Muzio Attendolo was a light cruiser of the Italian Regia Marina which fought in World War II. She was sunk in Naples by bombers of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) on 4 December 1942. Although salvaged after the war, she was damaged beyond repair and was scrapped.
Design
Muzio Attendolo was part of the Raimondo Montecuccoli sub-class, which were the third group of Condottieri-class light cruisers. They were larger and better protected than their predecessors.
She was built by CRDA Trieste and named after Muzio Attendolo, a 14th-century ruler of Milan and founder of the Sforza dynasty.
Career
Completed in 1935, this ship served in the Mediterranean. In 1936, under the command of Captain Manlio Tarantini, she was sent to Spain to protect Italian citizens following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.
During World War II she served in the following actions: Battle of Punto Stilo Operation Halberd
At the inconclusive First Battle of Sirte, which came about as a British attempt to intercept the resupply of Benghazi, Attendolo was part of the "Close covering force" for Convoy M42.
Sent as part of the planned Italian attack on the British Operation Pedestal in August 1942, the Italian cruiser division which was denied air cover by the Germans was instead withdrawn. Passing through the patrol area of two British submarines, Muzio Attendolo was torpedoed by in the early morning of 13 August. She lost all the hull forward the first turret, but the transversal bulkhead resisted enough to save her from flooding, and the loss of the damaged part lightened the ship herself. She was towed to Messina and Naples and mostly repaired within 3 months. The cruiser , also torpedoed by Unbroken at the same time, had been struck amidships and was not repaired due to a lack of resources.
St. Barbara’s Day bombing
Muzio Attendolo was at least theoretically part of the 7th Naval division, together with two other Condottieri-cruisers, and . But the real formidable deterrent was the 1st Squadron, with all three s. All this could have been effective with classical naval warfare, but airpower soon changed things drastically, as shown in the Battle of Taranto and Naples port attacks (1940–41).
In late December, Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bombers increased their activity over Naples which had become the Italians' most important naval base. Taranto had become too dangerous to harbour major ships, but Naples was still within the range of American Liberator and British Vickers Wellington bombers. On 4 December 1942 (St. Barbara's Day), 20 USAAF B-24s of 98th and 376th Bombardment Groups, based in Egypt and armed with 500 and 1000 lb bombs from , flew to Naples unnoticed. Confused with a formation of Junkers Ju 52 transports, and flying apparently from Vesuvio, they were already over the port before anti-aircraft defences opened fire at 16.40.
Coming in from the higher terrain around Vesuvio, the pilots had underestimated the time they would need to spot, identify, and target the most important enemy ships before making course corrections that would most successfully result in hitting their primary targets. Terrestrial structures and other topographic features, from this direction, also served to clutter and confuse the pilots and their bombardiers as they tried to quickly pick out the more important enemy targets in the quickly approaching harbor. The direction and added background clutter may have also served to confuse and slow down the reaction time of the anti-aircraft defense crews who likewise had little time to identify and target the incoming bombers and resulted in these batteries only opening fire once the B-24s were on top of them. The B-24 flight had hoped to find and hit Italian battleships in the harbor. However, the direction of the air-attack had put the B-24s out of position for a bombing run on them. Even though the B-24s current flight path could not be modified enough to effectively strike at the battleships, there were other important ships in the harbor that were more vulnerable, less well defended and within the bombers current flight path. Therefore, the crews of the B-24s set their sights and made their bombing runs on the cruisers of the 7th Division.