Italian warship sunk by Hitler located after 70 years

Almost seven decades after it was sunk by German aircraft during the Second World War, an Italian battleship containing the bodies of 1,352 seamen has been discovered on the sea floor off Sardinia.

The Italian navy has long been searching for the exact location of the wreck of the Roma, which went down on September 9, 1943, a day after the armistice between Italy and the Allies was publicly declared.

It announced the discovery on Thursday after identifying the wreck using a deep-sea diving robot. An image of a barnacle-encrusted cannon was captured by the robot's camera.

The ship was discovered around 16 nautical miles off the northern coast of Sardinia at a depth of around 3,300 feet. The Roma, launched 15 months before the attack, was one of the Italian navy's most modern vessels of the period. Its guns had a range of 26.6 miles, half a mile more than Japanese guns.

The 787ft long, 44,000 ton ship was part of a flotilla on its way to Malta to surrender to the Allied fleet following the fall of the fascist leader Benito Mussolini and Italy's decision to swap sides. The Luftwaffe attacked while the Roma was sailing between Sardinia and Corsica, dropping two Fritz X radio-controlled missiles, the forerunners of today's smart bombs.

The first hit caused water to flood two boiler rooms, leaving the ship limping along with two propellers. The second detonated in the forward engine room, causing a huge explosion.

The Roma quickly capsized, broke in two and sank, taking 1,352 men with it, including Admiral Carlo Bergamini, the head of the Italian fleet, and the ship's commander Adone Del Cima. Only 622 sailors survived.

The rest of the Italian fleet sailed on to Valletta, Malta and surrendered to Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, the commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet.