the submarine inside caissons placed on the deck of the boat. The raiders, having concluded the transshipment, returned to the pontoon to return to land, while the Scirè began its long and slow navigation of transfer to the island of Lero, in the Aegean.
The mission is described in detail on the pages of the book by Enrico Cernuschi and Andrea Tirondola, "Mediterranean and Beyond": "For some time, experience has highlighted the fact that the" machine man "represented by the operators reacted badly to the conditions, worse than sacrificed, of the life aboard the submarines. The physical tone, for example, inevitably fell, given the lack of space to exercise and the forcibly spoiled air on board risked compromising the lung capacity which, on the other hand, had to be exploited to the fullest at the decisive moment, like the vista, physiologically "asleep" from the many hours spent diving. The raiders, therefore, would reach the Lero base by plane and in due course to rejoin Borghese and their vehicles.
With the unmooring of the submarine Scirè, which during the entire operation confirmed the extraordinary importance of the underwater weapon, one of the most memorable pages in the history of the Navy begins to be written (find out more about submarines and submariners).
In the next news, respecting the mission calendar over 70 years ago, we will describe the subsequent phases of the GA3 operation.
