Page - 681 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The Unrestricted Submarine War 681 Austria, it was noted with considerable bitterness that President Wilson did not take these incidents into account, probably because these ships were not carrying American citizens on board. From whichever perspective the unfolding of the naval war was seen, no-one could say that the state of affairs was entirely satisfactory. Overall, only sixteen ships were sunk by Austro-Hungarian submarines through- out the course of 1916, most of which were in fact small coastal steamers or sailing vessels. This stood in clear contrast to the favourable balance of 1915, during which in the case of Italy alone, two armoured cruisers, one destroyer, three torpedo boats,and four submarines had been sunk. When the battleship Benedetto Brin was blown up in Brindisi and sabotage was suspected, the incident was considered to be the final straw. However, the Allies then appeared to gain the upper hand. It transpired that the Im- perial and Royal Navy was not in a position to prevent the evacuation of the Serbian Army to Corfu. A raid on Durrës at the end of December 1915 almost ended in fiasco. The Allies got wind of the fact that German submarines were flying the Austrian flag. The blockade of the Strait of Otranto was promptly intensified in that with the aid of cutters, steel nets were let down to great depths, with the intention of preventing sub- marines from breaking out, or at least to make it significantly harder for them to do so. Immediately afterwards, in May 1916, the Imperial and Royal submarine U 6 became caught in a net and was lost. Although the naval forces of the Central Powers were able to book some successes in the Adriatic during the further course of the year, the result remained mixed, and the increasing effectiveness of the blockade of the Strait of Otranto gave the Austro-Hungarian Navy only very few opportunities to act, reducing its role to that of a coastal protection force. The loss by the Italians of the dreadnought Leonardo da Vinci in Taranto as the result of an explosion, the greatest loss of a warship throughout the course of the entire war, could be traced back to sabotage, but certainly not to an intervention by the Imperial and Royal Navy. The submarines failed to make any significant improvement to the balance. While they made a daring exploit and on 1 August 1916 had capsized the Italian submarine Giacinto Pullino and towed it to Pula, and could count the sinking of the auxiliary cruisers Principe Umberto and Città di Messina and the destroyer Impetuoso among their successes. For its part, the Imperial and Royal Navy lost two submarines during the course of 1916. The Germans had been far more successful in this respect. Already by mid-1916, it was registered that the level of success of the German submarines in the Mediterranean in particular was extremely high, and that they were hindering the movement of Allied ships to a significant degree. When Italy declared war on the German Empire on 28 August 1916, it also no longer became necessary to sail German submarines under the Austro-Hungarian flag. However, Admiral Holtzendorff had one substantial argument on hand as to why it would still be favourable to sail the German submarines under the red-white-red flag. He claimed that if this practice were not continued, the Aus-