The ''Radetzky'' class was a group of three
semi-dreadnought
The dreadnought (alternatively spelled dreadnaught) was the predominant type of battleship in the early 20th century. The first of the kind, the Royal Navy's , had such an impact when launched in 1906 that similar battleships built after her ...
battleships built for the
Austro-Hungarian Navy between 1907 and 1910. All ships were built by the
STT shipyard in
Trieste
Trieste ( , ; sl, Trst ; german: Triest ) is a city and seaport in northeastern Italy. It is the capital city, and largest city, of the autonomous region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, one of two autonomous regions which are not subdivided into prov ...
. They were the last pre-dreadnoughts built by the Austro-Hungarians, and the penultimate class of any type of Austro-Hungarian battleship completed. The class comprised three ships: , , and . They were armed with four guns in two twin turrets and eight guns in four twin turrets.
Commissioned only a few years before the outbreak of World War I, the ships had limited service careers. All three of the battleships conducted training cruises in the
Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean Basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Western and Southern Europe and Anatolia, on the south by North Africa, and on the ...
in 1912. In 1913, they took part in an international naval demonstration in the
Ionian Sea that protested the
Balkan Wars. After Italy declared war on Austro-Hungary and the other
Central Powers
The Central Powers, also known as the Central Empires,german: Mittelmächte; hu, Központi hatalmak; tr, İttifak Devletleri / ; bg, Централни сили, translit=Tsentralni sili was one of the two main coalitions that fought in ...
in 1915, the three ''Radetzky''-class ships bombarded coastal targets in the
Adriatic Sea
The Adriatic Sea () is a body of water separating the Italian Peninsula from the Balkan Peninsula. The Adriatic is the northernmost arm of the Mediterranean Sea, extending from the Strait of Otranto (where it connects to the Ionian Sea) to t ...
. After 1915, their participation in the war became minimal. All three ships were handed over to Italy after the end of the war, and broken up for scrap between 1920 and 1926.
Development
Design work for a new class of battleships started about two weeks after the launching of , an , which took place on 30 April 1904. By the end of July 1905, the Austrian Commander in Chief of the Navy,
Admiral Monteccuccoli, laid out his vision for an expanded Austro-Hungarian fleet. This included twelve battleships, four
armored cruiser
The armored cruiser was a type of warship of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was designed like other types of cruisers to operate as a long-range, independent warship, capable of defeating any ship apart from a battleship and fast eno ...
s, eight scout cruisers, eighteen
destroyers, thirty-six large
torpedo boat
A torpedo boat is a relatively small and fast naval ship designed to carry torpedoes into battle. The first designs were steam-powered craft dedicated to ramming enemy ships with explosive spar torpedoes. Later evolutions launched variants of ...
s, and six
submarines. A navy design board evaluated five designs for the new battleship type between 25 and 29 September 1905.
The first task which needed to be accomplished before construction on any new ships could begin was securing the necessary funding. While naval spending was growing rapidly after 1905, particularly a result of the patronage of Archduke
Franz Ferdinand
Archduke Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria of Austria, (18 December 1863 – 28 June 1914) was the heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary. His assassination in Sarajevo was the most immediate cause of World War I.
Fr ...
, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne; he and Montecuccoli had succeeded in attracting public support, neither the budgets of 1905 or 1906 included spending allocations for an additional class of battleships. With construction on the ''Erzherzog Friedrich'' and
''Erzherzog Ferdinand Max'' nearly completion in April and May 1905, two large slipways at the Stabilimento Tecnico Triestino in Trieste were freed up for the first time in years. In a speech to the Austrian
Reichsrat in July 1906, Montecuccoli lobbied hard to put these slipways to use by saying, "The best defense of a coast lies certainly in a powerful offensive. But...we could not go on the offensive against the fleet of any great power." In November, Montecuccoli presented both the Austrian Reichsrat and the
Diet of Hungary
The Diet of Hungary or originally: Parlamentum Publicum / Parlamentum Generale ( hu, Országgyűlés) became the supreme legislative institution in the medieval kingdom of Hungary from the 1290s, and in its successor states, Royal Hungary and ...
a new naval budget for the construction of three battleships with a displacement of . The budgets passed and the Navy soon went to work assigning shipyards in Triest for the construction of the ships.
By the time design work began on the ''Radetzky'' class, a number of foreign navies had moved to adopt very heavy secondary battery guns, usually calibers in the range of , and this trend influenced the Austro-Hungarian design staff. Ships of these types were sometimes called "semi-dreadnoughts". The first design was armed with four guns in two twin
turrets, four guns in single turrets, and eight guns in
casemates. The second design retained the 28 and 24 cm guns as in the first version, though altered the tertiary guns to twelve guns. The third design, representative of the new
dreadnought
The dreadnought (alternatively spelled dreadnaught) was the predominant type of battleship in the early 20th century. The first of the kind, the Royal Navy's , had such an impact when launched in 1906 that similar battleships built after her ...
type of battleship that was being contemplated in other navies, featured eight 28 cm guns in four twin turrets, one fore, one aft, and two wing turrets. The heavy secondary guns were dispensed with altogether, and the light-caliber guns were increased to sixteen 10 cm guns. The fourth design was a variation on the third type; the eight 28 cm guns were replaced by six guns, in two twin turrets and two single turrets. The 10 cm guns remained the same. The final design mounted four 30.5 cm guns in two twin turrets, eight 19 cm guns in four wing turrets, and twelve 10 cm guns in casemates. The leader of the design staff,
Siegfried Popper, advocated the construction of an "all-big-gun" ship. However, Austro-Hungarian dock facilities at the time limited displacement to ; the two "dreadnought" type designs were too heavy.
Popper eventually relented, after admitting that the larger dreadnought type design would also warrant the construction of a new floating dry dock, which would significantly increase the cost of the project. The design board selected the fifth design, though during refinement of the design, the secondary guns were increased in caliber from 19 cm to 24 cm. The 30.5 cm gun was chosen because the breech of the new 28 cm was unreliable. The resulting design was the last
pre-dreadnought
Pre-dreadnought battleships were sea-going battleships built between the mid- to late- 1880s and 1905, before the launch of in 1906. The pre-dreadnought ships replaced the ironclad battleships of the 1870s and 1880s. Built from steel, protec ...
type of battleship built by the Austro-Hungarian navy.
Underwater protection was also emphasized. Between August and November 1906, the Austro-Hungarian navy conducted explosive tests using the 30-year-old ironclad . The tests were conducted with , in an attempt to investigate blast effects of the standard
naval mine
A naval mine is a self-contained explosive device placed in water to damage or destroy surface ships or submarines. Unlike depth charges, mines are deposited and left to wait until they are triggered by the approach of, or contact with, any ...
on a 1:10 scale. The tests were generally unsuccessful; as a result, Popper devised a mathematical model to predict the strength the underwater protection system would require to adequately protect the new battleships. The ships were ultimately equipped with an armored
double bottom for defense against mines and torpedoes.
Design
General characteristics
![Klasa radetzky](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Klasa_radetzky.png)
The ''Radetzky''-class ships were
long at the waterline and
long overall
__NOTOC__
Length overall (LOA, o/a, o.a. or oa) is the maximum length of a vessel's hull measured parallel to the waterline. This length is important while docking the ship. It is the most commonly used way of expressing the size of a ship, an ...
. They had a
beam of and a
draft
Draft, The Draft, or Draught may refer to:
Watercraft dimensions
* Draft (hull), the distance from waterline to keel of a vessel
* Draft (sail), degree of curvature in a sail
* Air draft, distance from waterline to the highest point on a vesse ...
of . The ships were designed to displace normally, and up to with a full combat load. Machinery consisted of two four-cylinder vertical
triple expansion engine
A steam engine is a heat engine that performs mechanical work using steam as its working fluid. The steam engine uses the force produced by steam pressure to push a piston back and forth inside a cylinder. This pushing force can be tr ...
s. Each engine was powered by six
Yarrow boiler
Yarrow boilers are an important class of high-pressure water-tube boilers. They were developed by
Yarrow & Co. (London), Shipbuilders and Engineers and were widely used on ships, particularly warships.
The Yarrow boiler design is characteristic ...
s. Power output was , for a top speed of . The ships carried of coal, which enabled a maximum range of at a cruising speed of .
Armament
The ''Radetzky''-class ships, as noted above, carried a
main battery
A main battery is the primary weapon or group of weapons around which a warship is designed. As such, a main battery was historically a gun or group of guns, as in the broadsides of cannon on a ship of the line. Later, this came to be turreted ...
of four
30.5 cm (12 in) 45- caliber guns in two twin
gun turrets. The guns were built by
Škoda Works
The Škoda Works ( cs, Škodovy závody, ) was one of the largest European industrial conglomerates of the 20th century, founded by Czech engineer Emil Škoda in 1859 in Plzeň, then in the Kingdom of Bohemia, Austrian Empire. It is the predece ...
in
Pilsen. They were capable of a
rate of fire of three shells in the first minute, and then 1 to 2 rounds per minute afterward. The guns fired
armor-piercing
Armour-piercing ammunition (AP) is a type of projectile designed to penetrate either body armour or vehicle armour.
From the 1860s to 1950s, a major application of armour-piercing projectiles was to defeat the thick armour carried on many wars ...
(AP) shells that weighed and required a
propellant charge. Their
muzzle velocity was . The turrets could depress to −3° and elevate to 20°. At maximum elevation, the guns could hit targets out to . These turrets suffered from a number of design faults; among them were the overly-large
cupola
In architecture, a cupola () is a relatively small, most often dome-like, tall structure on top of a building. Often used to provide a lookout or to admit light and air, it usually crowns a larger roof or dome.
The word derives, via Italian, fro ...
s on top. If a cupola was struck by gunfire, the thin top armor could be peeled back. Another serious issue was a defect in the ventilation system: when the turret was being ventilated under combat conditions, the system would duct toxic propellant gases into the gun house. It was estimated that the turrets contained only 15 minutes of oxygen once the ventilation system was activated.
The ships carried a heavy secondary battery of eight 24 cm (9.4 in) guns in four twin turrets. The turrets were mounted amidships, two on either side. These guns had nearly half the penetration power of the larger 30.5 cm guns, and approximately 25% shorter range. The secondary armament was augmented by twenty
10 cm L/50 guns in single mounts. These guns fired shells at a rate of between 8 and 10 rounds per minute. The shells were fired at a muzzle velocity of and could hit targets out to . ''Radetzky'' and her sisters also carried several smaller caliber guns, including two
L/18 landing guns, four
L/44 and one 47 mm L/33 quick-firing guns. After refits in 1916–1917, each ship had four
Škoda 7 cm K16 anti-aircraft guns installed. Three
torpedo tube
A torpedo tube is a cylindrical device for launching torpedoes.
There are two main types of torpedo tube: underwater tubes fitted to submarines and some surface ships, and deck-mounted units (also referred to as torpedo launchers) installed aboa ...
s were also carried, two on the beams and one in the stern.
Armor
The ships had an
armored belt that was thick in the central portion of the ship, where it protected the ammunition magazines, machinery spaces, and other critical areas of the ship. Forward and to the rear of the main battery
barbette
Barbettes are several types of gun emplacement in terrestrial fortifications or on naval ships.
In recent naval usage, a barbette is a protective circular armour support for a heavy gun turret. This evolved from earlier forms of gun protectio ...
s, the belt reduced in thickness to . A thick
torpedo bulkhead
A torpedo bulkhead is a type of naval armour common on the more heavily armored warships, especially battleships and battlecruisers of the early 20th century. It is designed to keep the ship afloat even if the hull is struck underneath the belt ar ...
ran the length of the hull to provide a second layer of underwater protection should the main belt be penetrated. The armored deck was thick, and supported by a sloped deck that was also 48 mm thick.
The main battery turrets were heavily armored. Their sides and face were thick, while their roofs were thick. The turrets for the secondary 24 cm guns had slightly less armor, with thick sides and thick roofs. The casemates that mounted the 10 cm guns were protected with worth of armor plating. The armored
conning tower had 250 mm-thick sides and a 100 mm-thick roof.
Ships
Service careers
Pre-war
The three ''Radetzky''-class battleships were assigned to the 2nd Division of the 1st Battle Squadron, alongside the ships in the 1st Division. The three ships conducted several training cruises in the
Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean Basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Western and Southern Europe and Anatolia, on the south by North Africa, and on the ...
after their commissioning in 1910–1911. ''Radetzky'' was present during the British
Coronation Review
A fleet review or naval review is an event where a gathering of ships from a particular navy is paraded and reviewed by an incumbent head of state and/or other official civilian and military dignitaries. A number of national navies continue to ...
at
Spithead
Spithead is an area of the Solent and a roadstead off Gilkicker Point in Hampshire, England. It is protected from all winds except those from the southeast. It receives its name from the Spit, a sandbank stretching south from the Hampshire ...
in 1911. In 1912, ''Zrínyi'' took part in a training cruise with the recently commissioned dreadnoughts and in the eastern Mediterranean, which included a stop at
Malta
Malta ( , , ), officially the Republic of Malta ( mt, Repubblika ta' Malta ), is an island country in the Mediterranean Sea. It consists of an archipelago, between Italy and Libya, and is often considered a part of Southern Europe. It lies ...
. The following year, the three ships were involved in an international naval demonstration to protest the raging
Balkan Wars;during the operation the first
seaplane
A seaplane is a powered fixed-wing aircraft capable of taking off and landing (alighting) on water.Gunston, "The Cambridge Aerospace Dictionary", 2009. Seaplanes are usually divided into two categories based on their technological characteri ...
s to be launched from a warship in combat were operated from ''Radetzky'' and her sisters.
World War I
The assistance of the Austro-Hungarian fleet was called upon by the German
Mediterranean Division
The Mediterranean Division (german: Mittelmeerdivision) was a division consisting of the battlecruiser and the light cruiser of the German ''Kaiserliche Marine'' (Imperial Navy) in the early 1910s. It was established in response to the First Balk ...
, which consisted of the battlecruiser and light cruiser . The German ships were attempting to break out of
Messina, where they had been coaling prior to the outbreak of war—British ships had begun to assemble off Messina in an attempt to trap the Germans. By this time, the Austro-Hungarians had not yet fully mobilized their fleet, though the three ''Radetzky''s and three ''Tegetthoff''s, along with several cruisers and smaller craft, were available. The Austro-Hungarian high command, wary of instigating war with Great Britain, ordered the fleet to avoid the British ships, and to only openly support the Germans while they were in Austro-Hungarian waters. On 7 August, when the Germans broke out of Messina, the Austro-Hungarian fleet, including the ''Radetzky''-class battleships, sailed as far south as
Brindisi, before returning to port.
In October 1914, the French army established artillery batteries on
Mount Lovčen to support the Army of
Montenegro
)
, image_map = Europe-Montenegro.svg
, map_caption =
, image_map2 =
, capital = Podgorica
, coordinates =
, largest_city = capital
, official_languages = M ...
against the Austrian army at
Cattaro
Kotor (Montenegrin Cyrillic: Котор, ), historically known as Cattaro (from Italian: ), is a coastal town in Montenegro. It is located in a secluded part of the Bay of Kotor. The city has a population of 13,510 and is the administrative ...
. By the time they were operational, on 15 October, the Austro-Hungarians were ready with the pre-dreadnoughts of the . However, their 24 cm guns were insufficient to dislodge the French artillery batteries, and so ''Radetzky'' was sent to assist them. On 21 October, the ship arrived, and the gunfire from her 30.5 cm guns forced the French to abandon the position. On 24 May 1915, all three ships
bombarded the Italian coast, including the important naval base at
Ancona
Ancona (, also , ) is a city and a seaport in the Marche region in central Italy, with a population of around 101,997 . Ancona is the capital of the province of Ancona and of the region. The city is located northeast of Rome, on the Adriatic ...
, following the entrance of Italy into the war on the side of the
Triple Entente
The Triple Entente (from French '' entente'' meaning "friendship, understanding, agreement") describes the informal understanding between the Russian Empire, the French Third Republic, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland as well a ...
.
By October 1918, Austria prepared to transfer her entire fleet to the
State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs
The State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs ( sh, Država Slovenaca, Hrvata i Srba / ; sl, Država Slovencev, Hrvatov in Srbov) was a political entity that was constituted in October 1918, at the end of World War I, by Slovenes, Croats and Serbs ( ...
in order to keep it out of Italian hands. On 10 November 1918, one day before the armistice, Yugoslav officers with scratch crews sailed ''Radetzky'' and ''Zrínyi'' out of Pola. As they cleared the breakwater at Pola, they sighted the approaching Italian fleet. The two battleships hoisted American flags and sailed south along the
Adriatic coast to
Castelli Bay near
Spalato
)''
, settlement_type = City
, anthem = ''Marjane, Marjane''
, image_skyline =
, imagesize = 267px
, image_caption = Top: Nighttime view of Split from Mosor; 2nd row: Cathedra ...
. They appealed for American naval forces to meet them and accept their surrender, which a squadron of USN submarine chasers in the area did. However, under the
subsequent peace treaty, the Allied powers ignored the transfer of the Austro-Hungarian ships to the Yugoslav navy; instead, the ships were to be ceded to Italy. ''Radetzky'' and ''Zrínyi'' were broken up in Italy between 1920–21; ''Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand'' survived until 1926, when she too was scrapped in Italy.
Footnotes
References
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External links
30.5 cm/45 (12") & K10 Škoda, at NavWeaps site(accessed 2016-09-01)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Radetzky Class Battleship
Battleship classes
World War I battleships of Austria-Hungary