What Happened to the 1918 Navies

Posted by Christopher Eger May 5, 2007

When World War two ended, the once mighty Imperial Japanese and Nazi German navies had been chased from the oceans and the best parts of them lay beneath it. This was very different from what happened at the end of the Great War - The First World War. The fleets of the two largest combatants, Imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were still very much afloat and were even stronger than they had been at the beginning of the conflict.

The Austrian Navy did something very interesting in military history-it dissolved itself. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a patchwork of nationalities that only existed for sixty years. Its navy was manned largely by ethnic Italian and Yugoslav sailors and commanded by Austrian and Magyar officers. When the Empire broke apart into a half dozen new countries in the final months of the war its modern fleet found itself with only skeleton crews and it passed quietly into history. The end of the cold war even stamped out the scattered remnants.

The glittering High Seas Fleet of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Imperial Germany was another story. When the guns fell silent on November, 11, 1918 it was decided by the Allies that the dangerous still dangerous German fleet be interned under guard of the Royal Navy at its base in northern Scotland. The Allies decided to split the fleet amongst themselves like a naval buffet after six months of negotiations but the joke was on them when the German crews sent their own homes to the bottom. Just to have the last laugh the British salvaged most of old Uncle Willy’s lost navy over a twenty year period.