Pola

Pola was the fourth and last of the Zara-class heavy cruisers, following Zara, Fiume and Gorizia, and took her name from the city on the Istrian coast — now Pula in Croatia — that Italy had seized after the First World War. She was laid down at the Odero-Terni-Orlando yard in Livorno on 17 March 1931 and launched on 5 December that year; fitting out went quickly and she was commissioned on 21 December 1932. On 29 July 1934 she was formally given her battle flag in a ceremony in her namesake city.

She was 182.8 metres long overall and displaced 14,133 long tons at full load, a figure nominally inside the 10,000-ton Washington limit and in reality nothing of the kind. Two Parsons turbines fed by eight oil-fired Yarrow boilers trunked into two funnels gave 95,000 shaft horsepower and 32 knots, with a crew of 841. Alone among her sisters she was built to work as a squadron flagship, with a larger forward superstructure faired into the forward funnel to take an admiral and his staff.

Her main battery was eight 203 mm Mod 29 53-calibre guns in four turrets in superfiring pairs, behind 150 mm on the belt, the turret faces, the barbettes and the conning tower, with an armour deck of 70 mm through the centre of the ship. Anti-aircraft defence began as sixteen 100 mm guns in twin mounts with Vickers-Terni 40 mm and 12.7 mm weapons, revised in the late 1930s to 37 mm and 13.2 mm guns, and two 120 mm star shell guns were added in 1940. She carried two IMAM Ro.43 seaplanes, hangared under the forecastle and launched from a fixed catapult on the centreline at the bow.

She spent the 1930s doing the work of a showpiece. Mussolini came aboard for a naval review in the Gulf of Naples on 6–7 July 1933 and again for a short cruise to Italian Libya in March 1937. She was in the review held in the Gulf of Naples for the visiting German Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg in June 1937, and in another for Hitler's state visit in May 1938.

The Spanish Civil War gave her real sea time. She left Gaeta on 3 September 1936 for Spanish waters and began a non-intervention patrol, lying at Palma de Mallorca from 10 September to 3 October to safeguard Italian interests there. On 7 March 1939 she and her sisters sortied from Taranto to head off a Republican squadron of three cruisers and eight destroyers making for the Black Sea; ordered not to open fire but to impede them and force them into Augusta, the Italians failed to stop the Spanish commander, who steamed to Bizerte in French Tunisia and was interned. The next month, on 7–9 April, she gave gunfire support to the Italian forces occupying Albania.

When Italy entered the war on 10 June 1940 she was flagship to Admiral Riccardo Paladini, commanding the 2nd Squadron — two Trento-class cruisers, three light cruisers and seventeen destroyers. Her first operation was covering minelayers on the night of 10–11 June, and the pattern of that first summer was convoy escort to North Africa. On 6 July she escorted a Libya-bound convoy that drew in reinforcements from the 1st Squadron after reconnaissance reported British cruisers at Malta, and two days later the fleets met inconclusively off Calabria. Pola engaged British cruisers during the action; neither side scored a hit.

She was in Taranto harbour on the night of 11–12 November when the British carrier strike came in, and was not attacked. On 26 November the fleet sailed again after a British convoy, and off Cape Spartivento the following day Pola and the battleship Vittorio Veneto were attacked by Swordfish from Ark Royal and evaded the torpedoes. In the hour-long surface action that followed, two 203 mm hits disabled a main battery turret aboard the British cruiser HMS Berwick; some sources credit them to Pola, others to her sister Fiume. Admiral Inigo Campioni broke off, wrongly believing from poor aerial reconnaissance that he faced a superior force.

The fleet was reorganised on 9 December and Pola joined her three sisters in the 3rd Division of the 1st Squadron under Admiral Angelo Iachino. Five days later a British air raid on Naples put two bombs into her amidships on the port side, damaging three boilers and causing significant flooding and a heavy list. She was drydocked on 16 December and under repair until 7 February 1941, returning to Taranto on the 13th and working up with Zara and Fiume in extensive manoeuvres that March.

The fleet went out again in late March 1941 after a British convoy south of Crete, and the operation became the Battle of Cape Matapan on 27–29 March. For most of the daylight action Pola and the 3rd Division were on the disengaged side and saw nothing. After Vittorio Veneto was torpedoed by aircraft from Formidable and forced to withdraw, the division stayed on the fleet's port side to screen against a repeat. A second British airstrike failed to find the retiring battleship and instead put a single torpedo into Pola, amidships on the starboard side. In the confusion she had nearly collided with Fiume and had been forced to stop, which cost her any chance of evading.

The damage flooded three compartments, disabled five boilers and the main steam line to her turbines, and left her immobile — and, with the power gone, unable to train her turrets or use her main guns at all. Iachino did not learn of her plight until 20:10 on 28 March, and detached Fiume, Zara and four destroyers to protect her. At about the same moment the British cruiser HMS Orion picked her up on radar and reported her position. The British fleet, built around the battleships Valiant, Warspite and Barham, was 50 nautical miles away and closing, guided by a technology the Italians did not have.

By 22:10 Pola lay about six nautical miles from Valiant. Her lookouts saw shapes approaching, took them for friendly ships and fired a red flare to guide them in. Twenty minutes later the British searchlights found Zara, then Fiume, and the battleships destroyed both cruisers and two destroyers at point-blank range. Pola was left alone at first; her captain, expecting to be next and unable to fire back, ordered the seacocks opened and the ship abandoned.

Just after midnight the destroyer Havock found her, still without power in the dark. British destroyers converged, sinking the wrecked Zara with a torpedo from Jervis, then prepared a boarding party for Pola — only to find most of her crew already in the water and the rest huddled on the forecastle ready to surrender. Jervis took off 22 officers and 236 enlisted men. HMS Nubian then torpedoed her while Jervis held her in her searchlights; her magazines exploded and she sank at 04:03 on 29 March, taking 328 men down with her. She was formally struck from the naval register on 18 October 1946.