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]

CHAPTER XXXI

STORY OF THE "EMDEN"

We now return to the exploits of the Emden, its mysterious disappearance and the narrative of its heroes—a great epic of the sea.