New construction was needed, and if income could not meet expenses then the state must borrow to build the warships it so desperately needed.
Spatharios, second of the
Augustus class dreadnoughts, was laid down in 1919. These were fast, powerful and efficient ships, achieving more on 33,000 tons than Austria could with 10% greater tonnage. Nine 14” guns as in the
Typhon class were carried in triple turrets, all forward and with the center turret superimposed. These were backed up by a powerful secondary battery of 20x6” guns in ten twin turrets, all directed by the latest fire control. Though coal-fired, they could make 24 knots and carried 14” of armor with ease. By continuing to use the ‘three turrets forward’ design the Imperial Navy was engaging in a bit of purposeful deception, for just as the
Thalassion semi-dreadnoughts had been intentionally similar to the
Autokrator, so it suited Imperial purpose for all of their dreadnought battleships to closely resemble one another.
The powerful new Augustus
class of dreadnoughts, showing the resemblance to Valentinian
and Belisarius
Despite their arguable victories, or more accurately because of the price they were paying for them, the Austrian public was growing discontented with the conduct of the war. Workers began to strike for better rations and higher wages, and anti-war demonstrations were seen in the public squares of the major cities. In the Empire, the cabinet resolved to continue borrowing to fund the Navy rather than impose additional war taxes and increase unrest. It was not a solution that was viable in the long-term, but as the Navy seemed unable to drag its opponent out and bring them to battle, there was nothing else to be done.
Another cruiser action in April of 1919 off Corfu showed the enemy was still skilled, tenacious and resourceful – and determined only to show up when the weather was bad. Whether it was a trick of rain, good Austrian fire control or simply her usual bad luck,
Typhon was once again heavily handled by two Austrian battlecruisers; four destroyers had to be sacrificed to cover her escape. This time there was no later, cheering news: it was defeat; worse, it was humiliation and impotence following on the crushing loss of five Imperial destroyers off the Dalmatian Coast and the loss of
Pyr Thalassion. On the strength of this battle Austria again asked for a peace with no concessions or conditions, implying that they might soon begin to ask for concessions if Byzantium should refuse. The cabinet was again divided but despite strong resistance from the Navarch, this time the majority was in favor of the Austrian proposal. A memorandum was drawn up and presented to the Emperor, who brought it personally back into the cabinet meeting.
Emperor Isaac V at the Coronation of George V in the uniform of a British Field Marshal He set it on the table and tapped it with a finger. “My lords and gentlemen, I have received your recommendation and I have given it careful consideration. While my sympathy for the suffering of our people – and for the sacrifices of our brave sailors – is acute, I am not prepared to give my assent to this proposal. My ancestors sat upon the throne of Rome when the Hapsburgs were diddling sheep,” he said, voice absolutely level and diction lethally precise. “The people may rise up and throw me out, but never shall I consent to this.” His gaze traveled down the table, fixing at last on the face of his Admiral. “My lords. Gentlemen. Win me this war.”
There would be no more talk of peace without victory. What had begun as a limited war intended to unite the nationalities of the Habsburg dominions – the ‘short victorious war’ that von Plehve hoped for and did not receive - had become a death-grapple of the Eastern Empires. The Byzantine Empire might have little to gain from a victory in the war but it had now set its face against any compromise that could be construed as defeat.
With desperate times came a willingness to resort to desperate expedients. Shortages and hunger were causing unrest in Austria and anti-war demonstrations were occurring despite proclamations of martial law, but the Austrian government of Emperor Franz Ferdinand showed no sign of relenting. Austria might, because of her many nationalities, be more fragile politically than the Byzantine Empire, but the loss of shipping was damaging the Imperial economy and eroding public confidence in the government. As the navies had failed to achieve a decision and the armies lacked a front where they could be employed, both sides began to search for extraordinary means, even dangerously unorthodox methods, by which to bring the war to a satisfactory close.
While no monarch could be complacent about scheming to throw another off his throne lest the same treatment be served upon him in turn, political action now seemed to offer the best path to victory. At least on the Imperial side, this decision was not arrived at lightly. While the Byzantines had a well-earned historical reputation for slyness, double-dealing and trickery – the usual practices of statecraft – the modern Empire had adopted Western European culture and sensibilities. In the process it had become somewhat sensitive about its past reputation for dirty tricks and unsavory methods – or at least about having them discovered. A gentleman might of course quietly read another’s mail if the opportunity arose, but was expected to refrain from rousing the rabble to riot against that other gentleman’s monarch: it was simply a question of civility and decency. And underneath the genteel manners and polished phrases lay the very real risk that fomenting revolution would backfire; before them as an example was the Polish uprising from the end of the Great War, set in motion by the Habsburgs of Austria against the Russian Tsar but ultimately fatal to Habsburg prospects there.
But the military situation was virtually deadlocked, and if it the Imperials had somewhat the better of it then the difference was small. The Austrians were too careful to risk coming out where and when they could be beaten. It seemed that every battle-cruiser sweep was a baited hook, every channel and island of the Adriatic’s eastern shore formed a hunter’s blind for mines, concealed batteries and submarines in ambush. If the Austrians would not offer battle except under favorable circumstances, then neither did the Imperial Navy have the means to go in and force them to fight. Mutual bleeding was unsatisfactory; it seemed likely both to require a long time and to be uncertain in its final effect. And there was precedent for the Empire to believe political action might work: in November of 1904, during the First Spanish War, the notorious communist and revolutionary, Pedro Lopez Amar, had been released from his Austrian prison cell and smuggled into Barcelona. His revolt had failed but helped bring down the old Spanish government all the same, and the new ministers had been eager to make peace.
This was a very long way to say that fomenting revolution might be reprehensible, and it was certainly dangerous… but what would once have been inconceivable was now not merely considered but actually put into motion.
Not a week after Isaac V definitively rejected the Austrian proposal of peace, Admiral Theodoros received a small, discreet note requesting an audience from the Royal Minister of Parks and Grounds. As in other monarchies the personal and official properties of the Emperor were administered as the Imperial Household, whose officials were known for reasons lost in antiquity as Royal (not Imperial) Ministers. Vast with estates, parks, hunting grounds and the like, this independent bureaucracy made up almost a state-within-the-state. The sprawling Household served the Emperor and only indirectly the Empire, but sometimes the functions overlapped and the boundaries were intentionally blurred. In this case, the Royal Minister did indeed supervise the Emperor’s hunting parks, estates, woodlands and such, but attached to that was the vast apparatus of his real work: the running of all Imperial intelligence work in foreign lands and some at home. The Admiral had clashed with the RM on several occasions and would have preferred to decline to meet. But the request for an actual, personal audience was so unusual as to give him pause to reconsider, and on reflection, to accept.
Theodoros rang the small electric bell beneath his desktop. When an aide entered the Navarch handed him the note and said, “Please convey to the gentleman that I should be very happy to see him at any moment he may find convenient.”
The aide accepted the paper, but said, “He is here now, sir. In the anteroom.”
“Well! One cannot be more impat… prompt than that. Show him in, Spyro – by all means, show him in. Do not ring for Doris to bring tea unless I call; this is not a social visit and my guest will not be staying long.”
A rare photo of the Royal Minister of Parks and Grounds circa 1914 The Royal Minister was a sleek, dark man of middling height and portly girth, unathletic and unexceptional save for a near-sighted reader’s squint. “I don’t suppose you are at leisure, Navarch Theodoros, and neither am I. Perhaps you will not take offense if I move from my sincere wishes for your continued health, directly to a more pressing matter?”
“None whatsoever,” the Admiral said, motioning the aide out. “Directly to business would suit me very well. And may I offer my hope for your good health also, Minister? It will be just the two of us, then. In what way has the Navy transgressed this time, pray?”
The slightest of frowns crossed the smooth expanse of forehead, disturbing not a single strand of brilliantined black hair. “You do have a talent for wishing to employ persons of… Well. Persons. Those in whom we perhaps should take an interest, Navarch. Some… may be dangerous.”
“There is no person who can be of use to the Empire who is not in some way dangerous,” the Navarch growled.
There was a stony silence, followed by the slightest smile. “Well. Perhaps you have a point. But that is not in fact why I am in earnest of your time today, Navarch. We have been directed to…” He paused again. “A moment of explanation may be in order. During the Great War, Austria invaded Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. A Colonel Klaus Mergen headed the occupation of the town of Sabac.”
Theodoros sat up very straight and pushed back in his chair. “Mergen! The Butcher of Sabac?”
“Just so. The town was destroyed; half its inhabitants were left dead or… missing. And when the Serbian Army marched back in six months later, he fled. By one estimate, he took out with him perhaps a hundred thousand solidi in plundered treasure.”
“I thought he was dead!” Theodoros said.
“Everyone does. Convicted, sentenced and then tried in absentia; I assure you that is the correct order.” Another ghostly smile. “But some men require perhaps more than a pen-stroke to dispatch. He is now living in a villa in Albania. Under our… observation, you see. Running low on funds, I am told, and rather as tired of Albania as they have become of him. So.”
“You’re going to send the Butcher back to Austria?” The Admiral’s eyes grew large with astonishment and a trace of horror.
“He still has friends. Somehow. Fellow-thinkers, perhaps I should say, men who believe the Great War was lost because they were
too soft. And we have names he may find… of interest. Persons of influence who are… discontented. Persons who may be… useful. Perhaps.”
“Very well. It seems a hard thing to do, even to an Austrian, but the Navy is ready to assist in any way it can.”
“Perhaps before we discuss the methods, I should give you this. Please read it and give it back to me. The information may be passed verbally to officers as you see fit – as few as possible, yes? But it is not to be written down; that is my condition.” He paused while Theodoros took in the few brief lines of typewritten text.
“We have a… useful friend who has come into possession of information concerning an upcoming Austrian naval evolution on, we believe, that date, and in the area listed. We have decided to release this to you in the hope that you may perhaps find it useful. This is a unique opportunity. Our… friend will not remain longer in his current position so there is now no reason to protect our source. I cannot of course assure you that it is reliable. But… we do believe that
he believes it to be true, and he is in a position to know.”
“So,” Theodoros lifted a hand as if to scratch his chin but reconsidered. “Is this to be our… inducement? We need none to do our duty!”
“In no way, I assure you. It is only that it is a matter of some… delicacy. I thought it best to deliver it to you personally. It is very bad for our… trade… if it becomes known that we get our sources killed. Inadvertently.” The slight smile returned and fled.
“Well, then. What then is the Navy to do?”
“We would need our… asset picked up from the port of Orikum. The night of that Austrian sortie would be quite convenient for us, but the final decision is yours. And delivered to, oh, Sibenik. Perhaps Vodice. Pakostane would suffice; I am informed that Pola is quite out of the question.”
Theodoros exhaled heavily and shook his head. “A dromon could send a launch to Orikum; that is not perhaps… ahem. Not a problem. But Sibenik… With respect, Royal Minister, and may I say with my most heartfelt regrets, no - that cannot be done. The Austrians have a few carefully protected passages through thick minefields, covered by shore batteries and well-patrolled. A dolphin couldn’t pass through there without being shot, much less a boat.”
The Admiral held up a hand; though the RM had said nothing, his face was eloquent. “I must consult my officers who know that coast. If there is a goat-path to a beach, we will find it.” He slapped the notepaper in one palm. “For this I would promise to put a battleship on wheels and
roll it to Vienna. Hah!”
The gods may play dice with men and they may cheat in other ways but they do use honest dice. And so, if a man has the stakes to last and the determination to see it through, he may stay in the game until his luck changes. June 11th found the battlecruiser squadrons of both fleets once again in the Strait of Otranto, northwest of Corfu in the strait’s narrowest part. The time was half-past noon and the visibility would have been good save for a drizzling rain from overcast skies. The Austrians were expected to trail the same bait as twice before, using battlecruisers running south to find the enemy and then north to lead the Imperials onto the barb of the hook: two Austrian dreadnoughts. Rear-Admiral Miklos Horthy, in command of the battlecruisers, did not yet know that the Imperials were expecting him to appear. Nor was he aware that submarine UT-32 had put a torpedo into one of those dreadnoughts, sending both back to Pola under strict radio silence. The Austrian admiral was thus doubly a victim, of that which he did not know – and of what he knew to be true, but was not.
Admiral Miklos Horthy from a portrait of 1929, wearing the uniform of the Austro-Hungarian Republic. He was a survivor of the sinking of the Triest.
Sighting the enemy to the ENE, Rear-Admiral Constantine Metaxas signaled for full speed and steered his battlecruisers north to engage; as expected, the Austrians came around on a parallel course and opened fire in haze and rain at a range of at less than three miles.
Kraken and
Typhon were capable of only 26 knots while the Austrians could reach 29, so even as the first waterspouts of near-misses sprouted from the sea the Austrians began to draw away.
Kraken, leading, was hit six times; Imperial spotters believed the Austrian flagship to be
Triest and claimed 11 hits on her. This slowed the Austrians enough for the ships to draw almost level at point-blank range, and the carnage was fearsome.
Typhon, ever unlucky, took twenty heavy caliber hits in quick succession, losing two of her three turrets. Then her luck turned at last: a 14” shell hit the weak 8” turret armor on the brand-new
Graz and a centerline turret flared like a torch through the rain and haze. A plume of yellow-white smoke – a rumble – and
Graz disappeared behind a fog of cordite smoke, never to re-emerge, an eerie echo of the fate of her sister,
Lissa.
Artist’s depiction of Graz
just before the explosion Metaxas now swung west and then south to withdraw, expecting Horthy to also retreat. The Austrian Admiral steamed off to the north and made his way to the rendezvous only to find his dreadnought support missing. He cruised in a circle for a bit, taking the measure of the problem, and then turned… south.
Dawn found Metaxas’ ships battered but serviceable; both were still short a main turret but frantic repairs ensured they could at least steam and, if necessary, fight. Despite his ships’ condition the Imperial admiral was unwilling to leave the Strait until he received the coded radio signal saying D-21 had dropped off the Butcher, and his tenacity was now to be rewarded. A smoke smudge against the clear skies to the northeast proved to be
Triest, coming south with a great white bone of foam in her teeth. Metaxas called for all available speed and turned east to cross her bow, then swung north to close the range. Horthy saw the Imperials lying in wait and turned his ship in a wide circle onto a parallel course. Both sides opened fire, and with the Imperials down to only two turrets each the number of guns on each side was even. Flash-roar; gouts of cordite smoke; tiny flashes in the sunlight – black dots against the clouds – and then tall fountains of water thrown up when the shells came down. One 14” shell struck
Triest on her deck armor amidships, plunging through the armor as cleanly as a knife before exploding in an auxiliary machinery space. Generators shrieked and sparked, electrical shorts and surges melted fuses. Hydraulic pumps spewed fluid from shredded hoses, a hit in the jugular vein for a modern warship and if not fatal then deadly serious. Crewmen sprang to damage control stations but equipment throughout the ship ground to a halt. Without hydraulic pressure for the actuators and electric power for the motors the turrets froze, unloadable guns fixed at the point where the Imperials had been moments before. Frantic sailors began to rig for manual steering; in the engineering spaces the fans died and pumps ground to a halt. Triest lost her white moustache and began to slow, her interior spaces dark and eerily silent save for the sounds of her struggling crew.
On
Kraken’s bridge, Admiral Metaxas turned to Captain Spiridos. “No man can do very wrong if he lays his ship alongside of the enemy. Let us profit from Nelson’s instruction. Captain, close the range.” Spiridos looked at the vast bulk of the Austrian battlecruiser, seemingly close enough to touch, then nodded. “Helm! Come to thirty degrees true! Take us in!”
The Imperials closed in to a range of less than two miles; though each battlecruiser now had only three working guns, they kept up a steady drum-beat of fire while the 5” secondary mounts pumped shells into the enemy superstructure. From the
Kraken’s bridge they had visual confirmation that all four turrets on
Triest were wrecked, and then – incredibly – the vast dark bulk began to stir, gouts of black smoke vomiting from her stacks and propellers churning up white foam under her stern. Low in the water and listing she might be, but her size and thick armor belt were allowing her hull to absorb the punishment her turrets could not.
“Across her bows, Spiridos.” “Admiral, we are nearly out of ammunition.” “Throw spittoons, then! Tell cook to bring up his pots.
Anything!” “Aye.” “Chaldor. Signal the destroyers to attack.” “They have no torpedoes left, sir.” “With guns, then, Spiridos. With
teeth!”
A long moment’s silence. “I want that thing
dead.”
Across her bows they went, pounding shells into the soft, unarmored nose, then down her starboard side and back across the battered stern.
“She’s… going. Look sir! She’s rolling! There she goes!” Austrian sailors began running up the tilting deck, over the sloping side and then over onto the vast gray bottom as
Triest rolled her belly to the skies in surrender.
“Signal all ships, ‘Cease Fire’. And Spiridos – take us out a little way before you launch the boats; there might be a submarine about. Devils they may be, but charity we must show them now.”
After the loss of
Triest the war settled down again into abortive cruiser forays into the Adriatic and destroyer melees off the Dalmatian coast. Over and over the Imperials would move forward to attack only to find their intended prey covered by lurking Austrian dreadnoughts. The destroyer losses continued to mount on both sides; at one point the Austrians were supposedly down to only five ships ready for sea. Run-ins with Austrian cruisers in the fog, fields of mines and lurking submarines all took their toll, while on the high seas Austrian auxiliary merchant cruisers and commerce raiders continued to prey on Imperial shipping. The Imperial Army was committed to a campaign in the Dalmatian islands, in hopes of securing a forward base from which light forces could operate, but here too the Austrians had been busy. Their Great War education in trench warfare had been expensively bought, and now they were forcing the Imperial Army to pay in blood for the same. As Corfu became little more than a giant army camp and hospital it became clear that, as for the Navy, there would be likewise no grand victories for the Army in this war.
There had been no word of what had become of the Butcher Mergen, but Naval Intelligence did have reports that Austrian sailors were refusing to leave their shore-side barracks for sorties, making even the reduced Austrian fleet severely short-handed. Crippled by supply shortages, personnel problems and losses of ships, the K-und-K Admiralty nevertheless steeled itself to take the war into a place where the enemy would be most vulnerable – an act of desperation, perhaps, but the war in the winter of 1919 had become desperate. Their plan required a night when the Strait of Otranto would be dark and lightly guarded, relatively easy to find now that
Kraken and
Typhon were both in the repair yards again. With no battlecruisers left to them and the battleships much too valuable to risk outside the Adriatic, the Austrians would rely on cruisers and their few remaining destroyers to mount a strike deep into enemy-held waters.
And so on a dark January night with the new year of 1920 only days old, the gray shapes slid through Bloody Otranto Strait and quested south to round the Greek Peloponnese. Imperial armored cruisers
Isauria and
Athina never saw them go by; no Imperial destroyer raised an alarm. There was only a brief radio squawk from the old armored cruiser
Boukellarion… and then a final, permanent silence. Austrian naval records were in part burned after the war; no trace of the old Imperial cruiser was ever found and of her seven-hundred-man crew, there were no survivors. Celebrated, storied
Boukellarion – the lucky ‘Old War Horse’ of the Navy – was gone. The war, it seemed, could become no darker than this, and Imperial spirits sink no lower.
Austrian ships began to range farther afield, hunting not for the most targets but for reaches unpatrolled by Imperial cruisers. Clashes occurred in the Caribbean and Far Eastern waters as well as in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean. Wherever and whenever the opportunity arose to bring the enemy to battle, the Imperial Navy pressed for it. Imperial officers were no longer blindly aggressive but they well knew that a damaged Austrian warship in foreign waters would have to be interned, or scuttled, while Imperial ships were repaired at nearby friendly bases. Battle, however they could find or force it, was their fixed policy.
On March 6, 1920, troops under the command of Graf Anton Andrassy occupied the War Ministry in Vienna and attempted to storm the Palace. Great confusion followed, as soldiers of the Vienna garrison were not certain whose orders should be obeyed. Riots grew around the Ringstrasse, some participants flourishing banners of red communist rebellion while others set fires and looted for food. In the week that followed, gangs made the capital nearly ungovernable; the sailors at Pola, ordered to sortie and then to form brigades for a march to Vienna, refused both commands. From Hungary came a proclamation of independence, followed by three days of silence as the city convulsed in revolution. It was too much. Chancellor Graf von Hartig confronted Emperor Franz Ferdinand with a proclamation of abdication and demanded, in tears, that he sign.
Former Archduke and former King and Emperor Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary “But I have no heir!” The new Emperor cried. “There must be a Hapsburg on the throne!”
“Majesty… the people demand it,” the old Graf replied, and so sign it the Emperor did. Franz Ferdinand went into exile in Italy and then to France, and would finally be invited to return to his throne after more than a dozen years in exile. The Butcher of Sabac ruled from Vienna for two weeks; he was shot by a supposed anarchist while getting out of his motorcar on the Ringstrasse. Graf von Hartig then formed a provisional government and, having patched up the old alliance with Hungary, led the first elections of the new (and short-lived) Austro-Hungarian Republic. There were of course no colonial possessions for the Empire to attach, nor was there any practical way to seize a warship from the chaos of the Pola naval base. The new republic signed away a promise of a large indemnity for wartime expenses, and the Empire had to accept it.
It is from this time that the Navy added the second, mournful line to its traditional toast. After “Confusion to the enemy!” and the response, “
Hellas and
Boukellarion!” the most senior officer present gives, “
Olympos and
Boukellarion!” in memory of the two lost cruisers. The response is, “Never again!”, and for the Navy this is a most serious oath. It is the Imperial Navy’s version of, ‘To absent friends', and it speaks to the Navy’s sense of wrenching grief borne from needless loss.
Olympos was lost to progressive flooding; from that time the Navy would take care that its ships would be better designed and built.
Boukellarion had been put, without escorts, in an area known to be frequented by enemy submarines, to satisfy local political pressure by a token but ineffective presence. This, too, the Navy pledged itself to fight.
It is not happenstance that
Boukellarion should appear in both toasts; she had been, in many ways, the ‘school-ship’ of the modern officer corps. In her stout construction, powerful armament and willingness to face down any danger – even capital ships – she was the emblem of what the new steel Navy wished to become. And in her passing, the Navy would mark its final transition from brash upstart to emerge as one of the great fighting navies of the world.