Raid on Pula 1918
Recorded location from Wikidata; battle sites are often approximate.
Key facts
| Date | 1 November 1918 | Wikidata |
|---|---|---|
| Year | 1918 | Wikidata P585 (point in time) |
| Era | World War I era (1914–1918) | derived from year |
| Location | Croatia | Natural Earth (modern borders) |
| Continent | Europe | Natural Earth |
| War / conflict | Adriatic Campaign of World War I | Wikidata P361 |
| Participants | Kingdom of Italy, State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs | Wikidata P710 |
| Coordinates | 44.8767, 13.8075 | Wikidata P625 |
About the battle
The raid on Pula was an Italian Navy operation conducted during the night of 31 October – 1 November 1918, at the end of World War I. It was carried out by frogmen Lieutenant Colonel Raffaele Rossetti and Raffaele Paolucci, who used the Mignatta human torpedo to sink the former flagship of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, the SMS Viribus Unitis. She was anchored, with several other vessels, in the Adriatic port of Pula–the main naval base of Austria-Hungary. The raid succeeded in sinking the flagship and the abandoned passenger ship Wien, which had been used as a floating barracks until a few days before the raid. An estimated 300–400 crew members were killed when Viribus Unitis sank.
The raid took place during the dissolution of Austria-Hungary and the collapse of its armed forces at the Italian Front, which led the Austro-Hungarian command to request and negotiate the Armistice of Villa Giusti days later. In those circumstances, the Italian government ordered its armed forces to continue to advance as far as possible to occupy the territory that the Allies of World War I promised to Italy under the 1915 Treaty of London in order to entice Italy to join the war.
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Raid on Pula (revision 1375514461), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes: excerpted from the article lead section; shortened by selecting paragraphs and trimming at a sentence boundary; formatting and citations removed. No text added.
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Other battles of the Adriatic Campaign of World War I
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