HMS P311: A “SPECIAL FORCES” ROYAL NAVY SUBMARINE SUNK IN WWII

BACKGROUND

Mediterranean Sea, January 1943 We were in the middle of a world war that was fought with maximum effort and sacrifice from all parties. As with any war, every possible way to attack the enemy becomes “legal,” and all sides were in a tight race to find new technology and techniques to attack harder, attack more efficiently, attack lethally.

Italy is a country with ancient roots in the field of weapons technology even though, by WWII, it was behind because of some new Allied equipment (i.e. sonar and radar). But, Italian men were in the process of developing a new way to strike enemy fleets in the water. A top-secret device, coined “maiale” (the word “pig” in Italian), was being engineered by two brilliant Italian Navy officers, Teseo Tesei and Elios Toschi. The birth of the maiale came about with two intentions. First, Tesei and Toschi (with their team) needed to stealthily sink the Royal Navy warships and UK supplier cargo vessels lingering in the harbors of the Mediterranean Sea. Second, they intended to do so by improving the old WWI concept of the world’s first manned torpedo, the “mignatta.”

From the beginning of the war, a very small team of Navy divers had been training vigorously in a secret location in Tuscany (a very famous region for wine, not war!) perfecting