The K.u.K. Kriegsmarine, 1856 - 1918
Naval ensign of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
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A navy is defined by its mission, in turn suggested by the geography of the nation it protects. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Britain's Royal Navy assumed a worldwide scope to protect their country's vital commerce and foster its burgeoning empire. France's Marine Nationale had a twofold mission: to defend against British incursion on the Channel and Atlantic fronts, and to cover France's trade and colonial interests in the Mediterranean, against traditional foe Austria-Hungary and, later, unified Italy. The Kaiserlich und Königlich Kriegsmarine, as the Austro-Hungarian Navy was known officially, had a far more limited scope in the era under study. Its poor-cousin status in the defense establishment of the Dual Monarchy was underlined by its financial dependency: navy budgets were entirely controlled by the War Ministry (i.e., the Army) after 1865, and its top naval administrators were generally Army brass-hats indifferent to maritime matters. Nevertheless, during its brief lifespan of 51 years the K.u.K. navy produced a creditable crop of naval leaders and a few genuine heroes. Influential advocates within the government including Admiral Graf Rudolf Montecuccoli, the prewar C-in-C, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Heir to the Throne and disciple of Alfred Thayer Mahan, pushed energetically for naval expansion in the last years leading up to the Great War.
Following the reunification of Italy in 1861, the Austrian Navy was devoted primarily to coastline protection, the suppression of smuggling, and deterring the powerful Italian fleet across the Adriatic. Its scope was mostly the Adriatic -- some 400 nautical miles from north to south -- and secondarily the Mediterranean. Another specialized mission was patroling the Danube; Austria's river monitors presided over twoscore years of peaceful policing and "showing the flag," before being used extensively in military operations against Serbia and Romania during WWI. Because of the turf to be defended, the K.u.K. fleet thus consisted mostly of small, nimble ships: swift, shallow-draft cruisers and darting torpedo boats.
But as Vienna's 19th century tottered towards its champagne-sotted conclusion, the relentless buildup of the Italian fleet goaded the complacent Austro-Hungarian Empire to counter with a buildup of its own. At a leisurely pace at first, then faster and faster, Vienna augmented its battle fleet. Starting with the sensible and unambitious 3-ship Habsburg class of 1897 (10,000-tonners carrying three 9.4" guns), Austria was sucked into a costly naval competition with Italy. 1910 found the Empire (already fielding a fleet of 10 powerful pre-dreadnoughts) straining its finances to produce four mighty dreadnoughts equal to Italy's latest battleships -- on paper. The Austrian fleet comprised handsome, well-designed, and smallish ships. Building the dreadnoughts proved a technical stretch for the nation's shipyards, but in the end it was done. By the time they came into commission, the Empire they served was cracking and groaning ominously, with only 5 years left.
To service their burgeoning fleet, the Austrians developed naval facilities at several deep-water ports along the Adriatic. Pola (Pula) became the battle fleet's principal base, nicknamed "the Austrian Portsmouth." Located at the tip of the Istrian Peninsula, it had a superb landlocked harbor and one of the largest floating drydocks in the Mediterranean (map). Pola Seearsenal (naval base) is seen at left in the early 1890s; click here for awesome enlarged view. Other important facilities were located at Trieste, the Empire's shipbuilding powerhouse, located at the northernmost extremity of the Adriatic; Fiume (Rijeka) at the head of the Gulf of Istria, home of the State Naval Academy; at Sibenik and the Bay of Cattaro (Kotor), Austria's southernmost port (south of Dubrovnik in present-day Croatia), where the main submarine base was established. In 1916, Austria-Hungary captured the port of Durazzo (Durrës) in Albania, used for assembling and servicing U-boats and for probes of the nearby Otranto Barrage. The retaking of Durazzo by Allied forces on Oct. 2, 1918 was the only Allied naval battle in which U.S. forces took part during the Great War. While the coast of Croatia was a long-held crown territory, neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina was a more recent acquisition for the Habsburgs (annexed 1908). Its loyalty to Vienna was shaky; Bosnian ears were susceptible to Slav nationalist agitation emanating from Belgrade and Petersburg. Viewed in this context, the reasons for the 1914 assassination of Archduke (Erzherzog) Franz Ferdinand in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, become less cloudy and confusing.
That assassination triggered the greatest war in European history to that time, a war against Serbia recklessly provoked by Austria-Hungary -- a war which spread and persisted until it pulled down the entire dynastic system of Central and Eastern Europe like a house of cards. Under the strain of prolonged warfare, the Dual Monarchy crumbled, torn apart by the same ethnic strife and ardent nationalism which plague the Balkans to this day. The peace settlement spelled out in the Treaty of St. Germain (1919) left a rump Austria entirely shorn of coastline and four new independent successor states: Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and (on the Adriatic) the "southern Slav republic" of Yugloslavia, comprising Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, and Montenegro (re-drawing the map in Europe just as it was done in the Mideast at the same time). In the peace settlement the Austrian ships were doled out, mostly to Italy, for scrapping; deprived of both ships and ports, the new Austrian Republic went instantly from underdog navy to no seagoing navy at all. The Emperor Karl attempted to preserve the remaining ships by giving them to the new Yugoslav Republic, but Austria's old archenemy Italy exerted pressure on delegates to the Versailles peace confrence; in the end most of the ships went to the Allies as war reparations. Thus it was that many an ancient iron hull still floated in the backwaters of Italy when peace came in 1945.
The Conduct of the War at Sea
The German High Seas Fleet ended up spending most of the war in port, blockaded by the British. Germany carried out its most aggressive and sustained naval warfare by U-boat, successfully squeezing British supply lines from America and the Empire. Just so the two Adriatic antagonists, Austria and Italy, conserved their battleship fleets by keeping them in port for the most part; the Italians instituted a de facto blockade of the Adriatic even before declaring war openly in May 1915, and maintained a distant blockade thereafter. The Habsburg Empire's surface fleet was largely confined to base by a fuel shortage: she had imported most of her coal (getting her prime steam coal from Cardiff, Wales) and this was obviously impossible while at war with Great Britain and blockaded by Italy's Regia Marina.
Austrian surface operations can be summarized in one paragraph: Bombardment of railway bridges and other shoreline targets in Italy and Albania in 1915-16; a cruiser-and-destroyer foray against the Otranto Barrage on May 14-15, 1917; and an abortive sortie by the dreadnought fleet in June 1918, resulting in the loss of one Austro-Hungarian battleship. Fleet units also bombarded Italian positions in support of army operations on several occasions. Austrian destroyers, light cruisers, and torpedo boats had a far livelier war than the main battle fleet.
Limited by the coal shortage, the K.u.K. Kriegsmarine instead fought a vigorous submarine war. Its diesel-electric powered submarines claimed a number of the Allied warships operating in the Gallipoli campaign, also damaging the French dreadnought Jean Bart and sinking 2 Allied armored cruisers outright in the Adriatic. Austria provided basing facilities to German U-boats at Cattaro and Sebenico (modern-day Kotor and Sibenik in Montenegro). These southern ports were convenient to the Straits of Otranto, gateway to the Adriatic from the wider seas beyond and thus a choke point for intercepting commercial steamers.
Although the Allies attempted to block the Strait with an enormous minefield and submarine net reinforced with 3 lines of drifting warships on the surface, (the "Otranto Barrage"), their effort was only partly successful. Since Italy and Germany remained technically at peace until late 1916, German U-boats operated under the Austrian flag when attacking Italian shipping during this prelude to actual hostilities. Germany also shipped small UB-class U-boats to its ally by rail. The subs arrived in three sections and were reassembled at Trieste and, later in the War, at Durazzo. Italy retaliated using motor-torpedo boats (MTBs or, in Italian, MAS boats) and frogmen to sabotage Austrian vessels, with considerable success. Two of the Viribus Unitis class dreadnoughts, including the name ship, were destroyed by these means, as well as one Monarch-class monitor and several lesser craft. The 50-foot MAS boats carried two torpedoes each and were equipped to skip over floating booms at high speed, foiling the Austrians' main form of passive defense. In a fascinating footnote to history, Capt. Georg von Trapp (father of the Trapp Family Singers) became a war hero (sinking from his submarine, the U-5, twelve freighters totaling more than 45,000 tons, the French sub Néreide, and the French armored cruiser Leon Gambetta). Knighted for his services, Ritter von Trapp ended the war as commandant of the Kriegsmarine's Seearsenal at Cattaro Bay -- the main U-boat base.
Operationally, a unique characteristic of the Austrian fleet stemmed from the polyglot nature of the empire, with 11 separate ethnolinguistic groups. Austria's maritime capabilities had taken an enormous blow with the loss of its Italian territories: traditionally a land power, the monarchy had long relied on the Italian principalities for most of its ships and crews, and its main naval base was Venice until 1860. Following independence, in 1866 the Italians opportunistically attempted to take another swipe at Vienna by grabbing island territory in Dalmatia, resulting in their resounding defeat at Lissa. The victorious imperial crews were largely natives of the Dalmatian coast (present-day Croatia), fighting for their homeland. As the empire launched a larger fleet in the pre-dreadnought age, the fleet also contained German-speaking Austrian officers, Italian speakers from the Trieste/Fiume region, assorted Slavs, and a sprinkling of Macedonians, Greeks, and Turks. Cultural affinities and language difficulties led to functional specialization by ethnic and linguistic groups in the navy. The result has been compared to the Indian caste system, in kind if not in absolute complexity: officers were required to speak at least four of the 11 languages found in the Empire. Germans and Czechs generally gravitated to the signal corps or engineering; Hungarians tended to become gunners; Croats and Italians became deck-hands or stokers. Yet, like the far-flung empire which it served, despite these weaknesses the navy demonstrated remarkable flexibility and survival skills over the 51 years of its existence.
At the very end, reflecting conditions in the society and, indeed, in Europe as a whole, the navy was swept by mutinies, with U-boat crews being driven to duty at pistol point. A massive mutiny at Cattaro involving some 40 ships was put down harshly by a loyal squadron in February 1918. The execution of mutiny ringleaders preceded the end by only 8 months. As the fifth summer of the war ripened into autumn, the old Habsburg Empire expired on a pyre largely kindled by its own vain, bumbling quest for military glory. As the empire fragmented, ceremonies were held on Oct. 31, 1918 in which the new Yugoslav flag was hoisted over the Radetzkys and the 3 remaining dreadnoughts; for some of these ships it was not the first time they had flown a secessionist banner.
Despite the bitter clashes of the past, the old K.u.K. navy is fondly remembered, as proven by the large number of modelers, historians, marine artists, commemorative bric-a-brac vendors, and specialty websites active today. There could be no worthier object of study.
Led by the dreadnoughts, the K.u.K. Kriegsmarine fleet on exercises early in WWI. Click here for enlarged panoramic view!
If you enjoy what you see here, be sure to leaf through our dossier on the Regia Marina, for ships with innovative features and "wow" design concepts only the Italians could deliver. For a photo essay on the Imperial German fleet from 1869 right through the dreadnought era and the Great Scuttle of 1919, stop by our German Navy desk. Finally, for a fleet that can't be beat for sheer weirdness, visit our French Navy site.
Some Pertinent Weblinks