SMS Prinz Eugen

Austria-Hungary had long built battleships for coastal defence, and the navy commanded little public interest until Archduke Franz Ferdinand — who believed a strong fleet was needed to face Italy — was made an admiral in 1902. Rudolf Montecuccoli took charge of the navy in 1904, and by January 1909 he was putting a memorandum before Franz Joseph proposing four dreadnoughts of 20,000 tonnes. Leaked to the Italian press three months later, it produced its own answer: Italy laid down Dante Alighieri that June.

Money was the obstacle. The collapse of Wekerle's government left Hungary without a prime minister for nearly a year and no budget to pay for the ships, so the Witkowitz Ironworks and the Škoda Works offered to build the first hulls at their own risk against a promise of later purchase. Franz Ferdinand personally courted Albert Salomon Anselm von Rothschild for the funding, and the secret deal held until the Social Democrat paper Arbeiter-Zeitung broke it in April 1910 — by which time the design was fixed. Prinz Eugen was projected to cost over 60 million krone, against about 40 million for a Radetzky.

Siegfried Popper designed her: 152 metres long, 21,689 tonnes at full combat load, four Parsons turbines and twelve Babcock & Wilcox boilers for about 20 knots. Her main battery was twelve 30.5 cm Škoda K10 guns in four triple turrets — the first Mediterranean dreadnought class, the triples chosen both to answer Dante Alighieri and to keep the citadel short and the displacement within Austro-Hungarian means. Her belt was 280 mm at the citadel, as were her turrets, barbettes and conning tower. Her weakness was underwater: a protection system only 1.60 metres deep, incapable of containing a torpedo or mine detonation without rupturing — a flaw that would kill two of her sisters.

Laid down at the Stabilimento Tecnico Triestino in Trieste on 16 January 1912, she was launched after just eleven months on 30 November. The budget deal split the work along the Dual Monarchy's seam: armour and guns from Austria, electrical wiring and equipment from Hungary, ammunition bought half in each. Franz Joseph chose the names himself, and hers went to Prince Eugene of Savoy, victor at Zenta in 1697. She was commissioned on 8 July 1914, ten days after Franz Ferdinand was shot at Sarajevo.

Her first operation was a chase that never caught up. When the German Mediterranean Division — Goeben and Breslau — broke out of Messina on 7 August 1914, Prinz Eugen sailed with Viribus Unitis, Tegetthoff, three Radetzkys, Sankt Georg, Admiral Spaun, six destroyers and thirteen torpedo boats to escort them into Austro-Hungarian waters. The German run towards the Adriatic was a feint; Goeben rounded Greece for the Dardanelles, and the Austro-Hungarian fleet returned to Pola.

Then came the long inaction. Admiral Haus wrote in September 1914 that so long as Italy might declare war, his first duty was to keep the fleet intact, and he held to it: mines were feared, and 75 per cent of the navy's pre-war coal had come from Britain and was now unobtainable. He refused a German request in 1915 to attack the Otranto Barrage and relieve the pressure at Gallipoli. The policy drew sharp criticism from the army, the German navy and the Foreign Ministry — but it tied down Entente forces in the Mediterranean that might have been used elsewhere.

It also left the fleet ready for the one day it was wanted. Italy renounced the Triple Alliance on 4 May 1915 and declared war on the 23rd; within two to four hours of the news reaching Pola the fleet was at sea, Prinz Eugen and her sisters heading for Ancona. The bombardment wrecked the railway yard and port facilities, knocked out the shore batteries, set wharves, warehouses, oil tanks, radio stations and coal stores alight, and cut the city's electricity, gas and telephone lines. Thirty Italian soldiers and 38 civilians were killed and 150 wounded. The raid delayed the Italian army's deployment to the Alps by two weeks and let Austria-Hungary strengthen the border.

After Ancona the Otranto Barrage shut the Adriatic and Prinz Eugen spent three years guarding a coastline she rarely left port to see. Her sister Szent István spent 54 days at sea in 937 days of service — 5.7 per cent of her life. The notable events at Pola were visits: Emperor Karl I in December 1916 and again in June 1917 for the first formal imperial review since 1902, Kaiser Wilhelm II at the German submarine base in December 1917, and more than eighty Italian air raids.

After the Cattaro Mutiny of February 1918 the navy's commander was dismissed and Miklós Horthy — Prinz Eugen's own captain — was promoted rear admiral and made Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet. Horthy thought differently from his predecessors: he took the ships to sea for manoeuvres and gunnery on a regular basis, both to restore discipline after the mutinies and to prepare a real operation. By June 1918 he judged the fleet ready to break the Otranto Barrage and open the strait for German and Austro-Hungarian U-boats.

He sailed on 8 June with Viribus Unitis and Prinz Eugen; Szent István and Tegetthoff followed the next evening. Pushing to catch up, Szent István overheated her turbines and, when steam was raised again, made heavy smoke. At about 03:15 on 10 June two Italian MAS boats returning from patrol saw it, penetrated the escort screen, and MAS 15 put two torpedoes into Szent István abreast her boiler rooms. Tegetthoff tried to tow her; the pumps could not keep up, and she capsized off Premuda at 06:12. Horthy, judging surprise lost, cancelled the operation. Prinz Eugen returned to Pola and stayed there for the rest of the war.

The end came without a shot fired at her. As the empire dissolved, Karl I handed the fleet to the newly formed State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs rather than to the Allies; the transfer was completed on the afternoon of 31 October 1918 and the Austro-Hungarian ensign came down. The strain of those weeks broke Prinz Eugen's captain, Alexander Milosevic, who killed himself in his quarters aboard the ship. On 1 November two Italian officers, Raffaele Paolucci and Raffaele Rossetti, rode a manned torpedo into Pola and mined Viribus Unitis, which sank in fifteen minutes with her new commander Janko Vuković and 300 to 400 of her crew. Prinz Eugen was untouched.

The Armistice of Villa Giusti refused to recognise the handover to the South Slav state. Italian ships entered Trieste, Pola and Fiume on 4 November 1918, troops occupied the Pola installations the next day, and by 9 November every remaining ship in the harbour flew the Italian flag. The final division of the fleet waited until 1920 and the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, under which Prinz Eugen was ceded to France.

The French Navy removed her main armament for inspection and then used the hull as a target ship. She was first put under test aerial bombardment — a new question in 1922, and one her designers had never had to answer — and then sunk by the battleships Paris, Jean Bart and France off Toulon on 28 June 1922. It was eight years to the day since the shots at Sarajevo, and she had been commissioned ten days after them: her whole existence as a warship fitted inside the war those two dates opened and closed.

Her name did not go quietly. After the Anschluss of March 1938 Hitler reached for Austria-Hungary's naval past to court Austrian opinion. A German cruiser building at Kiel was to have been named Tegetthoff, but naming a ship for the victor of Lissa risked insulting Mussolini, so Hitler chose Prinz Eugen instead. She was launched on 22 August 1938 with Hitler present and christened by Magdolna Purgly — wife of Miklós Horthy, who had commanded the original Prinz Eugen from November 1917 to March 1918 and now stood at the launch as Regent of Hungary.