Ode to the Austrian Navy

While most people find it an odd piece of historical trivia that Austria, a landlocked country high in the Alps, once had a navy, I was aware of this from my earliest days. Salzburg's military museum, buried in the depths of the Hohensalzburg fortress, is mostly dedicated to the exploits of my grandfather's old unit, the 59th "Erzherzog Rainier" Infantry Regiment. But when I was small, it also had a large model of a torpedo boat, and a painting of an Austrian cruiser slicing through the Adriatic. I'm not sure either is still there, but I clearly remember seeing them. But then, sometimes, I do get confused. Perhaps the painting and model were in Vienna.

At any rate, I started playing wargames when I was eight or nine, and my mother picked up a copy of Avalon Hill's Jutland for me in Fort Bragg, N.C. She plunked down a quarter for it in one of the on-base "thrift" stores, where personal items belonging to troopers who wouldn't be needing them any more were sold off. Clueless as to the game's origins, I happily manuevered the cardboard ships across the living room's puke-green shag carpet.

But there was something missing. Where was the Austrian navy? I knew there was one; actually, it had come as a greater surprise that Germany had a big navy. This stayed in the back of my mind for many years.

Not that many years later (advancing age has a way of changing perspective; it seemed a lifetime in those days because, well, it was) I signed on to do various design and development tasks with Quarterdeck Games. The owner there was a naval game guru, Jack Greene Jr.

I learned a lot about game mechanics from Jack, about the game business, about life in general. Jack is truly one of my favorite people on the planet. That's actually easy to say, since I don't like many people. But among the tasks Jack set for me was to craft an operational game to go along with The Royal Navy, then the new Quarterdeck naval game.

The Royal Navy was a purely tactical game, a series of battle scenarios from both the First and Second World Wars. It was fairly complicated, with hit records on separate sheets of paper and intense interaction between armor thickness and gunnery penetration. I did make sure it had at least a few Austrian ships in it.

As a topic for this operational game, Jack set the cruises of the German battlecruiser Goeben on the Black Sea during World War I. I'm sure he had a good reason for this and shared it with me, but two decades later, I have no clue what it might have been. Before this game was finished, Quarterdeck went away.

Over the following years I went to college, worked as a newspaper reporter, went to graduate school, became an academic historian. I even had a run-in with the dean of Austrian naval historians, Anthony Sokol, a rite of passage for all such specialists until the Old Man of the Adriatic died in the mid-1980s. And I wrote a dissertation featuring this guy:

The game eventually came out from another publisher, one I do my best not to name in public. Or in private, either, since just the name makes my sweet and cultured Southern wife cuss like our sales manager. It won awards and was well-received among those who saw it. I began to sketch out a sequel set in the Adriatic, one that would be filled with Austrian ships.

That went nowhere fast, as Brian Knipple and I founded Avalanche Press in 1993. A new naval game based on the old was in our earliest plans, and Brien Miller began work on the art to support it. It would cover both the Adriatic and the Black Seas (thus its bizarre project name, "Deux Mare"). That wasn't a really bright idea (the name or the topic) so we expanded it to show all of the Mediterranean Sea during World War I. Never did come up with a decent name for it. Mediterranean came out in 1996, to widespread acclaim. We sold out of it a few years later, and in 2002 brought out a deluxe edition.

This time, I could indulge in Austrian warships to my heart's content. Or almost so. All of the Austro-Hungarian fleet that fought in the Adriatic Sea and Mediterranean made it into the game: battleships, armored cruisers, even that light cruiser whose picture had inspired me many years before (SMS Helgoland, I learned much later). The game is filled with scenarios for them, both historical actions and those the admirals thought or hoped they might fight.

There are also Turkish, British, French, Greek, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Bulgarian, Japanese and German ships, and piles of scenarios for them, but these are all window dressing. I designed the game so that it could have the Austrian Navy in it.

Satisfying as that might have been, I still had many drawings for planned but unbuilt Austrian warships that we didn't use in Mediterranean. I really wanted to put these in our U.S. Navy Plan Black game, but let myself get talked out of that. When we decided to produce a supplement with real counters, here was my chance.

Dreadnoughts has an article on Austrian naval construction, and some new ship types: the huge battleships and fast battlecruisers designed by Austrian engineers long after any hope of completing them had been extinguished. The Austrian aircraft carrier, with airplanes to operate from it including the famous armored helicopter. Some extra fast cruisers and battlecruisers of type we'd shown as single examples in Mediterranean, that would have been built in three- or four-ship classes had they ever been completed. And we added a counter for the ancient coast defense ship Erzherzog Rudolf. I had a scenario all planned out for her when I prepared the counter manifest for Peggy to draw, but I forgot what I had in mind by the time the book was done. There's actually no scenario in the book for the old tub, but Peg did a very nice drawing.

This was very satisfying. We added some nice tactical rules by Karl Laskas, so that players can have a more intense experience defeating the Dual Monarchy's enemies. And I threw in some articles and scenarios on South American dreadnoughts, Spanish naval planning and the Turkish navy, but again, all that was window dressing. I wrote the book so I could produce more Austrian ship counters.

And finally, there was Cruiser Warfare. Planned years ago, the game only went into serious design work in early 2004. A single Austrian cruiser was present in the Far East when World War I broke out, Kaiserin Elisabeth. So she's in Cruiser Warfare, along with her sister ship, Kaiser Franz Josef.

Once Dreadnoughts hit the shelves, I felt quite liberated. I had finally answered that eight-year-old boy's question. The Austrian Navy was done. And so, as I always do once a project is done and in my hands, I gathered up the books, notes and papers to put them away. And as I did, I noticed something about the technical schematics I'd collected from the Austrian War Archive.

I have more of them.

Mike Bennighof
September 2004