Battles in the Alps by Root G. Irving

Author:Root, G. Irving [Root, G. Irving]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Historical Non-fiction
ISBN: 9781456062002
Publisher: PublishAmerica
Published: 2008-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

Hands Off! Is the Response as an Italian Hand

Reaches for Austria’s Adriatic Seacoast.

Horthy’s command tore into the line of anti-submarine craft, sinking 14 and crippling three more.134 Immediately, every British, French, and Italian warship in the area began to close on the Austro-Hungarians, hoping to cut them off from their bases. What followed was the most extensive action of the war in the Adriatic. First shots were exchanged just after daylight; the Austrian destroyers were able to reach the safety of the Albanian coast before they were overwhelmed. Horthy’s cruisers, meanwhile, engaged a more powerful fleet of British cruisers in a running battle that lasted two hours. Both groups suffered damage, and Horthy was injured by a hostile shell, and his ship crippled. However, the Entente fleet never closed in for the sure kill; bedeviled by mechanical failures and missed signals, it hesitated just long enough for the Austrian reinforcements, led by the old battleship, to discourage any further aggression. Minor, post-climactic maneuvers dominated the remainder of the day. These did not go well for the Entente. British light cruiser Dartmouth was torpedoed that afternoon by a German submarine, and although it was rescued before it could sink, it had to be towed to port for extensive repairs. Soon thereafter, the French destroyer Boutefeu slammed into a mine and was lost.

The Adriatic battle of May 15th is often remembered as ‘The Battle of the Otranto Straits’, somewhat of a misnomer, but it had begun there and its effects were most noticeable there. For the time being, the Entente leaders decided to suspend implementation of the line of nets at nighttime, when the helpless little ‘drifters’ were most vulnerable. Once again the underdog Austro-Hungarians had won a sea action, a capability for which they had, before the war, never been given much credit. Their fleet, after all, was only the eighth most powerful in the world, and six of the first seven were united in the Entente. Strategically, the battle had changed nothing, which was just fine with the leaders of the Alliance forces; they still seemed to be winning the sea war with submarines alone. In the month of May, another 181,000 tons of shipping was destroyed in the Mediterranean, and a further 168,500 in June.135

If events in the Tyrol or out in the Adriatic made any impression upon Luigi Cadorna, he showed no indication of it during the Tenth Battle. Unperturbed about the fact that Capello’s army had been unable to capture all of Mt. Santo or advance due east of Gorizia, he now could think of nothing but the second phase of his one-two punch planned for the Carso Plateau. At dawn on the 23rd of May the Duke of Aosta’s Third Army artillery commenced firing for its second major barrage in eleven days. All day the big guns, which included those batteries sent by the British, roared away at the Austrian positions between the Wippach and the sea. Off shore in the Gulf, a number of British light warships joined in, turning all available weapons against the heights above the coast road.

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