The Navy's fleet prepares for the Great War

(To Marina Militare)
26/08/15

Among the many and far-sighted initiatives that Vice Admiral Paolo Thaon of Revel (Navy Chief of Staff since April 1 1913) undertook to prepare the Royal Navy for the imminent entry into the war, there was to concentrate the fleet in Taranto and reunite it under a single command.

The Taranto base was chosen, in relation to Italian neutrality, to avoid any susceptibility both from the Entente and from the Central Empires. Taranto, in fact, was not central to the Mediterranean and the Tyrrhenian and was sufficiently far from the Adriatic.

On 26 August 1914, Admiral Luigi Amedeo di Savoia Aosta, Duke of the Abruzzi, assumed command of the naval army formed by the dissolution of the two pre-existing naval teams.

The Navy's warship initially consisted of five divisions to which a group of ship sinking ships and a group of cargo ships were aggregated.

Luigi Amedeo di Savoia will initially embark on the tower battleship Regina Margherita and then hoist his command banner on the more modern single-fiber battleship Conte di Cavour, at the end of April 1915.

The naval army was subsequently reorganized, and on the eve of the conflict it will constitute a modern and fearsome instrument with 14 battleships (including 5 modern single-caliber battleships), 8 armored cruisers, 6 explorers, 35 destroyers, 18 submarines and about fifty ships auxiliaries (see Ezio Ferrante, The Great War in the Adriatic - on the LXX anniversary of the Victory, Historical Office of the Navy, Rome, 1987, p. 18).