Conte di Cavour-class battleship
The Conte di Cavour–class battleships were a group of three dreadnoughts built for the Royal Italian Navy in the 1910s. The ships were completed during World War I, but none saw action before the end of hostilities. Leonardo da Vinci was sunk by a magazine explosion in 1916 and sold for scrap in 1923. The two surviving ships were extensively reconstructed between 1933 and 1937 with more powerful guns, additional armor and considerably more speed.
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The Conte di Cavour–class battleships were a group of three dreadnoughts built for the Royal Italian Navy in the 1910s. The ships were completed during World War I, but none saw action before the end of hostilities. Leonardo da Vinci was sunk by a magazine explosion in 1916 and sold for scrap in 1923. The two surviving ships were extensively reconstructed between 1933 and 1937 with more powerful guns, additional armor and considerably more speed than before. Both ships participated in the Battle of Calabria in July 1940, when Giulio Cesare was lightly damaged. They were both present when British torpedo bombers attacked the fleet at Taranto in November 1940, and Conte Di Cavour was torpedoed. ConteDiCavour was scrapped in 1946. GiulioCesare was used as a training ship in early 1942, and escaped to Malta after Italy surrendered. The ship was transferred to the Soviet Union in 1949 and renamed Novorossiysk. The Soviets also used her for training until she was sunk when a mine exploded in 1955. The class was designed in response to French plans to build the Courbet-class battleship. They had a 1. 5 to 2 knots speed advantage over the 20-to-21-knot standard of most foreign dreadnougts. They displaced 23,088 long tons at normal load, and 25,086 long tons at deep load. They could store a maximum of 1,450 long tons of coal and 850 tons of oil that gave them a fuel load of 850 tons.
None of the ships reached a maximum speed of 22 knots on their sea trials, despite generally exceeding the power of their turbines, despite their speed of 1.5 to 2 knot. The Italians imported the raw nickel steel for their armor from America and Britain and processed it into their equivalent of Krupp cemented armor, called Terni cemented, but there were problems with this process and suitable plates took longer to produce than planned. Construction was delayed by late deliveries of the 305-millimeter guns and armor plates as well as shortages of labor. The Regia Marina was forced to use 305- millimeter guns in the ContediCavours because Italy lacked the ability to build larger guns. The Italian Navy had a total of 13 ships in service at the time of the Second World War, but only 13 of them survived the war. The last ship to serve in the Italian Navy was the battleship San Girolamo, which was decommissioned in 1945 and scrapped in 1957. The Conte de Cavour class was provided with a complete double bottom and their hulls were subdivided by 23 longitudinal and transverse bulkheads. All three ships had two rudders, both on the centerline. The original machinery for all three ships consisted of three Parsons steam turbine sets, arranged in three engine rooms. They used a dozen oil and coal boilers, eight of which burned both oil and oil and fuel.
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This page is based on the article Conte di Cavour-class battleship published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
