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HISTORY

Italian historian locates WW2 steamer below bed of Po river

The Italian San Giorgio boat had sunk in a storm near the mouth of the Po river in Italy while on patrol duty towards the end of WW2.

Published: 29 August 2018 17:38 CEST
Italian historian locates WW2 steamer below bed of Po river
The Po is Italy's longest river. Photo: Zveiger/Depositphotos

It's 54 metres long and eight metres wide but somehow the WW2 steamer had not been found since it sunk in a storm on the night of February 12th 1944. 

The German captain (the ship had been taken over by the German 'Kriegsmarine' after the 1943 Armistice of Cassibile, which stipulated Italy's surrender to the Allies) had attempted to maneuver the ship, to shelter from the storm, towards a lighthouse in Pila where a German squadron was waiting. 

The German soldiers abandoned the vessel but the San Giorgio sunk into oblivion. 

“After the rescue operations of the crew and armaments and the recovery of the coal from the hold, the Germans consented that the fishermen of Pila take from the semi-submerged ship all that was removable, so in a couple of months almost all the core structures disappeared ” Luciano Chiereghin, who made the discovery, explained to local daily Rovigo Oggi. “Only the now bare blanket and the cannon, installed in a pitch above the bridge of the foredeck, remained visible,” he added. 

As local fishermen continued to collide with the boat's cannon in the two decades after the war, they eventually requested it be removed. The port authorities in Chioggia, a seaside town south of Venice, eventually blasted the cannon off the boat.

As the delta and the beach spread in the 1970s, the sunken steamer became obscured. Chiereghin and a team of experts analyzed satellite and aerial thermal images of the delta and have been able to locate the ship's outline below the riverbed near one of the banks of Italy's longest river. 

Subsequent magnetic tests confirmed that the lost steamer is situated three to five metres below the Scana Boa beach in Porto Tolle in the northeastern Italian region of Veneto. 

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TODAY IN FRANCE

France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

France has paved the way towards paying reparations to more relatives of Algerians who sided with France in their country's independence war but were then interned in French camps.

Published: 16 May 2023 08:29 CEST
France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

More than 200,000 Algerians fought with the French army in the war that pitted Algerian independence fighters against their French colonial masters from 1954 to 1962.

At the end of the war, the French government left the loyalist fighters known as Harkis to fend for themselves, despite earlier promises it would look after them.

Trapped in Algeria, many were massacred as the new authorities took revenge.

Thousands of others who fled to France were held in camps, often with their families, in deplorable conditions that an AFP investigation recently found led to the deaths of dozens of children, most of them babies.

READ ALSO Who are the Harkis and why are they still a sore subject in France?

French President Emmanuel Macron in 2021 asked for “forgiveness” on behalf of his country for abandoning the Harkis and their families after independence.

The following year, a law was passed to recognise the state’s responsibility for the “indignity of the hosting and living conditions on its territory”, which caused “exclusion, suffering and lasting trauma”, and recognised the right to reparations for those who had lived in 89 of the internment camps.

But following a new report, 45 new sites – including military camps, slums and shacks – were added on Monday to that list of places the Harkis and their relatives were forced to live, the government said.

Now “up to 14,000 (more) people could receive compensation after transiting through one of these structures,” it said, signalling possible reparations for both the Harkis and their descendants.

Secretary of state Patricia Miralles said the decision hoped to “make amends for a new injustice, including in regions where until now the prejudices suffered by the Harkis living there were not recognised”.

Macron has spoken out on a number of France’s unresolved colonial legacies, including nuclear testing in Polynesia, its role in the Rwandan genocide and war crimes in Algeria.

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