Looking at the end of two fleets
When I was a kid I remember watching the Sound of Music (“Doe a Deer, a female Deer”) with my mother—who to this day counts the movie on her top five list—and I wondered about something that went unsaid in the film:
Since Austria was a landlocked country, How in the world did Captain Georg Von Trapp serve in the navy?
Well, that’s just it. Austria had a quite extensive naval history going back to the 14th Century. It had the unique coincidence of fighting both the last naval battle between wooden ships (which it won) and the first fleet battle by all armored ships (which it also won). In World war one it had one of the largest fleets in the world and its submarines were in fact quite deadly. (Captain Von Trapp was a Uboat commander.) However, coming up the loser along with Germany in 1918 Austria lost 99% of its fleet along with most of its empire at the end of the war.
What little survived was three small boats on the Danube River who continued the Austrian naval tradition from 1918 until 1945 when Austria found itself on the losing end of another war and lost even this small fleet.
In 1955, at the end of the Allied occupation, the Austrian navy was reformed as a small unit attached to the Army. These patrol boats served to protect Austrian Neutrality until this year. Budget cuts forced the retirement of the ships In August and they are now museums pieces.
Captain Von Trapp must be rolling in his grave —which is in Vermont
