SMS Viribus Unitis

Viribus Unitis was ordered by the Austro-Hungarian Navy in 1908 as the first of four ships, the first dreadnoughts the empire ever built. She was to have been called Tegetthoff, but Emperor Franz Josef ordered her renamed for his personal motto - Viribus Unitis, 'With United Forces' - and the name Tegetthoff passed to the second of the class. Her keel was laid at the Stabilimento Tecnico Triestino shipyard in Trieste on 24 July 1910, and after eleven months of building she was launched on 24 June 1911. Fitting out took her to a commissioning date of 5 December 1912.

She measured 152 m overall with a beam of 27.9 m and a draught of 8.7 m at deep load, displacing 20,000 tonnes at load and 21,689 at deep load. Four Parsons steam turbines, each in its own engine room, took steam from twelve Babcock and Wilcox boilers for a designed 27,000 shaft horsepower and 20 knots, though no figures from her speed trials are known to survive. She carried 1,844.5 tonnes of coal with a further 267.2 tonnes of fuel oil to be sprayed on it to make it burn faster, good for 4,200 nautical miles at 10 knots.

Her main battery was twelve 30.5 cm Skoda K10 guns in four triple turrets - a heavy armament on a comparatively small hull. Twelve 15 cm Skoda guns sat in casemates amidships, with twelve 7 cm guns on open pivot mounts above them and three more 7 cm on the upper turrets for anti-aircraft work. Four 21-inch submerged torpedo tubes were fitted, one each in the bow, the stern and either broadside, with twelve torpedoes carried.

In late June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand travelled aboard Viribus Unitis on his way to observe military manoeuvres in Bosnia. He boarded at Trieste on 25 June and the ship carried him to the mouth of the Neretva, where he transferred to another vessel. On 28 June he and his wife Sophie were assassinated at Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, the event that began the First World War. Two days later the same battleship carried their bodies back to Trieste.

Viribus Unitis was assigned to the 1st Battleship Division before the war, and her war was constrained by geography: the Otranto Barrage kept Austro-Hungarian battleships from leaving the Adriatic, and she hardly ever left Pola. On the eve of hostilities she was mobilised with her sisters Tegetthoff and Prinz Eugen and the rest of the fleet to support the flight of the German battlecruiser SMS Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau out of the strait of Messina; the fleet had reached as far south as Brindisi when the Germans broke out successfully and it was recalled.

In May 1915 she took part in the bombardment of the Italian port of Ancona, and after that she stayed at Pola for most of the rest of the war, where the Italians flew eighty air raids between 1915 and 1917. The monotony was broken by a visit from the new Emperor Charles I on 15 December 1916 and another from Kaiser Wilhelm II on 12 December 1917, inspecting the German submarine base there.

In 1918 the fleet's new commander, Konteradmiral Miklós Horthy, planned another attack on the Otranto Barrage to let more German and Austro-Hungarian U-boats through. He left Pola on the night of 8 June with Viribus Unitis and Prinz Eugen; Szent István and Tegetthoff followed on 9 June with a destroyer and six torpedo boats. At about 3:15 the next morning two Italian MAS boats of a platoon commanded by Capitano di fregata Luigi Rizzo - MAS 15 under Armando Gori and MAS 21 under Giuseppe Aonzo - spotted the fleet and penetrated the escort screen. MAS 21's torpedoes failed against Tegetthoff, but MAS 15 hit Szent István at about 3:25.

Tegetthoff tried to tow her crippled sister and gave up; Szent István sank a few minutes after 6 am. Horthy, believing the Italians had discovered his plan, cancelled the raid and turned for Pola - though in fact the Italians did not learn the dreadnoughts had sailed until aerial reconnaissance photographs later that day showed them gone. It was the last military operation Viribus Unitis took part in.

By October 1918 defeat was certain, and the Austrian government handed Viribus Unitis and much of the fleet to the newly formed State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, which had declared neutrality - preferable, in Vienna's view, to surrendering it to the Allies. The transfer took place on the evening of 31 October. A minority of sources say she was renamed Jugoslavija that afternoon, and her crew proposed Frankopan, but other accounts of the handover mention no change, and the National Council's own document on her sinking calls her simply Viribus Unitis.

That night two Italian officers, Raffaele Paolucci and Raffaele Rossetti, rode a primitive manned torpedo nicknamed the Mignatta, or leech, into the naval base at Pola, unaware that the fleet had changed hands the day before. They reached Viribus Unitis at about 4:40 am, and Rossetti fixed a canister of TNT to her hull timed for 6:30 and sank a second on the harbour floor nearby. Having no breathing sets, the pair had to keep their heads above water, and were spotted and taken prisoner minutes after placing the charges.

Brought aboard, they told the new captain what they had done but not where. Admiral Janko Vuković sent them across to Tegetthoff and ordered the ship evacuated. When 6:30 passed without an explosion he returned aboard with many of his sailors, believing the Italians had lied. The charge went off at 6:44, and Viribus Unitis sank in fifteen minutes, taking Vuković and between 300 and 400 of her crew. The second canister sank the Austrian freighter Wien. Paolucci and Rossetti were interned until the war ended days later and received the Gold Medal of Military Valor from the Kingdom of Italy.

She is remembered in three countries' worth of objects. The Austrian mint made her the motif of a collectors' coin issued on 13 September 2006, the last of the series 'Austria on the High Seas', showing the ship from the deck of a consort on one face and, on the other, a biplane overhead and a submarine surfacing - a tribute to all three arms of the Imperial and Royal Navy. A 1:25 cutaway model six metres long, built between 1913 and 1917 by eight craftsmen of the Stabilimento Tecnico Triestino, stands in the Museum of Military History in Vienna. Her bow is displayed at the Venetian Arsenal.