Page - 401 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

On the Isonzo and in the Sette Comuni 401 modern units of the battleship fleet to Kotor. There, the Navy would have again lapsed into the slumber of inactivity for which it had already been criticised prior to May 1915 if there had not been the operations by the smaller units, in particular the submarines. The latter in particular became the pride of the Navy and naturally also dominated the headlines in the daily press. However, there was a catch : the boats were only partly Austro-Hungarian ; others had been ‘lent’ by the Germans. At the start of the war, the Imperial and Royal Navy had owned only seven subma- rines, of which only five were of a (more) modern type. In the autumn of 1914, they were relocated to Kotor, while two old boats remained in Pula. Any hopes that sub- marines ordered in Germany before the war would be completed in Kiel and delivered remained unfulfilled, however. In December, the Imperial and Royal Navy succeeded in sinking the French submarine Curie. It was excavated and put to service as the Imperial and Royal U 14. Then, the components of two German submarines were brought by train to Pula, assembled and brought under Austrian escort to the Mediterranean. This proved that submarines could be sent not only via Gibraltar, but also across the Alps. Now a deliberate confusion of a particular kind began. The fact that although Austria-Hungary and Italy were at war with each other, Italy and the German Empire were not, appeared to make no particular difference at sea. And to a certain degree, as compensation for the decision by Germany to cancel the Austrian orders and to use the submarines built in Kiel for its own purposes, Germany sent submarine boats into the Mediterranean and the Adriatic that then sailed under the Austro-Hungarian flag. On 10 June, the Imperial and Royal submarine boat named as the U 11, which was in reality the German UB 50, and which had only one Austrian officer on board, sank the Italian submarine Medusa. On 7 July, a submarine named as the U 26, which was also sailing under the Austrian flag and with just one Austrian officer among an otherwise entirely German crew, sank the armoured cruiser Amalfi, one of the most modern Italian ships of the Pisa class. In November 1915, the U 38, which was sailing under the Austro-Hungarian flag, but which was also,in fact, German, torpedoed the passenger ship Ancona off the Tunisian coast, which was en route from Messina to New York. Over 200 people died, including American citizens. This case, in conjunction with the sinking of the British steamer Lusitania to the south of Ireland, led to a vehement debate in Germany as to the justification for torpedoing passenger ships. One of the greatest proponents of unrestricted submarine war, Admiral Tirpitz, made his exit, and the German Imperial Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg succeeded in (temporarily) halting the unrestricted submarine war. In the interim, the naval war had continued to rage in the Mediterranean. An increasing number of German submarines found their way past Gibraltar, also overcoming the barriers in the Strait of Otranto and waged a war that primarily served the purpose of fulfilling German interests and plans, although at the same time, they certainly also helped to underline Austria-Hungary’s