A pair of Russian Tupolev Tu-160 (NATO: Blackjack) heavy strategic bomber this week took a cruise around the Baltic Sea. Dubbed the “White Swan” by the Russians, just 14 or so of the big variable-wing aircraft, with their 177-foot wingspan, are in service– all with the 121st Guards Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment in Saratov– making one, much less two of the planes airborne at the same time, a rare sight.
Therefore, the sortie was well-attended by NATO and Baltic state fighters.
From the Russian MOD:
Two Tu-160 strategic missile carriers performed a scheduled flight over the neutral waters of the Baltic sea.
The flight duration was more than 7 hours.
At some stages of the route, long-range aircraft were escorted by F-16 fighters of the Belgian [on a NATO Air Policing Mission out of Lithuainia], Danish and Polish Air Force, F-18 of Finnish Air Force, JAS-39 Gripen of Swedish Air Force. After the flight program, the crews of the Russian Aerospace Forces returned to the airfield.
And of course, state-owned Russian media played it up, shocked at the fact that people come out on the porch whenever you have a parade along their front lawn.
Here we see the Italian Royal Navy (Regia Marina) armored cruiser (incrociatore corazzato), Giuseppe Garibaldi around 1904. She had a curious, if brief career, and could be taken as a bridge between 19th and 20th Century naval warfare, as she tangled with both Civil War-era ironclads and deadly U-boats.
Garibaldi came from a large and interesting class of cruiser designed by Edoardo Masdea, with good speed for the 1900s (19 knots), decent armor (up to 6-inches in sections), and a hybrid armament of one 10-inch gun forward and two 8-inch guns aft, along with a varied mix of casemate guns of all types, a quartet of torpedo tubes, and a ram bow.
They were handsome ships, with orders quickly made within a decade from Argentina, Italy, Spain, and Japan (who picked up two from Argentina’s contract). As a twist of fate, the first delivered was to Argentina, who named their new cruiser, ARA Garibaldi, after the famous Italian red-shirt-wearing patriot. This has the twist that, at the same time in the 1900s, Rome and Buenos Aries both operated sisterships with the same name.
The class-leading Argentine ARA Garibaldi, Photographed by A. Noack of Genoa, probably at Naples or Genoa before her departure for Argentina. Note that the ship does not appear to be flying any flags at all. Description: Catalog #: NH 88672 Colourised by Diego Mar
Further, the first Italian-service Garibaldi was sold before entering the fleet to the Spanish, who were eager for new warships to unsuccessfully defend their overseas Empire from Uncle Sam in 1897, thus making our subject Garibaldi the third such ship of the same class to carry the name.
To help visualize the mess, here is the fortune-cookie-sized-overview of name, country, and chronological order year, with our feature ship *asterisked to keep her straight:
-ARA Garibaldi ordered from Argentina 1895 -ARA General Belgrano from Argentina 1895 -ARA Pueyrredón from Argentina 1895 -ARA San Martín from Argentina 1895 -Giuseppe Garibaldi for Regia Marina 1895, sold to Spain as Cristóbal Colón 1897 (sunk 1898) -Pedro de Aragon, ordered for Spain 1897, canceled 1898
-*Giuseppe Garibaldi for Regia Marina 1898 -Varese for Regia Marina 1898 -Francesco Ferruccio for Regia Marina 1899 -ARA Bernardino Rivadavia from Argentina 1901, sold to Japan as Kasuga 1903 -ARA Mariano Moreno from Argentina 1901, sold to Japan as Nisshin 1903
Our vessel was constructed at Gio. Ansaldo & C., Genoa, and commissioned 1 January 1901 and, soon joined by her two twin sisters in Italian service, Varese and Ferruccio, were a common sight in the deep-water ports of the Mediterranean from Alexandria to Gibraltar and back, often serving as division flagships.
Garibaldi in her original scheme, by late 1901 she carried a more muted grey scheme
It was while carrying the flag of RADM (later Grand Admiral/Naval Minister) Thaon di Revel, that Garibaldi joined in the naval bombardment of Ottoman-held Tripoli just four days into the Italo-Turkish War in October 1911. She sent a company-sized landing force ashore, one of the first modern Italian marine ops, to disable the Turkish big guns at Fort Hamidiye. It was part of a much larger assault, one of the most unsung in amphibious warfare history, and would leave the Italians in control of Libya until 1943.
Italian Navy landing companies landing on the beach of Tripoli, in October 1911 under the guns of Garibaldi and the rest of the fleet. The naval battalions would be followed by a Bersaglieri regiment, and ultimately the Italians would put a corps-sized force of 30,000 ashore that month. Source Garyounis University, ” The Martyr Omar al-Mukhtar Festival: Catalogue of Exhibition”, Arabic-English version, Benghazi, 1979, P.23. via Wiki Commons
Still, under Revel, Garibaldi and her two sisters would go on to give the Turks grief off Tobruk, in Syria, and the Dardanelles, as well as in the Aegean and the Levant. The biggest tangle of these would be in Ottoman-held Beirut. On 24 February 1912, Garibaldi and Ferruccio sailed into the Lebanese harbor and engaged a Turkish torpedo boat Ankara and the old ironclad Avnillah.
Italian cruisers Ferruccio and Garibaldi, bombarding Gunboat Avnillah & Torpedo boat Angora/Ankara in Beirut Harbour, Feb. 24, 1912
Built in England in 1869, the 2,300-ton central battery gunboat had fought in the Russo-Turkish War some 35 years previously and, while her original black powder muzzleloaders had been replaced with modern German Krupp 5.9-inchers, she still retained her legacy engineering suite which meant that she had been virtually stationary in the harbor for more than a decade.
Avnillah, in better days.
In the end, it was no contest and Garibaldi started the engagement with her 10- and 8-inch guns at 6,000 yards then moved in to finish off the old ironclad with a brace of Whitehead torpedoes at close range. Avnillah, settled on the harbor floor, ablaze, losing half her crew.
Turkish ironclad Avnillah, sunk in Beirut in 1912
French destroyer Hache in Beirut with a sunken Turkish ironclad Avnullah (Avnillah) in the background
Ferruccio, meanwhile, accounted for Ankara. During the fracas, several civilian craft were also damaged while hundreds of the city’s residents were killed or injured. The Italians suffered no injuries and sailed away to leave the locals to pick up the pieces.
Avnillah’s hulk was still visible inside the harbor mole four years later when the Royal Navy raided Beirut during the Great War.
Beirut, Lebanon. A seaplane of the R.N.A.S. Port Said Squadron obtaining hits with two 60-pound bombs during World War I. The wreck in the harbor is the Turkish Ironclad AVN-I ILAH, sunk on February 24, 1912, by the Italian Cruisers GARIBALDI and VARESE. NH 42779
NH 42780
Speaking of WWI, Italy was officially an Austro-German ally on paper as part of the so-called Triple Alliance but entered the conflict tardy and on the other side, which gave both Vienna and Berlin a bit of heartburn. On 23 May 1915, nine months into the war, Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary followed by declarations of war on the Turks that August, Bulgaria in October, and Germany in 1916.
Just three weeks into Italy’s war against the Austrians, on 17 July 1915 a group of warships under the command of RADM Trifari, whose flag flew from Garibaldi, sailed from Brindisi on a mission to interdict the railway line between Sarajevo and Herceg Novi by shelling the railroads at Dubrovnik.
While offshore of the Croatian coast near Molunat, the task force was discovered in the early morning of 18 July by the Germaniawerft-made U-3-class submarine SM U-4, commanded by Linienschiffleutnant Rudolf von Singule of the K.u.K. Kriegsmarine. Singule, who had previously managed to put a fish into the British RN cruiser HMS Dublin without sinking her, was luckier when he pumped a torpedo into Garibaldi and she sank reportedly in minutes, taking 53 of her crew with her.
Her sinking became memorialized in the maritime art of the era.
The Sinking of the Italian Cruiser Giuseppe Garibaldi, Painting, Gouache on Paper; By Charles Malfroy; 1915; Unframed NHHC Accession #: 70-671-D
Austrian propaganda painting of her loss, via Wiki Commons
Garibaldi’s flag was saved, as were 90 percent of her crew, and has for generations been a treasured relic of the Italian navy. Today it is held on public display at the Sacrario delle Bandiere del Vittoriano in Rome.
Via Wiki Commons
Of Singule, the Austrian who slew the mighty Italian flagship, he chalked up 22,000 tons of shipping while in the K.u.K and was recalled to serve in the German Kriegsmarine in WWII in a training role. He was reportedly “killed attempting to protect a woman from drunken Soviet soldiers on a street in Brünn (Brno, Czech Republic) five days before the German surrender,” in 1945.
Today, Garibaldi is at 122m just off the coast of Croatia, making her an advanced but reachable dive.
As for her 10 sisters, the Spanish Pedro de Aragon was never built while Cristóbal Colón was sunk by the Americans in the Spanish-American War. The Americans likewise sunk the Japanese Kasuga in 1945, which had long been turned into a training hulk, while the IJN Nisshin was expended in the 1930s as a test target. Of the Italian sisters, both survived WWI and served as training ships for naval cadets until they were replaced by the purpose-built sail training ships Amerigo Vespucci and Cristoforo Colombo. The original four Argentine sisters endured in one form or another through the 1930s with ARA Pueyrredón even remaining in the fleet till 1954, at which point she was pushing 60.
ARA Pueyrredon in Dublin in 1951. At this point, this pre-SpanAm War era vet was pushing her into her sixth decade at sea.
The name “Garibaldi,” naturally, was reissued to the downright lucky WWII-era Duca degli Abruzzi-class light cruiser Garibaldi(551), and, since 1985, to the 14,000-ton harrier carrier Giuseppe Garibaldi (C-551), both of which also served as fleet flagships.
Italian Navy ITS Giuseppe Garibaldi (C-551) with nine AV-8B Harrier II and one Sea King in the flight deck carrier
Specs:
Displacement: 7,350 tons, full load 8,100 tons
Length: 366 ft
Beam: 59 ft
Draft: 24 ft.
Engine 2 triple vertical expansion steam engines, 24 Niclausse cylindrical boilers, 14,713 ihp (trials), 2 propellers
Speed: 19.7 knots
Range 5,500 miles at 10 knots on 1,200 tons of coal
Crew: 555
Armament:
1×1 254 mm/40 caliber
1×2 203 mm/45 caliber
14 152 mm/40 caliber
10 76 mm/40 caliber
6 Hotchkiss Mk I 47mm/50 caliber 3-pdrs
2 Maxim MG
4 17.7-inch torpedo tubes
Armor, hardened steel, Harvey system:
bridge from 38 to 50 mm.
belt from 50 to 150 mm.
50 mm batteries.
turrets from 100 to 150 mm.
tower from 50 to 150 mm
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A few days ago, these several pallet displays of low brass 12 gauge shells by the case were five-to-six feet high and squared-off. Then, dove season hit this weekend.
Of note, if you haven’t gone on a Deep South dove hunt in September– which is often done with your best friends over a corn or soybean field while wearing shorts and flipflops and debating everything from the moon landing to politics– you haven’t lived the Southern experience.
Paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division loading aircraft for Holland, 17 Sep 1944:
Part of the epic First Allied Airborne Army, the 82nd, along with the 101st, the British 1st Airborne, as well as later Polish and other Allied units, was to make a daylight combat jump in what is still the largest airborne operation of all time, Market Garden.
SGT David Webster, E Co 2nd/506th PIR, 101st Airborne, “A Complete Wardrobe for the Holland Tourist, Sept 1944”
Men of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment during Operation Market Garden, 17 September 1944. Note the patch has been obscured by censors.
101st Airborne Division troops that landed behind German lines in Holland examine what is left of one of the gliders that cracked up while landing.
The paratroopers and their follow-on glider-borne infantry/artillery were to clear and hold the myriad of bridges in the Eindhoven–Arnhem corridor across the Netherlands while the British XXX Corps, a mechanized unit, was to come up and quickly relieve and reinforce them.
You wouldn’t know it by looking at her, but this humble police patrol boat has seen a lot.
When the British assumed control over the Solomon Islands in 1889, they recruited a small force of local police under what later became known as the Solomon Islands Protectorate Armed Constabulary. Never a very large organization, it was equipped with a modicum of surplus Martini-Henry rifles and later Short-Magazine-Lee-Enfields. During WWII, the force assisted first the Royal Australian Navy’s Coastwatchers and later the U.S. Marines, with Constabulary Sgt. Maj. Jacob C. Vouza, a 25-year veteran of the force, pitching in with both and earning a silver star (presented to him personally by MG Alexander A. Vandegrift), a George Medal, and becoming a knight of the KBE.
Sir Jacob Charles Vouza, an Island scout and local police sergeant major, in his USMC HBT fatigues, wields a captured Japanese sword.
Post-war, the constabulary became the British Solomon Islands Protectorate Defence Force and was requipped in the 1960s with SLRs (inch-pattern semi-auto-only FALs) and Sterling SMGs. After independence in 1978, the force was renamed the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force.
In 1983, the new country formed its de facto blue water navy/coast guard in the form of a single 82-foot GRP-hulled patrol boat, RSIPV Savo (02). Then, in 1988, came new Australian-built 103-foot Pacific Forum-class patrol boat RSIPV Lata (03) followed by her sistership, RSIPV Auki (04), in 1991. Mounting a pair of .50-cal Brownings to go along with a small arms locker, they carried a crew of 20, large enough to send a 6-10 man landing force ashore when needed. Alternatively, they could also transport a squad-sized element of the RSIPF’s Special Operations guys, should they be needed.
Lata and Auki were instrumental in cracking down for the first time on poaching vessels from Vietnam, China and elsewhere who were encroaching on the Solomon’s EEZ. Other missions, like destroying masses of encountered UXO and mines left over from WWII, tangling with pirates and rustling smugglers, were constant.
Then came the Solomons civil war in 1999 between the so-called Malaita Eagle Force (MEF), along with its allied Solomon Islands Field Force, and the Guadalcanal Revolutionary Army, which boiled and simmered in the archipelago until international involvement in 2003. Lata had the unenviable record of being seized in June 2000 by the MEF, who sailed the patrol boat around Guadalcanal and turned her .50 cals on rival forces near the capital of Honiara.
Eventually, a multi-national force headed by Australia moved in and disarmed not only all of the rebel groups but the police as well.
She is being replaced by a new 130-foot Guardian-class patrol boat later this year under the Australian Regional Defence Cooperation Program while Auki will be replaced in 2023. A new, longer wharf is being created at the country’s Maritime Aola Base to operate the larger vessels.
On the 75th anniversary of D-Day, we highlighted the lost Operation Neptune minesweeper USS Osprey, which went down in the early morning of 6 June 1944, clearing a way for the invasion fleet.
In that Warship Wednesday, we covered that her bell had apparently been recovered sometime around 2007 and gave a lead to the dive op that may know more about it.
The US authorities contacted the UK coastguard when pictures of the ship’s bell appeared on the internet.
An investigation was launched by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency when it was established the bell had not been reported to the receiver of wreck.
Acting receiver Heloise Warner said the agency “put the word about” that it was searching for the bell and it was subsequently left anonymously at an undisclosed location last month.
“It’s absolutely fantastic that such a poignant part of our history is back in our possession,” she added.
Osprey’s bell via MCA
It is expected the NHHC will soon take possession of the recovered bell.
Bravo Zulu, guys, and, as always, thanks for sharing! Let’s continue to save history together.
A hearty toast to those lost on Osprey, who will never be forgotten so long as their names are still written:
Lieutenant Van Hamilton
Seaman 2nd Class John Medvic
Fireman 1st class Walter O’Bryan
Quartermaster 2nd Class Emery Parichy
Motor Machinist’s Mate 2nd Class Joseph Vanasky, Jr
The “AR” in each case does not stand for “assault rifle” as those who are uninformed often think. It is, in fact, short for Armalite, the firearms company that employed a generation of incredible forward-thinking gun designers, engineers, and inventors including Eugene Stoner, Charles Sullivan, Charles Dorchester, Arthur Miller, Daniel Musgrave, Robert Fremont and even the great Melvin Johnson (inventor of the M1941 Johnson rifle series).
Established in the early 1950s as a division of the Fairchild Airplane Corporation, the latter perhaps most famous today for their A-10 Warthog tank buster attack plane, Armalite leveraged aviation industry’s advances and applied them to firearms. Their engineers registered some of the first firearm patents incorporating foamed plastics in both stocks and handguards, aluminum receivers, self-lubricating alloy gun barrels, folding synthetic buttstocks, and other developments.
Before the original Armalite company tanked in 1983, they made it from the AR-1 to the AR-180, with lots of interesting stops in between to include bolt-action rifles, 22s, and even shotguns.
In an effort to commemorate the upcoming 75th anniversary of the end of the Battle of the Atlantic next May and the Royal Canadian Navy’s role in that epic U-boat war, the Canadian Admiralty has authorised a special paint throwback paint scheme to be carried by the Kingston-class coastal defence vessel HMCS Moncton (MM708) and the Halifax-class frigate HMCS Regina (FFH-334).
As noted by the RCN, “These historical paint schemes provide a wonderful opportunity to honour the sailors of our past, embrace the sailors of our present, and look ahead to our bright future.”
Kingston-class coastal defense vessel HMCS Moncton (MM708), in her new livery
During WWII, Canadian vessels escorted over 181 million tons of cargo across the pond, sinking 27 German U-boats in the process as well as accounting for a further 42 Axis surface ships. In return, the Canadians lost 24 ships of their own during the war, along with 1,800 men with hearts of steel. Among the Canadian vessels sent to the bottom was the Flower-class corvette HMCS Regina (K234), torpedoed by U-667 off the coast of Cornwall while the brave escort was busy rescuing survivors of the American Liberty ship Ezra Weston. Regina sank in just 28 seconds, taking a third of her crew to the deep with her.
This, naturally, makes the choice of today’s Regina to carry “the old colors,” a memorable one.
Flower-class corvette HMCS REGINA (K234) circa 1942 – 1943, prior to her WWII loss.
Official caption: “Foreign-born soldiers made citizens, Washington, D.C. Sept 13, 1918. Group of naturalized soldiers, the following are represented: L-R: Front Row Armenian, Austrian, Russian Pole, Greek, Italian, Danish. Back row: Russian Jew, Turk Portuguese, German, Italian, French.”
Photographed by Pvt. Vincent L. Palumbo NARA 165-WW-74G-027
While I knew that the SEALs had a program to use surplus old 1,400-pound Mark 37 (NT37) homing ASW torpedoes in an anti-ship role to zap enemy warships in coastal/harbor raids via a hand-launch, I never knew the Navy had a dedicated Swimmer Launched Charge program. Apparently, this 1970s experimental small torpedo looked pretty elaborate. Photos via the U.S. Naval Undersea Museum.
