# Talk:Italian battleship Leonardo da Vinci

sources:
http://www.ussmissouri.com/Battleship-Italian.htm and
http://www.hazegray.org/navhist/battleships/ital_dr.htm
Zeimusu | (Talk page) 04:55, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
Cause of loss
Many Navies of that era lost one or more ships due to magazine explosions when not being fired at.  Almost certainly this was due to instability of the propellant used in the shells (cordite or equivalent)which could spontaneously decomplose in a run-away reaction.  Many Navies tended to go for a less technical diagnosis of sabotage, but they were almost certainly wrong (remember the Maine ?)

But how many of those ships (including the Maine) are later found listed as sunk by sabotage in documents seized from the office of an enemy nation's spy master? That would tend to lend credence to the claims of Austro-Hungarian sabotage. I am, of course, referring to the incident in 1917 in which Italian operatives broke into the Austrian consulate in Zurich, broke into the safe of a known intelligence operative, and seized documents confirming that the battleships Leonardo da Vinci and Benedetto Brin had indeed been sunk by Austro-Hungarian saboteurs. (Taken from Charles W Koburger Jr's The Central Powers in the Adriatic, 1914-1918: War in a Narrow Sea). To use your example, that would be the equivalent of finding documents proving the Spanish were responsible for sinking the Maine after all. SpudHawg948 (talk) 22:38, 20 July 2010 (UTC)