Raffaele Rossetti

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Raffaele Rossetti, creator of the first human torpedo

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.

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.

At the end of october 1918 Major of Naval Engineers 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.

In 1919 Raffaele Rossetti 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).

There they sank the Austrian battleship Viribus Unitis and the freighter Wien using limpet mines.

Working their way down the long line of Austrian battleships, the two men reached the Viribus Unitis at 4:45 am. Rossetti removed one of the canisters of TNT from the front of the torpedo and attached it to the hull of the Viribus Unitis. Rossetti set a timer to detonate the 400-pound charge of TNT at 6:30.....Paolucci hastily armed the second canister of explosives and set it free in the ebbing tide. Rossetti flooded the torpedo’s air cylinder, letting it sink to the bottom.Later they learned that the second canister of explosives, set free by Paolucci just before they were captured, had exploded against the hull of an Austrian ship called Wien, sinking it..... At 6:44 the charge of TNT detonated. Rossetti and Paolucci were surprised that the delayed explosion made only “a dull noise, a deep roaring, not loud or terrible, but rather light.” Immediately, however, a huge column of water rose into the air at the ship’s bow and splashed down on its foredeck

They had no breathing sets and they had to keep their heads above water, and thus they were discovered and taken prisoner just after placing the explosive under the battleship hull.

SMS Viribus Unitis

Indeed, Major of Naval Engineers Rossetti and his colleague Paolucci did not know that there has been a mutiny in the Austrian Navy (on the same day they departed from Venice for their mission) and that the battleship Viribus Unitis has just been given to the newly-created State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs.

They could have spared themselves the mortal danger of the assault, and hundreds of deaths. Furthermore, the Italian navy could have obtained -as "war compensation" and in perfect conditions- the battleship Viribus Unitis (as happened later, after the end of WWI, with the SMS Tegetthoff).

Medals of Honor

Medaglia d'oro al valor militare (Italian Gold Medal of Military Valor

Medaglia commemorativa italiana della Vittoria (Allied Victory Medal)

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.

See Also

• SMS Viribus Unitis
• Regia Marina
• Adriatic Campaign of World War I