Ships of the Empire
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
July 2010

More than once, I've been asked to write game variants for one or more of our games positing a survival of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into the Second World War. It was certainly possible for the empire to avoid dissolution in 1918, chiefly by making peace well before its political, economic and social order collapsed. And that order proved much stronger than critics at the time claimed and many later observers have credited. The surprise is not that Austria-Hungary broke apart, but that it fought off its enemies for so long. The federal solution pushed by many within the empire, presaging the united Europe of the 21st century, was probably a very workable answer.

I suppose at some point I'll need to write on the empire's end at greater length, but we'll start with the premise that the empire's doom was not inevitable.

More problematic in the request is the depiction of Austro-Hungarian forces fighting in the Second World War. World War II saw an extremely civilized nation descend into barbaric conduct of the worst order, to satisfy the twisted urges of a demented leader. A few years ago I would have argued with conviction that an advanced society could only see such a breakdown under extreme, long-standing stress — such as the loss of the First World War after suffering massive human and economic loss, followed by a humiliating peace treaty, starvation, and further massive economic loss. A nation with a long democratic tradition, enjoying economic prosperity, would surely be immune.

I have become less sure of this in recent years, and can allow that fascism might not require extreme societal distress to take root, particularly in a nation with a compliant mass media. Adolf Hitler enjoyed enormous luck in his seizure of power in 1932 and 1933, and while an Imperial Germany would be much harder to overthrow than the Weimar Republic the possibility might still have existed.

Nazi Germany could in no way peacefully co-exist with its neighbors; aside from his insane racial agenda, Hitler's entire economic program represented an irreversible course toward war. And so there would have been war at some point, with the Austro-Hungarian Empire standing against the totalitarian powers.

And in such a conflict, what sort of fleet would the empire have available?

In the years before the Great War, the empire built four dreadnoughts and made a slow start toward four more. All of them were delayed many times by political wrangling and the most expensive ships of their era, thanks to the need to spread sub-contracting work throughout the empire to assure funding. A federal, democratic state would still suffer from these inefficiencies — there are always greedy types who'll put profit over patriotism. And so the fleet probably would not be very large.

Germany and Austria-Hungary would probably have participated in the Washington Naval Conference had they emerged from a victorious or stalemated Great War with their political institutions intact. An allotment equal to those of France or Italy would have satisfied the Austrian representatives. And treaty limitations would have placed the Imperial and Royal Navy in the same situation as its rivals in the 1930s, contemplating expensive rebuilding of older warships since new construction was not allowed.

The fleet would have consisted of re-built veterans of the Great War in the battle line, a number of heavy and light cruisers similar to those built by other nations under treaty limitations, a couple of aircraft carriers, and a large commitment to submarines, destroyers and light craft — the most successful units of the wartime K.u.K. Kriegsmarine.

Austria-Hungary had a relatively short naval history, but in the latter part of the 19th century old ironclads received extensive rebuilding at great expense. The idea of scrapping perfectly good battleships repelled elected representatives in many nations, and old warships were extensively modernized in the 1920s and 1930s, at prices often exceeding those of new ships. The Washington and London Treaties certainly also encouraged this process, allowing signatories to rebuild older ships when they could not build new ones.

Treaty incentives combined with Austrian frugality would have assured that the Navy's dreadnoughts would have been modernized, though not likely to the same extent as their Italian counterparts. The three surviving Tegetthoff class dreadnoughts appear in Imperial and Royal Navy having been re-engined for oil firing, with a slight lengthening to improve their hull form and massive internal reconstruction to correct their poor subdivision. They've been given a new dual-purpose secondary armament of 120mm guns in turrets, replacing their 150mm guns mounted in casemates. They retain their Skoda-made 12-inch guns, re-conditioned like those of other navies.

Austria-Hungary never completed the four battleships of the Ersatz Monarch class, but they're included here as if they had been commissioned, the thinking being that their presence might have helped Austria win the war or negotiate a favorable settlement. They had a somewhat better hull form than the preceding class and better internal design, but still would require serious work to bring them up to standard. Like the older class, in the World War II form they've been given oil-fired engines and greater length to improve their speed. They also sport a dual-purpose secondary armament in turrets just like those shown in the empire's final drawing-board dreadnought designs.

By the mid-1930s, Austria-Hungary would have joined other nations in building a new generation of fast battleships. The empire's designers had moved toward the fast battleship concept with their last proposals, which carried excellent Skoda 16.2-inch (410mm) guns in dual turrets — or at least would have had they been built. But Austria-Hungary had solid experience in design of triple turrets and the Austrian admirals preferred them.

Therefore, the Admiral Haus class represents a 45,000-ton fast battleship, with its displacement at the 1938 escalator limit of the Second London Treaty. She carries nine 16.2-inch guns in triple turrets, adopting the Italian and Japanese solution of simply ignoring treaty limits that become an annoyance. She has a powerful anti-aircraft armament, in keeping with the last Austro-Hungarian designs and warships designed in Yugoslavia between the wars.

Positing aircraft carriers for the Imperial and Royal Navy takes a greater step away from reailty; late in the war Admiral Anton Haus issued an order to convert the torpedo depot ship Gaa into what he called an aircrat carrier. However, he probably meant a seaplane tender rather than a ship witha flight deck.

There are two carriers in the set, big ships with large complements of aircraft. These could possibly represent battle cruiser conversions; the navy did draw up plans for battle cruisers very similar in concept to the Royal Navy's Glorious and Courageous.

Austria's fast scout cruisers all survived the Great War, but in worn-out condition thanks to heavy use. They would not have been present in the 1940s. The last designs drafted in the monarchy followed concepts similar to those of the Royal Navy: a heavily-armed light cruiser for commerce raiding, and a very long, very fast and nearly unprotected battle cruiser. Basic design principles likely would have been fairly conservative.

The 1939 fleet features two classes of "treaty cruiser," ships limited to 10,000 tons and 8-inch (203mm) guns. The older class carries eight guns, the latter one ten. They are fairly conventional cruiser designs for the period, but given the successful Austrian intelligence operations during the Great War it's reasonable to assume they would have had good knowledge of Italian programs. Since the Italians cheated blatantly on their Zara class, we've let the Austrians do the same for their Fiume class. As with the battleships, all of the heavy cruisers carry a formidable anti-aircraft armament.

There are also two classes of light cruiser. One is a very conventional design, similar to those of other naval powers. The other is a small, very fast ship suitable for supporting destroyers in surface combat. This was the role Austria's cruisers ended up fulfilling in the Great War, and these ships would have been Austria-Hungary's answer to the French large destroyers and Italian small fast cruisers.

As early as 1914, the Austrian Navy tried to couple seaplanes and warships, with the battleship Radetzky employing a seaplane to spot for her bombardments of Montenegrin positions. Cruisers would no doubt have carried either seaplanes or helicopters. We covered early Austrian experiments with the helicopter in our Dreadnoughts book, complete with counters for them. And the Austrian fleet receives three helicopter cruisers, with a design similar to that of the seaplane cruisers built by the Japanese and designed by the Italian firm of Ansaldo but not accepted for construction.

The Navy built a large number of small 262-ton torpedo boats just before the Great War, but found their lack of range and durability very disappointing despite their low cost. Designs drafted in the last years of the war called for a much bigger torpedo boat and even larger destroyer.

That concept carried over to the Polish and Yugoslav navies in the years after the war, staffed with veterans of the Imperial and Royal service. Yugoslavia built the 1,900-ton Dubrovnik in 1931, while Poland launched the 2,000-ton Blyskawica five years later. Austro-Hungarian destroyers would likely have been similar, large and heavily-armed, following the same lines as German developments.

Both the Yugoslav and Polish destroyers were built in foreign yards, Dubrovnik in Britain and Blyskawica in France. The yards that built the Imperial and Royal Navy fell under Italian rule after the First World War, and built warships for Mussolini's fleet, including two of the Littorio-class battleships. A new generation of Austrian warships, like the last, would have been constructed at home and armed with Skoda weaponry.

The 1918 plans are a slender basis on which to project 20 to 25 years of policy, but given the trends in other navies it does seem reasonable to assume that the K.u.K. Kriegsmarine would have built large destroyers maximized for surface action, drawing on the experience of the Battle of Otranto. Yugoslavia began construction of an enlarged version of Dubrovnik in 1939, named Split, with Skoda-made 140mm guns and German machinery. Austrian destroyers might have been very similar; Split and Dubrovnik both showed a prescient attention to anti-aircraft defense.

Italian designers emphasized high speeds from the latter decades of the 19th century, and after the First World War the French followed suit thanks to their rivalry with Italy. Austrian designs usually put protection ahead of speed, at least in design of capital ships. A modern Austrian destroyer probably would not have been as fast as an Italian boat, with greater durability instead.

The destroyers would likely be backed by a large number of "torpedo boats" chiefly intended as convoy escorts. The two surviving Mediterranean powers, France and Italy, made use of the Washington Treaty's allowance of an unlimited number of warships under 600 tons' displacement. The Empire probably would have done so as well.

Imperial & Royal Navy comes with a full-sized standard sheet of counters: 70 "long" ship pieces and 140 small ships, aircraft and task force markers. There are also of course ship data sheets to match, and 10 scenarios (three battle, seven operational).

This piece originally appeared in December 2008.

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