Wreckage found of lost Second World War ship
1,352 lives lost on Italian vessel in bombing raid
Almost seven decades after it was sunk by German aircraft during the Second World War, an Italian battleship containing the bodies of 1,352 seamen has been discovered on the sea floor off Sardinia.
The Italian navy has long been searching for the exact location of the wreck of the Roma, which went down on Sept 9, 1943, a day after the armistice between Italy and the Allies was publicly declared.
It announced the discovery Thursday after identifying the wreck using a deepsea diving robot.
An image of a barnacle-encrusted cannon was captured by the robot’s camera.
The ship was discovered about 30 kilometres off the northern coast of Sardinia at a depth of about 3,300 feet. The Roma, launched 15 months before the attack, was one of the Ital- ian navy’s most modern vessels of the period.
The 787-foot (240-metre) long, 44,000-ton ship was part of a flotilla on its way to Malta to surrender to the Allied fleet following the fall of the fascist leader Benito Mussolini and Italy’s decision to swap sides. The Luftwaffe attacked while the Roma was sailing between Sardinia and Corsica, dropping two Fritz X radio-controlled missiles, the forerunners of today’s smart bombs.
The first hit caused water to flood two boiler rooms, leaving the ship limping along with two propellers. The second detonated in the forward engine room.
The Roma quickly capsized, broke in two and sank, taking 1,352 men with it, including Admiral Carlo Bergamini, the head of the Italian fleet, and the ship’s commander Adone Del Cima. Only 622 sailors survived.
The rest of the Italian fleet sailed on to Valletta, Malta, and surrendered to Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, the commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet.