Submarines: Balilla Class

[Brian James]

RM Domenico Millelire belonged to the Balilla Class of ocean-going Submarines, one of the largest Submarine Classes ever built in Italy (86 meters long, displacement of 1,464 tons surfaced and 1,927 tons submergd). During the interwar period, Millelire carried out several training cruises in the Atlantic and in the Mediterranan; in 1933 she crossed the Atlantic as a support vessel for Italo Balbo’s group flight with 24 floatplanes from Rome to Chicago and back. At the end of that voyage, Millelire and Balilla visited Boston. When Italy entered World War II, Millelire was one of the oldest boats in the Italian Submarine fleet, and thus no longer fit for ‘frontline’ service. She carried out a dozen uneventful mission till January 1941, then she was used as a Training Ship until May 1941, when she was laid up and turned into a pontoon and floating oil depot. In 1942 she was used for a couple of fuel transport missions to North Africa, being loaded with 600 tons of fuel and towed at a relatively high speed – faster, anyway, than most merchant ships – by a Destroyer. Sometime during the Allied invasion of Sicily, in July 1943, she was sunk or scuttled in Palermo Harbour. In 1946 the wreck was salvaged and sold to the Pirelli Tyre Company, that used it as a floating liquid latex storage depot (as pictured), moored in Genoa and La Spezia. In this – heavily altered – 'capacity', Millelire outlived every other pre-1945 Italian Submarine: all the thirty-odd Submarines that had survived the war had been scrapped in 1948 by order of the peace treaty, save for Giada and Vortice, kept as “pontoons” and re-activated after Italy’s adhesion to the NATO (they were scrapped in 1966 and 1967, respectively); Marea and Nichelio, ceded to the Soviet Union (both scrapped in the early 1960s); Nautilo, seized by Yugoslavia at the end of the war (scrapped in 1971); Galileo Galilei, Perla, and Bronzo, captured by the Royal Navy in 1940-1943 (scrapped in 1946, 1954, and 1948, respectively).She was the last survivor of a Submarine fleet that had numbered 115 boats in June 1940, forgotten by everyone, she was quietly scrapped in 1977.

[ivorthediver]

Curious as you say Brian , but surprised as I would have thought that they could have found a better use for all that Latex .

She is a big old girl and not exactly discreet , still as you comment part of a sizeable fleet of submarines during the war of which not a lot was said .