Page - 748 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

748 Kerensky Offensive and Peace Efforts could be prevented, failed, but the blockade nonetheless fulfilled its purpose. The loss of one, and perhaps two, Imperial and Royal submarines was attributable to this net.1731 It seemed natural, therefore, for the Imperial and Royal Fleet Command to take the decision to eliminate the naval blockage in the Strait of Otranto. The operation was fixed for 15 May 1917 and was to be carried out with the cruisers Novara, Helgoland and Saida under the command of the Ship-of-the-Line Captain Miklos von Horthy.1732 Parallel to this, and in order to confuse the Allies, an attack by two destroyers against the maritime traffic off the Albanian coast at Vlorë was envisaged. The operations commenced at 3 :30 in the morning and lasted until sunrise. The destroyers under the command of Johannes Prinz von Liechtenstein sank an Italian destroyer and a freighter off Vlorë and damaged two others, so that they had to be abandoned. At the same time, Horthy’s formation attacked the cutters in the Strait of Otranto and sunk 14 of 47 boats ; four others were partially heavily damaged. Then, however, the hunt began for Horthy’s squadron, which succeeded, in spite of a tem- porary superiority of British, French and Italian ships, in reaching the protection of the ships approaching quickly from Kotor. Finally, the Allied pursuers turned away. Simultaneous attacks by Austro-Hungarian submarines and the laying of sea mines off Brindisi inflicted additional losses on the Allies, so that this day has gone down in the history of Austro-Hungarian naval forces in the Adriatic during the First World War as doubtlessly one of the most successful. The large vessels of the ‘Tegetthoff’ class had remained inactive. The most important result of the operation was that the Strait of Otranto had be- come at least temporarily ‘open’, since it took until July for Italian warships to once again bestow some protection on the cutters with their net in the Strait.1733 To this were added six Australian destroyers, a Japanese cruiser, and fourteen further Allied warships that were transferred to the Mediterranean and for a time strengthened the blockade at the exit to the Ionian Sea, and in this way the situation had reverted after a short time to the accustomed scene. The Allies could not completely close off the Strait of Otranto, and they were also unable to provide complete protection to the tugboats, but as a rule it was enough when the Strait, which was more than 40 nautical miles wide, was blocked and monitored for a distance of 24 miles. The Austro-Hungarian naval forces remained trapped in the Adriatic. It was precisely this naval battle that had demonstrated that the proud dreadnoughts were condemned to inaction ; not only that : they were useless. The plans for an even more powerful class of destroyers, the ‘Laudon’, were put on ice, and no more vessels of the ‘Tegetthoff’ class were commissioned. Only the model of the Fleet’s flagship, ‘Viribus unitis’, continued to be built. It would still not be ready at the war’s end.