Guide to submarines in the Mediterranean

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The leader of the submarines in the Mediterranean was a service of the German Imperial Navy created on January 1, 1918 and existing until October 30, 1918 . Its seat was in the Austro-Hungarian naval port of Pola on the Adriatic Sea .

The Imperial Navy began to move submarines into the Mediterranean in the spring of 1915 , initially to support the Ottoman Empire in the battle for the Dardanelles , but then increasingly with the task of waging a trade war. As early as July 1, 1915, the "U-Boot-Halbflottille Pola" was formed from the first boats operating there, and after the arrival of five more deep-sea submarines it became the "U-Flotilla Pola" on November 18, 1915 . In June 1917 it was renamed " U-Flotilla Mediterranean ".

Since the flotilla already comprised about two dozen boats of various types at the end of 1917, it was transferred to the “I. U-Flotilla Mediterranean "(in Pola) and the" II. U-Flotilla Mediterranean ”(in Cattaro ) divided. Both flotillas, as well as the boats stationed in Constantinople and combined in the "U-Halbflotille Konstantinopel", were subordinate to the "Leader of the Submarines in the Mediterranean" appointed that day. The first incumbent was the sea captain and Commodore Theodor Püllen . Captain Kurt Graßhoff followed Püllen on August 28, 1918 as commodore and leader of the submarines in the Mediterranean, but he fell ill with typhus in October , and Püllen took over on October 9 and until the bases Pola, Cattaro and Constantinople were abandoned at the end of October 1918 again.

literature

  • Bodo Herzog: German U-Boats 1906–1966. Karl Müller, Erlangen, 1993, ISBN 3-86070-036-7 .
  • Charles W. Koburger Jr .: The Central Powers in the Adriatic, 1914-1918: War in a Narrow Sea. Praeger, Westport, Conn., 2001, ISBN 0-275-97071-X , pp. 89-90.
  • Gaetano V. Cavallaro: The Beginning of Futility: Diplomatic, Political, Military and Naval Events on the Austro-Italian Front in the First World War (1914–1917) , Volume 1, Xlibris, Bloomington, Indiana, 2009, ISBN 978-1 -4010-8425-7 , p. 500.