Italian destroyer Quintino Sella


Quintino Sella was the lead ship of her class of four destroyers built for the Regia Marina in the 1920s. Completed in 1926, she served in World War II.

Design and description

The Sella-class destroyers were enlarged and improved versions of the preceding and es. They had an overall length of, a beam of and a mean draft of. They displaced at standard load, and at deep load. Their complement was 8–9 officers and 144 enlisted men.
The Sellas were powered by two Parsons geared steam turbines, each driving one propeller shaft using steam supplied by three Thornycroft boilers. The turbines were rated at for a speed of in service, although Quintino Sella reached a speed of from during her sea trials while lightly loaded. The ships carried enough fuel oil to give them a range of at a speed of.
Their main battery consisted of four [120 mm Italian naval gun|] guns in one twin-gun turret aft of the superstructure and one single-gun turret forward of it. Anti-aircraft (AA) defense for the Sella-class ships was provided by a pair of [QF 2 pounder naval gun|] AA guns in single mounts amidships and a pair of machine guns. They were equipped with four torpedo tubes in two twin mounts amidships. The Sellas could also carry 32 mines.

Construction and career

Quintino Sella was laid down by Pattinson at their Naples shipyard on 12 October 1922, launched on 25 April 1925 and commissioned on 25 March 1926.

Fate

In the afternoon of 11 September 1943 during Operation Achse, at 4:50 p.m., S 54 stopped the Italian steamer Pontinia about 30 nm south of Venice and she was taken as a prize. At 5:45 p.m., the approaching Quintino Sella, which was actually on her way to Taranto to surrender to the British, was sunk with two torpedoes from the Kriegsmarine S-boats S 54 under tactical leader Oberleutnant zur See Klaus-Degenhard Schmidt and S 61 under Oberleutnant zur See Axel von Gernet. The captain Corrado Cini, seriously wounded, and most of the survivors were rescued by order of Schmidt and brought to Pontinia and Leopardi, others were rescued later by Italian fishing boats. A total of 27 crew members of the ship perished, but also many of the 300 civilians from Venice, which Quintino Sella had on board.
In 1956, an unsuccessful attempt was made to recover the ship. The wreck was again identified in 1972, in good condition, and was partially dismantled to recover metals.