Sinking of the battleship Regina Margherita

On the night of 11–12 December 1916 the Italian battleship Regina Margherita sank off the coast of Albania. The ship was leaving the Bay of Vlorë (Valona) for Taranto when she struck two mines. About 675 men were killed and about 270 were saved. In terms of lives lost it was the heaviest loss of the Italian Navy in this war. The British chronology of the war states that the battleship sank on an Italian minefield. This question still raises doubts today.

Regina Margherita, named after Queen Margherita, widow of King Umberto I, was a sister ship of Benedetto Brin, which had blown up a year earlier in the harbour of Brindisi. Built at the La Spezia arsenal and commissioned in 1904, she was for several years the flagship of the fleet, and in the war with Turkey she fought in the Aegean. By 1916 she was an obsolete pre-dreadnought. Since the spring she had been lying in the Bay of Vlorë, where, flying the flag of Rear Admiral Lorenzo Cusani Visconti, she covered the Italian entrenched camp, the base on the island of Sazan and the barrage in the Strait of Otranto, which closed the exit from the Adriatic to the Austro-Hungarian fleet. In December she was ordered back to Taranto for a periodic refit in dock.

On 11 December a storm was raging over the bay. Admiral Enrico Millo, who issued the sailing order, left the hour of departure to the ship’s captain, Capitano di Vascello Giovanbattista Bozzo Gravina. When the storm began to abate at about 9 p.m., the battleship, escorted by two destroyers, set off along the channel between the minefields towards the mouth of the bay. Also on board was General Oreste Bandini, commander of the Italian expeditionary corps in Albania. Between Sazan island and Cape Linguetta there were two explosions, according to Italian accounts under the forward magazine and near the engine room. The ship lost steering, began to settle by the bow and within a few minutes went to the bottom. Among the dead were the captain and General Bandini. The destroyers picked up only some of the survivors from the rough sea.

To this day it is not known for certain whose mines they were. The uboat.net website, based on German records, and many studies attribute the sinking to the German minelaying submarine UC-14, which operated under the Austro-Hungarian flag. That boat had earlier mined the approaches to Vlorë, and in December 1915 an Italian destroyer and a troop transport sank there on its mines. In October 1916, however, UC-14 was transferred to the North Sea, so its mines would have had to lie in the water for several months. The Italian inquiry pointed to a different cause. The naval staff concluded that in the bad conditions the ship strayed from the designated channel and ran onto its own, Italian, minefield. Hence the version in the British chronology.

According to some sources, the Italians kept the loss secret for a long time and announced it only in January 1917. The disaster joined a long list of misfortunes of the Italian fleet, which had earlier lost two armoured cruisers in the Adriatic and, in harbour, the battleships Benedetto Brin and Leonardo da Vinci. In February 1917 Prince Luigi Amedeo of Savoy, gave up command of the fleet, and his place was taken by Admiral Paolo Thaon di Revel. The wreck of Regina Margherita was found by divers in 2005 at a depth of about 66 metres, a few miles off the Albanian coast.