Imperial Austro-Hungary:
The Austro-Hungarian torpedo boat TB 11 during World War I.
TB 11 had led a rather undistinguished life for seven years. She was a small coastal torpedo boat, built by the Danubius shipyard in Fiume between 1909 and 1910: part of the TB 7 class, she was 44 meters long, had a displacement of 131 tons and was armed with two 47/33 mm guns, two 450 mm torpedo tubes and one machine gun. Her crew numbered twenty, including two officers. She did not even have a proper name, just a number.
TB 11 had spent her early years, during peacetime, as a training ship in Pola, first for torpedomen and later for engineers; after the outbreak of World War I, her wartime service had been relatively uneventful. Based in Sibenik since July 1914, she had spent most her time patrolling the coast of Dalmatia, bringing supplies to island garrisons and protecting coastal traffic; the highlight of her career had been on 27 May 1915, when she had shot down an Italian aircraft in the southern Adriatic. On 18 March 1916 she had provided assistance to the hospital ship
Elektra, which had been run aground on Rab after being torpedoed by the French submarine
Ampère.
TB 11’s crew provided a good sample of the multi-ethnicity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: her commanding officer, Lieutenant Henrich Simmel, was Austrian; the radio operator was also Austrian, from Vienna; the chief torpedoman, Francesco Donat, was an Istrian Italian; the assistant engineer, Bogumir Petrla, was a Czech from Moravia; the cook, Bogumil Brkl, was also Czech, from Bohemia; the chief gunner, Petar Gwozdic, was an ethnic Serbian; the sailors included Slovenes, like Leopold Tursic, and Hungarians, like Joseph Pencak (hailing from Carpathian Ruthenia), as well as Slovaks, Croatians, Austrians and Poles. Many of these men, by 1917, had grown tired with the war, with their mistreatment at the hands of their superiors, and with the food situation (the rations were becoming scarcer in quantity and worsening in quality), and others had started to become permeated with nationalistic ideas that called for the independence of their countries. Either way, they did not want to fight for Austria-Hungary anymore.
Among the most discontented were Donat and Brkl, both of whom had been planning to desert for some time. In May 1917, while on leave ashore, Donat had met Brkl and had informed him of his plan to seize the ship and cross the Adriatic, reaching an Italian port. After some initial surprise, Brkl approved the idea, and the two men started to “test the water” with other crewmembers. In order for the plan to succeed, the mutineers needed to have the radio operator on their side, otherwise he may have informed the commands ashore of what was happening onboard; but the Viennese radio operator could not be counted upon, as he was loyal to the Habsburgs. Donat, as one of the senior non-commissioned officers, managed to convince Lieutenant Simmel to have him replaced, persuading him that he was not suited for his role; the new radio operator was a Bosnian, Dusan Jerinie, who was soon informed of Dusan’s plan and decided to cooperate with him. Brkl, meanwhile, convinced Petrla to join the plot as well; after him, Pencak and Tursic were informed in turn, and also accepted to participate in the planned mutiny. Donat, finally, informed a friend from Pola, part of the crew of the repair ship
Vulcan, of his plans. During the following months, Donat, Brkl, Petrla and the sailor from the
Vulcan met several times in the woods near Sibenik, discussing the details of their plot; the last meeting, which also saw the participation of Tursic, Pencak and Jerinec, was held on 8 September 1917. As
TB 11 was scheduled to sail for a mission on 22 September, the seven men decided to enact their plan on that day. At last minute, Donat recruited another mutineer, Gwozdic.
As it happened, the 22 September mission was delayed, and the mutineers had to wait until 5 October before having an opportunity to carry out the plan.
TB 11 sailed from Sibenik for what was should have been a routine mission – she was scheduled to meet a German U-Boat, coming from Pola, and guide it to Kotor –, but once on the open sea, the mutineers’ plan started to unfold. While the officers were away from their cabins, Donat entered the cabins and stole all their handguns; none of them noticed that the weapons were missing when they went to sleep, a few hours later. The mutineers waited until the officers and most of the Austrian members of the crew were asleep, then took action; firstly the two chief helmsmen, both of whom were Austrian, were locked in their cabins, then Brkl, Petrla, Gvodzic and Tursic stormed into the officers’ cabins, guns in hand, and locked them up as well. Meanwhile, Donat and others did the same with the Austrian sailors. Finally, the off-duty firemen were imprisoned in their own room, where they were sleeping, by training a torpedo tube so that it would block the hatch. All was over within a few minutes: there was no resistance, and nobody was harmed; the engineering crew on duty below did not even notice what had happened. Armed sentries were posted in front of the cabins.
Then,
TB 11 made for the Italian coast. The mutineers were well aware that being caught would result in their immediate execution, and had prepared scuttling charges: if the Austro-Hungarians would find out about the munity and manage to intercept the ship, they would release the prisoners and then scuttle the ship, going down with her, rather than face the gallows. Fortunately, these extreme measures were not needed. All went smoothly, and after some hours
TB 11 spotted the Italian coast, near Potenza Picena; the Austro-Hungarian flag was hauled down, and the tablecloth of the officers’ mess was raised as an improvised white flag. The ship and its crew were then taken into custody by the Italians; the mutineers were separated from the others, who became prisoners of war, and were interned with other Austro-Hungarian deserters first in Sulmona, Abruzzo, and later in Servigliano, Marche. Some of the Czechs in the crew eventually joined the Czechoslovak Legion fighting on the Italian Front alongside the Italian Army, whereas in 1918 Francesco Donat became part of a commission tasked with the assistance of Italians from Trentino and the Julian March (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) who defected to Italy.
Taken to Ancona and then to Venice, on 28 October 1917
TB 11 was commissioned into the Regia Marina and renamed
Francesco Rismondo, after a Dalmatian Italian who had volunteered for the Italian Army in 1915 and had been executed by the Austro-Hungarians after capture (or had been killed in an escape attempt, what really happened is not clear); she went on to serve as uneventfully as before, now under Italian flag. Initially assigned to the 15th Torpedo Boat Squadron in Taranto, tasked with coastal defense, she was later transferred to La Spezia, where she was used in the testing of a new torpedo. The Italian authorities, in order to prevent reprisals against the families of the mutineers, did not disclose the news of the defection until after the end of the war. In February 1920,
Rismondo was deprived of her armament and turned into a lighthouse service vessel, stationed in the Tuscan Archipelago. In December 1921 she was laid up in La Spezia, and on 29 November 1925 she was decommissioned and subsequently sold for scrap.
After the war, Francesco Donat became a civilian employee at the Pola Naval Base; he kept this job for twenty-four years, till 1943, when the Germans dismissed him after the Armistice of Cassibile and their occupation of Istria (allegedly as a belated reprisal for his 1917 defection). In 1947, with the annexation of Istria by Yugoslavia and the Istrian exodus, Donat left forever his native land and moved to Apulia, where he found work at the Taranto Naval Base. After retiring in the 1950s, he moved to Rome and died there in 1970, aged eighty-two.
