Just as aircraft carriers and cruisers of the second half of the 20th century are threatened by small, missile-firing craft, so the giant capital ships of the world’s navies at the beginning of the century faced a deadly enemy in the form of small, fast, nimble torpedo boats.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Military History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Most European navies had some type of motor torpedo boat (MTB) by the outbreak of war on July 29, 1914, but it was the Italian navy, with the Adriatic Sea as a proving ground, that did the most to advance the design and tactics of this formidable weapon system.

The idea of small, mobile boats carrying torpedoes goes back to 1864, when a retired Italian army officer, Capitano Giovanni Luppis, developed a small ‘mobile spar torpedo’ or explosive charge that could be steered by two wires. It was a great improvement over the spar torpedo that was used in the American Civil War, which had the great drawback of usually destroying the attacker as well as the attacked.

A British engineer, Robert Whitehead, was so impressed by Luppis’ invention that he worked on the design and came up with ‘an automobile torpedo’ that could be detonated below a ship’s waterline. The Whitehead torpedo was further refined, and, in 1877, British boatbuilder John Thornycroft adapted it to his fast steam launches. The first boat of that design was accepted by the Royal Navy as HMS Lightning, the first seagoing vessel to be armed with an explosive cylinder driven by a compressed air engine. Lightning was still no more than a steam launch–fast by the standards of the day, but still not a very effective weapon. In 1900, however, a boat with a gasoline engine won the International Motor Boat Show Race in Paris.

Naval weapons experts were impressed with the idea of marrying the design of those fast gasoline-powered boats with some type of armament, such as an explosive torpedo. As a naval craft, however, the type had serious drawbacks. First, there was the thin steel hull, often too fragile to be much use in pounding seas. Then there was the gasoline-powered engine. To achieve the high speeds necessary to overtake massive–and very fast–capital ships, the boats’ engines had to run at maximum revolutions per minute. That meant that the engine often broke down and usually at the wrong time–like in the middle of a torpedo run. The already thin hull had to be kept narrow, for speed, and the boat’s silhouette had to be low, to make it hard to see at night.

Other small torpedo craft designs quickly followed Lightning’s example, especially those of the British, French and German navies. In 1906, the Italian Fiat company built a multipurpose motorboat armed with a 47mm gun, two machine guns and two 14-inch torpedoes. Twin 80-hp gasoline engines drove the boat at 16 knots.

As the design improved, the use of MTBs began to be incorporated into strategic and tactical military planning. In March 1915, the Italian navy placed an order with the Societa Veneziana Automobili Navali (SVAN) for two 15-meter boats powered by gasoline engines and capable of 30 knots. Armament consisted of two 18-inch torpedoes launched over the stern. They were named Motorbarca Armata SVAN and numbered MAS.1 and MAS.2. The two boats were not great successes, however, and in November 1915, they were rearmed with guns and confined to submarine chasing.

Twenty more boats were ordered from SVAN, MAS.3 through MAS.22. Built with additional weight to compensate for the fragile hull, their speed dropped to 21 knots, and the method of firing torpedoes over the stern was found to be clumsy. Nevertheless, the Italian navy pushed ahead with plans to use them as an offensive weapon in the Adriatic Sea. Each MAS boat had a crew of eight, and MAS.5 and MAS.7 were the first of the group to be fitted with 14-inch torpedoes and dropping gear.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to