Italian Aircraft Carrier Aquila - Genesis

Genesis

Though she was not built from the keel up and never attained operational status, Aquila is considered Italy’s first aircraft carrier. She was an ambitious conversion that, completed sooner, might well have proven a formidable adversary for her British counterparts in the Mediterranean during World War II.

Following World War I, the Italian Royal Navy (Regia Marina) began tentatively exploring the use of ship-borne aircraft by converting the merchant ship Città di Messina into the twin-catapult-equipped seaplane tender Giuseppe Miraglia. Commissioned in 1927, the ship could carry as many as four large and 16 medium seaplanes and was primarily used as an experimental catapult ship for most of her career. By 1940, she was designated an aircraft transport/training ship and functioned as a seaplane tender for Italian capital ships.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Italian military and political circles vigorously debated the role and necessity of aircraft carriers in the expanding Italian fleet. Men such as Gino Ducci (Regia Marina chief of staff in the early 1920s), Romeo Bernotti (assistant chief of staff) and naval officer Giuseppe Fioravanzo championed development of a fleet air arm, the building of aircraft carriers and consolidation of the air and naval academies.

Other factions opposed these ideas, especially carrier construction, not so much on the grounds of military usefulness, but rather on cost and practicality. More than anything else, Italy’s limited industrial capacity, inadequate shipyard space and lack of financial capital prevented her from building the kind of well-balanced fleet envisioned by her naval theorists. Priority went to those ships deemed most necessary in a future conflict.

Since France was considered Italy’s most likely foe in another European war, keeping parity with her navy became a paramount concern. When the French Navy laid down the keels for Dunkerque, Strasbourg, Richelieu and Jean Bart between 1932 and 1937, dictator Benito Mussolini and the Italian admiralty were persuaded to scrap any plans for carrier construction and instead modernize two of the navy’s older battleships (Cavour and Cesare in 1933) and begin construction of two new ones (Vittorio Veneto and Littorio in 1934).

Because the Regia Marina was expected to operate primarily in the relatively narrow confines of the Mediterranean and not on the world’s oceans, the navy’s lack of a fleet air arm seemed a tolerable omission (especially given that carriers were an expensive and unproven commodity at the time). The Italian mainland and islands such as Pantelleria and Sicily were viewed as natural aircraft carriers, whose many airbases, operated by the Italian Air Force (Regia Aeronautica), could provide adequate fleet air coverage when requested by the navy.

Nevertheless, in June 1940, shortly after Italy's entry into the war, Mussolini sanctioned conversion of the 30,800 long tons (31,300 t), 21 kn (39 km/h; 24 mph) ocean liner Roma into an auxiliary carrier, featuring a flush deck and a small hangar. On 7 January 1941, less than two months after the successful British carrier raid on Taranto, Mussolini authorized a much more ambitious and extensive conversion of Roma into a full fleet carrier, capable of operating a larger air group and of keeping pace with the Regia Marina′s faster battleships and heavy cruisers.

By 27 January, however, the order was just as quickly rescinded following numerous objections from the Regia Marina. These included excessive cost; technical obstacles involving development of catapults, arrester gear and elevators; an estimated two-year development time for folding-wing aircraft; the time needed for studying the effects of air turbulence over the flight deck from an island superstructure; problems the Germans were encountering in the construction of their own aircraft carrier, Graf Zeppelin; and recent accounts of the heavy damage inflicted by German dive bombers on the British carrier Illustrious, graphically demonstrating the vulnerability of carriers operating in the Mediterranean.

Then, on 21 June, three months after losing three heavy cruisers off Cape Matapan, a loss potentially preventable had the Italians possessed their own aircraft carrier, the Regia Marina and Regia Aeronautica finally agreed to proceed with Roma′s conversion.