Ettore Manni wears a Panerai Radiomir

On the night of 18 December 1941, three Italian manned torpedoes slipped into Alexandria harbor and disabled two British battleships. Luigi Durand de la Penne rode one of them the hard way: his diver, Emilio Bianchi, lost his grip when the machine dived, and de la Penne wrestled the slow-running torpedo against the hull of HMS Valiant alone. Captured and held aboard the ship he had just mined, he warned her captain in time to clear the crew. The Valiant (1962), a British-Italian production directed by Roy Ward Baker, restages it with Ettore Manni as de la Penne, Roberto Risso as Bianchi, and John Mills as the captain. In March 1945 the real captain, by then Admiral Morgan, pinned the Medaglia d'Oro al Valor Militare on de la Penne himself.

The watch on Manni's wrist is documented frame by frame: a Rolex-Panerai 3646, and a rare late configuration. Early 3646s hung from soldered wire lugs that tore out of the case under hard use, so Panerai produced replacement middle cases with lugs carved from the same block of steel, and it is this straight-lugged version the film shows, in profile before the mission, again after it, and in close quarters during an interrogation in the ship's anchor chain locker. Bianchi wears a Rolex-Panerai too. The 47 millimeter cushion case was the same watch the real Decima Flottiglia frogmen took into harbors like Alexandria.

De la Penne finished his career an admiral. The Italian Navy launched a destroyer named for him in 1993.