TORPEDOING THE WIEN

Evening Star, Issue 16675, 6 March 1918, Page 3

TORPEDOING THE WIEN

DASH INTO TRIESTE. AMAZING NAVAL FEAT. The following detailed account, of the Italian dash into Trieste Harbor and the torpedoing of the Austrian battleship Wicti is by air Perceval Gibbon : There are men and deeds -which shine athwart the fog of war, across its dreary rotitine and staleness, like a sunbeam through clouds. Such a man, such a deed, cime "to "'STlit when two little ships and their craws gnawed their way through the bcoms and nets which guard the inner harbor of Trieste, and sank the battleship Wien, where she lay moored to her buoy, with her sister, the '.Monarch, slumbering alongside of her. A guarded harbor, steel nets fringed with mines, sentries yawning by their guns on the mole and the breakwater, and the Italian sailors, under Lieutenant Rizzo, of the navy, ■working at the cables of the nets ivithtn earshot of the forts aud the ships till thev sawed them apart and could run in and do their work ! It was more than e. great feat or aims; it was a lark. The Wien was one of three ships launched in 1895. Her sisters were the 'Monarch and the Budapest. She carried four lOin and six 6m guns, and a crew of 441 officers and men. She 'has owed Italy a death any time these two years. The. Italians nearly got her a month ago, when she was shelling the Lower Piave, and the motor boats went for her with their torpedoes. She has. too, had other narrow escapes. Now she lies on the bottom of the Vallone di Muggia in Trieste Harbor, on a clean, sandy bottom, in about 11 fathoms of turquoise-blue water. 'Lieutenant Kizzo aud the crews of his two launches—craft not much bigger than a ship's lifeboat—are the men who put her there. Lieutenant Rizzo is one of those men in the Italian navy who make a weird speciality of "tickling the Austrian in his'bed." He is 30 years of age. a Sicilian, with the strong masculine good looks of his race. In charge of his second boat, was a tough Arecater of 62 years. , " CUTTING THE STEEL CABLES. The thing had been well prepared after careful study of the mined area. It seemed that the Austrians had devised a system of combined nets and mines, so that Rizzo's chances were great, at the best, of bein" b.own to pieces. One of his chief problems was that of the huge steel cables attached to the nets. But he ait these handily asunder. On the night of the 9th, when the two little boats set out, there was mist on the sea. _ It was past midnight when they crawled' in towards the coast where lies the city of Trieste, cascading in snowy terraces down its radiant hillside to the piers and docks of its port. The two boats crawled in towards the harbor mouth. Trieste Harbor is an affair of three piers, jutting seaward, making thus two one to either hand of the central pier, which is also a break-water. These channels were closed by booms and nets with their- mines all linked to the piers bv the great sfui-i hawsers. The boats glided alongside the pier, aud Rizzo climbed up its concrete side and reconnoitred the situation. There was nobody on that pier. On the middle pier, however, was the guard room. There couid be heard a confusion of voices and the balking of a dog, and from the railway station ashore the noise of an engine screaming vociferously, aud betwecn-while the slap" slap of the feet of a sentry patrolling the middle pier. Lieutenant Rizzo crawled back and gave the order, and up came his men, crawling on hands and knees over the concrete, passing big cutting tools from hand to hand. G roping their way io the cables, some set to work to cut them, while two men scouted inshore lest some sentry should arrive. I shouldn't have liked to be that sentry, with those big, wet sailors lying armed behind the mooring bollards 'aud waiting to silence him! ' The cutting instruments worked well. It only needed a strong jar to set the mines exploding, but the cutters bit their way through strand after strand of the twisted steel wire. Three cables above water were severed without trouble, then five more below water were grappled and hauled to the surface and cut in their turn. At last came the moment when the weight of the net and its attachments tore the last remaining steel strands asunder. The whole great cobweb of metal and explosives funk. The harbor lay open! "LET HER GO." Rizzo and his men crawled back to their boats, and those boats moved like shadows into the Vallone of Muggia. where the Wien and the monarch lay" nosing their buoy:-. Nearest lay the Wien; the Monarch slumbered 200 yards beyond her. Rizzo edged in to investigate, and then backed oif till he had his enemy at 150 yards. His second boat, under the old petty officer, shifted out upon his beam to get a line which cleared the Wien's bow and commanded the -Monarch's great steel flank. Rizzo raised his arm in that gloom, and saw the answering gesture of the old petty officer. Tt was the moment. "Let her go!" In a second four long steel devils were sliding through the water for the enemy. A roar —a blast of flame—a waterspout raining on to them—and a second roar, as the Monarch, too, got her dose! In the motor boats the men yelled involuntarily as the torpedoes landed on their targets. A searchlig-lit flashed out from the Wien and sawed in the darkness. An agitated scream sounded over the water, " Wet" da?" ("Who goes there?") There were shoutings and stampings along the deck of the wounded ship; searchlights waking along tbe_ shore, and on the" breakwaters: and anti-aircraft guns Tousing everywhere. None in Trieste knew whenoe the attack had come—where from air or sea. The sky was festooned with bursting shrapnel, while ships in the harbor opened with their funs towards the harbor mouth, shelling the misty Adriatic, at random. By the light of tlia.b furious illumination the' Italian sailors saw the great bulk of the Wien listing towards them. By this t-ime they were making for the harbor mouth. Shells spouted around them, but none hit them; and both boats saw, ere they left, that last subsidence, that wriggle and resignation with which a dead ship goes under. The Monarch still floated, but tho Wien lay fit the bottom. The conquerors breakfasted ■ at. home. Every man of them was very hungry.