Sinking of the cruiser Amalfi

At dawn on 7 July 1915 in the northern Adriatic, about 20 nautical miles from Venice, a submarine designated as the Austro-Hungarian U-26 torpedoed the Italian armoured cruiser Amalfi. The ship capsized and quickly sank. In reality the attacker was the German UB-14 with a German crew. It was the first loss on this scale for the Italian navy in the war.

Amalfi, a ship of the Pisa class commissioned in 1909, was one of the most modern Italian armoured cruisers. At the end of June 1915, together with her sister ship Pisa and two other armoured cruisers, she was transferred from Taranto to Venice. After the Austro-Hungarian raids on the Italian coast in May and June, the cruisers were to strengthen the defence of the northern Adriatic and deter the enemy from further raids. On the night of 6–7 July the Italian ships put to sea. Amalfi, commanded by Captain Giacomo Riaudo and escorted by two torpedo boats, was supporting a group of eleven destroyers and torpedo boats reconnoitring the northern Adriatic, according to some sources as far as the vicinity of the Austro-Hungarian fleet base at Pola.

UB-14 was a small submarine of the UB I type, with a crew of fourteen. Taken apart, she had come by rail from Germany to Pola, where she was assembled. She was commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Heino von Heimburg, who a month earlier, in another boat, had sunk the Italian submarine Medusa. Germany and Italy were formally not yet at war with each other, because Italy had declared war only on Austria-Hungary. German submarines in the Adriatic were therefore given Austro-Hungarian numbers and attacked the Italians under the Austro-Hungarian flag. Amalfi was the first major success of this flotilla.

The torpedo struck the cruiser on the port side, in the area of the boiler rooms. The ship quickly heeled over, and attempts to pump out the water were of no avail. The crew abandoned her in good order, the officers last. According to Italian accounts Amalfi turned turtle and sank after about ten minutes, though some sources speak of a longer time. The escorting torpedo boats rescued 682 men. The number of victims varies by source: from 67 to 73 killed and missing. UB-14 got away undamaged.

The loss of a modern cruiser a few weeks after Italy entered the war was a heavy blow for the Italians. Like the French after the sinking of the cruiser Léon Gambetta in April, the Italians learned that in the narrow Adriatic large ships were easy targets for submarines. From then on, for many months, the remaining armoured cruisers at Venice rarely left port. Soon afterwards Heimburg took his boat across the Mediterranean to Turkey, where in August he sank the British troop transport Royal Edward.