Two submarines almost never see each other. They hunt blind, listening through steel, and they spend their war stalking ships on the surface, not each other beneath it. On the morning of 5 July 1941, that rule broke in the waters off Mykonos. The Italian submarine Jantina was running on the surface when a British boat spotted her hull against the dawn light and turned to attack. What followed was one of the rarest engagements of the entire war, and for forty-eight men aboard the Jantina, it became the last thing that happened.
The Jantina was launched in 1932, one of seven Argonauta-class submarines built for the Regia Marina, Italy's royal navy, in the lean years between the wars. She was a modest vessel by the standards of the conflict to come: two diesel engines pushed her to 14 knots on the surface, electric motors carried her at 8 knots when submerged, and she bristled with six torpedo tubes, a single 102-millimeter deck gun, and a pair of light anti-aircraft machine guns. Built at La Spezia, she spent her early career in the Mediterranean and played a small supporting role in the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s. None of it marked her out. She was an ordinary boat in an ordinary class, the kind of vessel that fills a fleet's order of battle without making headlines.
By July 1941 the Aegean had become a hunting ground. The Jantina had sailed from the Italian-held island of Leros with forty-eight men aboard. Patrolling nearby was the British submarine HMS Torbay, whose captain caught sight of the enemy boat some four nautical miles ahead and moved to strike. At 20:16, Torbay loosed a spread of six torpedoes from fifteen hundred yards. The first two slid harmlessly past. The next found the Jantina, and the explosion tore her open. She went down fast in deep water. Submarine fighting submarine on the surface was almost unheard of; the war was full of cruelty, but few of its moments were as unlucky as being caught in the open by another boat that should never have seen you at all.
Of the forty-eight men aboard, only six lived. Two officers and four petty officers survived the sinking and the long hours that followed, swimming through the open Aegean toward land. They came ashore on Delos, the sacred islet of antiquity, after more than six hours in the water. The other forty-two did not make it. They were sailors of the Regia Marina, most of them young, lost in a few violent minutes far from home. It is worth pausing on that number rather than passing over it. Behind it are forty-two families that received the worst kind of letter, and six exhausted men who carried the memory of that morning for the rest of their lives.
For eighty years the Jantina lay where she fell, in 103 meters of water near Mykonos, her location unknown. In November 2021, Greek divers found her wreck on the seabed, and the discovery made news in both Greece and Italy. Later survey work identified her bow, blown apart from the rest of the hull by the torpedo that killed her. A war grave does not ask to be raised. The Jantina rests in the dark, intact in memory if not in steel, a quiet marker over the place where a rare and terrible thing happened, and where most of her crew remain. The sea keeps them now.
The Jantina wreck lies near 37.35°N, 25.33°E, in the strait between Mykonos and Delos, at a depth of 103 meters. Survivors came ashore on Delos, just southwest of the position. From altitude in clear Aegean weather, the cluster of Mykonos, Delos, and Rheneia is easy to pick out. The nearest field is Mykonos Airport (LGMK), a few miles northeast; Naxos (LGNX) and Santorini (LGSR) lie within a short hop to the south.