History of the Croatian Navy

See List of admirals of Croatia At the time of Duke Branimir (879-892) a Croatian fleet participated in the battle against the Venetians, who were completely defeated on 18 September 887, and in which the Doge Pietro I Candiano was killed.

When Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia, invaded the western Balkan provinces of the empire in 1084, Zvonimir sent his fleet to his aid.

The alliance of Normans and Croats made under the influence of the Pope Gregory VII lasted from 1082 to 1084: they led together a series of naval battles against Byzantine-Venetian navy.

In June 1866, the Italian King Victor Emanuel II declared war on Austria (as they had many times before the Adriatic Sea was a battlefield).

In 1866, a Croatian officer in the Austro-Hungarian Navy, Ivan Lupis, together with Robert Whitehead, constructed the first self-propelled torpedo in Rijeka.

After the end of World War I, in 1918 the Austro-Hungarian navy on the admiral ship SMS Viribus Unitis in Pula was forced, under order of the Emperor Charles I of Austria, to surrender to delegates of the National Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs from Zagreb - Ante Tresić Pavičić, Vilim Bukšeg and Ivan Čop and members of the Local National Council in Pula.

On the very same day a specially designed Italian craft called a mignatta ("leech"), similar to a guided torpedo, broke through the harbour of Pula and sank the battleship Viribus Unitis together with 250 sailors and Commander Janko Vuković.

The first ship in the naval fleet was landing craft nº 103, but soon Croatia gained possession of at least 34 ex-ships of the Yugoslav navy, captured during the battle of Šibenik.

[3] A flotilla of three naval trawlers and fishing boats had been already established in Kali, Ugljan island, under the operational command of the Croatian Army's 112th Brigade on 21 August 1991.

[4][5] Members of this unit, after landing from a motorboat and a sailboat, the Maša and the Nirvana, disabled the Yugoslav Mirna-class patrol boat Biokovo with a Malyutka antitank missile fired from a cove at Škarda island.

[10][11] The main actions of the new Croatian navy during the war of independence were the lifting of the Yugoslav blockade of Dalmatia[12] and the relief of Dubrovnik.