Piloted Torpedo

Last week the eternal secret weapon reappeared in the news. At La Linea, next to Gibraltar, "a strange craft looking like the hybrid offspring of a torpedo and a launch" -- ten feet long, equipped with a seat on either side slightly abaft the beam, drawn by a propeller in the nose, gasoline-motivated -- was found on the beach. Its motor was still running and its crew had disappeared.

This report was no fantasy from the mind of an idle reporter. In World War I Italy used the MAS (motor torpedo boat), the Grillo (a strange naval tank with spike-studded treads for climbing over harbor booms), and the piloted torpedo --prototype of last week's "secret" weapon.

Exactly ten days before the end of World War I, two Italian naval officers named Raffaele Rossetti and Raffaele Paolucci, dressed in watertight rubber suits with air pouches at chest and back, and headgear shaped to look (in the sea) like drifting barrels, entered the waters outside Pola Harbor with what they called their "machine." It was a converted torpedo the forward part of which consisted of two "war heads," metal cylinders each filled with 400 pounds of TNT, and equipped with both clockwork and contact detonators. The war heads were detachable from the main body of the machine. The torpedo would make two miles an hour and could be steered. In hours of darkness, Rossetti and Paolucci maneuvered this strange craft through and over the nets and booms of the harbor, removed one of the war heads and attached it to the side of the battleship Viribus Unitis, pride of the Austrian Navy. The other war head they cut adrift in the tideway. The former sank Viribus Unitis, the latter drifted against and blew up the battleship Wien.

Both Rossetti and Paolucci escaped unhurt. They are still heroes in Italy.

Last week's "hybrid" was a development of the piloted torpedo of Pola. Reports indicated that the war head exploded harmlessly at the harbor entrance. The attack therefore failed. But it served notice on the British that their superiority in the Mediterranean will be challenged not by the wide-open sea battle every British manjack wants, but by Italian ingenuity.

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