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Maiale (Pig)

1939 WORLD WAR 2

The story of Maiale (pig)

By 1935 it was painfully clear to Italian authorities that the Italian Navy claimed a weak position in the Mediterranean. The Italian navy stationed in Taranto was surrounded by British fleets in Malta, the coast of Sicily, Gibraltar in Spain and Alexandria near the Suez Canal. In addition, the French Navy maintained an efficient fleet in Toulon.

By default, Italy is the third naval power in Mediterranean waters, has more battleships than Italy, and did not deploy any aircraft carriers that were crucial to the Allied wars in World War II. Aircraft from the Royal Navy's aircraft carrier fleet attacked the Italian fleet at Taranto in 1940, sinking one battleship and damaging at least two others.

In 1939, Mailae's 10th Light Fleet, a natural-born team of specialists, now equipped with new scuba gear, devised a cost-effective plan for manned unprotected and unsuspecting Torpedoes attack enemy ships. The concept of the "human torpedo" was originally conceived as a way to counteract Allied capital ships without direct combat by Italian warships. The torpedo was designed to look like any standard WWII torpedo ammunition, but was specially modified to carry a pair of divers that, when they reached a specific target, fired an explosive warhead to sink an anchored ship. The round nose of the torpedo consisted of a warhead depot filled with several pounds of TNT. Behind the warhead is the shielded control panel of the main pilot, who sits on the torpedo like a horse.

The driver's back is the ballast pump housing, behind which sits the auxiliary diver, who grips the housing during the dive and the actual run. A toolbox is located behind the passenger seat. Both divers sit in the center of the diving tank. The tail of the torpedo contains the engine, propeller and dive/rudder aircraft.

These "frogmen" will dive and approach the target ship, remove the warhead, and hang the TNT charge under the ship's keel. The fee can be set up to a delay of up to 2.5 hours, which will allow the diver to escape.

The charge will then explode, damaging (hopefully) the enemy ship and knocking it back from combat for a while - or destroying it entirely.

Torpedoes proved difficult to handle in practice, and many were lost during testing, sinking into the water like stones. Her tendency to sink led to the ship being nicknamed "The Pig." The warhead is mounted on the bow of the torpedo and consists of 1 x 300 kg or 2 x 150 kg charges, connected by clips. The pilot controls the craft using a joystick control system attached to the seaplane and the stern rudder behind the propeller.

The initial delivery system involved the use of pressure vessels installed on existing Italian Navy submarines to allow diving teams to enter the water undetected while the submarine was still submerged. The first two attacks on the British fleet in Malta using this method failed when British aircraft sank one submarine and opened fire on another.

In December 1941, the three human torpedo crew of the Italian submarine Sirce launched an attack on the British near Alexandria and attacked two battleships - HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Valiant, and the tanker Sargona. All three ships were damaged and sank. However, the port was so shallow that the ship's superstructure was well above the waterline, causing all three Italian torpedo crew members to be found and captured. In any case, the damage had already been done two weeks earlier, when a German U-boat sank the battleship HMS Barham - which basically left no Allied battleships in the Mediterranean against the Axis fleet.

Alarmed by the changing fortunes, the British hoped to fool the Axis by using tarpaulins to hide damage to their ships while secret repairs were underway. The crew also continued their normal activities on the upper deck, as if their troops were ready to fight.

With so few ships operating in the area, the British government knew that unless the ruse was successful, the Mediterranean theater would be replaced by German and Italian warships.

For the next three years, the 10th regiment fought at Gibraltar against an old Italian merchant ship, the Dlterra, which was anchored a mile away in a Spanish port in the Bay of Gibraltar. The ship was converted to launch human torpedoes through a hatch cut six feet below the ship's waterline. This leaves combat swimmers and their vehicles coming and going relatively unnoticed.

The ship's original crew was replaced by men from the 10th Regiment, and the torpedoes were transported under the guise that they were nothing more than boiler tubes. In October 1942, three crew members were launched from the Dlterra, causing the sinking of three Allied merchant ships. They found it easier to attack merchant ships than against British warships, which were of course better protected than merchant ships.

Italian battle swimmers damaged or sank 42,000 ton Allied ships around Gibraltar, and the British Royal Navy could never find a secret base on the Italian ship Dlterra.

In September 1943, the Italians formally surrendered to the Allies under increasing casualties, domestic political pressure, and the sheer military might of the Allied Powers moving north across Italy. Some of Melay's men remained loyal to the ousted Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, while others defected to serve the Allies in the Royal Navy.

The British used Italian combat swimmers to develop their underwater power. Thus, the Italian "Pig" became part of naval history, and the war in Europe ended in mid-1945.

However, the concept of the manned torpedo continued into the Cold War years, leading to the design of the CE2F/X100. Capable of carrying two operators and taking them to a distance of 50 miles underwater, the CE2F/X100 features full GPS, autopilot and an optional built-in launcher capable of firing up to 5 mini torpedoes.