ITALIAN PARTICIPATION—OPERATIONS IN MANY WATERS

The month of May, 1915, saw new characters enter the theatres of naval warfare. Italy had now entered the war and brought to the naval strength of the Allies a minor naval unit.

At the time Italy entered the war she possessed six dreadnoughts, the Caio Duilio and the Andrea Doria, completed in 1915, the Conte di Cavour, Giulio Cesare, and Leonardo da Vinci, completed in 1914, and the Dante Alighieri, completed in 1912. Each of these dreadnoughts had a speed of 23 knots. The Dante Alighieri displaced 19,400 tons and had a main battery of twelve 12-inch guns, and a complement of 987 men. Each of the other five had thirteen 12-inch guns and a complement of 1,000 men. The displacement of vessels of the 1914 type was 22,340 tons; that of the 1915 type 23,025 tons. There were many lesser craft flying the Italian flag, but these larger ships were the most important additions to the naval forces of the Allies in southern waters. The chief operations of the Italian navy were directed against Austria. On May 28, 1915, the Italian admiralty announced the damage inflicted on Austrian maritime strength up to that date. On May 24, 1915, the Austrian torpedo boat S-20 approached the canal at Porto Corsini, but drew a very heavy fire from concealed and unsuspected batteries which forced her to leave immediately. The Austrian torpedo boat destroyer ScharfschÜtze, the scout ship Novara and the destroyer Ozepel, all of the Austrian navy, came to the assistance of the S-20 and also received salvos from the Italian land batteries. But on the same day the Italian destroyer Turbine, while scouting gave chase to an Austrian destroyer and the Austrian cruiser Helgoland. The strength of these Austrian ships was too much for the Turbine and she put on speed with the intention of escaping from their fire, but she was severely damaged by Austrian shells, and not having enough ammunition aboard to give a good account of herself, she was scuttled by her own crew.

It is now necessary to take up again the story of the German raiding ships at large on the high seas. As has been told above, after the Prinz Eitel Friedrich ended her career by putting in at Newport News the only German ships of the kind remaining at large were the Karlsruhe and Kronprinz Wilhelm. But on the 1st of April, 1915, the Macedonia, a converted liner which since November, 1914, had been interned at Las Palmas, Canary Islands, succeeded in slipping out of the harbor laden with provisions and supplies for use of warships and made her way to South American waters in spite of the fact that she had run through lines patrolled by British cruisers.

The Kronprinz Wilhelm's career as a raider ended on April 11, 1915, when, like the Prinz Eitel Friedrich, she succeeded in getting past the British cruisers and slipped into Newport News, Virginia. How this former Hamburg-American liner had slipped out of the harbor of New York on the night of August 3, 1914, with her bunkers and even her cabins filled with coal and provisions, with all lights out and with canvas covering her port holes has already been told. From that date until she again put in at an American port she captured numerous merchant ships, taking 960 prisoners and doing damage amounting to more than $7,000,000. She kept herself provisioned from her captives, and it was only the poor condition of her plates and boilers that made her captain give up raiding when he did. Her movements had been mysterious during all the time she was at large. She was known to have reprovisioned the cruiser Dresden and to have taken an almost stationary position in the South Atlantic in order to act as a "wireless station" for the squadron of Admiral von Spee. But when the latter was defeated off the Falkland Islands, she resumed operations as a raider of commerce. When she came into Newport News more than 60 per cent of her crew were suffering from what was thought to be beri-beri; she had but twenty-one tons of coal in her bunkers and almost no ammunition.

The total damage inflicted on the commerce of the Allies by the Emden, Karlsruhe, Kronprinz Wilhelm, Prinz Eitel Friedrich, KÖnigsberg, Dresden and Leipzig amounted, by the end of May, 1915, to $35,000,000. Sixty-seven vessels had been captured and sunk by them.

In the Dardanelles the naval operations were resumed, to some extent, during the month of May, 1915. For a number of weeks after the allied fleet had made the great attempt to force the Dardanelles on March 19, 1915, their commanders attempted no maneuvers with the larger ships, but the submarines were given work to do. On April 27, 1915, the British submarine E-14, under command of Lieutenant Commander Boyle, dived and went under the Turkish mine fields, reaching the waters of the Sea of Marmora. In spite of the fact that Turkish destroyers knew of its presence and hourly watched for it in the hope of sinking it, this submarine was able to operate brilliantly for some days, sinking two Turkish gunboats and a laden transport. Similar exploits were performed by Lieutenant Commander Nasmith with the British submarine E-11, which even damaged wharves at the Turkish capital.

But when the military operations were getting under way during May, 1915, the larger ships of the fleets were again used. The Germans realizing that these great ships, moving as they did slowly and deliberately while they fired on the land forts, would be good targets for torpedoes, sent some of their newest submarines from the bases in the North Sea, down along the coasts of France and Spain, through the passage at Gibraltar and to the Dardanelles. Destroyers accompanying the allied fleets kept diligent watch for attacks from them. The Goeben, one of the German battle cruisers that had escaped British and French fleets in the Mediterranean during the first weeks of the war, and which was now a part of the Turkish navy, was brought to the scene and aided the Turkish forts in their bombardment of the hostile warships.

On May 12, 1915, the British battleship Goliath, of old design and displacing some 12,000 tons, was sunk by a torpedo. This ship had been protecting a part of the French fleet from flank attack inside the straits, and under the cover of darkness had been approached by a Turkish destroyer which fired the fatal torpedo. It sank almost immediately.

The submarines of the German navy which had made the long journey to participate in the action near the Dardanelles got in their first work on May 26, 1915, when a torpedo fired by one of them struck the British battleship Triumph and sent her to the bottom. Of interest to naval authorities all over the world was the fact that this ship at the time she was struck had out torpedo nets which were supposed to be torpedo-proof; but the German missile tore through them and reached the hull. A hunt was made for the hostile submarine by the British destroyers, but she was found by the British battleship Majestic; but before the British ship could fire a shot at the German submarine, the latter fired a torpedo that caught the battleship near her stern and sank her immediately. Apprehension was now felt for the more formidable ships such as the Queen Elizabeth and others of her class which were in those waters; inasmuch as the operations at the Dardanelles assumed more and more a military rather than a naval character, the British admiralty thought it wiser to keep the Queen Elizabeth in safer waters; she was consequently called back to England. Only old battleships and cruisers were left to cooperate with the troops operating on the Gallipoli Peninsula.

Naval warfare in southern waters was continued against British warships by the Austrian navy. On June 9, 1915, the Austrian admiralty announced that a cruiser of the type of the Liverpool had been struck by a torpedo fired by an Austrian submarine while the former was off San Giovanni di Medua, near the Albanian coast. Reports of the incident issued by the Austrian and British naval authorities differed, the former claiming that the cruiser had sunk, and the latter that it had remained afloat and had been towed to an Adriatic port.

Most unique was an engagement between the Italian submarine Medusa and a similar craft flying the Austrian flag on June 17, 1915. This was the first time that two submarines had ever fought with each other. On that day the two submarines, the presence of each unknown to the other, lay submerged, not a great distance apart. The Medusa, after some hours, came up, allowing only her periscope to show; seeing no enemy about, her commander brought the rest of her out of the water. She had not emerged many moments before the Austrian vessel also came up for a look around and the commander of the latter espied the Italian submarine through his periscope. He immediately ordered a torpedo fired; it found a mark in the hull of the Medusa and she was sent to the bottom. One of her officers and four of her men were rescued by the Austrian submarine and made prisoners.

Italy's navy was not to continue to act as a separate naval unit in the southern naval theatre of war, for on June 18, 1915, the Minister of Marine of France announced that the "Anglo-French forces in the Mediterranean were cooperating with the Italian fleet, whose participation made possible a more effective patrol of the Adriatic. Warships of the Allies were engaged in finding and destroying oil depots from which the enemy's submarines had been replenishing their supplies." This effective patrol did not, however, prevent an Austrian submarine from sinking an Italian torpedo boat on June 27, 1915. In the Baltic Sea the naval activity had at no time during the first year of the war been great, but during the month of June, 1915, there was a minor naval engagement at the mouth of the Gulf of Riga, during which the Germans lost a transport and the Russians an auxiliary cruiser. In the other northern waters the Germans lost the submarine U-14, which was sunk on June 9, 1915. The crew were brought to England as prisoners. Three days later the British admiralty admitted that two torpedo boats, the No. 10 and the No. 12 had been lost. The loss of two such small boats did not worry Britain as much as did the loss of many merchant ships in the war zone right through the spring and summer of 1915, and to show that British warships were not immune from submarine attack, in spite of the fact that many of the underwater craft of Germany were meeting with disaster, the British cruiser Roxburgh was struck by a torpedo on June 20, 1915, but was able to get away under her own steam. The rest of the month saw small losses to nearly all of the fleets engaged in the war, but none of these were of importance.

The twelfth month of the first year of war was not particularly eventful in so far as naval history was concerned. On July 1, 1915, the Germans maneuvered in the Baltic Sea with a small fleet which accompanied transports bearing men who were to try to land on the northern shores of Russia. The port of Windau was the point at which the German bombardment was directed, but Russian torpedo boats and destroyers fought off the invading German fleet—which must have been small—and succeeded in chasing the German mine-layer Albatross, making it necessary for her captain to beach her on the Swedish island of Gothland, where the crew was interned on July 2, 1915. On the same day a German predreadnought battleship, believed to have been the Pommern, was sunk at the mouth of Danzig Bay by a torpedo from a British submarine.

In the Adriatic Austria lost a submarine, the U-11, through a unique action. The submersible was sighted on July 1, 1915, by a French aeroplane. The aviator dropped two bombs which found their mark on the deck of the submarine and sank her. Austria had, during that month, made an attempt to capture the Austrian island of Pelagosa, which had been occupied by the Italians on July 26, 1915. But July 29, 1915, the fleet of Austrian cruisers and destroyers, which made the attack, was driven off by unnamed units of the Italian navy. But a loss by the latter had been incurred on July 7, 1915, when the armored cruiser Amalfi, while scouting in the upper waters of the Adriatic Sea, was sighted and torpedoed by an Austrian submarine. She sank, but most of her men were saved. Another Austrian submarine had the same success on July 17, 1915, when it fired a torpedo at the Italian cruiser Giuseppe Garibaldi, and saw her go down fifteen minutes later. Italy endeavored to imitate the actions of Germany when, on July 6, 1915, she proclaimed that the entire Adriatic Sea was a war zone and that the Strait of Otranto was in a state of blockade. All the ports of Dalmatia were closed to every kind of commerce.

Near the coasts of Turkey, toward the end of the first year of war, there was fought the second duel between submarines. This time the vanquished vessel was the French submarine Mariotte, which, on July 26, 1915, was sunk by a torpedo from a German submarine in the waters right near the entrance to the Dardanelles. Britain ended the first year of naval warfare by destroying the German cruiser KÖnigsberg, which, since the fall of the year before, had been lying up the Rufiji River in German East Africa, after having been chased thence by a British cruiser. It was decided to destroy her in order that she might not get by the sunken hulls that the British had placed at the mouth of the river in order to "bottle her up." Consequently, on the morning of July 4, 1915, after her position had been noted by an aviator, two British river monitors, Severn and Mersey, aided by a cruiser and minor vessels, began to fire upon the stationary vessel. Their fire was directed by the aviator who had discovered her, but it was at first almost ineffective because she lay so well concealed by the vegetation of the surrounding jungle. She answered their fire and succeeded in damaging the Mersey, but after being bombarded for six hours she was set on fire. When the British monitors had finished with her she was a total wreck.[Back to Contents]