Execute! 75 years ago today

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Ships of Task Force 38 of the victorious U.S. Third Fleet maneuvering off the coast of Japan on August 17, 1945, two days after Japan agreed to surrender. The force at the time was under the command of Mississippi-born ADM. John S. “Slew” McCain Sr., who himself was only three weeks away from heading to that great wardroom in the sky.

Official U.S. Navy photo 80-G-278815 from the Naval History and Heritage Command.

USS Wasp (CV-18) is the aircraft carrier in the lower right. Note that her forward hull number on the flight deck is painted to be readable for planes coming from the bow.

The other identifiable carrier is USS Shangri-La (CV-38) in the left-center. She is the only known carrier to have her air group identification letter (“Z”) painted in white on her flight deck, instead of her hull number.

There are four other Essex-class carriers, four Independence-class light carriers, at least three battleships (two Iowa class and one South Dakota-class), several cruisers, and multiple destroyers in the formation.

End of the Kwantung Army

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Soviet Defeat of the Japanese Kwantung Army, 1945

75 years ago today, the largest Imperial Japanese military force on the planet, the fabled Kwantung Army, was instructed to surrender its remaining 500,000+ men into Soviet hands.

Formed in 1906 in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War to police the Empire’s slice of mainland Asia, it had long been the key command in the IJA and by 1945 was in actuality a large army group composed of no less than six numbered (3rd, 4th, 5th, 30th, 34th, and 44th) armies in addition to the forces of the puppet state of Manchukuo, those of various White Russian exile units, Korean auxiliaries, and assorted Chinese warlord allies.

That is, until the Soviets crashed in and burst that bubble, showing the force to be a hollow Easter bunny of sorts. This is because the Kwantung Army had been siphoned off in 1942-45, drawing irreplaceable elite cadres away to be fed into the meat chopper that was defending the Empire against the on-rushing Allied forces island hopping from Guadalcanal to Okinawa. For reference, in June 1938, 18 months before Pear Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Army had a full 34 combat divisions tied down on the ground in Eastern China along the Yellow River, that, when coupled with a supply train that ran back to the Home Islands through Manchuria and Korea, totaled over 1.1 million men in the field.

When the Soviets marched into the Theatre, that force had been halved and most of what was left were second-rate troops.

Soviet vehicles and troops crossing the border into Manchuria, August 1945.

A Lend-Leased M4A2 Sherman with a Soviet crew making friends

Soviet Motorcyclist column on Harley-Davidson WLA-42 and Dnepr M-72 in Manchuria, August 1945.

Soviet soldiers sitting on the throne of emperor Pu Yi, leader of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, China, September 1945

Gen. Otozō Yamada, an old horse soldier, cumulated 40 years of service in the Imperial Japanese Army on 16 August, the day after the Emperor ordered national surrender, by issuing a command to lay down the Kwantung Army’s arms and banners at the feet of the invading Soviets in Manchuria.

However, many of Yamada’s units kept fighting for several days until Field Marshal Hata Shunroku, son of a samurai of the Aizu domain, met with Soviet Field Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky in Harbin on the 19th, and a further cease-fire order circulated directly after.

A former Minister of War, Hata had experience with surrender, having been a member of the Japanese delegation to the Versailles Peace Treaty negotiations as a young colonel in 1919, although on the winning side.

Nonetheless, the Soviets kept advancing even after Stalin had announced the end of hostilities on 23 August. Red paratroopers hit the silk into Heijō, a Japanese colonial outpost since 1905 and known today as Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, on 24 August, the same week as the Soviet Pacific Fleet arrived in Wonsan– on American Lend-Leased LSTs.

Column of Soviet Soldiers advancing into the Korean Peninsula against the Kwaungtung Army meet U.S. personnel, September 1945. Soviet forces occupied the north of Korea with U.S. forces occupying the south, with the arbitray boundary between their zones being the 38th parallel, one that holds today. LIFE Magazine Archives – George Silk Photographer

On 9 September, a full week after the instruments of surrender were signed in Tokyo Bay, 100,000 Japanese troops in Nanking laid down their arms. Even with that, there were still isolated Japanese garrisons in China that remained intact well into November 1945.

Japanese fort surrendering to Chinese partisans, Fall 1945

Japanese surrender in Peking (Beijing), China to combined U.S./British/KMT forces, October 1945

The Soviets remained a presence in Manchuria and North Korea for several years, going so far as to keep troops in the Manchurian hubs of Mukden, Harbin, Dairen, and Port Arthur– all notably former Tsarist stomping grounds– until 1955, more than eight years after the Communist Chinese had taken over the supposed governance of such areas.

PPS-43 armed Soviet tankers in Mukden, 1946. Note the officer with an upcycled Japanese Army tanker winter suit that he has installed shoulder boards on. Also, note the bronze plaque behind them with T-34s on it.

Soviet Naval Infantry raising their flag on the famous 203 Meter Hill in Port Arthur– now known as Lüshun in Liaoning province– 22 August 1945. The Baiyu Tower, constructed by the Japanese in the 1930s to commemorate 1904-1905 war dead, is visible in the distance. The Japanese Army used 203 Meter Hill in late 1904 to destroy the besieged Imperial Russian Navy’s Pacific Squadron below. RIAN Archive Photo 834147

Manchukuo

Standing with the Japanese– briefly– was the “Manchukuo Imperial Army” of puppet Manchurian Emperor Pu Yi. Originally formed around the roughly corps-sized Chinese National Revolutionary Army of the “Young Marshal” (Zhang Xueliang) in 1932, it grew to a nominal peak of 300,000 men in the field, under Japanese tutelage, in seven provincial armies. While capable of pushing into Inner Mongolia and fighting roaming bands of warlords, the occasional Chinese Communist insurgent group, and bandit gangs, it was no match for the battle-hardened Soviets and, once the Russkis crossed the border, melted away into the countryside, with the conscripts often turning on their officers, killing their Japanese advisers, and vanishing into the towns and villages, taking their weapons but leaving their uniforms behind. Tellingly, the Soviets only captured about 30,000 non-Japanese Manchukuo Army soldiers– of whom half were ethnic Koreans and were too far from home to self-demobilize– and killed about 10,000 in very one-sided combat. In less than two weeks, the force had ceased to exist.

Chinese troops train under Japanese instructors. More than 300,000 soldiers from China fought for Hirohito against their own countrymen between 1932 and 1945.

Much as the Russkis dismantled the Kwangtung Army and its puppet Manchukuoan allies, they also took apart the Egami-gun, the Manchukuo Imperial Navy. Established in 1932 with donated Japanese destroyers and gunboats and drawing half of its officers (the senior half) from the IJN’s retired list, the force concentrated largely on coastal defense and river operations on the Sungari, Amur, and Ussuri rivers against bandits, pirates and anti-Manchu Communist partisans. Consisting of about 20 small gunboats and a force of armored cars to drive around on the ice every winter once the rivers froze over, the Egami-gun quickly lowered its flags as the Russians came in and took over their vessels. Some of these warships would be retained by the Soviet’s Amur flotilla for years as working trophies.

Manchurian gunboat Chin Jen in Soviet fleet as KL-56 captured in August 1945 from the Manchukuo Navy.

At 290-tons, Chin Jen and Ting Pien were built in the 1930s by the Japanese for the Manchukuo Imperial Navy as seen here and operated on the Sungari River as a part of the 1st Patrol Division until 1945. Armed with a pair of 120mm/45 DP mounts, two 170mm mortars, and some machine guns, they were both captured without a fight by the Soviets in August 1945. Refitted with Russian armament, they served on the Amur river as patrol boats until 1951, as training ships until at least 1953.

Throw away the key

As for Yamada, the former Japanese general was taken as a prisoner of war to Siberia and sentenced to 25 years in the Soviet gulag for war crimes, primarily related to the heinous activities of Unit 731, but was repatriated to Japan in the mid-1950s after Stalin’s death along with the remnants of his surrendered Army.

Ironically, most of those crimes had occurred under Hata’s period as commander of the Kwantung Army from 1941 through 1944, rather than Yamada’s. Sentenced to life imprisonment after a war crimes trial by the Americans, Hata was paroled in 1954.

On 10 May 1962, Field Marshal Hata Shunroku, the last surviving Field Marshal of the Imperial Japanese Army, died while attending a ceremony honoring Imperial war dead, age 82.

The Soviets said they ended up with 594,000 Japanese EPWs by October 1945, but Japanese authorities contend it was well over 700,000 when other, non-military, subjects of the Emperor under Stalin’s control were counted. Although 60,000, mostly the ill and elderly or females with children, were quickly paroled, some the same day, the Soviets hauled the rest back to Siberia.

Repatriated Japanese soldiers returning from Siberia wait to disembark from a ship at Maizuru, Kyoto Prefecture, Japan, in 1946. The Kwantung Army would trickle back over the next decade. 

Over the next decade, many of the Siberian prisoners perished, with estimates running at a minimum of 50,000 and some as much as six times that amount. Meanwhile, many ethnic Koreans in the Japanese ranks would be “re-educated” by the Soviets to become the bedrock of the North Korean People’s Army.

The last remnants of the Kwantung Army went home in 1956 although some elected to stay behind and “go native” in the Worker’s Paradise.

“A Japanese mother is reunited with her son after he is released from a Soviet POW camp in Siberia, 31 December 1956. He and his fellow prisoners are arriving at Maizuru port in Japan, having been captured at the end of World War II and held for another 11 years.” (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive via History Forum)

Japanese artist Nobuo Kiuchi, who during WWII was a Japanese paratrooper, spent years in Siberia after the Kwantung Army laid down its arms, and chronicled what he saw.

His art reflects those experiences and is on exhibit at the Maizuru Repatriation Memorial Museum located in the principal port where some 660,000 Japanese POWs and civilians were sent back home from China, Russia, and North Korea in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Echos into new wars

The wealth of equipment used by the Kwantung Army, unwanted and typically seen as obsolete when captured by the Allies, was quickly inherited by the Chinese and Koreans who soon put it into use against themselves and others. The boon of materiel picked up in large part by Mao’s Red Army gave it a huge shot in the arm in the final act of the Chinese Civil War and subsequently was recycled into the Korean War in the 1950s.

US soldier, Chinese soldier, and Chinese guerrilla fighters displaying captured Japanese flags, aircraft machine guns, and MP 34 submachine gun, China, 1945

Japanese Type 97 Chi-Ha medium tank in use with the Chicoms. Some 300 of these tanks became Mao’s iron fist through the late 1940s.

Shanghai Police Department monitor a political protest in 1948. Equipment includes a stahlhelm M35 helmet and captured Japanese Arisaka Type 38 rifle.

Red Chinese soldier late 1940s with captured Japanese Arisaka

Red Chinese captured Japanese Arisaka Type 38 rifles Type 30 bayonets M30-32 Tetsu-bo helmets 1949

Chinese soldier carrying captured Arisaka Type 38 rifles and a Type 11 light machine gun, date unknown.

Sun’s out, guns out

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Resistance fighters with the French Forces of the Interior armbands meet up with curious recently arrived American troops on the beach in the Saint Tropez area during Operation Dragoon landings along the French Riviera, 15 August 1944. The irregulars of the FFI numbered an estimated 400,000 by this stage of the war and were no longer underground.

Signal Corps Photo 111-SC-212383 via NARA

The Resistance members all seem to have pistols stuck in their waist-band, channeling Dan Tanna long before the 1970s.

Inset of 111-SC-212383

The fella to the left has a Colt M1908 Hammerless stuck in his belt while his buddy with the short (German surplus?) wool jacket has what appears to be an Astra 400 grip just showing. The stabby guy with the bandana has what looks like a 6.35mm pocket pistol such as a Browning Baby or Colt Vest model in addition to his steel-handled sheath knife.

As for the GIs, the older Soldier on the right has the distinctive seahorse patch of the 36th Engineer Regiment.

The 36th Engineers were everywhere in the ETO, earning campaign streamers for Algeria-French Morocco, Tunisia, Sicily, Naples-Foggia, Anzio, and Rome-Arno in the 22 months prior to the Dragoon landings. They would go on to prove essential in the push through Northwest Europe through Alsace and the Rhineland. An active-duty unit, after WWII they went on to serve in Korea, where they remained for 20 years. Reformed as the 36th Engineer Group in 1973 and as the 36th Engineer Group in 2006, they have continued to deploy downrange across the sandbox extensively over the past three decades.

The Curious V-43 Machine Carbine

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Via the collection of The Museum of the Parachute Regiment & Airborne Forces, we have the Vesely V-43 Machine Carbine.

This 9mm weapon– which used a very interesting double-stack 9mm magazine that was wide and used an extended magazine well, but was capable of holding 60-rounds– was proposed to be issued to airborne forces in the Second World War.

Curiously enough, the V-43, which was designed for Para use, was heavier than the V-42, which was intended for regular “leg” infantry, but the former had the ability to break down into three components (besides mags) for easier storage, say, while jumping out of a perfectly good airplane.

Vesely V-43 paratroop submachine gun disassembled

Designed by Free Czech firearms designer Josef Vesely while working out of Birmingham Small Arms, it could fire up to a rate of 1000rpm. It also had a short (8-inch) spike-style bayonet stored above the barrel.

As noted by the Para Museum, “However, it offered very little improvement over the Sten which continued to be issued instead.”

This particular version was presented to Lt Gen FAM “Boy” Browning by VAP Holdings, the manufacturer.

For more info on the Vessley, my homie Ian McCollum over at Forgotten Weapons has a section on it that includes the interesting 35-page manual.

Can you spot the difference between these two Lugers?

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One of these things is not like the other:

On the left, you have a DWM-made M1900 Luger in 7.65 with a skinny barrel, dished toggle knob, and push-grip safety, among other features. On the right is a gun that was made just 15 years later, am Erfurt-produced P08 in 9x19mm Parabellum with a thicker barrel, serrated toggle, and no grip safety.

Fundamentally, the one of the left is a commercial model, based on the original Luger adopted by the Swiss Army in 1899, and made for export, while the pistole on the right was the German Army standard for the Great War.

Further, the M1900 is an American Eagle, a breed of guns that proved unusually popular on the U.S. consumer market with Western lawmen and cowboys in the 1900s and 1920s.

More on the American Eagle Luger in my column at Guns.com.

B-25 and PBY on the USS Essex…in 2020

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A series of three upcoming Legacy of Peace Aerial Parade around Oahu, part of the 75th Commemoration of the End of WWII that will culminate with the official ceremony aboard the museum ship USS Missouri (BB 63) on 2 September, will have more than a dozen vintage warbirds take part including a B-25 bomber, some T-6 Texans and a former Navy PBY Catalina flying boat. The rare aviation classics came from the mainland and arrived at Pearl Harbor via the “aircraft carrier” USS Essex on Monday.

(U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Kenneth Rodriguez Santiago)

Of course, the Essex involved is LHD-2, the 5th U.S. Navy ship to carry the name, and calls back to the famous 4th, the WWII fleet carrier CV-9 which remained in service until 1969.

That beautiful B-25 being lifted from Essex’s deck. Too bad they didn’t try to fly it off– it’s been done before! (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Kenneth Rodriguez Santiago)

Of note, today’s Essex actually has a longer flight deck than 1942’s USS Hornet, which carried Doolittle’s B-25s on their famous “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” raid.

PEARL HARBOR (Aug. 10, 2020) North American T-6 Texans, part of a group known as the “Warbirds,” sit on the pier at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam after being offloaded from the amphibious assault ship USS Essex (LHD 2) for the 75th Commemoration of the End of WWII. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jessica O. Blackwell)

Flyovers of the Warbirds will include: Around Oahu (Aug. 29), Connecting the Military Bases (Aug. 30), and over the Battleship Missouri Memorial, Pearl Harbor to Waikiki (Sept. 2).

30 Years Ago Today: Salamandre

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Here we see “le Clem,” the French Navy’s Clemenceau (R98), the service’s first domestic-built fleet carrier, with her deck full of…Army trucks and helicopters as well as a handful of Bréguet 1050 Alizé ASW aircraft.

Photo: Marine Nationale

The reason? Saddam, of course.

Commissioned in 1961 as the first of a two-ship class to replace the WWII-era British Colossus-class light carrier Arromanches (R95) [ex-HMS Colossus] and the Independence-class light carriers LaFayette (R94) [ex-USS Langley] and Bois Belleau (R96) [ex-USS Belleau Wood], the Clemenceau-class ships were roughly comparable to an Essex-sized carrier with their 869-foot flight deck.

By the early 1990s, the airwing of Clemenceau and her sister ship Foch (R99) included a mix of 40 or so F-8 Crusader fighters, Super Etendard strike aircraft, Alize sub-busters, and Dauphin helicopters.

Beautiful French Navy Vought F8 Crusaders. The Aéronavale began fielding 42 modified F8s to replace downright elderly WWII-era F4U Corsairs in 1964, going on to operate them in combat off Djibouti (against Yemeni MiGs), Lebanon, Libya, Bosnia, and Kosovo. France saw their last Crusader flight in December 1999– the final country fielding them– and to their credit has over a dozen of these aircraft preserved in museums around the country. (Photo: Marine Nationale)

A Vought F-8 Crusader lines up for landing on the French aircraft carrier Foch (R99). Date and location unknown

With their 32-knot max speed, Clemenceau and Foch could also be used as a fast “commando carrier,” transporting French Army troops or Marines and an assortment of Puma, Super Frelon, and Alouette helicopters to carry them ashore.

That’s what you kinda see in the top image.

As part of France’s early involvement in the First Gulf War, reacting to Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait, le Clem was ordered to land most of her traditional airwing (save for its Alize and Dauphins) and take on elements of the Force d’Action Rapide to include a reinforced company of the French Foreign Legion’s 1er Régiment, an anti-air detachment (11e RAMa), and a full Army heavy aviation regiment (5e R.H.C.) to include a dozen SA 330B Puma and 30 SA 341/342 Gazelle helicopters. Added to the mix were 80 assorted trucks and combat vehicles. In all, some 800 French troops were embarked.

With escort provided by the cruiser Colbert (C611) and support of the Durance-class replenishment ship Var (A608), the whole thing was put together in 72 hours from the green light and sailed from Toulon as Task Force 623 on 13 August– just 11 days after Saddam crossed the border.

Cruiser Colbert escorts Clemenceau, who is carrying 42 helicopters of the 5e RHC (Régiment d’Hélicoptères de Combat), during Opération Salamandre along with four Bréguet-Alizé ASW aircraft and two SA365 Dauphins of the Aéronavale. Note the big 11,000-ton cruiser’s double ramp ECAN Masurca surface-to-air missile launcher, comparable to the Mk26, on her stern. Photo: ECPAD

Clemenceau, Colbert, and Var during Opération Salamandre. Photo: ECPAD

The mission was dubbed Opération Salamandre.

Crossing into the Red Sea via the Suez, the force had a brief stopover in the French colony of Djibouti before making for the Strait of Hormuz, where Gazelles combat-loaded with HOT anti-tank missiles and 20mm cannon stood on alert while Marines with Mistrals kept an eye peeled.

Helicopters of 5e RHC (Régiment d’Hélicoptères de Combat) operate from Clemenceau during Salamandre. (Photo: Marine Nationale)

Ultimately, the helicopters and trucks were offloaded at Yanbu in Saudi Arabia and TF 623 remained in the Persian Gulf area until early October, handing over naval operations to the Opération Artimon task force of frigates, as the semi-armored Daguet Division was slowly being built ashore, preparing for action the next year when the Gulf War went from a Shield to a Storm.

When Daguet went into action the next February, almost half of the Division’s aircraft had been carried to the theater by le Clem.

Ultimately, Clemenceau went on to have a more lively part in a shooting war with no less than five deployments off the former Yugoslavia from 1993 to 1996, including having one of her Etendards take a SAM over Bosnia.

She would be decommissioned in 1997 and later partially stripped to provide spare parts for her sister, Foch, which was transferred to Brazil. Le Clem was scrapped in 2010. Salamandre mate Colbert followed in 2016 after spending almost two decades as a museum ship, while Var is still active.

Warship Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2020: Franz Josef’s Sharpshooter

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2020: Franz Josef’s Sharpshooter

U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photo NH 87635

Here in the foreground of the above image, we see the Huszar-class torpesobootzerstörer SMS Scharfschütze of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Navy, the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine, in heavy seas, likely in the Adriatic around 1914. In a doomed fleet in which the surface forces saw very little actual combat during the Great War, Scharfschütze broke that mold.

The pre-Great War Austrian Kriegsmarine was strong in battleships (4 dreadnoughts, 14 pre-dreadnoughts), cruisers (2 armored, 10 protected/scout, 2 coastal defense), submarines (11) and torpedo boats (91) but was more sparse when it came to destroyers. In 1904, Vienna ordered a prototype destroyer from Yarrow, a 220-foot craft of some 400-tons based on the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Akatsuki-class which had been delivered five years previously.

Japanese Akatsuki-class destroyer Kasumi (Mist) at Yarrow Shipbuilders, Clyde, Scotland on commissioning, 1902. The Austrian Huszars would be to the same design, albeit with a lighter armament. Colorized by Postales Navales

Capable of 28 knots, the prototype vessel, Yarrow Yard No. 1171, was lightly armed with a single 70mm Skoda-supplied gun forward, seven 47mm 3-pounders, and a pair of 17.7-inch torpedo tubes. This was notably less powerful than Akatsuki, which carried a 4-inch Armstrong gun and five Hotchkiss 6-pounders.

Delivered in September 1905, Austria accepted the new destroyer as SMS Huszar (Hussar) and soon began building a dozen licensed clones at three domestic yards with Yarrow-supplied powerplants.

Huszar-class torpesobootzerstörer SMS Wildfang with a bone in her teeth NH 87632

A 14th ship was laid down for the Chinese government in 1912 as part of another baker’s dozen tin cans. All of the Austrian ships were named for types of soldiers in the Dual Monarchy’s multi-ethnic military such as Ulan (Polish Uhlan lancers), Pandur (a Bosnian gendarme), Uskoke (a type of Croatian irregular) and Csikós (a type of Hungarian mounted troop).

The subject of our tale, Scharfschütze, was named for the classic Austrian Tyrolean sharpshooter.

This guy. Photo by the Austrian State Archives (Österreichischen Staatsarchiv)

Going into the history books, the name was also a traditional Austrian warship moniker. Most recently it had been used by gunboat on Lake Garda along the frontier between Italy and Austria. The vessel had been sold to Italy in the aftermath of the brief 1866 war along with the rest of the Garda flotilla for 1 million florins– a good deal more than what they were worth. After all, it didn’t make much sense to keep them as the Italians owned the lake they were on when the war was said and done.

Scharfschütze, Austrian Gunboat (Kanonenboot), 1860-69 “A unit of the Austrian Lake Garda flotilla photographed circa 1866. On 18 October 1866, she became the Italian BORGOFORTE.” Courtesy of the International Naval Research Organization Catalog #: NH 87484

Laid down at Stabilimento Tecnico Triestino (STT) San Marco outside of Trieste in April 1906, the new destroyer Scharfschütze was commissioned the next September.

Soon the ship, with a shallow draft of just slightly over 8-feet, was in use along the craggy coastline of the Balkans where Austria had gotten increasingly aggressive, annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 from the ailing Ottoman Empire over the howls of most of Europe.

As the world sleepwalked towards the Great War, the Austrian Huszar-class destroyers were seen as smallish and under-armed when compared to contemporary greyhounds in their opposing fleets, a fact that in 1910 saw them land their 47mm guns in favor of larger 12-pounders and pick up a machine gun or two for use against the increasing threat posed by low-flying aircraft. At the same time, a larger (1,000-ton) class of tin cans with 4-inch guns, the Tátras, were laid down at a Hungarian shipyard.

During the Balkan Wars of 1912-14, in which a loose confederation of minor powers soundly beat the Turks only to turn on each other and lose half of their territorial gains, Scharfschütze was involved in blockading Albania. It was on this duty that, for one reason or another, she detained the lightly armed 156-foot Montenegrin royal yacht/gunboat Rumija, which had been carrying a cargo of captured Ottoman officers that the Austrian ship repatriated, likely to the great pleasure of the Turks.

Scharfschütze. The three-funneled cruiser in the back-ground is SMS Sankt Georg. NH 87636

War!

When the balloon went up and the lights went out across Europe in July 1914, the only Huszar classmate intended for the Chinese that was far enough along to complete, Lung Tuan, was seized and placed in Austrian service as SMS Warasdiner, after a type of Hungarian infantry common in the Seven Years War.

Scharfschütze, along with her sisters, joined the battlefleet in an abortive attempt to come to the aid of RADM Wilhelm Souchon’s hounded Mediterranean Division, composed of the battlecruiser Goeben and the cruiser Breslau. While Souchon famously skipped the Adriatic and made for Constantinople, Scharfschütze had to make do with coastal raids and patrols along her old stomping grounds off the rugged coast of Montenegro.

In doing so, she provided direct naval gunfire support for advancing A-H infantry, helped relieve the Franco-Montenegrin siege of Kotor from forces dug in along Mount Lovcen, shelled the monastery in Lastva where the Montenegrin headquarters was located at the time, helped destroy radio station towers along the coast, and screened the old battleship SMS Monarch, whose 9-inch guns were tasked with their own NGFS missions.

As Lovcen proved a tough nut for the Austrians to crack, our destroyer also screened the modern dreadnought SMS Radetzky, which was called in to lend her 12-inch guns to the campaign. Of note, Scharfschütze’s old foe, Rumija, was sunk during this time by Austrian torpedo boats.

Enter Italy

Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy were bound by the Triple Alliance agreement going back to May 1882 to come to each other’s aid in the event of a European war. This was key to Germany coming to Austria’s aid after the latter invaded Serbia in July 1914 but the more waffling Italy pumped the breaks when her statesmen realized they would have to stand against not only the upstart Balkan Slavs but also France and the might of the British Empire. Shopping around for a better deal, Italy broke her pact with the two Kaisers and turned against her former allies, siding with the Entente.

On 3 May 1915, Rome renounced the Triple Alliance and, perhaps to no one’s surprise, declared war against Austria-Hungary at midnight on 23 May, enticed by secret promises of slices of Austrian Alpine and Adriatic territory. London and Paris were fine with giving away Franz Josef’s land if it meant ending the war on a high note.

Of course, the entry of the Italian fleet into the conflict effectively bottled up the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine for the duration of hostilities, which made what came next even more dramatic.

The day the war turned hot for Italy, Scharfschütze was tasked with a special mission of retribution. Sailing with the light cruiser SMS Novara and two torpedo boats (SMS Tb 80 and Tb 81), they set out in the darkness for the Italian torpedo boat station at Porto Corsini, located just 60 nautical miles from the city of Pula, where the main Austro-Hungarian naval base on the Adriatic was located.

While the other ships remained just offshore, our destroyer crept past the outer mole in the predawn hours of 24 May and penetrated the inner harbor via the narrow Candiano canal, which only spanned 100 feet or so from shore to shore.

Once inside the harbor, Scharfschütze achieved complete surprise and opened with everything she had at around 03:20, sending two schooners to the bottom, damaging the lighthouse, destroying the semaphore station, the lifeboat station and various private homes while taking several Italian coastal batteries under fire.

A German postcard portraying the attack

While the goal of attacking the torpedo boats stationed there fell flat as the vessels weren’t in port, the Austrians did draw blood. A single Italian fatality, Navy electrician Natale Zen, killed in his bed by shrapnel was probably the first Italian killed in the conflict.

Scharfschütze making her way out of Porto Cortini, with flames behind her and Italian shells bracketing her by German maritime artist Willy Stower. The portrayal is off, however, as the whole raid took part in the dark

By 04:00, Scharfschütze reunited with Novara, screened by the cruiser’s guns, and withdrew for home. She suffered no casualties or reportable damage, a feat that brought decorations to her wardroom and crew, personally delivered pier side by the future and last Hapsburg Kaiser, Archduke Karl.

Of course, when compared to the scale of the global conflict, the raid was small potatoes and did not cause more than a pinprick’s damage to Italy’s war effort. Nonetheless, the audacity of sending a destroyer into an Italian harbor where it ran amok provided a useful victory to the flagging Austrian efforts and it was much celebrated in period propaganda.

Postscript

The rest of Scharfschütze’s war was active, with her tagging along on other, less successful coastal raids and in turn, finding herself in sharp surface actions against not only fast Italian MAS torpedo boats but also American subchasers and lived to tell the tale.

When the final act of the Great War played out and the Hapsburgs lost the throne amidst the Dual Monarchy’s disintegration as a country, the inventory of the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine that fell into the Entente’s hands was parceled out among its members.

From right to left are Austrian destroyers TURUL, WARASDINER, WILDFANG (with 4 funnels showing), A torpedo boat of the 74T Class, Torpedo boat 79T, and a group of 82F class torpedo boats. Photographed in the Gulf of Cattaro. NH 87633

Of the Huszár-class destroyers, two (Streiter and Wildfang) had been lost during the war. The survivors were doled out to France (Pandur and Reka), Greece (Ulan) and Italy who garnered the rest of the obsolete 1890s designed little tin cans to include Scharfschutze— the second time in Austrian naval history that a ship of that name was taken over by the country’s Roman foe to the South.

None of the ships survived the 1920s, having long since been scrapped as part of the interwar drawdown in naval tonnage.

Specs:

1914 Jane’s entry on the class.

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Canvas and steel, 130 years ago today

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Here we see the early Boston-class protected cruiser USS Atlanta in Boston harbor, 11 August 1890, with bluejackets on her yardarms during the Eastern Yacht Club Regatta.

A member of the so-called “New Navy” of the 1880s, Atlanta, and her sistership Boston were some of the first steel warships of the U.S. Navy and showcased such modern attributes as steel armor plating, rapid-fire breechloading guns, and complex steam engineering plants. Still, as a throwback to the days of sail, they were also equipped with extensive auxiliary sail rigs to increase their cruising range– and provide insurance against powerplant failures.

These new and beautiful warships were assigned to the Squadron of Evolution, also referred to as the “White Squadron” for obvious reasons, which globetrotted the world prior in the decade leading up to the Spanish-American War, after which they were soon obsolete.

Still, they were beautiful in their time in the sun and inspired the artists of the day.

Painting of The White Squadron: USS ATLANTA, USS CHICAGO, USS YORKTOWN, and USS BOSTON with USS CHICAGO in the foreground. Watercolor by Fred S. Cozzens, 1892. Lithographed by Armstrong & Co. Copied from “Our Navy- Its Growth and Achievements,” copyright 1897. #: NH 335

“Peace” painting by Walter L. Dean, published in “Harper ‘s Weekly”‘ circa 1893. it shows the “White Squadron” in Boston Harbor, during the early 1890s. Ship in the center is USS Chicago. USS Newark is at left and USS Atlanta is at right. This painting is now in the U.S. Capitol. NH 95137

Baby (De)Eagles are back

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Minnesota-based Magnum Research recently announced that the Baby Desert Eagle is returning to the market in both polymer and steel frame variants.

The current version, designated the Baby Eagle III by Magnum Research, is manufactured in Israel by BUL Transmark in several variants to include both 9mm and .45ACP steel-framed and 9mm and 40 S&W polymer-framed guns, with each offered in both full and semi-compact sizes.

All models include double-stack mags, a double/single-action trigger with a 12-pound/4-pound trigger pull, ambi decocking lever, reversible magazine catch, and accessory rail.

More in my column at Guns.com.

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