Sinking of the Ancona

On 7 November 1915 in the Mediterranean, between Sardinia and the coast of Tunisia, a submarine flying the Austro-Hungarian flag shelled and then torpedoed the Italian ocean liner Ancona, bound for New York. About two hundred passengers and crew were killed, most of them emigrants, among them women and children and several citizens of the United States. In reality the attacker was the German U-38 under Kapitänleutnant Max Valentiner. The sinking of the Ancona caused a new crisis in Washington’s relations with the Central Powers, barely two months after Germany had undertaken not to sink liners without warning.

The date

Documents from those days give 7 November. That date appears in the note of the Italian foreign minister Sidney Sonnino, handed to the Americans on 15 November, and in the American secretary of state’s December note to Vienna. According to the first press reports the Ancona sailed from Messina on Saturday afternoon, and the submarine was sighted “shortly after noon on Sunday”, that is on 7 November, off Cape Carbonara in Sardinia. Some later works, however, including the lists of ships sunk by U-38, give 8 November. According to this version the ship left Naples late on the evening of 6 November, called at Messina on Sunday and sank on Monday at about 1 p.m.

The attack

The Ancona, a ship of about 8,200 gross register tons, built in Belfast in 1908 for the Genoese shipowner Italia, had before the war carried tens of thousands of emigrants from Italy to New York and Philadelphia. On her last voyage, according to later findings, she carried 446 people, including 163 crew. Most of the passengers were third-class emigrants, chiefly from Venetia and Apulia.

The course of the attack was disputed from the start. According to the survivors and the Italian government, the submarine shelled the ship without warning, and when the Ancona stopped it went on firing at the hull, decks and lifeboats. Italian sources even spoke of a hundred shells. An American survivor, Cecile Greil, testified before the US consul that the shelling lasted three-quarters of an hour and did not stop after the ship had halted. Finally the submarine fired a torpedo. Some of the lifeboats, lowered while the ship was still moving, capsized. The survivors were picked up by vessels sent from Bizerte, among them the French minelayer Pluton. They were taken to Bizerte, Ferryville and Malta. The number of victims varies from source to source, from about 190 to more than 200. The first reports spoke of 27 Americans missing; later works give between 9 and 11, and some about 20.

A borrowed flag

The Austro-Hungarian Admiralty presented the attack as the work of one of its own boats and published its version of events. According to the communiqué the submarine fired a shot across the ship’s bows, and the ship began to flee, obeying the orders of the Italian authorities. It stopped only after several hits. The submarine was said to have allowed 45 minutes to abandon ship, but few lifeboats were lowered, and these were taken mainly by the crew. The torpedo was fired only when another ship was approaching. The communiqué blamed the Ancona‘s crew for the passengers’ deaths and called reports of firing on the lifeboats lies.

In reality the attacker was a German boat. U-38 was on her way from Germany through Gibraltar to Kotor, from where German submarines operated in the Mediterranean. On the way she sank several ships, including French and Italian ones. Germany was not yet at war with Italy, whereas Austria-Hungary had been fighting it since May. That is why German submarines attacking ships in the western Mediterranean hoisted the Austro-Hungarian flag.

Crisis with America

Washington demanded explanations from Vienna, and on 6 December the secretary of state, Robert Lansing, sent a sharp note. In it he called the sinking of the Ancona a “wanton slaughter of defenceless non-combatants”. He demanded that the Austro-Hungarian government denounce the act, punish the submarine’s commander and pay compensation. The foreign minister, István Burián, on the advice of Berlin, which feared a break in relations with the United States, largely accepted these demands at the end of December. This outraged the commander of the Austro-Hungarian fleet, Admiral Anton Haus. The promise to punish the commander was in any case empty, since Valentiner was a German officer. On 30 December Valentiner himself sank the British liner Persia without warning, and with her more Americans.