Cattaro mutiny

Sailors of the Austro-Hungarian Navy in the Adriatic Bay of Cattaro (today: Kotor, Montenegro), which at that time belonged to Austria-Hungary, started it on 1 February 1918.

The naval historian Halpern portrays this event as the last victory of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy over the social forces that would eventually overwhelm it.

Workers' councils were formed, which also demanded better supplies, the abolition of censorship, the end of martial law and the introduction of the eight-hour day.

[2] Presumably unaware of the end of the actions, the sailors of the warships anchored in Cattaro decided to hold a demonstration, which they hoped would give the movement further impetus.

[3] The base of Cattaro in the south of Austria-Hungary became of special strategic importance when the Lovćen, located on Montenegrin territory and overlooking the bay, was conquered in 1916 during the occupation of Montenegro and Northern Albania.

For this purpose, besides destroyers, torpedo boats and submarines (also German ones), the whole Cruiser Flotilla under the flagship (Austrian: Flaggenschiff) "SMS Sankt Georg" as well as the V. Ship Division was deployed there.

The perceived privileged position of the officers also fed the suspicion that they were not interested in peace, but wanted to prolong the war, while the ordinary soldiers and their families had to suffer great privations.

[7][8] The uprising, which apparently had been prepared by various loose groups,[A 1] started from the flagship "SMS Sankt Georg" on 1 February 1918 at about 12 noon.

The chief officer (Austrian: Gesamt Detail Offizier) Zipperer,[A 2] who rushed on deck, received a shot to the temporal bone.

Anton Grabar demanded the immediate end of the war according to the Fourteen Points of Woodrow Wilson and he complained about the bad treatment especially by the young cadets and the insufficient rations.

Gäa was a depot and workshop ship with a large number of older workers on board, who had come into contact with social democratic ideas more intensively.

Only on the ships that were more frequently sent out for warfare, on which therefore the crews were treated much better by the officers, it encountered discomfort (on the fast cruisers) or resistance (on the destroyers, torpedo boats and submarines).

Under the threat from the armored cruisers that the ships would be taken under fire, some of the smaller units, partly with the agreement of their commanders, hoisted the red flag.

[13] In place of the officers, sailors’ councils or crew committees, usually designated by acclamation, took over, and continued to organise the service in the normal way.

In the evening the committee handed over a note with the demands of the crews to the cruiser flotilla commander Rear Admiral Alexander Hansa, which contained both general political and crew-specific points: "What we want Sailors' delegations of all units.

A patrol of the Gäa moored off Gjenović tried to persuade the crews of the nearby torpedo boats and submarines to join in by threat, but without much success.

[18] Sesan suggested that the ships should risk an advance into the Adriatic Sea in order to attract international attention and to encourage the crews of other nations to take action as well.

[19][A 6] Plaschka sees in Rasch the determining element of the revolt, who also clearly addressed the social-revolutionary perspective in his comments to Hansa: "that the system in the state must be overthrown.

[22] During the night the central sailors' committee tried to send two telegrams by radio to Dr. Adler in Vienna and Count Károlyi in Budapest.

They were asked to call on the government to intervene immediately, as to the committee's opinion the advance of the infantry may cause a general unrest in the Austro-Hungarian military.

[28] The defence attempted to decline the responsibility of the defendants: compulsion of the circumstances, carried away by the others, fear of artillery fire from "St. Georg", "Gäa", "Monarch".

On the same day, the judges deliberated on a pardon petition to Guseck for those sentenced to death (a common procedure according to Fitl), and the majority voted in favor.

The suspicions expressed by naval officers that the Entente had had a hand in the matter or that there had been agitation by political or national agents turned out to be groundless.

However, Julius Braunthal who was deployed in the region as a lieutenant in an artillery emplacement had already succeeded in February in informing Victor Adler of the SPÖ.

It was not until 8 October that insurrection and military court trials were discussed in the Reichstag, because of a query of the South Slavic deputy Dr. Anton Korošec.

Giving in to the growing public pressure, Emperor Karl decided to continue the trial only against 31 "ringleaders, principal offenders and non-commissioned officers".

It was not until nine years later that the journalist and doctor of philosophy Bruno Frei published a comprehensive study of the events in the newspaper Der Abend.

After the First World War, the uprising in Austria and Hungary was predominantly perceived as subversive and harmful, while in the other successor states a rather positive perception was noticeable.

After the Second World War, the Yugoslav and Czechoslovak Communist states, as well as Marxist Eastern European historiography, assessed the events as both Slavic and Bolshevik.

[46] According to the naval historian Halpern the event cannot be portrait as the beginning of the end of the monarchy, but as its last victory over the social forces that would eventually overwhelm it.