SMS Tegetthoff

For most of the nineteenth century Austria-Hungary built for coast defence, and sea power drew little public interest. That changed with the appointment of Archduke Franz Ferdinand as admiral in 1902 and of Vice-Admiral Rudolf Montecuccoli as Commander-in-Chief in 1904. Franz Ferdinand's interest was pointed at Italy, which he judged the empire's greatest regional threat: in 1903 Italy had eighteen battleships in commission or building against Austria-Hungary's six. New railways through the Alpine passes to Trieste and Dalmatia, and lower tariffs at Trieste, had also made the empire far more of a maritime power than it had been.

Dreadnought's launch in 1906 wiped the value off older battleships and gave Vienna a chance to catch up. In January 1909 Montecuccoli put a memorandum to Franz Joseph I proposing sixteen battleships, twelve cruisers and much else, including four dreadnoughts of 20,000 tonnes. Within three months the plan had leaked to the Italian press, and in June 1909 Italy laid down Dante Alighieri. Austria-Hungary had no money to answer: the collapse of Wekerle's government left the Hungarian Diet without a prime minister for nearly a year, and without a budget there were no funds.

The Witkowitz Ironworks and the Skoda Works offered to build at their own financial risk in return for assurances the government would buy the ships once money existed, an arrangement Montecuccoli accepted for two hulls, Tegetthoff and Viribus Unitis. Franz Ferdinand personally courted Albert Salomon Anselm von Rothschild, whose family owned Witkowitz and the Creditanstalt, to underwrite them. The deal stayed secret, since it committed some 60 million kronen without the approval of either parliament, until the Social Democratic paper Arbeiter-Zeitung broke it in April 1910, by which point the plans were finished.

Siegfried Popper designed her 152 metres long with a beam of 27.90 metres, displacing 20,000 tonnes at load and 21,689 at full combat load. Her main battery was twelve 45-calibre 30.5 cm Skoda K10 guns in four triple turrets, two forward and two aft in superfiring pairs: the first triple turrets in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, adopted both to keep the ship compact within Austro-Hungarian doctrine and budgets and to answer the Italian Dante Alighieri. Three guns a turret gave a heavier broadside for the size, a shorter citadel and better weight distribution, and Skoda already had a triple design in hand for a Russian order.

Her belt was 280 mm through the central citadel, thinning to 150 mm towards bow and stern, with 180 mm upper belt and casemates and 280 mm on turret sides, barbettes and conning tower. Twelve Babcock & Wilcox boilers fed four Parsons turbines for a designed 26,400 to 27,000 shaft horsepower and 20 knots; she was reported at 19.75 on trials, though the official trial records for the whole class were lost after the war. She burned coal, with 267 tonnes of oil carried to spray on it and raise the burn rate.

Her weakness was underneath. The underwater protection was an extension of the double bottom up to the lower edge of the belt, with a 10 mm outer plate and a torpedo bulkhead of two 25 mm plates, a total depth of only 1.60 metres, incapable of containing a torpedo or mine detonation without rupturing. Popper had intended the hull to defeat mines. It failed her sisters twice over: Szent Istvan to a torpedo in June 1918 and Viribus Unitis to a limpet mine that November. She was laid down at Stabilimento Tecnico Triestino in Trieste on 24 September 1910, launched in March 1912 and commissioned on 14 July 1913.

Before the war she and Viribus Unitis were the pride of the fleet, serving in the First Battle Division under Vice-Admiral Maximilian Njegovan. In spring 1914 the two dreadnoughts, with the pre-dreadnought Zrinyi and the coastal defence ship Monarch, cruised the eastern Mediterranean and the Levant, calling at Smyrna, Beirut, Alexandria and Malta. Tegetthoff and Viribus Unitis reached Malta on 22 May and left for Pola on 28 May, one month to the day before Sarajevo.

When news came of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie on 28 June, the navy's Commander-in-Chief Anton Haus sailed south from Trieste with Tegetthoff, the cruiser Admiral Spaun and several torpedo boats. Two days after the murders the bodies were taken aboard Viribus Unitis, which had been anchored off Bosnia waiting to receive the Archduke on his return. Tegetthoff and the rest of Haus's fleet escorted her back to Trieste, moving slowly up the Dalmatian coast within sight of land, church bells ringing in the coastal towns as the ships passed and people watching from the shore.

Italy's declaration of neutrality on 1 August 1914 ended any hope of using her in the Mediterranean, since the navy had counted on coal stockpiled in Italian ports. Coal was the recurring problem: 75 per cent of what the Austro-Hungarian navy burned had come from Britain before the war. Haus made his ships a fleet in being, writing in September 1914 that so long as the possibility existed that Italy would declare war, he considered it his first duty to keep the fleet intact. The army, the German navy and his own foreign ministry all criticised him for it.

When Italy did declare war, he was ready. Between two and four hours after the declaration reached Pola on 23 May 1915, the fleet sailed, with Tegetthoff and her sisters at the head of the force making 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. It delayed the Italian army's deployment to the Alpine border by two weeks.

After that she had almost no war. The Otranto Barrage sealed the Adriatic, and for three years she defended 1,130 nautical miles of coastline mostly by sitting in Pola. Her sister Szent Istvan spent 54 days at sea in 937 days of service. Haus died of pneumonia in February 1917 and Njegovan, who had privately chafed at watching his dreadnoughts idle, continued the same policy with 400,000 tons of coal at his disposal. The high points were inspections: Emperor Karl I in December 1916 and again in June 1917, Kaiser Wilhelm II in December 1917, and more than eighty Italian air raids on the port.

Miklos Horthy, promoted after the Cattaro Mutiny of February 1918, took the fleet to sea for regular manoeuvres and then planned a full attack on the Otranto Barrage, with Tegetthoff and her three sisters as its heaviest component. Horthy went south with Viribus Unitis and Prinz Eugen on 8 June 1918; Szent Istvan and Tegetthoff followed on the evening of the 9th. Pushing to catch up, Szent Istvan overheated her turbines, and when more steam was raised she made heavy smoke. At about 03:15 on 10 June, two Italian MAS boats returning from patrol saw it.

The platoon was commanded by Luigi Rizzo, with MAS 21 under Armando Gori and MAS 15 under Giuseppe Aonzo. Both boats got through the escort screen and split to take a dreadnought each. MAS 21's torpedoes missed Tegetthoff; MAS 15 fired at 03:25 and hit Szent Istvan twice abreast her boiler rooms. Tegetthoff, assuming submarines, left the formation, zigzagged and fired repeatedly at suspected periscopes. She returned at 04:45 and tried to take her sister in tow, and when that failed her crew came out on deck to salute as Szent Istvan capsized off Premuda at 06:12.

One of her officers, Linienschiffsleutnant Meusburger, filmed the last half-hour with his own camera alongside an official crew; the footage was later spliced together and shown in the United States, the proceeds going to feed children in postwar Austria. Horthy called the operation off. On 31 October 1918 the fleet was handed to the newly formed State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs rather than to the Allies, and the next morning two Italian officers, Raffaele Paolucci and Raffaele Rossetti, rode a manned torpedo into Pola and sank Viribus Unitis with limpet mines. Tegetthoff was untouched.

The Armistice of Villa Giusti refused to recognise the transfer. Italian troops occupied Pola on 5 November 1918, and by the 9th every ship in the harbour flew the Italian flag. In March 1919 Tegetthoff was escorted into Venice and displayed as a war trophy, and during those years she appeared in the film Eroi di nostri mari, which staged the sinking of Szent Istvan. Under the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye she was formally ceded to Italy, and after the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 she was broken up at La Spezia between 1924 and 1925. One of her anchors stands at the Monument to Italian Sailors at Brindisi; her bell is on display in Graz.