Italian aircraft carrier Aquila

RN Aquila at La Spezia in 1951, just before being scrapped
History
Italy
Name:	Aquila
Ordered:	1941
Laid down:	1941
Fate:	Taken over by Germany
Germany
Name:	Aquila
Operator:	Kriegsmarine
Fate:	Disabled by Italian commando frogmen and scrapped in 1952
Status:	Scrapped
General characteristics
Type:	Aircraft carrier
Displacement:	23,500 long tons (23,900 t) (standard) 27,800 long tons (28,200 t) (full load)
Length:	235.5 m (772 ft 8 in)
Beam:	30 m (98 ft 5 in)
Draft:	7.3 m (23 ft 11 in)
Installed power:	151,000 shp (113,000 kW)
Propulsion:	4 × geared steam turbines 8 × boilers 4 × shafts
Speed:	30 kn (56 km/h; 35 mph)
Range:	5,500 nmi (10,200 km; 6,300 mi) at 18 kn (33 km/h; 21 mph)
Complement:	1,420 (107 officers)
Armament:	8 × 135 mm (5.3 in)/45 cal guns 12 × 65 mm (2.56 in)/64 cal guns 132 × 20 mm (0.79 in)/65 cal anti-aircraft
Armor:	Deck: 8 cm (3.1 in)
Aircraft carried:	51

Aquila (Italian language: "Eagle") was an Italian aircraft carrier converted from the trans-Atlantic passenger liner SS Roma during World War II. Work on Aquila began in late 1941 at the Ansaldo shipyard in Genoa and continued for the next two years. With the signing of the Italian armistice on 8 September 1943, however, all work was halted and the vessel remained unfinished. Aquila was eventually scrapped in 1952.

Aquila was Italy’s first aircraft carrier although it was not built from the keel up as such, and was never completed. It was an ambitious conversion that might have changed the balance of power in the Mediterranean during World War II had it entered service.

Following World War I, the Italian Royal Navy (Regia Marina) began exploring the use of ship-borne aircraft by converting the merchant ship Città di Messina into the twin-catapult-equipped seaplane tender Giuseppe Miraglia. Commissioned in 1927, the ship could carry as many as four large and 16 medium seaplanes and was primarily used as an experimental catapult ship for most of her career. By 1940, she was designated an aircraft transport/training ship and functioned as a seaplane tender for Italian capital ships.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Italian military and political circles vigorously debated the role and necessity of aircraft carriers in the expanding Italian fleet. Gino Ducci (Regia Marina chief of staff in the early 1920s), Romeo Bernotti (assistant chief of staff) and naval officer Giuseppe Fioravanzo all championed development of a fleet air arm, the building of aircraft carriers and consolidation of the air and naval academies. Other factions opposed these ideas, especially carrier construction, not so much on the grounds of military usefulness, but rather on cost and practicality. More than anything else, Italy’s limited industrial capacity, inadequate shipyard space and lack of financial capital prevented her from building the kind of well-balanced fleet envisioned by her naval theorists. Priority went to those ships deemed most necessary in a future conflict.