Giulio Cesare, named after
Julius Caesar, was
laid down at the
Gio. Ansaldo & C. shipyard in Genoa on 24 June 1910 and
launched on 15 October 1911. She was completed on 14 May 1914 and served as a
flagship in the southern
Adriatic Sea during World War I. She saw no action, however, and spent little time at sea. The threat from these underwater weapons to his capital ships was too serious for him to use the fleet in an active way.
Giulio Cesare made port visits in the
Levant in 1919 and 1920. Both
Giulio Cesare and
Conte di Cavour supported Italian operations on
Corfu in 1923 after an Italian general and his staff
were murdered at the Greek–Albanian frontier;
Benito Mussolini, who had been looking for a pretext to seize Corfu, ordered Italian troops to occupy the island.
Cesare became a gunnery training ship in 1928, after having been in reserve since 1926. She was reconstructed at
Cantieri del Tirreno, Genoa, between 1933 and 1937. Both ships participated in a naval review by
Adolf Hitler in the
Bay of Naples in May 1938 and covered the
invasion of Albania in May 1939.
World War II Early in World War II, the ship took part in the Battle of Calabria (also known as the Battle of Punta Stilo), together with
Conte di Cavour, on 9 July 1940, as part of the 1st Battle Squadron, commanded by Admiral
Inigo Campioni, during which she engaged major elements of the British
Mediterranean Fleet. The British were escorting a convoy from Malta to
Alexandria, while the Italians had finished escorting another from
Naples to
Benghazi, Libya. Admiral
Andrew Cunningham, commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, attempted to interpose his ships between the Italians and their base at Taranto. Crew on the fleets spotted each other in the middle of the afternoon and the battleships opened fire at 15:53 at a range of nearly . The two leading British battleships, and , replied a minute later. Three minutes after she opened fire, shells from
Giulio Cesare began to straddle
Warspite which made a small turn and increased speed, to throw off the Italian ship's aim, at 16:00. Some rounds fired by
Giulio Cesare overshot
Warspite and near-missed the destroyers
HMS Decoy and
Hereward, puncturing their superstructures with splinters. At that same time, a shell from
Warspite struck
Giulio Cesare at a distance of about . The shell pierced the rear funnel and detonated inside it, blowing out a hole nearly across. Fragments started several fires and their smoke was drawn into the boiler rooms, forcing four boilers off-line as their operators could not breathe. This reduced the ship's speed to . Uncertain how severe the damage was, Campioni ordered his battleships to turn away in the face of superior British numbers and they successfully disengaged. Repairs to
Giulio Cesare were completed by the end of August and both ships unsuccessfully attempted to intercept British convoys to
Malta in August and September. On the night of 11 November 1940,
Giulio Cesare and the other Italian battleships were at anchor in Taranto harbor when they were attacked by 21
Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers from the British
aircraft carrier , along with several other warships. One torpedo sank
Conte di Cavour in shallow water, but
Giulio Cesare was not hit during the attack. She participated in the
Battle of Cape Spartivento on 27 November 1940, but never got close enough to any British ships to fire at them. The ship was damaged in January 1941 by splinters from a near miss during an air raid on Naples by
Vickers Wellington bombers of the
Royal Air Force; repairs at Genoa were completed in early February. On 8 February, she sailed from to the
Straits of Bonifacio to intercept what the Italians thought was a Malta convoy, but was actually a raid on Genoa. She failed to make contact with any British forces. She participated in the
First Battle of Sirte on 17 December 1941, providing distant cover for a convoy bound for Libya, and briefly engaging the escort force of a British convoy. She also provided distant cover for another convoy to North Africa in early January 1942.
Giulio Cesare was reduced to a training ship afterwards at Taranto and later
Pola. After the Italian surrender on 8 September 1943, she steamed to Taranto, putting down a
mutiny and enduring an ineffective attack by five German aircraft en route. She then sailed for Malta where she arrived on 12 September to be interned. The ship remained there until 17 June 1944 when she returned to Taranto where she remained for the next four years.
Soviet service After the war,
Giulio Cesare was allocated to the Soviet Union as part of
war reparations. She was moved to
Augusta, Sicily, on 9 December 1948, where an unsuccessful attempt was made at sabotage. The ship was stricken from the naval register on 15 December and turned over to the Soviets on 6 February 1949 under the temporary name of
Z11 in
Vlorë, Albania. While at anchor in
Sevastopol on the night of 28/29 October 1955, an explosion ripped a hole in the forecastle forward of 'A' turret. The flooding could not be controlled, and she
capsized with the loss of 617 men, including 61 men sent from other ships to assist. The cause of the explosion is still unclear. The official cause, regarded as the most probable, was a magnetic RMH or LMB
bottom mine, laid by the Germans during
World War II and triggered by the dragging of the battleship's anchor chain before
mooring for the last time. Subsequent searches located 32 mines of these types, some of them within of the explosion. The damage was consistent with an explosion of of
TNT, and more than one mine may have detonated. Other explanations for the ship's loss have been proposed, and the most popular of these is that she was sunk by Italian
frogmen of the wartime special operations unit
Decima Flottiglia MAS who – more than ten years after the cessation of hostilities – were either avenging the transfer of the former Italian battleship to the USSR or sinking it on behalf of
NATO.
Novorossiysk was stricken from the
naval register on 24 February 1956, salvaged on 4 May 1957, and subsequently scrapped. ==Notes==