Reminiscent of the USS Maine, the events was widely reported in the Italian press, which immediately blamed Austrian or German saboteurs.

The cause of the explosion was thought by others as having been unstable lignite, but the Italian counterintelligence later discovered an Austrian saboteur network, based in Zurich, which was responsible for the sinking of the two battleships.

[2] In December 1917, Luigi Rizzo with his MAS motor-torpedo boat sank the Austro-Hungarian pre-dreadnought battleship SMS Wien, which was at anchor inside Trieste harbour.

[3] In the early hours of June 10, 1918, Admiral Horthy and a number of ships were heading for the Otranto Barrage to make a surprise attack.

As the fairly new dreadnaught the SMS Szent István was steaming past the island of Premuda off the coast of Dalmatia, a small Italian motor boat carrying two torpedoes, again commanded by Luigi Rizzo on its way back to Italy, suddenly saw the battleship approaching with her escort.

Despite valiant efforts by the crew with the pumps, and attempts to tow it to a port, after several hours water levels could not be contained and the ship capsized.

On the night between 31 October and 1 November 1918, a small Italian human torpedo, called a "mignatta", which carried two men, entered the base of Pola and placed a limpet mine below the hull of the anchored battleship SMS Viribus Unitis.

Unknown to them, the entire Austrian fleet had just been handed over to the new National Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs; this had happened in the evening of 31 October, when the Italian ships assigned to the operation had already left the port, and thus could not be informed.

The Allied navies were able to sail relatively freely throughout the Mediterranean by keeping the Central Powers' surface units bottled up in either the Adriatic or at Constantinople.

The raid was a partial success but the raiders were nearly destroyed by a shell hit which knocked out an engine on the Austrian cruiser SMS Novara.

Allied fleets occupied Constantinople briefly after the Armistice of Mudros, until the new Turkish Republic under Mustafa Kemal took back control of the city in 1923.

[5] Japan, an ally of Great Britain, sent a total of 12 destroyers to the Mediterranean starting in April 1917 (later reinforced by two loaned from the Royal Navy).

The bulgarian mediterranean participation resalted in the defense of Dedeagach (placing a compound of 52 mines in front of the city) against a bombardment by English, French and Russian ships.