Italy's newest battleship never fired a shot in anger. Then Germany sank it with a radio-guided glide bomb as it sailed to surrender to the Allies.
Roma was the third Littorio-class battleship, ordered in the late 1930s after Mussolini's naval buildup because Italy feared its two existing modern battleships could not match a combined British and French Mediterranean fleet. Laid down in 1938 and launched on 9 June 1940, she was a 45,000-ton symbol of Fascist Italy's naval ambitions, armed with nine 15-inch guns in three triple turrets.
By the time Roma was commissioned in June 1942, Italy was so short of fuel oil that its largest warships could barely leave harbor. She spent her whole career shuttling between naval bases and serving as a floating anti-aircraft battery for Italian cities. In 15 months of service she made 20 sorties, none of them into combat, and never once fired her main guns at an enemy.
While anchored at La Spezia, Roma was bombed by American B-17s twice in June 1943. Near-misses off her bow let roughly 2,350 tons of water into the hull, and a later raid destroyed officers' quarters and struck her rear turret. She limped to Genoa for repairs and returned to service in mid-August 1943, only weeks before her end.
On 8 September 1943 Italy announced an armistice with the Allies. To keep the fleet out of German hands, Admiral Carlo Bergamini was ordered to take his battleships, with Roma as flagship, and sail to Malta to surrender. The fleet left La Spezia on 9 September, repeatedly changing course as ports along the route fell to German troops.
As the fleet passed through the Strait of Bonifacio between Sardinia and Corsica, German Dornier Do 217 bombers of Kampfgeschwader 100 caught up with it. They carried the Fritz X, a 3,000-pound armor-piercing bomb steered by radio after release and one of the first guided weapons ever used in war. Bergamini held fire at first, believing the distant aircraft were the Allied air cover he had been promised.
The first Fritz X to strike Roma punched through the hull and exploded beneath the keel, flooding boiler and engine rooms and starting electrical fires. As she fell out of formation losing power, a second bomb detonated deep inside the ship and set off the magazine of the number two 15-inch turret. The blast hurled the turret itself into the sea, and Roma capsized, broke in two, and sank.
Around 1,393 men died with the ship, including Admiral Bergamini and much of his staff, making it one of the deadliest single warship losses of the war. The wreck lay undiscovered until June 2012, when an underwater robot built by Italian engineer Guido Gay found it in two pieces about 1,000 meters down off northern Sardinia. The last crewman who survived the attack died in May 2025.