TORPEDOING THE WIEN.

Taranaki Daily News, 26 April 1918, Page 8

TORPEDOING THE WIEN.

DASH INTO TRIESTE. AMAZINt., NAVAL FEAT. The following detailed account of the Italian dash into Trieste harbor and the torpedoing of the Austrian battleship Wien is by Mr. Perceval Gibbon: There are men and deeds which shine athwart the fog of war across its dreary routine, and staleuess like a sunt through clouds. (Such :i man, sue. ,* deed, came to light when two little ships and their crews gnawed their way through the booms and nets which guard the inner -harbor of Trieste, and sank the battleship Wien, where she lay moored to 'her buoy, with her sister tho 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 ships till they sawed them apart and could run in and do their work! It was more than a great feat of arms; 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 10-ineh and six ti-ineh guns, and a .crew of <I-I1 oflicers 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. Shehas, too, had other .narrow escapes. Now she lies on the bottom of the Vallone ili Muggia in Trieste Harbor, on a clean, sandy bottom, in about eleven fathoms of turqoise-bluo water. Lieutenant Rizzo and the crews of his two launches—craft not much bigger than ship's lifeboat—are the men' who put her there. Lieutenant Rizzo is one of those men in the Italian navv who make a wierd speciality of "ticlclino- (he Austrian in his bed-' He is thirty years of age, a Sicilian, with the strong'masculine good looks of his race. ° In charge of his second boat was a tough fire-eater of 62 years. CUTTING THE STEEL CABLES. The tiling had been well prepared after careful study of the mined area. It seemed that the Austrians hud devised a system of combined nets and mines, so that Rizzo's chances were great, at the best, of being blown to pieces. One of his chief problems was that of the huge steel chains attached to the nets. lint be cut these handily asunder. On the night of the Oth, 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 hilfside 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 "'"innels, one to either hand of the cen--1 pier, which is also a breakwater. These channels were closed by booms and nets with their mines, all linked to the piers by the great, steel hawsers. The boats glided alongside the pier and reconnoitred the situation. There was nobody on that pier. On the middle pier, 'however, was the ' guardroom. There could be heard a confusion of voices and the barking of a dog, and from the railway station ashore the noise of an engine screaming voeifernu ly, and between-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 hands and knees over the concrete, passing big cutting tools from hand to hand. " Groping their way to 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 bojlards and waiting to silence him: The cutting instruments worked well. It only needed a strong jar to set the miijes exploding, but tlic cutters bit their way through strand after strand of the twisted steel wire. Three cables above water werte severed with/out trouble, then five more below water 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 greaf. cobweb of metal and explosives sank. The harbor lay open! "LET HER GO." Rizzo and his men crawled hack to (heir boats, and those boats moved like shadows into the VtiDone of Muggia, where the Wien and the Monarch lay nosing their buoys. Nearest lay the Wien; the Monarch slumbered 22 yards beyond her. Rizzo edged in 1o in'vestifatc, and then backed oil' till lie had his enemy at 150 yards. His second boat under the old petty ollicer, shifted out ed the Wieii'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 ollicer. It 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 searchlight flashed out from the Wien and sawed at tho darkness. An agitated scream sounded over the water,

"Wer da?" ("Who goes there?"). There were shoutings ami stampings along the deck of the wounded shin; searchlights waking along the shore, and on the breakwaters; and anti-aircraft guns rousing everywhere. None in Trieste knew whence the attack had come—whether from air or sea. The sky was festooned with bursting shrapnel,'while ships in the harbor opened with their guns towards the harbor mouth, shelling tlie misty Adriatic at random. By the light of that furious illumination the Italian sailors saw the great' talk of the Wien listing towards them. By this time 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 wilh which a dead ship goes under. The Monarch still iluatcd, but tlie Wien lay at the bottom. Tlie conquerors breakfasted at home. Every man of them was very hungry.