Brindisi in the First World War

Brindisi lies on the “heel” of the Italian peninsula, facing the coast of Albania, close to where the Adriatic narrows into the Strait of Otranto. When Italy entered the war, the port became the base of the Italian, British and French light forces that were to keep the Austro-Hungarian fleet away from the Mediterranean. From here cruisers and destroyers sailed against the ships from Kotor, and in the winter of 1915 and 1916 kings and governments of defeated Balkan states passed through the port.

A base at the exit from the Adriatic (1915)

The Italian navy was present at Brindisi even before the war: from 1909 it used the medieval castle of Emperor Frederick II above the harbour. The naval convention concluded in Paris on 10 May 1915 placed a fleet based on Taranto and Brindisi under the orders of the Italian commander-in-chief. After the declaration of war on Austria-Hungary the Italians kept their heavy ships at Taranto and concentrated the lighter units at Brindisi. At the end of May they were joined by four British light cruisers from the Dardanelles, Dublin, Dartmouth, Amethyst and Sapphire. As early as 9 June Dublin was damaged by a submarine’s torpedo.

The first summer brought the base losses. On the evening of 17 July the 5th Cruiser Division left Brindisi, and the next day U-4 sank its flagship, Giuseppe Garibaldi. The worst blow, however, came in the port itself. On 27 September 1915 the battleship Benedetto Brin blew up in the roadstead, killing 454 men, among them Rear Admiral Ernesto Rubin de Cervin. In Italy there was talk of sabotage, but in 2015 the navy ruled the disaster an accident caused by unstable propellant.

A haven for refugees (1915–1916)

In the autumn of 1915 the Serbian army was retreating through Albania, and Brindisi became the nearest port from which it could be helped. From 5 to 10 December British and Italian cruisers from Brindisi made sixteen runs to San Giovanni di Medua and delivered about 2,000 tons of supplies. On 29 December cruisers from Brindisi pursued until dark an Austro-Hungarian force that had raided Durrës, although the command in the port was slow to send out the pursuit.

People who had lost their countries passed through Brindisi. According to the Italian historian Franco Favre, King Peter I of Serbia arrived here on 24 December and spent five days in the town. In mid-January 1916 the Serbian government of Prime Minister Nikola Pašić moved to Brindisi, and soon settled on Corfu. On 20 January King Nicholas I of Montenegro landed at Brindisi and declared that he rejected the Austrian terms. On 24 February the Albanian leader Essad Pasha Toptani arrived here on an Italian destroyer from evacuated Durrës.

Guarding the Strait of Otranto (1916–1918)

The strait was guarded by British drifters, armed fishing boats with nets for detecting submarines. Two of their divisions were on patrol while the third rested at Brindisi. The warships waited at Brindisi, far from the drifters. On the night of 15 May 1917 Miklós Horthy’s cruisers sank 14 drifters. British and Italian ships under Rear Admiral Alfredo Acton sailed from Brindisi and badly damaged Novara, but broke off the pursuit. On the way back the cruiser Dartmouth was torpedoed by the German UC-25, lying in wait off the port.

From October 1917 six Australian destroyers also served in the British 5th Destroyer Flotilla, based at Brindisi, and stayed here until the armistice. In June 1918 Horthy wanted to attack the barrage with almost the whole fleet, and his submarines were to lie in wait off Brindisi, but the sinking of the Szent István forced him to call off the operation. Brindisi remained an Allied base until the end of the war. On the morning of 2 October 1918 Italian and British cruisers sailed from here and shelled Durrës.