Naval actions in the Italian-Ottoman War 1911-12

 Having completed the land armies for the Italian-Ottoman War, I decided to look at the naval units. For those unfamiliar with this little-known conflict, here is a handy meme that summarises the war.

The Italian Navy dominated the naval conflict; in 1911, it was one of the best in the world. For the initial actions against Ottoman Libya, it deployed two squadrons commanded by Vice-Admiral Augusto Aubry. The First Squadron had four battleships and five cruisers. The Second Squadron had three battleships and six cruisers. It also had seven light cruisers and about 62 destroyers and torpedo boats. The Italians had laid down dreadnoughts, but these were not yet available. However, they wouldn't face anything that required this level of firepower.

The pre-dreadnought battleship Roma, in the First Squadron.

The Ottoman Navy was much smaller, with few modern warships. It had two obsolete battleships, two cruisers, and seven destroyers based in Beirut. It also had two cruisers and four torpedo boats in Albania, and a destroyer and gunboats in the Red Sea. The two modern German Brandenburg-class battleships were in Constantinople with 12 torpedo boats.

German Brandenburg-class battleships

Even the modern Ottoman warships were in poor condition and largely stayed in harbour. As a 1910 British report put it: ‘At present the Turks have neither the officers to navigate and fight, nor the crews to man the ships which they have bought from the Germans, nor are they likely to for some time to come.’

This gave the Italians control of the sea, enabling them to bombard Ottoman ports in Libya with little opposition, other than coastal batteries. As a consequence, the war in Libya revolved around the Italians holding the ports and then launching attacks against the Ottomans and their tribal allies in the desert. This generally went badly for the Italians.

The Libyan part of the war is well recorded, not least because of the useful diaries published by the Ottoman commander Enver Pasha. However, the war spread across the Mediterranean, with the Italians attacking Ottoman positions to force them to abandon resistance in Libya. There were attacks on Beirut in February 1912, and then in the Aegean. As with navies before and after, attacking up the Dardanelles proved too much for the Italian navy. In March 1912, they sent torpedo boats toward Constantinople without success. A further attack in July reached the Ottoman fleet, but torpedo boats were not enough to have any impact. Italy's allies, which included Britain, opposed any blockade of the Straits.

The more realistic plan involved capturing islands off the Anatolian coast. The most interesting was the capture of Rhodes, with two infantry regiments. The Ottomans had to abandon the town of Rhodes because of the threat of naval bombardment. The Italians landed farther south, but they had to use the ships' boats because they had no landing craft. The navy occupied many smaller islands with little resistance, taking 13 of the 15 islands by May 1912. The Italians were supposed to return the islands after the peace treaty, but they held onto them until the end of WW2, when they were given to Greece.

Small naval actions occurred in the Adriatic. Five Italian destroyers under the Duke of the Abruzzi chased off two Ottoman torpedo boats near Preveza, and Ottoman coastal batteries opened fire. Two Italian destroyers entered the port and sank two Ottoman torpedo boats. While a small-scale action, all the European Great Powers, and most particularly Italy’s ally Austria-Hungary, were extremely sensitive to any disturbance of the status quo in the Balkans. As Bismarck put it, a ‘damned silly thing in the Balkans’ might precipitate a wider European war.

For more on this conflict, I highly recommend Charles Stephenson's book, A Box of Sand. He covers all the campaigns, including the naval actions.

I built a decent-sized Italian fleet in 1-3000 scale, as I intend to do the Adriatic actions against the Austrians in WW1. Plus a small Ottoman fleet for a few hit-and-run actions. We tried this in the midweek game, using an adaptation of DBA, which is simple, but it's not very convincing. I will need to research a better set of rules. However, I did manage to inflict some damage in the game, which, given my complete lack of naval skills, was quite pleasing. I usually crash my ships!

Italian

Ottoman

The Italians are bombarding the coast as I sneak up on them.