Chapter 267: Total Annihilation of the Courbet-class, the Retreat of the Frank Fleet |
The Frank and Austria fleets locked into duels, unleashing broadsides along a classic battle line. At frequent intervals, heavy-caliber armor-piercing shells slammed into the warships, leaving jagged, torn gashes across their hulls.
The battlefield aesthetic was strikingly retro—for a time, the officers and sailors on both sides suffered the illusion that they had been swept decades back into the past.
It was barely nine o'clock in the morning. In theory, both sides had an entire day ahead of them to decide who lived and who died. From the looks of it, this stalemate would not end until one side's slow-moving capital ships were thoroughly wiped out.
Not every grand naval battle granted the weaker side an easy escape route; the Battle of Jutland had merely been a rare exception.
When you couldn't win a fight, you usually couldn't outrun your enemy either. That was the iron reality of naval warfare.
After barely half an hour of trading broadsides, the Franks secured the first decisive strike. Though all four of their ships carried minor damage—having taken two to three armor-piercing hits apiece—they had concentrated their fire on Moltke with ruthless efficiency, successfully battering her until she lost both speed and firepower.
Moltke had now absorbed over thirty large-caliber armor-piercing shells. The non-citadel sections of her bow and stern had been blasted to pieces, taking on over 2,000 tons of water at each end. Combined with flooding elsewhere along the hull, the ship had swallowed more than 6,000 tons of water—a scale approaching the massive flooding suffered by Lützow at Jutland.
Her deck had sunk almost level with the surface, and her speed had plunged below five knots. She drifted dead in the water, motionless. The two aft turrets holding her last four functional main guns had been entirely destroyed; all ten of the dreadnought's main guns were gone.
Moltke's captain had already ordered abandon ship. Remaining aboard without the ability to return fire meant dying for nothing. It was better to evacuate the crew while the armored shell of the ship served as a floating target for the enemy's artillery—at least she could still draw fire.
The Franks failed to recognize Moltke's terminal state right away and poured another fifteen minutes of ammunition into her carcass. Only after every single Frank ship took another hit or two in return did they finally accept that Moltke posed no further threat.
"Turn your guns! Shift targets to your corresponding Austria warships down the battle line!"
Admiral Bouvet, commander of the Frank fleet, swiftly barked out new orders, and his ships promptly began training their turrets on new targets.
However, whenever a battleship shifted its gaze, it forfeited a substantial window of time to re-aim, recalibrate, and fine-tune its rangefinding. For the first twenty minutes after a switch, accuracy inevitably plummeted to rock bottom.
Naturally, when the Franks began adjusting their targeting, their initial accuracy was abysmal; over the next twenty minutes, not a single shell found its mark.
Worse still, shortly after shifting their fire, the Franks discovered an infuriating reality: the opposing commander, Admiral Horthy, was actually ordering his four Viribus Unitis-class battleships to pull back and widen the distance!
Originally, the two fleets had been slugging it out at a range of thirteen to fifteen kilometers. But back when the Franks had focused all their firepower on Moltke, the Austria ships had been sitting comfortably on the sidelines dealing unreciprocated damage, uncaring about exact range.
The moment the Franks swung their turrets around, the Austria forces abruptly retreated. The Franks hadn't caught the maneuver at first, and by the time they realized what was happening, the distance between the two lines had stretched just beyond fifteen kilometers! Even with their gun barrels elevated to maximum angle, the Frank guns couldn't reach them! Every shot fell short!
To be fair, the Viribus Unitis-class possessed no speed advantage over the Courbet-class—a fundamental difference compared to a fast battlecruiser like Goeben. If the Frank ships merely pressed the pursuit, they would close back into effective range soon enough.
Yet having spent the better part of twenty minutes dialing in their firing solutions only to watch that effort go completely to waste and face another recalibration cycle—it was thoroughly sickening.
Furthermore, Admiral Bouvet's command over his fleet wasn't entirely absolute; the captains commanding the other three battleships were quite capable of exercising "personal initiative."
For instance, upon realizing the enemy had opened the gap and could no longer be hit, the captains of Francia and Jean Bart refused to let their guns sit idle. Acting on their own authority, they swung their turrets right back around to pound the battered wreck of Moltke once more.
Watching this unfold from his bridge, Admiral Bouvet knew instantly that the fools under his command had lost their composure and walked straight into a trap!
"Do not change targets without orders! Close the distance immediately! Open fire with everything you have the moment the opposing Austria warships re-enter range! Not one more shell is to be wasted on the wreckage of Moltke!"
Bouvet knew all too well just how venomous this enemy scheme was. The opposing captains clearly knew that the maximum effective range of the Frank warships topped out at fifteen kilometers. They were intentionally dancing right along that absolute edge, baiting the Frank ships into switching targets.
And the moment you switched? Training guns on Moltke wasted at least twenty minutes of aiming time. Traversing them back later would burn another twenty minutes. Forty minutes of total offensive output thrown down the drain just like that—who could survive such a blunder?
For a capital ship, every single target transition represented an exorbitant loss of time!
Forty minutes later, after absorbing nearly fifty heavy-caliber armor-piercing shells in total, Moltke was finally dead beyond all hope of recovery and plunged straight to the bottom.
Yet by utilizing her ruined wreck, Admiral Horthy had successfully absorbed nearly twenty heavy shells from the Frank warships. Had those twenty impacts landed on the Viribus Unitis-class instead, they would have crippled at least two Austria capital ships beyond recognition.
In a battle that had initially looked evenly matched, that differential was absolutely fatal.
By the time both sides faced each other in a fair exchange again, every single Frank ship had absorbed at least five more 305mm armor-piercing shells than their Austria counterparts. They were fighting through minor to moderate damage across the board, their output and combat capability restricted to seventy percent at best.
The clock ticked past ten in the morning. Just as the Franks were slipping into a dire disadvantage, the straw that broke the camel's back finally arrived on the scene.
The Italy battleship Da Vinci—originally tasked with escorting the four Viribus Unitis-class warships—finally reached the battlefield after her allies had been locked in an artillery duel for nearly two hours.
As it turned out, the deep-seated Italy habit of shirking duty to preserve personal strength had flared up yet again.
Their earlier bravery at Taranto had been born of necessity; the Britannia forces had brought the fight straight to their doorstep, leaving them no choice but to resist. If they hadn't struck back with deadly intent, the Britannia fleet would have slaughtered them right there in harbor.
However, en route to this new theater, the captain of Da Vinci received word that the Britannia fleet had been completely wiped out, and their next opponents would be the Frank reinforcements.
Up to this point, the Italy navy held no immediate, blood-soaked animosity toward the Franks. Consequently, Da Vinci's captain decided to drag his feet and preserve his warship's strength.
He never explicitly refused to fight; he simply fabricated a sudden "minor engine malfunction" that reduced his vessel's speed, allowing her to lag behind at the tail end of the formation. By then, the course ahead was a straight shot that required no navigation guide anyway, so Admiral Horthy hadn't bothered arguing with Da Vinci—he merely used lamp signals demanding she keep up.
In the end, Da Vinci casually joined the fray only after her allies had spent an hour or two trading heavy ordnance with the Franks.
The captain of Da Vinci had calculated it perfectly: by arriving fashionably late, the enemy would have already locked their battle-line fire onto the four Austria dreadnoughts. Once he finally showed up at the tail of the formation, he could comfortably rack up damage from the rear while the enemy hesitated to shift their gun barrels toward him.
The logic held true: every target transition cost a battleship twenty minutes of aiming time. Having finally zeroed in on their current opponents, why would the Franks switch to a fresh target before finishing off the old one?
Da Vinci's wishful thinking played out without a hitch. Upon her arrival, not a single Frank ship traversed its turrets toward her. Joining forces with Prinz Eugen at the rear of the Austria line, Da Vinci gleefully initiated a righteous two-on-one assault against Jean Bart.
The battlefield had crystallized into the following tactical lineup:
Goeben, fighting with her six remaining main guns, led the line by plunging shells onto Courbet from eighteen kilometers out, teaming up with Viribus Unitis in a two-on-one bombardment;
Prinz Eugen and Da Vinci teamed up at the rear to pummel Jean Bart in another two-on-one;
In the center, Francia locked into a one-on-one duel against Tegetthoff, while Paris squared off against Szent István.
Among the four Frank warships, Courbet suffered the most. Having taken five free hits before the battle even officially joined, she had entered combat wounded and spent the entire engagement suffering under a two-on-one barrage. Unsurprisingly, she was the first to collapse.
Near noon, after absorbing over twenty armor-piercing shells, Courbet suffered a catastrophic explosion and slipped beneath the waves—the second casualty of this eleven-battleship slugfest (the first being the doomed Moltke).
Shortly past one in the afternoon, Jean Bart—the other vessel subjected to a two-on-one beating—crumbled under the barrage and sank to the bottom.
Viribus Unitis, which had spent the morning trading fire with those two fallen dreadnoughts, had accumulated nine 305mm hits. Her aft turret and rear superstructure were pulverized, and her funnel and spotting top had collapsed, yet she retained her propulsion and sailed on.
Prinz Eugen escaped with far lighter damage, absorbing a mere five enemy shells—a miracle owed entirely to Jean Bart disobeying Admiral Bouvet's orders earlier. By turning her guns to execute the floating corpse of Moltke just as Prinz Eugen pulled out of range, Jean Bart had squandered forty minutes of offensive pressure.
Throughout the engagement, Jean Bart had proven to be the most frustratingly ineffective of the four Frank warships, landing only five meaningful hits on active enemy vessels before her demise (strikes against Moltke didn't count).
By contrast, the two center Frank dreadnoughts fighting one-on-one performed noticeably better than their Austria rivals.
From ten in the morning until one in the afternoon, Francia steadily suppressed Tegetthoff. Had she not been baited by Moltke into wasting forty minutes of gunfire earlier, she could have pressed that advantage into a decisive lead.
Paris, which had spent the entire battle relentlessly hammering Szent István without distraction, delivered the finest performance among the Frank ships. Relying almost entirely on her own strength, she brought Szent István to the very brink of destruction.
However, during the final phase of the battle—with two of their sister ships already destroyed or out of action—the captains of Francia and Paris realized they would not be sailing home alive today.
As three enemy dreadnoughts converged their fire onto Francia, her captain calculated that he wouldn't have enough time left to finish off Tegetthoff. In his final moments, he swung his turrets around to concentrate his remaining firepower alongside Paris onto the crippled Szent István.
Their desperate final stand paid off. Before going down themselves, they successfully sent Szent István to the bottom, after which the two proud Frank dreadnoughts capsized and sank in a bitter struggle against the sea.
With their capital ships gone, the remaining Frank light cruisers, destroyers, and torpedo boats—having long since expended their torpedoes—knew the day was lost and scattered in retreat.
Light vessels enjoyed a distinct speed advantage; if they wanted to run, they could usually break away.
Admiral Horthy had no intention of letting them escape easily, ordering his auxiliary screens to pursue at full speed and claim as many stragglers as possible.
The pursuit claimed one Frank light cruiser and three destroyers before the surviving vessels managed to break free.
Among the retreating torpedo boats, seven had suffered severe speed reductions earlier from 37mm shrapnel hits. Unable to outrun the pursuit, they were run down by Austria destroyers and systematically picked off by their distinctive 100mm and 66mm guns.
Francia had deployed a slow-moving reinforcement fleet composed of Danton-class Pre-dreadnoughts and armored cruisers, but they had failed to reach the battlefield in time. Upon receiving news that their main fleet had been eradicated, they naturally refused to sail forward to their deaths. Terrified of being hunted down by the Austria forces, they abruptly veered toward Malta and ducked into the Port of Valletta for shelter.
Valletta was fortified by heavy 9.2-inch coastal defense batteries built by the Britannia forces, ensuring the enemy wouldn't dare brave fortress guns to bombard the harbor.
Now in full control of the waters, the Demania-Austria Coalition wasted no time launching rescue operations for the sailors adrift in the sea.
The sunken battleships Moltke and Szent István had each left hundreds of men floating in the freezing waters.
Between yesterday's skirmishes and today's battle, all four of Demania's deployed light cruisers had gone down, alongside several destroyers, leaving numerous survivors scattered across the waves. Some sailors had drifted over a hundred nautical miles from the original engagement zone and spent more than twenty-four hours in the water; finding them now was purely a matter of fate.
When the final tallies were calculated, this sprawling maritime battle—spanning nearly three days and sweeping over three hundred nautical miles from Taranto to Sicily, and finally to the coastal waters of Malta—came to an official close.
The Italy fleet stationed at Taranto had been nearly exterminated. The Britannia Mediterranean Fleet had been entirely wiped out. As for the Frank relief force, their dreadnoughts had been completely eradicated, leaving only a handful of light cruisers, destroyers, and torpedo boats to limply sail home.
The total casualty report stood as follows:
Coalition Forces:
Demania: 1 battlecruiser sunk (Moltke), 4 light cruisers sunk, 7 destroyers sunk. 1 battlecruiser heavily damaged (Goeben suffered severe structural damage requiring a full year of dockyard repairs).
Austria: 1 battleship sunk (Szent István), 2 battleships heavily damaged (Viribus Unitis, Tegetthoff), 1 battleship lightly damaged (Prinz Eugen). 1 obsolete protected cruiser sunk, 3 destroyers sunk.
Italy: 3 battleships sunk (Dante Alighieri, Giulio Cesare, Cavour), 6 Pre-dreadnoughts sunk, 3 armored cruisers sunk, 8 protected cruisers sunk, 11 destroyers sunk, 23 torpedo boats sunk.
Allied Forces:
Britannia: 1 battlecruiser sunk (Tiger), 3 battleships sunk (Agincourt, Barham, Bellerophon), 4 Pre-dreadnoughts sunk (India, HMS Africa, Cornwallis, Russell), 4 armored cruisers sunk, 14 protected cruisers sunk, 15 destroyers sunk.
Francia: 4 battleships sunk (the entire Courbet-class), 2 Pre-dreadnoughts sunk (Charles Martel, Liberté), 2 light cruisers sunk, 3 destroyers sunk, 39 torpedo boats sunk.
The consolidated tally of sunk vessels across both factions (excluding damaged units) stood at:
Battlecruisers: 1 to 1;
Battleships: 4 to 7;
Pre-dreadnoughts: 6 to 6;
Armored Cruisers: 3 to 4;
Light Cruisers: 4 to 2;
Obsolete Protected Cruisers: 9 to 14;
Destroyers: 21 to 18;
Torpedo Boats: 23 to 39.
At a glance, the Coalition appeared to have merely traded two fewer capital ships while matching the enemy across most other categories, even losing two more modern light cruisers. Their absolute dominance lay only in crushing the enemy's obsolete protected cruisers and torpedo boats.
Yet a closer inspection revealed that well over half of the Coalition's total losses had occurred during the surprise raid at Taranto—accounting for fully two-thirds of their casualties.
Comparing strictly the later phases of the campaign after the Demania-Austria main force arrived on the scene, the Coalition's combat losses amounted to merely one-third of the carnage inflicted upon the Britannia-Francia alliance.
