This is the second book in John Biggins' historical fiction series about an officer in the Austrian navy before and during WW1. It is billed as a sequel to Sailor of Austria, although it is actually a prequel, covering his service just before the war started in 1914.
Our hero, Otto Prohaska, is serving on the battleship SMS Erzherzog Albrecht in 1912 when, to escape the drudgery of a peacetime navy, he volunteers for the newly formed flying corps. So new, in fact, that pilots had to pay for their own training at private flying schools. His final flying test ends in an unfortunate collision with the Emperor's shooting party, resulting in his joining the staff of Archduke Ferdinand. Now, the Archduke has a generally good reputation, befitting the heir to the throne, whose life was tragically cut short in Sarajevo. However, Biggins's is less kind and paints a very different picture of him.
When that spell is finished, he ends up on a Danube monitor. These were low-draft gunships designed to defend the river approach to the empire. Little more than a floating artillery battery, they were unpopular postings for sailors. As a side story, the Royal Navy ended up on the Danube in WW1, supporting the Serbs, commanded by Rear-Admiral Troubridge. I highly recommend Charles Fryer's book, The Royal Navy on the Danube, for this story, which is almost as remarkable as any historical fiction.
Prohaska's run-ins with the captain are very entertaining. However, his amorous adventures with the wife of a Serb factory owner get him involved in a somewhat unlikely engagement with the Serbian Black Hand organisation prior to the Archduke's assassination. He goes on a very entertaining trip across the Balkans before ending up as part of a crew replacement for the Austrian navy's sole ship at the China station. He is in Tsingtau when war breaks out, and the Japanese, with some British units, besiege the German port. Charles Stephenson's book on this is excellent.
Our hero manages to escape on a Chinese junk before the port falls, then ends up in Dutch territory, and embarks on a long and bizarre journey home via Arabia and the Ottoman Empire.
Perhaps not quite as good as the Sailor of Austria, not least because the story is not quite as credible. But this is fiction, and it's a great read. I thought I had the whole series, but thanks to a reader of this blog, I understand there are two more, which I will certainly look out for.
For my planned mini-project on the Adriatic war during WW1, I have ordered a model of the SMS Erzherzog Albrecht. So, Prohaska will sail on my tabletop.
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