Explosion of the battleship Benedetto Brin

At about 8 a.m. on 27 September 1915, in the roadstead of Brindisi, the Italian battleship Benedetto Brin exploded. The blast tore apart the after magazine. The aft turret with its 305 mm guns was blown into the air and fell onto the port side, and the wrecked stern section quickly went under, dragging the whole ship to the bottom. It was the greatest loss so far suffered by the Italian navy in this war, and it was suffered not in battle but in its own harbour.

Benedetto Brin, named after the nineteenth-century naval designer and minister of the navy, was one of the two battleships of the Regina Margherita class. She was built at the yard in Castellammare di Stabia, launched in 1901 and commissioned into the fleet in 1905. During the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–1912 she supported the landing at Tripoli. By 1915 she was already obsolete compared with the new dreadnoughts. She served in the 3rd Division of the 2nd Squadron, and the division’s commander, Rear-Admiral Ernesto Rubin de Cervin, flew his flag in her. Brindisi was one of the main bases from which the Italians and their allies watched the exit from the Adriatic Sea, after the fleet had lost the cruisers Amalfi and Giuseppe Garibaldi in the Adriatic in the summer.

According to Italian navy figures, 21 officers and 433 petty officers and sailors were killed, 454 men in all, among them Rear-Admiral Rubin de Cervin and the commanding officer, Captain Fara Forni. 9 officers and 473 petty officers and sailors survived, about a hundred of them wounded. Some studies give slightly different numbers of survivors, but they agree on the number of victims: more than 450 dead.

In Italy there was immediate talk of sabotage. Suspicion fell on Austro-Hungarian agents or on Italians in their pay. There was, however, no hard evidence, and a defect in the ammunition itself was also mentioned as a possible cause. The matter came up again after the explosion of the dreadnought Leonardo da Vinci at Taranto in August 1916. At the beginning of 1917 agents of Italian naval intelligence broke into the office of the head of the Austrian network at the consulate in Zurich and carried off documents that made it possible to break up the ring of saboteurs. They did not, however, settle the case of Benedetto Brin. In 2015, on the centenary of the disaster, the Italian navy officially recognised that it had been an accident, similar to those that befell ships of other navies at the time, caused by the instability of the new propellants and charges.

The wreck was not a total loss. The Italians recovered some of her 305 mm guns and mounted them on floating artillery pontoons, which defended the coast in the Venice area.