Page - 746 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

746 Kerensky Offensive and Peace Efforts victories on the part of the Navy and not least by the surface vessels, the Army High Command was anything but satisfied with the Navy. The controversy had been smoul- dering for a long time and had intensified when Conrad had demanded an operation by the Commander of the Fleet Admiral Haus during preparations for the South Ty- rol offensive in the second half of March 1916 in order to deliver a telling blow to the Italians. Haus had rejected this request and had relied in the process on a paper from July 1915, according to which the High Seas Fleet would not be capable, even with the full utilisation of the range of its guns, of providing the left flank of the Austro-Hun- garian land forces with any noteworthy support.1723 If there had been a possibility of supporting the land forces, however small, argued Haus, the Fleet would naturally not have remained inactive for nine months. As it was, however, even the destruction of coastal fortifications, for example in Venice, would not improve the situation of the land forces. By way of contrast, the danger to which the Fleet would have to expose itself was incomparably large, since the Italians had of course not been idle, but had instead created so many defensive possibilities through the construction of minefields and by their own presence at sea that such an operation could hardly have the desired effect. The Imperial and Royal Navy was furthermore lacking destroyers and torpedo boats. These remarks demonstrate that the Navy’s fleet construction programme had in fact for decades been going in a completely wrong direction.1724 In the Adriatic, it clearly did not need any large battleships, but instead considerably smaller entities, and it was precisely the vulnerability and the inactivity of the battleships  – which were con- demned to inaction not least because the heating-up of the vessel and making it ready for use took several days  – that showed that here the wrong path had been trodden. In addition, the in any case only theoretical sailing of all the coal-fired vessels would have required 1,000 tons of coal each hour  – which were not available.1725 With all ambition to emulate the German Empire, Great Britain and France, following the reduction of its radius of action to the Adriatic, Austria-Hungary simply lacked the necessary ‘pond’. Therefore, aside from submarines, only torpedo boats, destroyers and mines played a notable role any more in the Adriatic, just as naval aviation gained in importance ; a series of Allied submarine losses was also caused by the naval aviators.1726 Thus, the course already set on was left unchanged. Haus, who had been promoted to Admiral of the Fleet in 1916, a rank that no-one in the Imperial and Royal Navy reached before or after him, became an ever stronger advocate of the German naval strategy and ulti- mately argued the case for unrestricted submarine warfare.1727 Haus and his Chief of Staff, Rear Admiral Rodler, assured the German admi- rals’ staff that the operations of Austro-Hungarian submarines in the Mediterranean would be intensified. In January 1917, it was also agreed that the German submarines U 35, U 36 and U 39 would continue to fly the Austrian flag, although they were