Livorno, November 9, 1971. We are in the midst of the Cold War, and the role Italy plays on the international political scene is strategically crucial for NATO, which is why the spearhead of its Army, the Folgore Paratroopers Brigade, will be for the Soviets, in case of war, the first major spearhead to clash with.
The exercises the Folgore is subjected to are intense. We are headed to Sardinia, from San Giusto airport in Pisa, for the NATO exercise called Cold Stream.
396 Paratroopers jumping divided into 10 planes 15 seconds apart from each other. An impressive exercise, nothing like it had ever been done before in the history of Italian airborne troops and not only.
The experience gained during the Second World War had shown that mass airdrops presented critical issues in terms of jumping from planes and the subsequent reorganization on the ground of the paratrooper soldiers.
Cold Stream is used to perfect the techniques of jumping and landing of the Paratroopers, thanks to the so-called "tactical flight" and the airdrop in CARP mode (Calculated Air Release Point), allowing for the selection of less extensive landing zones, boarding paratroopers in planes by their respective units, and reducing reorganization times on the ground.
This mode required that the planes took off one after the other at such an interval that when the first aircraft arrived at the drop zone and released the last paratrooper, the Jumpmaster of the following aircraft ordered the jump to the first paratrooper on board, and so on until the last aircraft in the formation.
The flight altitude had to be very low, to escape radar detection. Only near the drop zone did the planes have to climb to reach the drop altitude, after which they had to immediately dive to return to low altitude and follow the route back to base.
The sky is crossed by the roar of a formation of transport planes: 9 C-130s of the Air Force and 1 Hawker Siddeley Andover, all of the British Air Force.
On board are the barely twenty-year-old Paratroopers of the Folgore.
It is night. Dawn is near but does not yet have the strength to illuminate the coast. Operation Cold Stream, cold current indeed.
It will be the cold current of Meloria that sweeps away the lives of fifty-two of them. A flash, a roar, and the Meloria tower becomes a witness to the tragedy.
The stretch of sea just a few miles from the Livorno coast became the scene of one of the worst tragedies that plunged the Folgore Paratroopers Brigade into complete mourning.
The ten military planes, departed from the military base of Pisa S. Giusto and headed to Sardinia to reach the drop zone of Villa Cidro, were each marked by a chalk number on the side of the aircraft. One of these never made it to the appointment.
It was Gesso 4.
The shallows of Meloria swallowed it and with it the lives of six British aviators and 46 paratroopers of the 6th Grifi Company of the 2nd Battalion "Tarquinia".
The Incident
The first to take off, at 4:55, was the Andover ("Gesso 1") equipped with the necessary equipment to calculate the CARP in flight.
At 7:00, above the drop zone of Villacidro, in Sardinia, about 50 km northwest of Cagliari, the ten paratroopers of the Saboteur Battalion jumped from the plane and, once on the ground, prepared to signal and defend the drop zone awaiting the arrival of the nine C-130s carrying 220 paratroopers of the 1st Paratrooper Regiment, 100 paratrooper carabinieri, 44 paratrooper artillerymen, 12 paratroopers of the Folgore Brigade headquarters, and 20 from the maintenance company, for a total of 396 soldiers divided into 46 per plane, along with two jumpmasters.
"Gesso 2", the first of the nine C-130s, took off from the Pisa runway at 5:41 with the legendary General Ferruccio Brandi, a young Lieutenant and gold medalist veteran of El Alamein, and since 1969 Commander of the Folgore, and another 43 paratroopers of the 1st Regiment on board.
Brandi was turning 51 years old that very day. Fifteen seconds apart from each other, only seven C-130s took off in total, because "Gesso 9" and "Gesso 10" had experienced delays.
Gesso 4 does not respond
A few minutes after takeoff, the pilots of "Gesso 5", which followed "Gesso 4" by fifteen seconds, on which 44 paratroopers of the 6th Company and two jump directors of the Command Company of the II Paratrooper Battalion "Tarquinia" were embarked, saw a sudden flame over the sea in front of them.
The first pilot then informed the formation commander, Lieutenant Colonel Scott, who in turn immediately tried to establish radio contact with all seven aircraft in flight. All responded, except one. It was Gesso 4.
Scott then informed the base and headed with his own aircraft "Gesso 8" to the presumed crash site, while the rest of the formation proceeded towards Sardinia.
At Pisa airport, the head of operations of the Folgore, Major Antonio Milani, as soon as he learned from "Gesso 8" that "Gesso 4" was in the sea, headed aboard a helicopter AB-205 of the 26th Squadron Group ALE to the location that "Gesso 5" had indicated as the probable point of the incident: the Meloria shallows.
On site, floating in a large oil slick, were spotted the paratroopers' backpacks, the aircraft's landing gear, and empty lifeboats.
General Brandi was informed of the incident as soon as he landed with the parachute and immediately set out for Livorno, while the rest of the paratroopers continued the exercise.
The families of the fallen would be officially notified by Major Dario Orrù, director of the operations room of the Folgore command.
The cause of the incident
After the tragedy, a commission of inquiry was established to investigate the causes of the incident, but the work could only begin after the wreckage was found.
From "Gesso 4" there was never any alarm or emergency communication, and although large parts of the aircraft were recovered from the seabed thanks to a crane barge from the Arsenale M.M. of La Spezia, the commission was unable to determine the cause of the incident with certainty.
From the recovery and positioning of the aircraft's sections, investigators hypothesized that the pilots, realizing they were flying at too low an altitude, attempted to pull up the aircraft, causing the tail to impact the water and the subsequent breakage of the plane.
The Fallen:
- S.Ten. Paracadutista P.M. Magnaghi,
- S.Ten. Paracadutista E. Borghesan,
- Mar. Ca. Paracadutista G. Augello
- Serg. Magg. Paracadutista C. Celozzi
- C.le Magg. Paracadutista C. Colombini
- C.le Paracadutista M. Benericetti
- C.le Paracadutista S. Bolzoni
- C.le Paracadutista A. Fiumara
- C.le Paracadutista G. Ianni
- C.le Paracadutista P. Interrante
- C.le Paracadutista S. Licori
- C.le Paracadutista F. Vantaggiato
- Paracadutista L. Angelini
- Paracadutista E. Carta
- Paracadutista A. Ciappellano
- Paracadutista M. Carasi
- Paracadutista A. Deiana
- Paracadutista V. De Marco
- Paracadutista L. Dal Lago
- Paracadutista U. De Mitri
- Paracadutista P. Dessi
- Paracadutista P. Donnarumma
- Paracadutista D. Dal Zotto
- Paracadutista A. De Vito
- Paracadutista A. D'Alessandro
- Paracadutista G. D'Alessandro
- Paracadutista G. Di Natale
- Paracadutista F. Dall'Asta
- Paracadutista M. Ferrari
- Paracadutista G. Facchetti
- Paracadutista C. Frasson
- Paracadutista S. Fumosa
- Paracadutista W. Furgeri
- Paracadutista R. Fracassetti
- Paracadutista R. Giannattasio
- Paracadutista G. Giannini
- Paracadutista B. Guidorzi
- Paracadutista G. Guarnieri
- Paracadutista A. Ginex
- Paracadutista A. Gilioli
- Paracadutista R. Liuzzi
- Paracadutista D. Matelli
- Paracadutista R. Morganti
- Paracadutista E. Quarti
- Paracadutista S. Sabatini
- Paracadutista L. Torsello
English crew:
- FLT./LT. C.G. Harrison
- FG.OFF. R. Swann Proce
- FG.OFF M. Fawcett
- F./SGT. B.D. King
- SGT. R.R. Lee
- SGT.P. Fulford
The recovery of the bodies
The maritime military department "Alto Tirreno" of the Navy began the search by deploying boats and aircraft. The rough sea and the imprecise indications of where exactly the aircraft had crashed, reported by the search personnel, hindered the operations which led to nothing.
By crossing the observation points from land of two eyewitnesses with one of the Meloria lighthouses, Majors Orrù and Milani identified a more plausible impact point. On November 14, the then Chief of Staff of the Navy, Admiral Giuseppe Roselli Lorenzini, summoned Orrù to inform him that he was directly participating in the search, also wanting to know at which point on a nautical chart at his disposal "Gesso 4" would have crashed.
The point indicated by Orrù was very close to those indicated by the pilot and navigator of "Gesso 5", who were also present at the meeting. In this new area, the minesweepers Faggio and Ontano were sent, and it was Ontano, on November 15, that identified the wreck of "Gesso 4" at about 50 meters depth.
The recovery operations began on November 17 coordinated by the Navy with the support ship Pietro Cavezzale and with the help of Carabinieri, State Police, and members of the Paratrooper Saboteur Battalion. Several days later, the ship Cavezzale was joined by its British counterpart Layburn. The bodies recovered from the seabed were hoisted onto a tugboat and brought ashore.
The young men were all identified thanks to the parachute serial numbers and the serial numbers of the weapons assigned to each paratrooper. The next day, November 18, during the recovery phases, Sergente Maggiore dei Sabotatori Giannino Caria freed himself from the rope that kept him, for safety reasons, attached to a colleague, perhaps to explore more freely the remains of "Gesso 4", but he failed to resurface. A captain of the Air Force, alerted by the diving companion, immediately dived into the sea and brought Caria's lifeless body to the surface, decorated for his act with the Gold Medal for Civil Valor with the following motivation:
With a high sense of generous solidarity and daring enthusiasm, he volunteered to participate in the difficult operations to recover the bodies of his comrades trapped at the bottom of the sea in the wreck of an aircraft, sunk under tragic circumstances. Despite the violent adversity of the natural elements, he did not desist from making repeated, risky dives, until he became a victim of his own indomitable valor, sacrificing his young life and thus binding his fate to that of the fallen comrades. A noble example of complete dedication to duty and sublime self-sacrifice.
Largo della Meloria, Livorno, November 18, 1971
Ship Cavezzale remained in Livorno until February 10, 1972. On that date, the searches were suspended. Up to that point, thirty-five paratroopers and three aviators had been found. Ship Cavezzale returned twice more to the site of the incident following reports of discoveries by divers diving near the Secche della Meloria. In the following June, during a dive in the waters of Tirrenia, Major Francesco Miglioranza found the body of another paratrooper. The incident was the cause that initiated a new cycle of searches that brought three more paratroopers to the surface.
The remaining ten bodies were never found.
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