Nice Photo Tour of the Mikasa

[abaris]

Very interesting.  Actually the Italians were pretty good at shit like that.  In 1941 they severely damaged two British battleships in Alexandria with limpet mines attached by frogmen.

But they totally failed at Cap Matapan. For one because they didn't have any kind of radar, and secondly because, according to contemporary accounts, most of their sailors were drunk. The Italians may be the only nation not wanting to participate in WWII.

As far as the Motoscaffis in WWI go, Austrian commandos tried to capture one of them to reconstruct it. They were caught at the last mile. But on the other hand, our subs were better than the Italian ones. You may know the teary tale of the singing Trapp family. What's less known is that Georg Ritter von Trapp was one of the highest decorated submarine commanders in WWI.