The frogmen adjusted their oxygen masks and swam toward ships bearing their own nation's flag—ships they had orders to destroy.

The Frogmen of Bari: When Italian Divers Crippled Their Own Fleet

The forgotten sabotage mission that handed Mussolini's navy to the Allies

Italian combat swimmers sabotaged their own navy's ships after Italy switched to the Allied side in WWII.

The harbor of Bari lay black and still at 0200 hours on June 15, 1944. Beneath the oily Mediterranean surface, Lieutenant Commander Eugenio Wolk adjusted his oxygen rebreather and checked his magnetic limpet mine one final time. He was about to destroy warships bearing his own nation's flag.

Four months earlier, Italy had switched sides. The armistice had split the country in two—the south with the Allies, the north under German occupation. Now the Kriegsmarine controlled what remained of the Regia Marina's proudest vessels in the Adriatic, crewed by reluctant Italian sailors under German guns.

The mission seemed impossible. Six Italian frogmen—veterans of the elite Decima Flottiglia MAS, the same unit that had crippled British battleships at Alexandria—would swim into the heavily defended harbor of Trieste (with the operation staged from Bari) and attach explosives to ships now flying Nazi ensigns. They would destroy the vessels they had once served aboard.

Wolk led his team through the harbor's submarine nets, their black rubber suits invisible in the moonless water. The Germans had learned to fear Italian combat swimmers; searchlights swept the surface at irregular intervals.…

💡 The same Italian frogman unit that crippled British battleships at Alexandria in 1941 later trained British Royal Navy divers—who used those techniques against the Germans.