Page - 747 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The Naval Victory in the Strait of Otranto 747 manned by exclusively German crews.1728 It was Haus’ final decision before his un- expected death. His successor, Admiral Njegovan, who was of Croatian descent, had the task of waging unrestricted submarine warfare. Austria-Hungary’s own underwater forces had been reduced to only nine boats, but at the shipyards in Pula (Pola) and Rijeka (Fiume) there were ten boats on the stocks and these could be gradually brought into service. To these were added the German boats. The unrestricted submarine war could begin. Italy’s navy was at this time in a serious crisis. There were dismissals and personnel shake-ups from the Minister of the Navy all the way down. The British announced that they would withdraw three of their four destroyers from Taranto. The French wanted to offset the withdrawal of the British, but only on the condition that the Italian naval forces in the Adriatic were placed under French command. And there was only one message of success : the Italians succeeded at the end of February 1917 in forcing their way into the Austro-Hungarian consular section in Zürich, which under the leader- ship of Captain Rudolf Mayer had conducted extremely successful espionage activities against Italy and had also prepared the acts of sabotage that had led to the sinking of the Benedetto Brin and the Leonardo da Vinci. The Italian commando operation was able to force open Mayer’s safe and acquire the papers stored away there. The cover was blown on the entire network of Austrian agents in Italy.1729 For the activities of the Im- perial and Royal Fleet, which had known nothing of events in Zürich, this was initially unimportant, but in the long term it constituted a serious setback. Like their German counterparts, the Austro-Hungarian submarines achieved their greatest successes in April 1917. With 23,037 tons of shipping space, the number of ships sunk reached an unprecedented high point in that month. Thereafter, the tonnage figure for the ships sunk by Imperial and Royal boats dropped again in May to just over 10,000 tons and in June 1917 to little more than 6,000 tons.1730 Responsible for this was not least the far greater consideration given by Austro-Hungarian boats. The German Empire did not want to understand this and, above all, not join in. Germany accused the Allies, and rightly so, of using hospital ships to transport ammunition, and deduced from this the right to attack hospital ships of the Entente. In Austria-Hun- gary, opinions were divided on this matter. Eventually, Emperor Karl firmly prohibited on 21 April 1917 that Austro-Hungarian submarines attack Allied hospital ships, and decided furthermore that submarines that intended to carry out such attacks were not permitted to fly the Austro-Hungarian flag. For the naval war in the Mediterranean, it was above all the Strait of Otranto that proved to be one of the most decisive points. With Italian, French and British ships, the Allies had set up a blockade that admittedly remained porous but constituted a considerable obstacle to sailing in and out of the Adriatic. All attempts, and particularly British efforts, to strengthen this barricade so that all surface and underwater traffic