RN Roma

In the 1930s, as the naval treaties that had limited battleship construction began to fray, Italy resolved to build a fleet of fast, modern capital ships worthy of its ambition to dominate the Mediterranean — the Mare Nostrum of Fascist rhetoric. The result was the Littorio class (also called the Vittorio Veneto class), among the finest battleships any nation produced and the pride of the Regia Marina.

Roma was the third ship of the class to be completed, laid down at the Cantieri Riuniti dell'Adriatico in Trieste and commissioned in June 1942. By the time she joined the fleet, however, the strategic situation that had justified her construction was already slipping away — fuel was desperately short, Allied air and naval power was rising, and the great surface battles the class had been designed to win were no longer being fought.

Roma was a genuinely modern and powerful design. Her main armament of nine 381mm (15-inch) guns in three triple turrets fired an exceptionally heavy, high-velocity shell, and she was protected by a sophisticated armour scheme and the distinctive Italian Pugliese system of underwater torpedo defence. Capable of around 30 knots, she combined the firepower of a battleship with the speed of a battlecruiser.

Her lines were widely admired — clean, balanced and purposeful — and in a straight fight she could hold her own against almost any contemporary. Yet the class shared the era's universal weakness: like every battleship of her generation, she had been conceived for a war of gun duels between fleets, and was poorly prepared for the new threat that would ultimately destroy her — the aircraft, and the guided weapon.

The Regia Marina's chronic fuel shortage compounded the problem. For much of her short career Roma swung at anchor or made only limited sorties, conserving the precious oil the Italian fleet never had in sufficient quantity, and she never once fired her great guns at an enemy warship.

Roma was one of three completed sisters. The name ship Littorio (later renamed Italia after the fall of Fascism) and Vittorio Veneto bore the brunt of the Regia Marina's surface war, fighting at engagements such as Cape Spartivento, the disastrous night action off Cape Matapan, and the convoy battles of the Sirte. A fourth ship, Impero, was never completed.

Together the class represented Italy's bid for a modern battle fleet — fast, well-armed and handsome ships that looked every inch the part. But hamstrung by fuel shortages, the lack of radar in the early war, and the absence of naval air power, the class never achieved the decisive results its designers had envisaged.

Roma served chiefly as a fleet flagship, and her active career was cut short before she could prove herself in a surface action. Her fate was sealed not in battle with another fleet, but by the Italian surrender. Following the armistice of 8 September 1943, the Italian fleet was ordered to sail from La Spezia to Malta to surrender to the Allies, denying the ships to the Germans.

On 9 September 1943, off the coast of Sardinia, the fleet was attacked by 11 Dornier Do 217 bombers of Kampfgeschwader 100, each carrying the Fritz X — a 1,362 kg radio-guided armour-piercing glide bomb, one of the world's first precision-guided weapons. One bomb struck Roma at about 15:45 and passed through the hull; a second penetrated near the forward magazines and detonated the No. 2 turret magazine. The catastrophic explosion blew the turret overboard, broke the ship in two, and she capsized and sank within minutes, taking with her 1,393 of her ~1,850 crew, including the fleet commander, Admiral Carlo Bergamini.

Roma thus earned a grim place in history: the first capital ship ever sunk by a guided weapon, destroyed not by enemy guns but by a new technology that announced, as starkly as anything in the war, the end of the battleship's long reign.

Her killer was the Dornier Do 217 and its radio-guided Fritz X — a weapon against which a battleship’s vast armour was almost irrelevant, since the bomb fell from beyond the reach of her guns and steered itself down onto her deck. In a single afternoon off Sardinia the future of naval warfare had arrived, and the long age of the big-gun capital ship had begun to end.

RN Roma was among the most beautiful and powerful battleships of her age — a fast, heavily armed ship that embodied the Regia Marina's ambition to rule the Mediterranean. Yet she never fired her main guns at an enemy ship, her career strangled by fuel shortages and the changing nature of war at sea.

Her destruction on the way to surrender, at the hands of a guided bomb, made her a symbol of two endings at once: the collapse of Fascist Italy's naval dreams, and the dawn of the precision-guided age that would render the battleship obsolete. The wreck of Roma, discovered on the seabed in 2012, remains a war grave and one of the most poignant relics of Italy's war at sea.

• Roger Chesneau (ed.), Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships 1922–1946 (Conway Maritime Press).
• Aldo Fraccaroli, Italian Warships of World War II (Ian Allan).
• Erminio Bagnasco & Augusto de Toro, The Littorio Class: Italy’s Last and Largest Battleships (Seaforth).