Sinking of the cruiser Giuseppe Garibaldi

On the morning of 18 July 1915 the Austro-Hungarian submarine U-4 torpedoed the Italian armoured cruiser Giuseppe Garibaldi off the Dalmatian coast near Cavtat, in Italian Ragusa Vecchia. The flagship of the cruiser division sank within a few minutes. 53 sailors were killed and more than five hundred were rescued. It was the second loss of an Italian armoured cruiser in the Adriatic in less than two weeks.

Shelling the railway

Giuseppe Garibaldi, launched in 1899, was the flagship of Rear Admiral Eugenio Trifari’s 5th Cruiser Division, based at Brindisi. The division also included two sister cruisers, Varese and Francesco Ferruccio. A week earlier Garibaldi and Varese had covered the landing on Pelagosa. The Italians wanted to hamper Austrian supply of the troops in southern Dalmatia and the Bay of Kotor, and so from time to time they shelled from the sea the railway line that ran along the narrow coastal strip from Dubrovnik towards Kotor. Trifari had carried out the first such raid at the beginning of June.

On the evening of 17 July the three cruisers, escorted by destroyers and torpedo boats, left Brindisi. At 4 a.m. on 18 July, off Cavtat, they opened fire on bridges, tracks and railway buildings visible from the sea. After about twenty minutes a submarine periscope was spotted from Varese. The bombardment was broken off and the cruisers began to turn away.

Singule’s torpedo

The submarine U-4 had come out of the Bay of Kotor and ran into the Italian ships by chance. She was commanded by Linienschiffsleutnant Rudolf Singule, who on 9 June had torpedoed and damaged the British cruiser Dublin off the coast of Montenegro. Singule chose the flagship as his target and fired two torpedoes. One missed; the other, despite the cruiser’s turn, hit her amidships, in the area of the engine and boiler rooms. According to Italian accounts Garibaldi sank after six or seven minutes. The other cruisers left at once so as not to expose themselves to another attack, and the torpedo boats took care of rescuing the survivors. They saved more than 520 men, including the wounded Rear Admiral Trifari and the ship’s captain, Captain Franco Nunes. 53 sailors were killed, 51 according to some tallies. The ship’s battle ensign went down with her.

Consequences

The sinking of Garibaldi, eleven days after the loss of the cruiser Amalfi near Venice, settled the change in Italian tactics. Large ships stopped going out to shell the Dalmatian coast and stayed in port, and from then on the war in the Adriatic was waged mainly by destroyers, torpedo boats, submarines and aircraft. Singule became a hero in Austria-Hungary and later received the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Maria Theresa. The wreck of the cruiser, lying upside down at a depth of about 120 metres south-east of Dubrovnik, was found by divers in 2008–2009. It is protected as a war grave.