Ugo Tiberio, Nello Carrara, and Alfeo Brandimarte developed GUFO for the Regia Marina in 1936-37, only for funding cuts to stall the project before the war. Night actions against the Royal Navy made radar urgent again in 1941, and field testing began on a torpedo boat that April. Production then exposed Italy's difficulty turning effective bespoke engineering into equipment at fleet scale. Just twelve sets had reached warships by September 1943. Scipione Africano nevertheless demonstrated the system's combat value by detecting British motor torpedo boats in the Strait of Messina and helping destroy one before the attackers could achieve surprise.
Chapter · 18:20-20:31
GUFO radar exposes Italy's production bottleneck
Italy develops an effective naval radar before the war, but budget cuts and slow production delay fleet deployment until combat has demonstrated the need.