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Histories of the First World War tend to concentrate on the great armies fighting on the Western Front, the fleet battles in the North Sea or the struggle against the U-boat in the Atlantic. Less well known is the war in the Adriatic where the Habsburg empire of Austria-Hungary had a navy consisting of four dreadnoughts, six 20 knot battleships, seven 2nd class battleships, four cruisers, four old cruisers (two armoured and two torpedo rams) with numerous destroyers and torpedo boats and eighteen submarines.
Austria, urged on by Germany, invaded Serbia on 29 July 1914 and by the winter of 1915-16 the Serb forces had been driven into Albania where some 150,000 were evacuated from Valona, Durazzo and San Giovanni di Medua, most to Corfu, the remainder to Brindisi and Sardinia. They brought with them 25,000 Austrian prisoners of war who were interned in Italy, where many died of disease. Anglo/French forces advancing to their aid from Greece arrived too late and had to retire to Salonika in December.
The Austro-Hungarian fleet, the big ships at Pola and the lighter forces at Cattaro, remained riding at anchor, neither they nor the Franco-Italian forces being willing to risk a fleet action. Meanwhile Germany used the Austrian ports as bases for submarines. U 21 was the first, when Otto Hersing arrived at Cattaro in May 1915, before leaving for Turkey. Five others followed and a flotilla was formed based at Cattaro and Pola.
Italy was not at war with Germany when Max Valentiner in U 38 sank the Italian liner ANCONA with the loss of 200 lives on his way to Cattaro, and Austria-Hungary was forced to accept the responsibility. They refused to bail out Germany a second time over the his sinking of the liner PERSIA, with the loss of 334 lives, in December 1915, and an agreement that crews and passengers would be allowed to disembark before ships were sunk was enforced until unrestricted U boat war began in 1917. Throughout 1916 there were heavy losses due to submarines all over the Mediterranean. Admiral Ballard. who had recently taken command at Malta, urged convoys, but could not bring the Admiralty or the French Admiral Gauchet, C. in C. Mediterranean, to agree. Eventually, at an Admiral`s conference in Corfu in April, it was decided to leave the French watching the Austrian and Turkish battle squadrons while a British Admiral coordinated the protection of merchantmen. A system of convoys and the proper establishment of a barrage across the Straits of Otranto were the results of this policy.
From early in the war the “indicator net” had been used. A flotilla of steam drifters would each pay out some half a mile of light net, all connected so that a submarine would break one away and tow a marker buoy along the surface. In fact the submarine usually tore the net and went straight through, but the addition of mines made it more formidable and a U-boat was destroyed in 1916. These flotillas of drifters across the southern Adriatic were protected by Italian destroyers and Italian and British cruisers at Brindisi, not by continuous patrols but by monitoring Austrian movements.
Shipping losses continued to mount and it was decided to put mined nets across the straits from Otranto to FanЃE even though the depth was 500 fathoms. To the northward the barrage was to be patrolled by trawlers using British hydrophones and further south a line of American sub-chasers with a new design of hydrophone. Some 225 vessels were employed on this duty, which naturally took many away from convoy duty.
In May 1917 the Austrian Navy carried out a series of attacks on the barrage, The clash which took place on the 14th/15th will be the subject of a separate article.
The Austrian harbours were well protected and, apart from the regular